A Festival of Suffering (aka Badgerland Striders 24-12-6 hour race)

Hot and humid.

No shade.

No cloud cover, no sign of rain.

And you're running on a track.  For hours.

This was the Badgerland Striders 24-12-6 hour race.  I ran the six hour version, and before I give the wrong impression, let me assure you that it is a fantastic race.  Well run, great volunteers, great site.  An all-around class act event.

It was just really tough on such a hot day.

My goals:  

We've had an extremely mild summer, so I expected that a goal of 50K was totally reasonable. Race day weather had other ideas though: mid-eighties and humid, with a "real feel" temp of 90. With no shade and no breeze, that's rough conditions for a race. Ultimately, the heat kept me from hitting 50K over the course of six hours. My secondary goal was to eke out something just over marathon distance, and in the event of a really hot day I at least wanted to get a 20-mile training run out of the way. I ended up with 103 laps for 25.4 miles. I had nothing left to give at the end, so I have no regrets about how I ran the race. I feel like it was a good training run for my 50K in October, and I feel like I can manage my heavy race calendar over the next four weeks pretty well now that I have this high mileage run in tough conditions out of the way.

The race:

Back to the beginning: this race has a number of options - there's a 6-hour, a 12-hour, and a 24-hour race. For the people wanting to escape the heat, they offer a 6 and 12-hour option at night. There are also distance divisions where you pick a goal mileage, like a marathon distance, 50K, etc. - and keep going until you get there.  I opted for the 6-hour daytime version of the race.

Because this race is so customizable, it attracts a lot of people with interesting goals and great stories.  One of the volunteers mentioned that they have a repeat racer who aims to run his age in miles each year - he's 73 this year. One young woman was aiming for a goal of ten miles and she kept going past her goal to eleven miles.  Her dad was running with her and he was so proud of her accomplishment.  It was great to see.

The race is chip-timed, so each lap is counted. Pretty neat.

The race is held at the Germantown (Wisconsin) High School track. Runners are welcome to set up their own "aid stations" along the track, and quite a few families cheered on their runners from beneath shaded awnings and tents. The race also provided a great aid station with the usual ultra fare: water, Heed, Coke, PB&J sandwiches, oranges, watermelon, trail mix, chips, cookies and more. I brought my own cooler with ice and drinks, and although it was totally unnecessary since the aid station was so well-equipped, it was nice to have a place I could stash my shirt every few laps so I could put on an ice cold shirt every so often to cool down.

Pre-race, before the cloud cover burned off.

The day started out nicely, with plenty of cloud cover and a dense fog. The forecast suggested that the cloud cover would burn off just before race time but we were fortunate and it hung on until around 10:30.  The nice weather was tempered by the fact that they were inexplicably playing Michael Jackson's early catalog over the loudspeakers. I don't dislike MJ, not by any means, but I'm more of a Thriller-era fan. After about an hour of listening to that music I began to wonder if North Korea was taking notes as this seemed like an effective way to torture prisoners. I had enough and I went for my headphones. I listened to Amy Poehler's "Yes, Please." I love running with audiobooks, and I enjoyed that one for about an hour. I kept a steady pace for the first two hours and felt great, although I pretty much never need to hear Michael Jackson again in my whole entire life.

Around 10:45 the weather decided it had given us enough time to put in some miles, and it cranked up the heat. Heat plus humidity equals suffering, and suffer we did. The hot black track with no shade and no breeze made it feel much hotter than the actual temperature. There were times when the heat was absolutely choking. There were a few drops at this point, including one of the 24-hour runners who was totally burning up the track all morning. He was running so strong - I'm not sure what happened but I was surprised to see him go.  It was a sobering reminder that no matter how good your training is, shit can in fact happen on race day.

The race director provided mileage updates about ten minutes after each hour, and for the first two hours I was happily on target, around 10:30 - 11:00 miles - very sustainable - but I knew that the heat was going to be a game-changer. Plus, after I pass ten miles in any run, I become intimate friends with the restroom for awhile. I'll spare the details but hitting the restroom every 2 laps does not help one's 50K aspirations. By hour three I had given up my 31 mile goal, which I figured would happen with the heat, but I still wanted to get in something over marathon distance.

Boredom?

When I decided I was going to do this race, friends asked me how I was going to run around a 400 meter track for six hours without being bored. Part of the reason I signed up for this race because I thought it would be a test of mental toughness. And as it turns out, I was anything but bored. I listened to part of an audiobook, a podcast and some music. I socialized with other runners - I'm not usually much of a talker when I run but oh were these some of the nicest people - you couldn't help but chat for a lap or two before digging back into the task at hand. It never felt boring.

But the fiddling with my iPhone to access audiobook and podcasts did hurt me a bit. I crashed Strava twice in the process. The first time I only lost a few minutes of running, but the second time I lost a whole hour so I just shut the program down. That was a really discouraging - I love my Strava data, and I think if I had a better way of gauging my pace I would have been able to manage my mileage better later in the race.

After noon I started taking advantage of the cooler I had lugged to the sidelines and was stacking ice under my hat to deal with the heat. It worked well for awhile, and then it just gave me headaches. My hat was a great idea though - a ten dollar grab from Wal Mart and it kept the sun off of my face. Money well spent.  Around this time I also got some texts from my husband and son, and those gave me a boost.  I took a selfie to send them - my "I've been running for over three hours and it's hot and kind of miserable but I'm going to smile and pretend I'm A-OK and not actually dying" face.

Not dying!  Not dying!

After I abandoned my 31 mile goal I asked if I was on track to hit 27 miles. I was positive that I was but it turns out: I wasn't. I took it pretty hard and got discouraged. I really felt like I was still running relatively strongly, but apparently that wasn't so. I walked a lot after that. Physically I was beaten by the heat but mentally I was pushing on okay until then. The news that I wasn't going to hit just over marathon distance definitely took the wind out of my sails. It was tough after that. Very few people were running with any regularity at this point and eventually it really evolved into a timed carcass-drag to the six hour mark. My heart rate shot up and got fluttery a few times and that was enough to keep me to a brisk walk at the end. I crossed the timing mats at 6 hours, accepted a delicious frozen custard and enjoyed the shade of someone else's canopy for awhile.

This definitely would have been a different race in different weather, and now I understand why there are night running options. Overall, it was an educational race for me in that I learned what works for me (Sprite, please!) and what doesn't (food, mostly. And heat). If next year's forecast is like this one, I'll probably pass on this race but if we had something that was even a hair less humid I'll come back. It was fun, I met some great and really inspiring people, and it is a good opportunity to really define a goal and push myself.

And one final note:  somehow I managed to get a sunburn on my ass.  I promise, my ass was fully covered for the duration of the run.  I'm not sure how it happened, but, well...ow.