He who saw the Deep

30s F/4-5 C and pouring rain today. I walked 1 mile to the cemetery, did 3 loops, walked 1 mile to the pharmacy, picked up meds, was freezing cold*, ran the mile to the grocery store on the way back, picked up groceries, ran most of the mile home, and definitely enough to stay warm.

* 5C is not freezing cold. 5C and soaking wet is freezing cold.

Feeling pretty very good about this run, despite the low number of hill reps. The "go out, get very cold, and run just enough to stay warm" trick is working. :D

Maybe I can build up enough stamina before the weather warms up that I won't need the cold weather and can just run without the motivational boost.

Regardless, it's a nice trick to remember next fall/winter, because in addition to wanting to build up my running and walking stamina, I want to burn the "so-called 'inclement' weather is a reason not to go out" idea out of my brain. It was put in there by society, it is not me, and every time I go outside after hesitating and dragging my feet, I smack myself upside the head and remember that society's concepts of inclement weather and my concepts are very different. (Also my families'; both birth and current. These are other people's lifestyles, not mine.)

Photos of Jasmin's last-minute finish are starting to come in:

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Plus this awesome parody/tribute.

Most finishers per year: 5. Previously 3, in 2012 and 2023.

Most finishes per person: John briefly tied Jared for 3, then Jared leveled up to 4.

Most runners on loop 5: 7. Previously 4, in 2023.

Slowest known time (SKT): Jasmin at 59:58:21, smashing Karel's 59:53:33 of last year.

First female finisher: Jasmin!

Laz must be going crazy trying to think up new rules for next time. Course changes alone don't cut it, not if the weather holds! I imagine him seriously contemplating that 6th loop...

ETA: a moat with alligators has been proposed on Twitter.

Jasmin Paris finished the Barkley with ONE MINUTE THIRTY-NINE seconds to go! Official tweet.

First woman to start loop 5, first woman to finish the Barkley!

Ihor Verys, a Barkley virgin*, has led the field all day and has now finished at 58:44:59. Official tweet. Video of his finish.

* But I know his name vaguely from the 107 hours he ran at laz's Big's Backyard Ultra**, bringing him in a stunning SECOND to Harvey Lewis. He looked super strong in the pictures and in his finish today, and he was quoted as saying partway through, "It's only 60 hours, not 107."

** Obligatory reference to Karel, who won it in 2020 after running 75 hours.

Jared, Jasmin, and John, where are you?? (Ditto Greig, Sébastien, and Damian!)

Okay, off to run some hill reps, updates when I get back! Only 65 minutes left for the remaining 6 to finish!

She was spotted at the Fire Tower with 3-4 hours before the end of the race. Karel needed over 4 hours to cover that distance last year, and he came in with only 6 minutes to spare. However, she is definitely moving faster than he was at the same spot:

Jasmin

Karel

She's also got daylight for the whole thing, whereas his last couple hours were at night. Here's hoping she can sustain that pace and not make any navigational errors!

There's also the possibility that there was a significant lag time between when the video was taken and when it emerged onto social media: we don't know exactly when it was taken.

Since I gather people without a Twitter/X account can't follow unless I link to a tweet directly, here are some links for our #smalleuropeanwoman:

Keith's official tweet saying she left on loop 5.

Pictures from before she completed loop 4:
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Pictures from after she completed 4:
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News report from loop 4. It's pretty good, but it says she got clockwise because she was faster out the gate. In fact, Jared was faster but gave her the choice, and here's the video to prove it.

7 loops, plus some extra running!

I came up with a new plan I'm trying out, which is to continue ramping up on my loops, but then to take a breather and run home. I came up with it yesterday after discovering that my body really doesn't like walking up the hill on the way home, it would rather run. Just not continuously after doing X number of hill reps. So loops plus breather plus running it is.

Today I tried very hard to go at the slowest possible speed while doing the run home up the hill, just my cool-down pace, but my body didn't like that and forced me to pick up the pace a little partway up the hill. !!

In other words, I like this new plan and am looking forward to putting it into practice more. Like many things, I need to remind myself that multiple shorter practice sessions can add up to more than one continuous one, and that there's value in that. (This goes for language practice and German handwriting practice too.)

PLUS, today should be one of the last winter-weather days, 2 Celsius/35 Fahrenheit and super windy, so I took advantage by dressing for running rather than walking. I told myself that if I got cold, well, there was a solution for that: start running. I said that today would be an excellent opportunity to use the cold weather to motivate myself, and I should seize the day.

So after I finished my running practice, I walked to the grocery store without changing clothes or adding layers, was very cold, warmed up a bit in the store, and then was super cold as I came out and the sun was setting and the wind was biting.

