Hurricanes and Pre-Race Jitters
One of my favorite husband duties is serving as the crew for my wife's ultrarunning adventures. An ultramarathon is any footrace longer than the conventional marathon distance of 26.2 miles. For all practical purposes, the shortest ultras are usually 50Ks, and the upper distance can get insane. Thankfully, she limits her long races to "only" 100 miles.
As you might imagine, it takes a while to train for a 100-mile race, especially when you also work full time and happen to be in your late 50s. She's pretty serious about her running and dedicated to the training, getting up daily at 4:00 or 4:30 a.m. to run and often completing solo long runs on the weekends of 30 miles or more. She has a coach she communicates with via email and Zoom. Our house is a warehouse for running shoes and specialized nutrition products for endurance athletes.
We're currently staying in a mountain cabin, five hours from home, outside the southwest Virginia town of Abingdon. Her race, the OG Yeti 100-Mile Endurance Run, was scheduled for today (2024-09-27), but Hurricane Helene has complicated things a bit, and the race has been postponed 24 hours. Wonder Woman was not happy about the delay. It's not that she was excited about the prospect of running in a torrential downpour with 50 mph winds while dodging falling trees; she's just not a patient person and doesn't like waiting for anything a second longer than she has to. The course of the race, which takes place entirely on the Virginia Creeper Trail, has also been altered, eliminating the part of the run that takes place in the Mt. Rogers National Recreation Area. Now the course is limited to the part of the trail that runs between Abingdon and Damascus.
She's prepared a detailed spreadsheet for me to cover what my duties are each time I see her, which will be roughly every four hours. I have several jobs: cheerleader, sports psychologist, cook, valet, and medic among them. Here are my instructions for every time she comes into my aid station:
- Give me fresh water bottles & take my empty bottles.
- Ask if I have any blisters that need treatment.
- Spray me with sunscreen/bug spray if needed.
- Ask if I need lube for any hot spots.
- Give me more gels/nutrition.
- Make me eat something before leaving (soup, potatoes, sandwich).
- Upset stomach - ginger candy, Pepto, Tums.
If she tells me that she wants to drop out, we have agreed that I will tell her that if that's her choice, I will meet her at the next aid station, but she will have to go four more miles before quitting. Hopefully, by the time she gets there, she will have talked herself out of it. I am mostly immune to her in-race tears and temper tantrums. Ultrarunners do those things routinely, and I try not to be fazed by it. I do not enjoy watching her suffer, but the mental anguish of not finishing will be much harder for her in the long run than the temporary pain on the race course. She is aiming for a 24-hour finish, but the cutoff is at 30 hours, and if that's how long it takes, so be it.
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