Engineer, adventurer, and entrepreneur Carl
Byington serves as the president and chief
officer of PHM
Design company, located in Ellijay, GA. He has had a successful career with several companies over the years
including Sikorsky Aircraft and Lockheed Martin in Rochester, NY. In his free
time, Carl Byington is a long-distance runner and trekker who has completed
marathons all around the world. Here’s a little blog about a long run in the
Pennsylvania mountains.
It’s 4 AM and just under 40
degrees F. Time to get out of bed and eat before heading into the mountains for
a little exercise. It is best to eat light even though the race is still a few
hours from the start. It is also time to make sure you are starting to hydrate.
Some recommend foregoing on the coffee, but I still always have a couple of
cups before a long race. I need my caffeine!!!!
A few friends and I
ventured out into the near dark woods near Lock Haven PA for the start of the
Megatransect event). It was the third time that I have done the event.
It would have been the
fourth consecutive year, but I was knocked out by a badly sprained ankle during
a training run in 2009. The course changes every year and this year it was
perhaps slightly longer at just over 26 miles. So while this the same as a road
Marathon distance, this course and how you run it doesn’t resemble a road race
at all. There are significant uphill/downhill (about 6000 vertical feet or 2000
meters), scrambling over boulders, running down trails, crossing a stream (over
25 times!!), and so much more fun! 🙂 The event drew about 800 or so other
runners/hikers. Typically about 80-90% finish the race. The primary reasons for
not finishing are injury, illness, or excessive muscle cramping.
We leave at 7 AM with a
crisp chill on us as the air has only warmed a few degrees for us. Soon the sun
will be fully up though and once we are pushing up those hills we will be in
plenty-o’-sweat land. In the days before the race, the heavens threw in some
fresh rain, so we would now have some muddy slopes and slick rocks. The
organizers added some nice boulder work and shortened a few of those pesky,
obnoxious flat sections – after all this is mountain running; you should either
be going uphill or downhill over rocks, roots, mud, etc., right?!
The fastest runner
completed this roughly marathon distance in about 4 and half hours. Considering
this time is twice as long as it would take the fastest runner to complete a
road marathon, you have some idea of the difficulty involved in mountain trail
versus road races. The last people to finish were able to accomplish it in
close to 13 hours.
For me, I finished in a
little over 7 hours, which was a good time for me considering my nagging knee
injury that prevented me from training much this year.
To complete this race you
must carry your own water and some food, but they also have some stands in the
woods about every 8 miles or so. There are also Emergency Medical folks and
occasionally people cheering along the way. Balancing your food and water
intake with the energy used is very important in a longer race such as this
one. Those factors along with electrolyte replacement (I use Endurolytes pills
from Hammer Nutrition. It is one of the best.) are largely what determine
whether you will cramp up and not finish the run. Oh, but either way, you will
be in some muscle and joint discomfort and most folks also take some Tylenol or
Ibuprofen. I prefer Tylenol during the run and Ibuprofen afterward but this is
a personal choice and may not work for everyone.
At one point running
downhill I took a tumble when my ankle turned on a hidden rock in the trail. By
barrel rolling through it though I popped back up unharmed. Someone stopped and
made sure I was okay as well, which I appreciated. It reminded me that I needed
to be careful not to try to stop my momentum by planting my hands in such
situations. I chuckled again as I looked at the pictures where I still had the
dirt on my face from the tumble I took. The last several miles is just gruelling
as it is in any long distance event. You don’t feel like you can run and you
want to just walk. Actually you don’t even want to do that you just want to
plop down and lay there.
But you find ways to break
the problem down into manageable chunks. “I will just run to this next
marker.” You do that and give your self a break and then find a new way to
push yourself onward. As I finished the last mile or so, I walked a few hundred
yards with a new friend that I had just met. It was his first Mega, and he
enjoyed it but he was hurting. He said, “When do I have to start running
again so I know I can finish running?” (He didn’t know how much further it
was and you don’t want to finish it walking if you can avoid it when people are
cheering for you.) I told him, “Just over the top there, and then we will
run it in together.” And so we did. At about 100 meters to the finish I
looked over at him and said, “You have enough left to sprint it?” He
nodded and we ran it in hard to the crowd’s delight! 🙂
As we eat barbeque pork
sandwiches, pizza, and drink as much Troeg’s beer as we wanted, many of us feel
the transformation start to happen.
The
regeneration of our bodies and spirits with the food and copious amounts of
Troegs beer (and Ibuprofen) has started and more importantly we are no longer
just concerned with nursing our own scrapes, aches, and pains. You start to
spend your time talking with other’s about their experience, cheering on the
people that must drag themselves in with only their will left, and realize that
the accomplishment and experience is now part of your life. While you were on
the course the struggle was largely internal. And while you are out there, you
already realized it is you against you. You can quit anytime you
want. But if you do, you will be the one to carry that fact and maybe you had
more to give if you pushed yourself. Once you have accomplished the goal you
can turn to others and help them celebrate their own internal battle of will
and stamina.
It becomes your shared triumph with your larger
human tribe.
As I
sat there, I recalled the conversation I had with a friend at the event 3 years
ago over a bottle of Troeg’s beer afterwards in which he said, “This is the
hardest thing I have ever done.” And yet, he did it. This year he
finished 5th overall. That is quite an accomplishment indeed, but I and many
others cheered just as hard, if not even harder, for those that had finished it
in 9, 10, 11 or more hours. For many of them it was the first time they had
tried to do something that hard. They won their own challenge that day, and it
may just change how they address the rest of their lives. Good on them! 🙂
Some
times it is not how far we physically transport ourselves, but rather how the
trip affects our emotional state, conviction in life, and connections with
others that becomes the core essence of the adventure travel experience.
Carl Byington may be contacted for speaking engagements via
his company:
