Look at me go

Don't look now but I've run 7 days in a row.  After Sunday's 14-plus-mile Lynnfield loop with Mark and Mike, which was probably a couple of miles longer than I needed, I just took it really easy all week with only one goal: get out every day. On Wednesday, I even met Dan for my first o'dark early run in months.  Will need to do much more of that. Now with just a 20 mile weekend I can wind up in the 50s the easy way for the week. That's respectable.

On another note, I have noticed that the worse the weather, the less considerate drivers are of runners. Today was about as lousy as it gets--35 and pissing down rain.  I'd honestly rather bitter cold or snow.  I had to wait several minutes, in a marked crosswalk mind you, to get across Lowell Street as driver after driver saw me standing in the rain getting colder and colder and couldn't spare the energy to pump the brakes.  It seems strange to me but I guess I only see it from the runner's perspective.  Probably weather like that just puts people in a foul mood.

Time for a personal decision

Many of you will be relieved to know that I am getting closer and closer to making a personal decision to train again in a way that is more than just some disorganized fitness jogging.  I'm not sure what the training will look like, or what the short-term and long-term goal will be, I just know that I have that uneasy feeling of unfocused energy that has preceded several bouts of semi-serious training.  I don't see gangbusters all-in crazy training, and certainly no marathons (those are just dumb) just something semi-organized that lets me feel like a runner and race whenever I want at whatever distance without embarrassing myself.  You know, hobbyjoggerhood.

I will take some serious organizing this time--I need to get back to being an early morning runner, which I really haven't been with any consistency in almost a year.  Life is busy, things are going well.  I have a pretty big day job, my four daughters range from high school freshman to kindergarten and have active extra-curricular lives and of course there's The Beast, the 100 year old house, the aging parents, the real-life stuff we all have.  The hardest thing, oddly, is trying to always be the first one up in the morning and the last one to bed.  Somehow I feel like that's part of my job.  Those are things I know I will have to manage and it wont be easy.  But it beats the alternative of being a regular person, I'm finding.

In the mean time, my friend Jeff has been on a tear lately both with his running and his blogging.  It's great to see him having success with the program he's on, and best yet believing in the program and believing he can make a lot more progress.  That's all you can really ask out of this sport.  I remember what it's like to be in that place and it's inspiring to see. None of us but a handful of elites will ever do anything truly significant in this sport so it mostly comes down to how you want to see yourself, how you want to experience the world.  As Jeff said:

Running and racing is a way of leaving the ordinary behind. To speak romantically, we transcend the ordinary by plunging deeper into it, finding out what the limit is through surpassing it. Running and racing gives us a chance to talk about what we think matters: heart and effort, courage and fear, hope, suffering, and determination.

That and maybe running and racing is a way of appreciating a few laughs and a few beers with our friends a little more.

That's a wrap, 2011 stylee

I just got back from my final run of 2011 and it's time to stick a fork in this puppy.  It was a 2.5-mile shuffle with my 14-year-old daughter, Allie, who complained the whole way.  I didn't force her to go in any way, mind you, she's just a 14-year-old girl and that's pretty much what they do.  She was tired and whatnot since earlier I took her along for an hour plus long walk in the woods with Joe Joe the Idiot Circus Dog but hey.

Just before said 2.5-mile shuffle, I did 7 mile warm-up on one of my familiar loops while wearing my brand new, just out of the box, wicked obnoxiously orange Asics Sky Speeds.  Holy crap they're orange.

Orange

All in all I'll call it a good year of running.  It was low in overall mileage, low in racing, but high in fun and I finished the year healthy and mentally in a good way with running.  According to RunningAhead.com I ran 2,498.5 miles for the year.  Yeah...if I had known that before I sat down to write this you can bet I would have found a way to squeeze another mile and a half out of today to make the utterly meaningless milestone of 2,500 miles (Despite all pretenses of nonchalanceI am an obsessive-compulsive whackjob after all.)  Still, that's a lot more than I would have guessed.  A lot of that must have been loaded into the first half of the year though since I haven't had a 200 mile month since September.

