I can run for a very long time. I have never, however, been what you would
call speedy. I have never qualified for
Boston, and when I once won a 5K race, my friend Jesse snorted and said “must
not have been a very big 5K.” (It wasn’t). My specialty is a form of running that even
some ultramarathoners have not heard of…
multi-day running. Back when I
was at the top of my game, I even snagged myself an age group world record
(since lost), as well as a few outright wins.
I am not at the top of my game.
Spartathlon is 153 mile race in Greece from Athens to
Ancient Sparta. It has an overall cutoff
of 36 hours, but with aggressive cutoffs early on. There are checkpoints every two miles (or so) –
a total of seventy five. Each checkpoint has a
cutoff time. To successfully finish
Spartathlon, you need to be at the marathon point by four hours and forty five minutes, and the fifty mile point in nine and a half hours.
The year I finished Spartathlon, I WAS at the top of my
game. I was also six years younger and had
a competitive drive that seems, now, very far away. I went back two years later, in 2021, full of
confidence. I missed the cutoff at mile forty two. I went
back AGAIN the next year, and didn’t even make it to the marathon… found myself at the end of the pack early on,
lost confidence, and had my plantar fasciitis flare up so acutely at mile twenty two that I could barely walk.
Spartathlon leaves no room for error.
I swore I was never going back.
I knew that this wasn’t my race: being able to run forever doesn’t matter if
you can’t make it to mile twenty six without missing a cutoff. It is also an expensive DNF. Each time I’ve gone, I have brought and paid
for two crew members, which includes accommodations for several days as well as
international flights.
Although I swore off racing Spartathlon, I felt I had a lot
to offer as crew, and actually went back in both 2023 crewing Chris Rice and
2024 crewing Marisa Lizak. Both
experiences were fabulous – I got to experience all of the joy, excitement, camaraderie
and magic of the race and the course, without any of that pesky sick feeling
that I wasn’t going to make the next cutoff.
It was wonderful.
Why, then, I decided to put my name into the lottery to run
it again is, quite frankly, beyond me.
And, of course, my name got pulled and… I was in.
Well. Alrighty then.
One more shot. I’d give it everything I had, and regardless
of whether I finished, this was it. I
was never racing it again.
I lined up a coach – Meghan Canfield. I picked Meghan because she was an inspiration
to me the year I crewed Chris Rice. I
had thought, as a woman in my later fifties, that my shot at Spartathlon was
over – but Meghan was even a little older than me and finished the race strong.
I started my official training plan in June, about a week
after the 6 Day World Championship race in France, where I had done passably
well (fifth woman, and age group World Champion). Meghan started my buildup with hill sprints
for a few weeks, transitioned into a V02 max buildup phase, and final the “steady
state” phase. The V02 max phase was
pretty exciting for me, as I found that I could push myself to the very edge of
my ability (effort of nine on a scale of one to ten) and get myself an average pace of
8:11 for twelve minutes. This may not sound
impressive to any speedy folks out there, but I was coming in to this with a
comfortable long run pace of 11:30 to 11:45.
To test myself, in July I ran a marathon with a goal time of
4:30 (marathon cut-off time for Spartathlon is 4:45), and managed to hit 4:19 –
albeit, ready to collapse at the end. I
still had a few months of training between that race and Spartathlon, so that
was a confidence booster. The last week
before I went to Greece, as I started to taper, my “easy” runs were in the mid
10 pace. As well, I had done a few weeks
of sauna training, in preparation for what is usually a crazy hot race.
I had, in short, done everything I could do.
I was originally planning to run without crew, figuring that
if I was going to DNF, I at least wanted to do it on the cheap. I’d really wanted my husband Chris to come
with me, but when I signed up, he really felt that his work would not really
allow for travel. Conveniently, Chris
got laid off in early August, freeing him up for a trip to Greece. So, (BIG yay!), I was bringing my (very handsome) sweetie
with me, who would also be there along the course helping me to succeed. Bonus.
We arrived in Greece at 8:30 Wednesday night, picked up our
car and headed to Glyfada. Since Chris signed
up as crew after the deadline had passed to purchase crew accommodations, I had
booked our own accommodations at a hotel about a mile away from the race
hotel. We were staying at the Four
Seasons – which sounds like it would be nice, but… was… not. What it was, was adequate.
