All celebrations come after sacrifice, effort or commitment.
And the Croatan 24 Hour was no different. Johnny Armani and I went into the race categorizing it as our celebration of the trail running year and also our anniversary.
But first, we had 12 plus hours of sand running to get to the celebration: aka hot shower and an adult beverage. Both were hard-earned. In fact, even more than we thought they’d be.
We started the day by schlepping all our gear 3/4 mile to camp. Then doing it again because you know spending all day running requires some stuff to make it happen.
We got our 1.5 mile warm up in and then the race actually began. During our parade loop, with full military representation in the lead, we realized quickly that while there was plenty of sand it was not going to be a day at the beach.

Slow to warm up
I don’t know if it was the 2 days of driving to North Carolina or the laissez-faire attitude toward training I’ve had lately but it took me, no joke, three hours to “warm up.” My body, breathing and stride just felt tight. Just goes to show if you give it enough time whatever you are feeling will turn around. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes that’s bad.

Cover of Darkness
As we are heading toward winter we are all experiencing the reduction in sunlight and never is that felt more acutely than at a long race. We started, thankfully, in the daylight but with sunset at 5:08 p.m. your time in the sun is limited. In fact, for those who completed the full 24 hours, they spent more time running the course in the dark than in the light. Blissfully that was not us.
But the course becomes a whole new animal come darkness. Everything looks different and the level of focus demanded of you ramps up. First, you need to be looking for the hidden roots, dips or holes on the course that you easily breezed by for the first 8 hours. After 30 miles, some ups and downs, your path only being illuminated by your headlamp and your rapidly decreasing brain cells, it gets interesting. A near course mishap, a brutal introduction of a big toe to a root and aching necks from looking down are our only issues to report, thankfully.

It’s an eating competition with running
Seven-thousand calories. That’s a lot to burn and try to compensate for over the course of the day.
There aren’t many places in the world that you see someone who’s likely run 20 miles already blow by you with a chili-burger in one hand never breaking stride. But at an ultra you get the calories any way you can. It’s rarely pleasure eating. Often it’s just getting it down the hatch and moving on.
Thankfully for Johnny Armani he had some moments of “Manna from Heaven” in the form of cheese pizza.

Math is cruel
It was a long day and on a course that was approximately 2.25 miles long it proved to not always add up in your favor. We had a few different goals for the day and some fell by the wayside early and others we hung onto seriously. One of my random goals was that I would like to hit the 40-mile mark. So you can imagine how disheartened we were to come around the loop, in the dark, feeling tired to find that we were at 39.74 miles!!! That meant to get the 40, we had to do another loop of 2.25. In normal life that seems fine. On Saturday night it felt far, like Inca Trail to Machu Picchu far.

White sand, black feet?

After all day running in white sand, this is how our feet looked. How does that happen?

But finish we did just shy of 42 miles. Phew!
Oh wait, remember that hike to bring all our stuff to camp? Yep, we had to do it again.

Here’s to resting up until January 1, 2015!!

Sarcasm & Soreness,

G