How I celebrated my 50th birthday

One day last winter I realized that I would be turning 50 come springtime. So I completely freaked out. I bought a motorcycle, got a tattoo on my neck, slept with an attractive married woman. Wait. That’s not true. Not all of it at least. I didn’t buy a motorcycle. I don’t have any tattoos. But I did sleep with an attractive married woman. It was my wife, Carissa, which was (and is) great, I am not complaining one bit. But it’s hardly the stuff of bat-shit-midlife-crisis-crazyville either. And it felt like I needed to do something epic and regrettable to mark the survival of half a century.

So I decided to run a 50-kilometer ultra-marathon. For those of you who believe the metric system is a godless United Nations socialist plot, that’s roughly 31 miles. It seemed like the perfect birthday gift to myself. I liked the 50@50 symmetry. It also seemed like it would give me a head start as I entered my next half century. Or maybe it would kill me. Either way, I was going to make it happen. So I searched events on the world wide web and discovered a 50k trail run a few hours away scheduled for the day after my birthday. I signed up for the SingleTrack Maniac 50k near Williamsburg,Virginia, and started training.

Full disclosure: I was actually a little arrogant about signing up for the SingleTrack Maniac (STM) 50k. The course organizer warned that the STM course was difficult – single-track mountain bike trails with hidden roots, twists and turns, and more than 1,500 feet of elevation gain and loss. Sounded legitimately challenging, but I’ve been a runner for more than 20 years and finished 10 marathons in the last 10 years. Nearly all of my running happened while living out west where I had grown up and where I had adopted the common conceit of westerners that we are exceedingly hardy compared to our effete fellow Americans back east. In fact, this would not even be my first 50k. I did one in Idaho back in 2011 – the Foothills Frenzy 50k (you can't organize a 50k trail run without coming up with a wacky name - it's the law, you can check it out). The Foothills Frenzy was a brutal, unforgiving course. Nearly 6,000 feet of elevation gain on trails passing by scatterings of sagebrush and a few pine trees. So I wasn’t intimidated by the thought of running on “mountain” bike trails in the quaint hills of the Virginia piedmont. Or tidewater maybe (I’m still learning the mid-Atlantic geography).

But (foreshadowing alert) my last 50k was three and a half years ago. In the meanwhile, I’d had a couple of non-running related surgeries that had disrupted my running routine. We also moved from Boise to D.C., further disrupting my routine. And I’d gained about 10 pounds, which over a 31-mile run can start to feel like you’re carrying a belt made from a 24-pack of  Deschutes Brewery Mirror Pond Pale Ale bottles. Only they jiggle instead clank.

If you’re here to read a straight-up, no frills STM 50k race report, check out this link right here. If you want your race report with the frills and not necessarily written for runners, keep reading. My family – Carissa and our girls, ages 14 and seven – indulged me by making my 50@50 birthday celebration a weekend event. As soon as the girls were out of school on Friday, we jumped in the SUV and headed south from our home in Bethesda to Williamsburg. The trip is roughly 120 miles, but on a Friday heading south on I-95 out of D.C. (aka the world’s longest parking lot), that meant about five hours on the road. We stayed in a condo with two bedrooms, which was nice to have space when I was up at 4:30 sharp on Saturday morning to prepare for the 7 a.m. race start. If you’re wondering why I would get up at 4:30 for a race that begins at 7 and is only 15 minutes away from the condo, let me say only that biological functions are best dealt with before starting a 31-mile run and that pooping on demand is not one of my super powers. 

The STM 50k is a great local race. Roughly 85 runners started. This is the event’s third year and was perfectly organized, except they forgot to do something about the shitty weather. It was already warm and sticky with temperatures in the upper 60s (and heading for the 80s) as we lined up for the start. OK, the weather could have been worse. But this Idaho boy is not a fan of the mid-Atlantic humidity. Still, I started out fine. I held a steady pace as we covered two miles of asphalt and gravel road before heading into the single track mountain bike trails. The shade was great – mature oaks and pines lined the entire course. The runners quickly spread out and it was easy to feel alone in the woods.

The race organizer did not misrepresent when she said the course was twisting and turning and snaky and up and down and sideways. There were no mountains to climb, but there was not a single straight line or level plane on the entire course. She also spoke truth when she said that there were lots of roots on the trail, many of which were obscured by layers of leaves and pine needles, as I would discover.

I blame the warm, humid weather, but I started thinking about cold beer at Mile 8. At Mile 9 I caught a toe on a hidden root and fell to my hands and knees. No big deal. By the end of the day I would go down to my hands and knees three or four more times, and another three times landed flat on my stomach after finding a hidden root. The belly flops were a bigger deal, but I escaped serious harm. The black toenails and abrasions on my knees and hip, though, would tell that story the next day. I cruised along fairly well through Mile 15, roughly the midpoint.

But by Mile 18, as the sun climbed higher and the flies started buzzing, as I stubbed an already battered and bruised big toe on yet another unseen root, I entered that phase that endurance runners call The Wall. Although I had been regularly eating packets of specially formulated energy gel and drinking water and sports drink along the way, there came that point where my body had consumed its available fuel supply and I was running on fumes. It becomes difficult to do something simple, like knowing I was at Mile 22 of a 31 mile race but struggling to do the math that would reveal that I had only nine miles to go. Or remembering the name of the race I was running. Or the names of my children. As your brain is shutting down, you enter a world where gravity exerts and increasingly heavy pull on your body and your toes find more and more things to stumble over.

That typically doesn’t last forever. Miles 18-24 were the worst, and then I took a few minutes at an aid station to take on extra food and drink. Then it was time to grind out the last few miles. Quitting, of course, is not an option absent a compound fracture or complete physical and emotional breakdown. That’s the point of competing in endurance events, to finish what you’ve spent four months religiously training to finish. In 2007 at the Portland Marathon near Mile 20, I came up on a guy who had shit his running shorts and kept on running. That was a wonderful incentive for me to pick up my pace and move far, far away from that (yes, I’m going to say it) crappy situation. But think about it: the guy shit his pants and kept on running. The point is, the end of an endurance race can get weird and the challenge is to focus mind and body and finish with as much dignity as you can summon.

No poop-stained runners were on hand at the STM 50k to push my to run faster, but I had some  incentives pulling me toward the finish. For one, Carissa had blabbed on social media the day before that I was running a 50k on my 50th birthday, so it would have been awkward to not finish. Never underestimate the power of shame as a motivator. I also focused on the delicious cold beer awaiting me back at the condo. Finally I thought about my family at waiting at the finish line (I had recovered sufficiently from my early funk that I could now remember their names). One of the best parts of the day was racing my seven-year-old to the finish line after she joined me for the last 100 yards, although she wanted to race and is fast so I hustled a bit more than I wanted there at the end.

I finished the course in 5:46:15, a little slower than my previous 50k but given the course and the weather, I was suitably humbled and reasonably satisfied with my effort. I finished 17th overall and was the first of the 15 finishers aged 50 or older, (you have to click the 2015 tab for this year's results) which meant that I won the “Grand Master” division. It felt a little like cheating to win a division that I was a member of for all of one day. Nonetheless, that has not stopped me from demanding that my family address me as Grand Master.

Now that 50@50 business is over and I survived. I’m done with mid-life crisis mode for a while at least. But I am starting to think about how to celebrate when I turn 60. At the moment the leading idea is 60@60 – 60 different beers over my 60th birthday weekend with my brothers and few friends in Las Vegas. I’ve got ten years to train.

I can’t wait to turn 70.