I only ran 4 races:  3 5k's and a half marathon. (Wow, really?)  But there was that whole Tour de Vermont thing, which was pretty awesome.  Somehow I squeaked out a 17:23 5k back in the early summer when apparently I was actually training a bit, then a 1:22 half marathon in October after the slide toward not giving a crap was well underway.  I'll take it, all things considered.

I will make an honest effort to race more in 2012 and I'll try to write more as well.  Originally this blog basically just served as a place for me to put race reports which makes 2011 a complete fail as I don't believe I even wrote about any of the races I ran this year (all 4 of them).  The plan is to get back to capturing my races here (this is mostly for myself but if others like to read them that is always nice as well) but I also want to throw out a lot of other thoughts I have about running and the rest of life and how it all fits together.  I can't make any promises but that is the plan.

Happy New Year and happy trails.  Keep on rolling.

Promise me you'll always be a runner

I know that the two or three of you who follow this space will be very relieved to see my first post in several months.  Sorry, I have been busy.

Personally, professionally and in almost every other way, 2011 has been a very good year for me and I feel extremely blessed.  One of the side effects of this is that I logged, by a fairly good margin, my lowest mileage total in over four years and ran way fewer races than I had expected--less than a handful really.  That fact, which at one time would have caused immeasurable angst, does not faze me one bit.

I am pretty sure I wrote once that back before I really became a runner I always "stubbornly, and for no obvious reason, considered myself a runner, always owned a pair of running shoes and knew where they were in the back of my closet, just in case."  That was at least twenty-five thousand miles ago.  I guess you could say I am over having to ever reassure myself or anybody of the basic truth: I run because I am a runner.

My slide deeper toward hobbyjoggerhood and away from taking any competitive running goals very seriously also coincided with our little running crew, the RTC (Reading Track Club, so creative!) becoming firmly established.  The core group (Mark, Chris, Dan and I) and our part time shower-uppers, (Mike, Marc, Patrick, Joe, et al.) have made Thirsty Thursday workouts followed by beers at Grumpy's into a genuine institution.  We couldn't stop Thirsty Thursday now if we tried.  The Sunday long runs with the group have become more regular as well.  During the year plus of Showing Up nearly every Thursday evening and a lot of Sunday mornings, our little crew has experienced the full gamut that life has to offer: deaths, births, injury, illness, work stress, family drama, natural disasters and more.  We took all of these things on shoulder-to-shoulder, sometimes at a conversational pace and sometimes, well, not so much.  We ran in the pitch dark and cold with sleet and snow pelting our faces, and in the life sucking humidity of mid summer.  We climbed mountains (literally) and descended valleys.  We raced some, ran lots and had a lot of laughs.  We had a few blue bird days--like last night running in shorts under a starry sky the week of Christmas--but we also had a lot of days and nights where we just had to put our heads down, lean into the icy wind or sweltering heat and grind it out for no better reason that to feel alive and earn our beers.

I ran some number of miles with two of my daughters and my dog (not all at the same time, that's crazy talk) as well.  I haven't had so many regular running buddies since high school track.

When I think back to some of my favorite accomplishments in the sport of running--running a 2:49 marathon for the first time probably being the highlight in terms of goals achieved and all that went into it--I am happy and proud, no matter how meaningless they are in the grand scheme.  I still think often about the feeling I had at Mile 23 of the 2008 Baystate Marathon--feeling the over-arching pain start to cover me heavier and heavier like a shroud.  The fear and dread hanging just above me but not yet touching me, knowing knowing that I would make it because I had earned it and drawing enough strength from that truth to actually carry it off.  And then the feeling of actually doing it--running out the rest of what was in me, executing the perfect effort.  Seeing those red numbers on the clock as I hurtled toward the finish.  Hearing my family out of my left ear.  The sights, the sounds of the stadium that day.  The color of the sky.  The smell of the chicken soup.  I think about these things all the time--I let them wash over me and carry me through the hard days of life.  Those things are mine forever.

I also cannot ignore how hard it was to get there, how many things had to go right, and how much sacrifice it took.  And I honestly cannot say whether I will ever want to do it again.  If not I will be totally okay with it.  The single-minded determination it takes to really accomplish an aggressive goal in the sport of running is awesome and I will always admire the kindred spirits out there piling on the miles and workouts, often at the expense of a lot else that they hold dear.  They know what I know and then some.

But I have also come to appreciate more fully everything else that running does to enrich my life and I have decided to enjoy those other things more.  I plan to race more in 2012 than I did in 2011 and to care less.  I plan to run as much (or as little) as I feel like, which most likely will still be "a lot."

Amby Burfoot once wrote: "A starting line is the best, most exciting place I can imagine.  When I stand on one, I feel fully alive--scared, yes, but also energized, focused, and prepared for the big challenge ahead."

I like starting lines.

Onward.

Tour de Vermont, Part 6

This is the last of a 6 part series.  Click here to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 or Part 5.

On Monday morning we woke up to a glorious day in Burlington, Vermont.  We walked down the hill from our hotel and got crepes at a place called Skinny Pancake (I know, right?) right on the lake front.  It was easily the least masculine thing we did the entire 4 days but none of us cared.  The crepes were awesome.  We read that Amy Winehouse had died.

After packing up and checking out of the hotel we headed up to Colchester to run the Colchester Causeway, a 4.5-mile former railroad causeway that runs out into the middle of the lake, almost all the way to South Hero.  We parked the cars at a really nice park with lots of athletic fields and headed out.  Evan decided to run with us part of the way.  The weather was cool and cloudy with some light mist coming down--a welcome reward after all of the heat we had endured.

We followed the causeway through some neighborhoods and then swampy areas before reaching the shore of the lake.  Once out on the lake, the path became rutted and washed out in places, but still very runnable.  After a mile and a half or so, around the time we figured Evan would turn around, we reached a bridge with a warning sign saying the path was closed from there.  This was where Dan had run to the day before and Evan and Kyle had ridden their bikes.

(Taken the day before, when it was sunny out.)

Obviously we ignored the sign, ducked under the chain and kept running.  I was in the lead at this point and for whatever reason, I was feeling in the zone.  Maybe it was the cool weather or the fact that the mileage was starting to soak in, but I was in a groove and just really enjoying picking my way along the rough footing with the lake on both sides and the mist hitting me in the face.  Every now and then I'd look over my shoulder to see the other guys rolling along single file behind me, keeping enough space to find their own path through the rutted, rocky trail.

There were several really bad washouts and holes but we made it all the way to the end, to the site of a former railroad bridge and the end of land.  We stood out there on a concrete platform looking at the lake for a while, watching a couple of sailboats navigate the small channel between us and the continuation of the causeway on the other side.  We could just make out Mt. Mansfield to the east through the mist and fog and it was hard not to think about all we had done over the past 3+ days.

Eventually we turned around and headed back.  This time I was in the back following the guys back in toward land.  Chris was leading us over most of the causeway, rolling along at a really good clip.  We were easily running low 7's over the rough terrain--I took off my shirt take advantage of the free shower that was falling.  Somewhere toward the end of the causeway we all bunched up and then I found myself out in front with Mark.  For some reason we just started gradually dialing up the pace--my legs inexplicably felt awesome.  At one point, with under a mile to go, I noticed we were hammering.  The last mile was in about 6 minutes and I had no idea why but didn't question it.

We hung around the parking lot for a bit, eating cookies and laughing about stupid shit.  Evan had run 9 miles with us.  It was starting to set in that the trip was almost over.  Chris declared himself done, explaining that it was really a 3-day trip (noon Friday to noon Monday) and he'd run 75 miles in 3 days.  He had a point, a pretty impressive one.  But I had it in my head that I wanted to get in 20 per day, and by that I was thinking calendar day.  Dan still had it in his head he could hit a hundred miles for the trip.  So we pressed on.

The plan was to head toward Middlebury but jump out of the cars with 7 or so miles to go and run to the Otter Creek Brewery and our final stop (Dan would jump out with 9 miles to go.)  We headed down Route 7 south past working farms with amazing views of the lake and the Adirondacks.  As we approached the drop-off point, of course we had lost Mark.  Chris, looking in the rearview mirror declared, "He is the worst follower!"

I jumped out of the truck and started tying my shoes.  A minute later, Mark pulled up and jumped out and at that point he told us the reason we'd lost him was he had stopped to let Dan out 2 miles back.  Made sense.  Mark and I crossed the highway and started running south.  At that point it was all we knew--run more.

Route 7 kind of sucked just because of the constant passing traffic and the relentless rolling hills.  And the 75 miles we'd already run.  I do a lot of running with Mark and Dan and although both of them are much faster than me, I wouldn't call either of them half steppers--the annoying people who always need to run a half step in front of you.  Mark and I have run thousands of miles together and he never has a problem chilling out and running at a pace that's comfortable for me.

But he wanted to be done.  And I didn't blame him.  And the fucker half-stepped me for 7 goddam miles of US Route 7 that day.

At about halfway down to Middlebury Mark openly declared his done-ness.  He said, "You know what I'm done with the hills and I'm done with the scenery and I'm done with the whole thing."  He spoke for both of us.  At one point we had to turn off of Route 7 onto Exchange Street for the last 3/4 mile.  I was expecting Exchange Street to be a bustling city like street with shops and restaurants but it was just this industrial wasteland of warehouses and factories.  I was so bummed.

At about the point when I was about to give up hope, pull off the road and lay down in a ditch, we saw a red, white and blue "Open" flag up ahead.  The Otter Creek Brewery, at last.  We rolled into the parking lot and found Chris, Evan and Kyle tailgating at the back of the lot.  A quick change of clothes, a shower under a bottle of spring water,, a dry t-shirt and some crackers and I was good as new.

10 minutes or so later Dan showed up, bonking hard, and declared, "I'm done.  As in done, done."

Fruits of our labor.

There was some debate at Otter Creek about going to Long Trail on the way home but Chris and I were both thinking the same thing: we were on borrowed time.  It really was the end of the road.

We took a bunch of pictures like the tourists we were and did our handshakes and high fives and then hit the road--time to get back to reality.

Look, big tanks of beer!

Dan and the Brothers Hudson jumped in Mark's car and Chris and I hopped in his truck.  We figured we'd see each other at the Wendy's in West Lebanon, NH, but we all knew the trip was basically over.  It had been awesome in ways none of us could really describe.

I can honestly say that when Mark and I shuffled into the parking lot at Otter Creek on fumes, I knew for sure that I would never do something like that again.  And yet, as Chris and I drove through Middlebury and up and over the mountain, it dawned on me that of course I would...in a heartbeat.  And the best part was I could tell Chris would too.

Over the ride home we sort of transitioned back to our normal selves.  We talked about our kids and wives and all of our first world problems.  We got ready to re-enter society.  Eventually we hit the Boston area at rush hour and the everyday traffic and scenery looked totally familiar, yet utterly foreign.

We pulled into my driveway and I unloaded my gear.  It was all over.

*****

It's been almost 2 months since the end of the trip and I'm just now getting around to writing the final chapter of this story. I have struggled trying to think of a way to sum it up that would make sense to someone who wasn't there.  The fact is it won't, so it's not worth trying.

