Escarpment 2010
Why DO I run that crazy race up in the mountains again and again. For the sixth time I ran the escarpment trail run this past Sunday. The 2010 version featured no rain for most of us, and 70s temps all day, but it was extremely humid. The cold front which promised to chill us with 50s temps at the start didn’t arrive in time. After drinking quite a lot during the run and after, several hours after I finished the race I still weighed 3 pounds less than the in the morning. It can always be hotter, so I was grateful it wasn’t. Very similar to last year, and again the rocks were extremely slippery. And prior, of course 2008 had been the year of a very intense lightning storm, hail, and a trail that turned into a deep stream over the 2nd half of the course, and that’s no exaggeration.
The first three times I ran the Escarpment trail, I was able to train fairly hard, got my weight down, and had pretty good runs, clocking 4:24 in my first, then 4:10, and then 4:17, after starting a bit too fast trying to get in under 4 hours. Then the last two years I had major issues. In 2008 it was my left knee that wasn’t healed after a blunt trauma that broke the kneecap early in the year, so that year I just finished in 5:25, in the worst storm ever, by the way. Last year I had a lot going on and wasn’t trained or rested, and finished in 4:50, in what was a miserable experience. But luckily my love of trail running, and my exhilarating experiences on that trail the three previous years, wouldn’t keep me from coming back. The only problem is that again this year I was unprepared.
After promising spring training this year, I was getting my hours per week up where I wanted them, and was just starting to do longer runs. Then things came that needed to be done and they squeezed out my training time, and then I got sick from a virus for a couple of weeks, which hasn’t happened in years. My sixteen week average for hours per week run before the race was about 5, but that included very few long runs and no real hill training. So about 3 weeks before the run, I did one longer run of 2:48 with some climb, but it was so hot it felt more like a hike sometimes than the kind of long training run I’m used to doing, and normally I’d build up and do a long effort every 2-3 weeks for months. So I resolved not to struggle hard to run like last year, but to really go slower, try to enjoy it, finish in the time limit, and to film some more.
On the long bus ride to the start, I sat next to a guy who has done Escarpment over 20 times, and he had an interesting story to tell about this year’s race. It turns out he’s been hiking the Appalachian trail this spring and summer, and he got off the trail, rented a car, and drove down to the Catskills from Vermont just to run the race. He was driving right back to be on the trail again the next day. So he hadn’t run in over 4 months. But I saw him during the run and he was doing fine, not as fast as he normally was, but a lot lighter, and faster than me, as at first I passed him at some point to enjoy some downhill running after Windham (after Stuart went by I decided that I had to enjoy the downhill too), then him passing me somewhere just before blackhead. He finished about 15 minutes ahead of me. His novel idea for hiking the AT: since he lives sort of in the middle of the trail, start at one end and hike home, visit home, then start at the other end and hike home again.
100 Mile Club!
At the Start, it’s the tradition for the race director, Dick Vincent, to read out the names of runners who had returned to run the race enough times to mention. This starts with the 100 mile club, which is for runners who’ve run the race 6 times. Then there’s a race for the 200 mile club, and others are recognized beyond that. So, as I heard my name read out and that I was one of the runners going for the 100 mile club, I thought, that’s something at least, even if I’m not in shape to go for a PR.
I started near the back purposefully, wanting to hike most of the first climb. Even so, EVERYBODY starts this race way too fast. I let people go past me over and over, until I thought there were 20-30 people behind me. I tried to go slow and pace myself, and I think I did ok for the most part. My HR was too high but that’s totally normal after tapering for me at the start of a race. It would average out to 166 bpm for the first leg of the race, uphill all the way to Windham High Peak, over 3 miles and 1700’ of climb up.
I got up the first climb in about 1:04, similar to when I ran slow two years ago, and I was glad to be over that first hour of what can feel like a slog sometimes. For those who have run the race before, you just don’t want to blow up or use too much energy on that first hill, and I felt like I hadn’t. I wanted to get through the first ½ of the course with some reserves, so that I didn’t have the same horrible experience as last year in the final parts, and so that I could do some filming. I knew if I was tired or on the verge of puking for hours like last year, that I wouldn’t film.
After Windham, there are some nice downhills and about 5 miles of rolling terrain until you get to the base of the Blackhead climb, then it’s about a mile at 20% grade, progressively steeper toward the top. I ran with small groups here and there to the next climb, and had more running room than in previous years in that section. I was trying to run conservatively, and my HR dropped to 160 average for that section.
I started the Blackhead climb and resolved to go really slow. Then, to plan, after running for about 2 ½ hours, and halfway up the climb, I saw the 3500’ elevation sign and took that as a chance to get out the camera, because I wanted to film a little of the final climb, and then film all the way from the top of Blackhead down into Dutcher Notch. I had stashed the camera and mount in my waist pack until then, so I could run free and relax until I started filming. Carrying the camera in hand and filming made a normal arm swing impossible.