"You know what to do," I said to myself.

So I ran most of the way home. Not all of it, but any time I felt that a minute had passed without running, I told myself I needed to start again before my body temperature dropped. And that was super motivating!

Oh, I should add notes on my experience on the 7 loops: I was physically fine! The last one I was mentally weak on, because I didn't have confidence I was ready for 7, but it became rapidly clear that my legs weren't hurting at all and were fully capable of keeping my stride.

That's my chant, btw, as I crest the hill and force myself through the steepest part: "Don't break stride, don't break stride, don't break stride." Or sometimes, if having something positive to focus on is working better, "Hold your stride, hold your stride, hold your stride." It's basically a "You have ONE job" message. And I only have to do it for a matter of seconds. But I do have to do it. Turns out as long as I only have the one job, I can.

Plus I wasn't *that* out of breath cresting the hill. Certainly not enough to justify the mental whining. Tomorrow, I vow to be mentally stronger.

Btw, deliberately seeking out bad weather as an opportunity for toughening yourself up is something Barkley runners do: I was always struck by the story of Jared Campbell seeing a blizzard as an excellent training opportunity, and I ran into the story again last night in more detail, in Michiel Panhuysen's In the Spell of the Barkley, which I am reading:

Just before [Jared's] first Barkley, there was a weather warning in Utah State, where he lives. A violent storm was predicted, with heavy snowfall and freezing temperatures. The government issued media warnings to stay at home and go outside only in an emergency. To Jared, this seemed the ideal occasion for some heavy-duty, night-time training in the mountains.

And while I'm not outdoorsy like these people and absolutely don't have anything like their physical capacity, I understand the mentality. I read something like that, and I'm like, "YES! Exactly!"

I'm not even sure what I'm training for, as I have exactly zero ambition to run a race, and I know I would hate camping, which limits my hiking opportunities. I'm not even interested in pushing my limits. Maybe in another lifetime, but in this one, I have too many other (intellectual) things to do. I think I'm just training to feel better about my physical condition after a decade of that stupid foot injury, and to be able to follow the Barkley from my phone without feeling totally ashamed of myself. :P

I think it comes down to: since I was about 10, maybe 12, years old, I've had the ambition of getting into shape enough to do *some* significant walking and/or running before I die. Spending my entire 30s barely capable of walking and standing because of foot pain forced me to put that on the back burner. Now that I've fixed at least enough of my physcal problems that I'm capable of doing some training, I'm starting to revive that "Right, I wanted to do this at least once before I die" mentality.

There *is* a problem with not enough hours in the day, but I'm still chipping away at French and at German handwriting and still planning to finish those 18th century history essays. It's a higher priority than running, which is why I said I would need another lifetime to push my limits with walking or running. But this feels good, so I'm hoping to see what I can do in terms of running ramp-up in March, at least.

The awesome stories accumulate.

1. One runner came in from loop one, was a page short, went back out and got it, and came back in time to start loop 2 with a huge grin on his face!

No word on whether he skipped a book and had to go find it, or whether he dropped a page and it miraculously hadn't blown away (as happened to poor Guillaume in 2022).

I've always wondered what would happen if you got to the gate with a missing page and time to go back, and now I know!

ETA: Okay, I wrote that yesterday, and now I have details: It was in fact Guillaume, and what happened was he was going to quit at the gate, but he was encouraged to go back and look for the page he'd dropped. He went back and started asking every runner if they'd found his page. Someone had, gave it to him, and he finished the loop.

This is AMAZING. All the more so because of that 2022 year when he had to drop because one of his pages blew away. Guillaume, that sounds like a problem you should solve!

(2022 was also the infamous year John Kelly dropped his belt bag with his pages in it, and only found it after 3 hours, costing him the time he needed to finish.)

2. In the first loop (and often after), the official tweeter only gives us confusing descriptions of runners, so you have no idea who's who. This year's descriptions included "Guy with awesome glasses," "guy with very daring shorts," and other gems. My favorite tweet, though, was when he said

"A guy with a gray beard and a muscular guy with tree trunk legs came through the fire tower at 12:55." and somebody replied, "Gandalf and Aragorn?"

ROFL!

Obligatory use of my Aragorn icon for this one.

(For those of you who started following me 10 years ago for the Tolkien scholarship; yes, Aragorn is canonically lean and it's more likely Boromir who had the tree trunk legs. Still funny.)

As Jasmin (and John, Damian, and some others) head out onto loop 3, I head to bed. We'll see what updates await us in the morning! Plus I still owe you a couple from today that I never finished typing up.