Race Report part I

Two days before the big race I came down with a fever. A real one. Because I was worried that people would think I was chickening out, I took a photo of my thermometer reading 100.8 and texted it off to a few friends. I was so frustrated. Two days until the race and I saw myself sitting on the sidelines. For some reason this was unacceptable. I had come this far and worked this hard only to be betrayed by my own body. Uh, no.I purchased and took more cold medicine and more aleve than I want to admit. I went through two bags of cough drops and chewed many, many, many milligrams of vitamin C. On Saturday morning I woke up feeling awful, got dressed anyway and, along with ten of my friends, headed to the start line.

My plan had always been to run to the first aid station and evaluate my situation. This plan was originally made based on my initial fears of Orcas. On Saturday morning the only fear I was feeling was fear of knocking my immune system for such a loop that I would be bedridden for a week. Sometime during the first mile or two I decided that once we hit that aid station I would throw in the towel. My breathing was ragged, my legs were lead, and there was no way I could be as tired as I was and still make it through the race. We had started in a large group and no one else was having trouble breathing, no one else was showing any indication of exhaustion. My goodness, two miles into a 15 mile race and I wanted to curl up under a cozy blanket and sleep for a week.

But still, I moved forward.

Alexa who was setting the pace, had us walk even the slightest of hills. I could tell that this was too much walking for some people in our group. For me, it was perfect. As the miles stretched out the alternating between walking and running was a godsend. And as the day unfolded our group thinned out. By the first aid station around mile five, there were only about six of us. We came up a small hill and at the top we were greeted by our friends Karen and Susan who were working the aid station. I was elated to see them. I had been feeling well for while at this point (when did things change? I’m not sure) and knew I would carry on.

We refilled our camelbacks, ate a bunch of great snacks and used the “bathroom”, which just meant we grabbed some toilet paper and squatted behind the small outbuilding that marked the aid station. We said our farewells to aid station workers and friends who had just arrived at the station (in a race of fewer than 400 people there were more than thirty Dirty Girls and Dirty Dudes running Orcas-talk about representin’!). We were briefly on the road and then back on a trail. It wasn’t even five minutes when we realized the race had changed, the mountain climb had begun.

Up until this point we were run/walking on terrain similar to trails we had run before. We were up and down rolling hills and switchbacks. Nothing we had done had indicated what we were about to do. It is so unfortunate that neither my writing nor my photography skills can express the steepness of this part of the climb. Everyone, even the chattiest of us, was suddenly quiet. We were all hunched over, and looked more like a group of chimpanzees than upright humans.  The majority of people were grabbing on to limbs and branches as they climbed. Soon people were picking up sticks to help them balance. I was determined not to fall behind and not to lose my friends. Even when people were grabbing sticks, they didn’t stop moving. I think we all feared that if we stopped we would not have the capability to start again.

I grabbed the first stick I saw and tried to rely on it to help me up the hill. It was wiggly and hollow and looked like a witch’s stick. My friend Lori and I used our last bit of spare strength to laugh at this ridiculous excuse for a walking stick. But we didn’t laugh long; we couldn’t risk using that energy. Again, I can’t explain the steepness of this portion of our climb, but in a sport that I usually consider great for all shapes, sizes and ages, I found myself worried about perfect strangers as I watched them struggle up the mountainside. There was a man who stopped because he was “seeing stars”, and an older woman who was overheating due to an unexpected appearance by the sun. This was the hardest part. We were all so focused and determined that there wasn’t much room for anything else. I wasn’t a coward nor was I champion. I just was. There wasn’t room for much more than being, than existing. The climb was on.

 This was the part that made each one of us say we would never do Orcas again. Never, ever, don’t even think about it. However, this portion was really just a tiny bit of the race. Though it was extremely challenging, it was over in a reasonable amount of time and we were soon back on the downhill.

As you know the downhill was my biggest fear and my pace was extremely cautious. Our group shrunk again, as two of our friends cruised downhill at a faster clip and were soon out of sight. We were once six, but now we were four, navigating along switchbacks and going down, down, down. We hadn’t reached the summit of Mt. Constitution, and I knew we would be summiting as part of our race, so downhill was absolutely, positively, the wrong way to go. With each downward footfall I found myself filling with dread. Not because this downhill course was particularly technical or challenging, but because I knew that soon we would have to go back up, up, up…