After a wee-hours-of-the-morning search for coffee (the room
had none), Chris and I got in a lovely five mile taper run along the shore, and
Chris got his first glimpse of the trash filled and poorly maintained streets
of Greece. We had some breakfast, completed
check-in, and headed in to Athens to show Chris the Acropolis. He was suitably wowed. We headed over to the Plaka to wander the tourist
filled streets, and headed back to Glyfada. Dinner consisted of some authentic
Greek fare, and then Friday morning was more of the same – early morning search
for coffee, followed by breakfast, Athens (the Acropolis museum), and then back
to Glyfada for final race prep and dinner.
Race morning arrived.
I pulled on my planned outfit, feeling relatively calm. We drove to Athens without incident, arriving
about an hour before race start. The Acropolis
shined in the darkness, and we took in the sights and chatted with the other
athletes. We met the US team for a team
photo, and then it was time to start.
USA Team prior to race start |
The Acropolis pre-dawn |
I was cautiously pleased as we headed downhill from the Acropolis
into Athens. My feet felt good; my
breath did not feel labored, and I was maintaining ten minute miles. My goal was to hit the marathon point between four hours and twenty minutes, and four hours and thirty minutes. This would give me fifteen minutes on the cutoffs.
Very quickly, I felt a huge difference between my previous two attempts. Neither of those attempts had
included race specific training (read:
speedwork), so both of them were high effort for the first fifteen miles. At my
most recent race attempt prior to this one, I recall feeling extraordinarily dismayed
during the uphill section between miles two and six, realizing that I was already
at the back of the pack, and was already sucking wind. This attempt was different – although I was
working, I wasn’t at the very back of the pack, nor did I feel that the effort was
unsustainable. Moreover, as soon as I
hit about mile six, where the long downhill section started, my pace quickly
dipped into the nines – even including a few furtive slips into the bushes. I passed a few people and felt like my pace
was both sustainable and something that would get me where I needed to be. Maybe… this was my day.
I breezed through each CP (checkpoint), gradually gaining
time on the cutoffs. Ahead by seven, nine, fifteen minutes. The temperature was blessedly
(and unusually, for this race) still cool.
Hitting the high teen miles, I was still running comfortably compared with
how I had felt at this point during my previous two efforts, where I recalled feeling
pretty cooked trying to maintain a ten minute mile pace that I hadn’t trained
for. Again, this time, although I could
feel the effort, it still felt sustainable.
The training had paid off.
I had been thinking that the marathon point was CP 12, where
I would see Chris, so I was surprised to see the sign at the marathon point say
CP 11, and see no spectators. I don’t
know why I was surprised – I had crewed this race twice in the past two years,
and those years I knew that CP 12 was past the marathon, but I was a little
thrown off by this. Still, I hit the
marathon point almost exactly the time I’d aimed for, and covered the next mile
or so to CP 12 where I’d (FINALLY!) get to see Chris.
I was overjoyed as I saw the CP off in the distance, and as
I approached, saw Chris waving to me. I
ran in, pulling on the ice bandana he had ready, sucking down some cold kefir,
and just reveling in sitting, for just a moment. I was more cooked than I realized, putting
ice on my forehead and the back of my neck.
I just needed a minute or two to regroup. As I got ready to leave, I
asked Chris what the cutoff time for this CP was. “12:10”, he said. It was 11:46.
I had a twenty four minute lead on the cutoffs.
I breathed a little easier and headed out.
The course immediately transitioned into a hill, and I
started walking quickly, following other runners doing the same thing. Natalie Larsen, another member of the US
team, walked with me for a bit.
View from the course |
This section was both uphill and exposed, and with a twenty four minute lead on the cutoffs, I didn’t feel a need to kill myself. I felt that a better strategy would be to
walk the hill, cool my core temp a bit, and then run as soon as I hit the down,
which I did. It was three hilly miles into
the next CP, (CP 13) and leaving that CP, I was not able to see the sign that
showed the cutoff times. I knew I had
slowed down a bit, but was starting to feel a little less cooked, and ran well
enough whenever I hit downs.
It was only about one and a half miles to the next CP, which I hit at
the exact same time as Natalie. This
time, I could see the sign that showed the cutoff time, which was 12:45. I looked at my watch. It was 12:45.
We were… impossibly… AT the
cutoff. The staff didn’t pull us,
though, and I started trotting, telling Natalie “we are AT the cutoff.” She took off, faster than I could run. I didn’t have a sprint in me at that point
but knew I needed to keep moving as quickly as I could to have any hope of
making the next cutoff.
Unfortunately, in addition to feeling a bit toasted by this
point, my right foot had started cramping badly. This was the issue that had taken me out of
the race the last time, and so this time I had prepared for this possibility by
packing some supportive inserts in my pack.