What was the point?  The point was there was no point.  There was no cause we were benefiting, no hidden meaning, no greater good.  This was about paying homage to The Run, and nothing else.  It was about guys being guys, about friends you can count on, about experiencing the world by being in it, not looking at it through the window of a car going 75 mph.  This run was worthwhile for the same reason a hot shower feels so much better after a long run in sideways snow, why a cold shower feels so much better after a 15-mile Breakheart run in August, why the beers always taste better after a Thirsty Thursday workout.  We didn't have a death wish, we had a life wish.  It was about experiencing through doing, not watching.

It was about runners running.

Tour de Vermont, Part 5

Click here to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.


After the Mount Mansfield and Underhill State Park adventure, we needed lunch and then the plan was to head into Burlington and do some more running from there.  Having given up on the idea of literally running point to point across Vermont due to the logistics, we decided to make our 3rd night in Burlington so that we could enjoy the town and sample the local brews without having to worry about getting in a car and drive home from there.  On our way into Burlington we stopped in Essex Junction an the On Tap Bar.


We pulled into find a bizarre fundraiser car wash type deal going on in the parking lot but the place had a big deck with outdoor seating and lots of beer on tap.  We got a big table out on the deck with a decent, if a bit overly talkative waiter.  I think we ordered one of everything on the menu.  The food and beers went down easy.  About the only downside was the kiddie band that was playing inside (with speakers pumping the music outside.)  It's hard to describe so I'll just say you had to be there.  It was hard to listen to.

Kyle and his trusty steed, Sputnik

With some food and beer in us we headed into Burlington.  On the way we called ahead and Chris got us a couple of rooms at a full service Hilton a couple blocks from the water with amazing views of Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks.  We checked in, took our first real showers in a couple of days and relaxed for a few hours before heading out for our 2nd run of the day.  After the Mansfield debacle, we only needed about 6 miles for a 20 mile day and Chris was determined to not run one step farther than that.  We ran along a really nice bike path, the Island Line Trail, right along Lake Champlain, past beaches and nice neighborhoods.  The sun was starting to go down and the views across the lake were amazing.  Meanwhile the sherpas headed out for a bike ride on the same path.  After a few days of screwing around with the bike that he'd bought from "the Russian" in Portsmouth, Kyle finally took it to a good bike shop in Stowe and got the beast road ready.  "Sputnik" was ready to roll.


As we jogged along the bike path my legs were feeling like cement and I was happy that Chris seemed just as sluggish as I was and in no rush.  We let Mark and Dan pull away, figuring they were going to end up going longer anyway.  At about 3 miles out, Chris and I turned around and headed back toward downtown Burlington.  Running was not fun at that point and the days and miles (and the mountain) were definitely setting in.


Chris and I got back downtown, got a soft serve ice cream and walked up the hill to the hotel.  While Chris went to the truck in the parking garage to grab some beers from the cooler, I took my 2nd shower in just a few hours then put on some clean clothes and took a cat nap on one of the beds.  Wow that felt good.  Chris and I were just chilling in the room watching some tv when Mark knocked on the door, all showered and ready to go get some dinner.  Dan was still out running and the sherpas were still on their bike ride so the three of us headed out for a little walk through downtown Burlington to find some grub.  I had been to Burlington a few times before but for some reason never in the summer.  It's really a beautiful city and has a great energy.  The weather was just about perfect and as we shuffled through town on cement legs with our flip flops dragging there was plenty of good people watching to be had.


We were all looking for some waterfront dining so at the recommendation of the concierge, we headed to Breakwater Cafe, right next to the ferry terminal.  We let Kyle and Evan know where we were--nobody had heard from Dan yet.  All of us it seems were in the mood for our first non-beer drinks of the trip: I got a couple of margaritas and we ate below average pub food waterfront as the sun set behind the mountains on the other side of the lake.  There was definitely a sense of accomplishment at having gotten over the mountain, and just generally having run 60-something miles in 3 days.  We were all really tired, but feeling good.  Eventually Dan showed up to Breakwater just before the kitchen closed and ordered some food.  The bastard had run18 miles or something (for a 30+ mile day), halfway out the Colchester bike way into the lake and back.  After dark, Breakwater cleared out pretty fast and they started to shut down.  It was just as well as we needed to sample some of the local breweries, of which there are plenty in Burlington.


