Tahoe 200
To The Finish
I was amazed at what a 2 1/2-hour nap would do for me. It changed everything for me at the very end; it was almost unbelievable, and I am thankful to be able to share with someone what the human body is capable of. Joel Colbert and I enjoyed parts of the last 18 miles as if we were doing a Sunday run on our home trails. There was no way to explain the pain I felt as I approached the Spooner aid station, but I thought sleeping would hurt my overall placement and finishing time in the race. This thought was crushing for me, but this low point would change. After I woke up, I knew things were about to get better.
As I woke up with Colbert’s help, I grabbed my pack, which I’d resupplied earlier. I noticed the pain in my quads had eased a little, but my left foot was still hurting badly from the blister and a possible stone bruise on the bottom. We started the climb out of Spooner, which is 5 miles and the last long grinder of the race. After the race, Colbert mentioned he noticed I felt different climbing out of Spooner, even though I was still power-hiking with my poles. We hit a few small downhills that I tried to run slowly, and I could feel things were different. Even though I was still in a lot of pain, my mind was able to work through it a little better.
After we finished the big climb out, we leveled off on the TRT in a big meadow I know as the Bench section. This is a very rocky section of the trail, and I stepped wrong on my left foot, sending pain through my foot and up my leg that stopped me dead in my tracks. I sat down for Colbert to check the bottom of my foot, but it looked no worse than before, so we covered the blister with some tape and marched on through the last of the rocky section.
Now comes the fun part, an 8-mile mostly downhill section I will force myself to run, though how fast is unknown to us. With about 10 miles to go, we pass the first runner of the day. While I was sleeping at Spooner, five or six runners went through without my knowing, and I decided that with this first runner, I would leave them no hope. I picked up the pace to a near-sprint on the downhill, passing them. Even though I would audibly grunt a little as my left foot hit the ground from time to time, I noticed I could run very fast. Then we came up onto three runners packed together on a good downhill section, and I jokingly said to Colbert, “Let’s crush their souls and give them no hope.” We blew their doors off, sprinting past at about a 9-minute mile pace that carried us for some distance. After this, I felt energized enough to run most of the way to the finish line, except for the last 2 miles uphill near the finish. Another reason it’s good to have a pacer, their brain is working better than yours. I kind of forgot that everyone was watching my tracker, which shows the estimated time to the next checkpoint. It had me finishing around 11:30-12:00, but we are going fast enough to shave about 3 hours off that, so Colbert texted everyone that we are coming in hot.
As we approached Kingsbury Highway, we came down a sketchy switchback that dumps you right onto the road, and it made Colbert laugh as I literally stone-cold ran across the road haphazardly. As we closed in on the finish, I started to come back to life. As we crossed the final creek with about 3 miles to go and 2 miles of uphill, my pace picked up considerably.
As we approached our final turn off the TRT and down to the finish line, I stopped to thank and hug Colbert and said something like, “Thanks for sharing this moment; now let’s run this thing in” for the last half mile. That is exactly what I did, and Colbert couldn’t keep up as I sprinted it in. As we approached the final quarter-mile, we caught up to another runner I had run with on and off since mile 55, the no-trail, tree-hopping, bushwacking, water-crossing nightmare of the first night, Elle Jones. Elle and her pacer damn near jumped out of their trail shoes as Colbert and I came crashing down the very loose, rocky, downhill switchback section of the trail to the finish. I beat Elle by 1 minute 47 seconds, making up for all the ground I lost during my 2 1/2-hour nap at Spooner, and then some. I still can’t explain why the last mile of this race was probably my fastest, but I can say that for the last 4 minutes, as I ran down the hill to the finish, all the pain disappeared. But this would be short-lived, as you will see from the pictures below. As I crossed the finish line, it all came back almost instantly.
All that pain would be short-lived, as I saw everyone at the finish line, waiting to see me cross.
At 8:36 AM Monday morning, I finished in 71 hours, 33 minutes, and 43 seconds, placing 34th with an average pace of 21.5 minutes per mile, with 3 changes of clothes, 6 pairs of shoes, 4 hours of sleep, one running pack, and a shit ton of memories.