I had a critical decision to
make: should I address the cramping
issue by pulling out the inserts (which would cost time), or keep going as is,
with the cramping possibly getting worse and race ending? Well, I had packed the inserts so I COULD solve
this problem, so I sat on a guardrail, and changed my inserts as quickly as I
could.
As soon as I started running, I knew that the insert change
had, in fact, been a bad call. Rather
than easing the cramping, the uncomfortable hardness of the insert just added
to the discomfort. I ran as fast as I
could, hearing myself make little groaning noises at the pain and effort. That mile after the insert change was my
fastest of the last few, but… it wasn’t enough.
I pulled into CP 14, and the folks there kindly informed me that I was
out of time.
And that was it.
I went from a race that was going according to plan… to a
race that was over.
How, exactly, did that happen?
I texted Chris, who was less surprised than I was at the
outcome. Unlike me, he had been aware of the
cutoff times for 13 and 14, and saw that I was right up against them. He brought me an ice cream bar (which, alas,
seemed too sweet for me as my stomach was a little squirrely at that
point). I cleaned up with baby wipes,
and we headed off to have a meal and check out some ruins.
So. What happened?
After I got pulled, I went back and studied the pace chart
that I had painstakingly prepared and, foolishly, not memorized. Although the cutoff time for CP 12 was 12:10
(and I’d had twenty four minutes to spare at that point), it was three miles to the next CP,
where the cutoff was 12:30. That meant
that to maintain my twenty four minute lead on the cutoff, I’d have to do sub seven-minute
miles to CP 13. That meant that even at
my BEST possible pace at that point in the race, if I’d been able to maintain,
say, 10:30’s up the hill in the sun, I was going to lose eleven and a half minutes
on my cutoff lead, and I was by no means doing 10:30’s…. I had a 13.75 minute mile in there, and
another 13:30, and then a twelve something.
Those three slow miles were enough to completely obliterate my cutoff lead.
Pace chart |
As I said. This race
leaves no room for error.
Chris and I cleaned up and got some lunch, and went to see
some ruins in Ancient Corinth. We got to
see Bob Hearn coming through strong. We
headed for Sparta, checked in to our AirBNB, and basically made the best of the
DNF by getting in some run explore in Sparta the next day, along with a trip to
the Olive Oil museum.
Visiting ruins at Ancient Corinth with my sweetheart |
On the last day, Chris and I drove back to Athens, stopping
at some of the key aid stations that he did not get to experience as crew (and
I did not get to experience as a runner).
We went to Mountain Base, and drove DOWN the lead-up to the mountain. Chris fell in love with the course, and
expressed amazement that I had ever finished.
(I feel that every time I am there).
So – the very shiny silver lining to my third Spartathlon
DNF was getting to spend a few days on a Greece vacation with my love.
What did I learn?
In retrospect, which is the only way to look at DNFs, it was
clear that I had my focus on the wrong cut-off point. Because the marathon and fifty mile points
are so iconic, it is easy to focus on those checkpoint cutoffs and not pay
attention to the ones in between.
However, it is critical for any runner (particularly any slower runner)
who wants to succeed in this race to actually carry a chart with ALL cutoff
times, and be prepared to make each one.
Had I focused more on the cutoff for CP 13 rather than 12, I likely
would have been OK. It was the illusion
that I had a twenty four minute buffer on the cutoffs that lead to my false assumption
that I could slow down a little bit.
What’s next?
Well. This was really
the ONLY thing on my race schedule, and it has been my sole focus for the past five months or so. It’s been difficult for
me to figure out what I want to do next.
Given that this was my third DNF out of four attempts, I felt
pretty down about not finishing. I also am
also finding myself struggling with my identity as a long distance runner. It is hard for me to feel particularly motivated
for any future races, having invested so much into this one only to fail again.
On the other hand, I know
that my fitness for this race was outstanding – I built up speed and strength
that I have not had for years. It was
exciting to see my fitness chart on Strava, which has hovered around 70 for
literally years, skyrocket up to a high of 221 over the course of the past five months.
I’m feeling like I don’t want to waste
this fitness.
My fitness trend in Strava over the past year |
It was nice to come back to North Bend and just jump back in comfortably to big miles. I went from feeling crappy
about the race to realizing that the race itself is just one marker of
many. This particular race might be one
I will never finish again. However, I am
still getting lots of joy running long slow miles, exploring new places, and
playing with speed and strength. I
figure the goals will come.
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