Unfortunately, it was a Sunday night and several of the breweries we wanted to visit were closed.  Fortunately it was Burlington and there were plenty more to chose from.  We headed a few blocks to American Flatbread, brewers of Zero Gravity beers.  Somewhere on the way, we lost Chris and Mark--they were worn out and needed to crash.  So Dan, Evan, Kyle and I walked into Flatbread and ordered a few beers.  I started with a Black Cat Porter.  The beer was good, the restaurant was pretty cool inside, but it was a weird vibe--almost like we had crashed a private party.  Being Sunday night it seemed like the only people in the place were the staff and friends of the staff.  It was fine, just odd and after a couple beers we moved on.


Our next stop was Vermont Pub and Brewery, Vermont's oldest craft brewery.  This place had a bit of a gritty, no-frills feel to it and we sat outside on wrought iron furniture.  Other than Evan, who decided to experiment with some kind of beer/fruit smoothie hybrid, all of us liked our beers and the place was quiet with only a few other tables occupied.  It was a perfect night.  I was really, really tired but happy with how things had gone so far.  We kind of figured that the next day would basically be a victory lap with no mountains to climb and no huge distances to cover so there wasn't a lot to be stressed over.


After a couple of beers, we headed down the hill back to our hotel and crashed.  For reasons we still can't explain, Dan decided to sleep on the floor but I have to tell you the bed at the Hilton was top notch after two nights on the ground and 64 miles in three days.


To be continued...

Tour de Vermont, Part 4

Click here to read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

When we woke up on Sunday and made our coffee and breakfast, we had a vague idea that day 3 was going to be the toughest day.  When you endeavor to run across the state of Vermont, you have to at some point get over "the spine."  So why not do it at it's highest point, we figured, and run over the summit of Mount Mansfield.

We said goodbye to our home for two nights, the Lake Elmore campground, and headed back down the road to Stowe and Pickwicks, where we had finished the day before.  Chris was extra quiet as he drove down Route 100--every now and then I think I caught him taking peeks at the mountain up ahead and to our right.  Chris had, by far, done the least running of the four of us.  Mark and Dan are the young bucks of our group--they are both in their early 30's, they ran cross country together at D3 Allegheny College, and have marathon PRs of 2:28 and 2:31. I have a not-too-shabby-for-an-old-guy 2:49 to my name and have run 3000 miles a year for the past 3 years.  Chris had only really started getting back into running with any seriousness  this time last summer and has jogged a few half marathons with his wife, so he had reason to be concerned.  Not too many people can run the Stowe Toll Road to the summit of Mount Mansfield.  Let alone doing it after running 43 miles in the 2 days before then doing a 7 mile "warmup" just getting to the mountain.  Mark, Dan and I tried to play it cool because we didn't want to make Chris overly nervous about it--the fact is we all had total confidence he'd make it after seeing what a workhorse he'd been the first two days--but I know I was a little nervous and I'm sure Mark and Dan were too in their own way.

The starting point was Pickwicks on the Stow Mountain Road, about 7 miles from the start of the Toll Road.  It was actually a really good idea to start here and get some nice, gentle miles in before the sufferfest of the Toll Road.

We ran along the Stow Quiet Path, a rambling multi-use path along the river that winds its way up the valley toward Stow ski resort.  The weather had finally broken and it was crisp, beautiful morning as we jogged along the shaded path with views of horse farms, the river and the mountains.  There were lots of people out running, walking and biking along the path and nearly all of them were perfectly happy and friendly.  Every  now and then The Mountain would peek out at us from between the trees.  It looked gentle enough from a distance.

Only at the very end did our run up to the Toll Road get hilly--the last mile was steeply uphill, just to get us in the mood.  Eventually we made it to the start of the Toll Road, Mark and Dan went on ahead and I waited for Chris who had fallen back just a bit on the last hill.  Damn the thing was steep.  The start of it looked like it went up a wall.