After I filmed the 3500’ sign, I had the same issue: filming ahead showed others bunched up and slogging up the climb, and filming off to the side always wouldn’t be as interesting as the trail. So I turned off the camera for a while until we got to the really steep section nearer to the top. For me, being out of shape, it was a miserable slog to the top anyway, even going slowly.
I got up to the top feeling pretty good and ready to go, but it was really humid and I was feeling it. I would have gotten sick pretty quickly if I went any faster, so I was happy it was a recreational day for me and that I wasn’t really pushing myself to the maximum. Last year that had been miserable toward the end when I was not in top shape.
Conclusion
The reason why I’ve returned to the Escarpment trail run now five times is that it’s just plain a bigger challenge and more fun than any other single event I’ve run in.
Stats
The following table show’s my split times over the years:
| | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 |
| Windham | 0:53:58 | 0:49:06 | 0:48:20 | 1:04:58 | 0:50:44 | 1:03:45 |
| Water | 0:35:35 | 0:30:56 | 0:30:21 | 0:39:34 | 0:34:00 | 0:38:02 |
| StartClimb | 0:31:45 | 0:30:29 | 0:28:45 | 0:37:22 | 0:33:41 | 0:40:02 |
| Blackhead | 0:24:51 | 0:23:42 | 0:24:26 | 0:34:31 | 0:28:03 | 0:32:15 |
| Dutcher | 0:32:17 | 0:31:55 | 0:33:29 | 0:39:52 | 0:37:58 | 0:40:46 |
| Stoppel | 0:36:55 | 0:36:57 | 0:39:13 | 0:44:18 | 0:48:09 | 0:47:27 |
| NorthPoint | 0:21:29 | 0:19:16 | 0:21:38 | 0:25:57 | 0:24:24 | 0:31:07 |
| Finish | 0:27:50 | 0:28:30 | 0:31:42 | 0:37:53 | 0:32:43 | 0:35:47 |
| Wt | 164 | 168 | 169 | 172 | 171 | 181 |
| AvgHR | | 166.8 | 168.8 | 159.8 | | 160.9 |
| Total | 4:24:40 | 4:10:51 | 4:17:54 | 5:24:25 | 4:49:42 | 5:29:11 |
Notes on Filming
I had tried two years ago to film parts of my run of the escarpment trail using a helmet cam. Unfortunately, that was the day of the most intense storms every, and somehow the waterproof casing for my camera didn’t work and I lost everything. I did get a bunch of still photos in time sequence from early in the race, but it was very uninteresting because it was too blurry to see much, except it captured the runners in front of me – not really what you want to see or what they would want you to see of them, for the most part.
So this year I decided that since I wasn’t in good shape I would try to film the race again, but this time using a weighted hand camera mount to try to stabilize the image somewhat. This had worked in some tests I did to help smooth out the image, but it you still had to hold it as steady as possible, and it meant you couldn’t use your arm swing to balance your running stride much on the side you were holding the camera.
The compromise I came up with was to cut the top foot off the top of a hiking pole with a camera mount, and then to duct-tape some small weights to the bottom front of the pole to balance the camera on top. The mount and weights were 1.12 lbs, and the camera is 0.5 lbs. When holding an inch or two below the camera, it was nicely balanced to remain upright, with the center of gravity under my hand.
This system worked well but you still had to control and stabilize the camera with your hand, which was hard to do as I got tired. Even with the weights, it’s not a true steadycam and there’s still jitter, to deal with in software later perhaps. The camera is a Panasonic Lumix zs3, which takes 720p HD video in the AVCHD Lite format, conserving memory over other formats. In that mode also, you can record continuously until the memory card is full (>1 hour for 8gb).
My plan was to just record the final few miles, which feature some of the most difficult technical terrain, and has always been my favorite part of the course to run. But then Doug suggested that I film some of the blackhead climb and descent, and I thought that would be cool also.
I had decided I wouldn’t film people running for the most part, because mainly I wanted to capture the experience of running the trail, and when the camera show’s other people the viewer will tend to focus on that, when in actual experience one running normally ignores as much as possible the other people running nearby, at least visually, because there’s so much to take in otherwise. Also, I think people feel funny about being filmed from the standpoint of another runner. It’s one thing to run past a stationary camera; it’s another to have someone filming from behind you or turning around to film you as you run. I wouldn’t want to be filmed like that, so I decided to be thoughtful of that as much as possible. So I really tried to keep the camera pointed down at the trail when nearby people, or to just show quick shots of the trail up ahead, or to just show feet running in front of me. My goal always was to have space ahead of me to film, so that’s what I tried to do.
