Eat before you're hungry. Drink before you're thirsty. Walk before you're tired.
Blake Norwood was a genius. I say this with complete sincerity and also as context for what follows, which is the story of a man who heard that motto, nodded, and did not eat.
Fred picked me up from the airport. Fred has finished Umstead thirteen times. Fred arrived at RDU with the calm of a man who has made peace with this race, with himself, and with the general arc of his athletic life. Fred's goal was 50 miles. He knew what he had. He knew what he didn't have. Fred is emotionally intelligent in ways that I am not.
My goal was 100. I have finished 100 before. I have finished it twenty times. I have finished Umstead specifically seven times, which means I have successfully executed Blake Norwood's motto seven times on this exact course, and I want you to hold that number — seven — while I describe my preparation, because the contrast is going to do a lot of work.
January: 110 miles. Forty of those were at the St. Croix Winter Ultra, where I walked. All of them. Slowly. With Kevin, Bob, and Oak, in what I can only describe as a timing-chip social event. I did run one mile — after midnight, in the dark, at a pace that tested the legal definition of running — specifically to keep a 15-year daily running streak alive. That mile was a negotiation between me and the universe about what words mean. The universe blinked first. I counted it.
February: 74 miles of treadmill intervals, based on a theory I developed myself and continue to defend. If I can run 9-minute miles for 20 minutes, my all-day ultra pace improves from 14-minute miles to 13-minute miles. That's nearly two hours saved over 100 miles. That's not nothing. That's sports science. The treadmill responded to my sports science by giving me knee pain, which is the treadmill's version of peer review.
March: 139 miles, including this race.
323 miles since January. Seven buckles. Twenty hundreds. I showed up with a training log that was imperfect but present, a bib number I had made my profile picture, and the specific confidence of a man who has mistaken familiarity for fitness.
Friday was 80 degrees. I sweated through a shirt and told myself it didn't matter because race day would be cooler. Race day was 50 degrees and perfect. I want that acknowledged. The weather was not the problem. The weather was blameless. The weather did everything right and I am not going to drag the weather into this.
Friday night I lay in the dark and catastrophized. This is a thing I do. I have finished this race seven times and I find that statistic unpersuasive at 11pm the night before. I was going to bonk. The knee was going to go — the treadmill had tried to tell me and I hadn't listened and now we were here. I couldn't finish. Obviously I couldn't finish. I made peace with the DNF before the starting gun, the way you make peace with turbulence before a flight, and somewhere in that process I realized I was actually a little relieved. If I couldn't finish, I wouldn't have to. The logic was airtight. I went to sleep.
Loop one: 2:50. Near the back, moving fine, eating — and this is important — not quite enough, but I wasn't hungry, so I noted that and moved on. The bigger problem was that the loop went well. My knee held. My legs were there. The catastrophizing had been wrong, as it always is, and I was now staring at 75 more miles of evidence that I was going to have to run 100 miles. I want to be honest about the emotion I felt at this realization, which was not excitement. Part of me, a not-small part, was genuinely bummed that the excuse wasn't materializing. I had pre-grieved the DNF. I had made peace. And now my body was threatening to perform and I was going to have to renegotiate the whole thing.
Loop two solved this problem for me. Somewhere between Aid 2 and HQ my body ran out of fuel with the abruptness of a phone dying when you were sure you had 20% left. I was never hungry. I just stopped working. I rolled into HQ and ate everything within reach and sat in the specific relief of a man whose body has made the decision his ego was too proud to make. The catastrophizing, I now understood, had simply been early. I was going to DNF. I had just had the timeline wrong.
Blake Norwood said eat before you're hungry.
I was never hungry.
The second half of loop three the food kicked in and I felt fine, which was its own cruel joke — look how well this works, said my body, eat food and you can run, it's very simple — and I rolled into the start of loop four doing math that felt like optimism and was actually denial wearing a hydration vest.
The second half of loop four I bonked again.
Same bonk. Identical bonk. The same gap between Aid 2 and HQ, the same empty tank, the same total absence of hunger preceding the same total absence of forward momentum. Blake Norwood's motto has three parts. I had now violated the first part twice in one race, on a course I have finished seven times, having heard the motto eight times at eight pre-race briefings, having nodded eight times, having presumably understood English on all eight occasions.
Eat before you're hungry.
I was never hungry.
The cutoff math was simple. I pulled at 50. I walked into HQ, sat down by the fire, and someone handed me pierogies. I ate them with focused, mechanical gratitude. Across from me, in a wheelchair, was the winner of the race. He had run 100 miles. He finished approximately 30 minutes before I finished 50. He was in a wheelchair because winning Umstead costs you your legs for a period afterward. I was in a chair with pierogies because not eating costs you your legs in a completely different and significantly less impressive way. We were both immobile by the fire. Only one of us had earned it. We both knew which one.
The next morning I went to Waffle House and ordered a steak. Rare.
The cook looked at me. "Rare?"
Yes.
He came back. "Rare rare?"
Yes.
Third visit: "Sir. You want it rare."
I had bonked twice on a course I've finished seven times. I had spent the night before hoping for a DNF, spent loop one quietly devastated that I might have to finish, and then felt genuine relief when my body confirmed the DNF by refusing to eat food on a race where the central organizing principle, established by a beloved founder, is to eat food. I looked that cook in the eye. Rare. Yes. Final answer. I have never been more sure of anything in my athletic career.
He asked twice more. The steak arrived. It was perfect. It was the single best-executed decision of the entire weekend and it wasn't close.
Fred finished his 50. I finished my 50 three hours and twenty minutes faster. Fred's goal was 50.
I'm going back next year. I'll walk 40 miles somewhere cold with my friends in January. I'll do some treadmill stuff in February. I'll show up with 300 miles in my legs and lie awake the night before absolutely certain I can't finish. Loop one will go fine and I'll feel the quiet dread of a man whose excuse isn't materializing.
And then, somewhere between Aid 2 and HQ on loop two, I won't be hungry.
Blake Norwood built something beautiful. I just think the motto could be more specific. Something like: eat before you're hungry, drink before you're thirsty, walk before you're tired, and schweddy, this means you.
portions of this post were generated by chatdnf.com and claude.
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