The Toll Road is 4.5 miles long and has an average grade of over 10%.  The only thing I've ever run that beats that is Mt. Washington.  Chris and I talked a bit at the bottom by the toll booth and agreed that we were each gong to have to take this thing at our own pace and we'd just meet at the top.  I headed out up the first face and just got into it.  After only a few hundred yards the road went into the woods and was mostly shaded, thankfully, for most of the way up.  It was still cool but going up such a steep grade at any pace at all just generates a ton of heat and almost immediately sweat was just dripping off my forehead, off my nose and chin and just soaking my shirt.  I had a water bottle in my hand but that was it.  Every once in a while, I'd hear a car coming from behind or from up ahead and a carload of tourists would rumble slowly by and look at me like I had nine heads, but mostly I was alone with my thoughts.  My only goal was to run the whole thing, no matter how slowly.  I stopped once to look at the view on a particularly awesome overlook, but otherwise I just kept my head down and ground my way up that mountain.  When the trees started getting really small and the switchbacks closer together, I knew I was almost there.  I passed a couple of lower parking areas where I thought I was done but finally reached the summit.  The view was worth it.

At the top, Mark and Dan were nowhere in sight.  I stood on a rock pile over the parking lot for a while looking down into the valley, waiting for Chris.  After 10 minutes or so, I asked the girl who was sitting there by the warming hut if she had seen 2 runners go by.  She said that Mark and Dan had headed down the long trail about a mile to the gondola top station where there was a snack bar.  After a few more minutes I started walking back down around the bend to wait for Chris.  After just a couple of minutes, he came around the bend looking pretty rough but happy to have made it.

I let Chris catch his breath and take in the view for a minute before I suggested we head down the trail toward Mark and Dan.  It seemed like a good idea but pretty quickly both of us started bonking--we had all been so focused on running the mountain that we'd totally forgotten to do the math as in a 7 mile warmup plus a 4.5 mile run straight up a big mountain is probably about the outer limits of our glycogen supplies.  Oops.  So as Chris and I were scrambling along the top of the spine on the Long Trail, a rocky rooted hiking path that runs the length of Vermont, we were both in the midst of a fairly hard sugar crash and our water bottles were empty.  And of course we were in nothing but running shorts, t-shirts and lightweight trainers--not exactly mountaineering gear.

Eventually we found Mark and Dan on their way back.  Dan proclaimed, "We bought out the store!" and started emptying his pack of M&M's, crackers, cokes, water and lots of other goodness.  I like to say that Dan saved our lives up there with Peanut M&Ms and Coca-Cola.  Well, temporarily at least.  We still had to get down the other side.

Our savior, me and Chris on top of Vermont.

The way down was interesting.  There was no turning back as Kyle and Evan were supposed to meet us at Underhill State Park at the eastern foot of the mountain, having driven around via Smugglers Notch.  The only way for us to get there was to take a steep, rocky hiking trail called "Halfway House Trail."  It was roughtly 3.5 miles from the summit to the parking area at Underhill where we were supposed to meet the sherpas and just about all of it was super steep downhill, the first part ridiculously so.  The only people we saw on the trail were wearing some pretty serious hiking gear and had big packs and all kids of equipment.  We had running shoes.

I had a really hard time with the downhill trail--I probably rolled my ankle 7 times.  All the guys left me in the dust as I picked my way down the mountain until we finally reached what was basically a fire road that careened down the rest of the way to the parking area.

Once the trail turned into basically a dirt road, I just let my legs go and flew down the road out of control.  Again Mark and Dan were up ahead and Chris and I were together.  As we rolled into the parking area I still didn't see Evan or Kyle until I was almost past them.  I stopped short and blurted out, "Hey what's up, I just ran here from Stowe."  We immediately started laughing at how absurd that sounded.  But it was true.

Continued...