Crewing and Pacing Dad at Burning River 100, 2016 (Part 1)
This is the story about our experience crewing my dad at Burning River 2016. It turned out to be both as stressful as my Gorge 100k finish and as monumental as my attempt at Virgil Crest 100…
This all started a while ago when he started getting into trail running and 50ks. Bigfoot 50k, Fool’s Run 50k, and more. Those weren’t enough so then he ran Burning River 50 in 2015. Then, he helped pace me at Virgil Crest 100. Having seen what a 100 is all about first hand, the seeds were planted to start working towards attempting one himself. It seems like that’s just the way these things tend to lead into each other with so many of us.
So he trained. A lot. Goofy Challenge, more 50ks and 50 mile races than I could keep track of, and he completed 76 miles at O24. With the huge amount of time, energy and money he put into this, he was clearly in the best shape he’d ever been in. We had high hopes.
Leading up to the race we started talking about crewing and pacing. Miranda was in for crewing from the day he signed up. Justine was interested in crewing and pacing. I recruited Stef for pacing some miles on Saturday and Brittany for the end of the race. In the week before, I gathered all of the aid station information, we packed the car, the cooler, planned snacks and had everything ready to go to live out of the car for a day and a half.
Burning River is a 100 mile foot race of mixed terrain, starting from Squire’s Castle and finishing in Cuyahoga Falls. The race is expertly organized, the mixed terrain of trails, roads and towpath makes it kind of unique in the ultra world (most take place almost entirely on trails), it takes place in August when Ohio is hot and humid, and the event includes a number of events other than the solo 100 so there is lots of people and excitement.
Dropping Dad off at Squire’s castle was pretty uneventful, even the first 30 or so miles were uneventful, it was more or less the same race he had been through last year. The 100 starts even earlier in the day, at 4 am, so he was further along on the course at earlier times of the day than last year.
Justine was the first to jump in as a pacer. Being 60, he was allowed to have a pacer for the entire race, while most were not allowed pacers until they reached mile 50. Justine ran with him from 26 to 38. I’m glad she took these miles, a lot of it was in the sun on the towpath — not my favorite for sure!
We had planned for Stef to take 38–50, but when we realized she wouldn’t make it out to the race on time (he was moving faster than expected!) I got dressed so that I could cover those miles. He and Justine came into the aid station, I jumped in with him, and we got going.
38–50 were not too eventful either, but I started to see that he is still not quite comfortable on technical trail :/ Roots and such really slow him down. He needs more practice on that stuff!
Stef was ready to go when Dad and I came into the 50 mile aid station. We resupplied him and gave them both headlamps and they were off. This is when things started to go not-quite-so-swimmingly. We were assuming that the next crew-accessible aid station would be another 12 miles or less, although Stef said that she would be happy to do more if she was feeling good.
Usually, we (the crew) will fill up his hydration pack with Tailwind, pre-mixed before he even arrives. For longer stretches, he should carry extra Tailwind powder so that he could add it to water at aid stations where the crews were not allowed access. We forgot to give this to him.
After Dad and Stef took off, and we got back to the car, I checked the aid station list, and discovered that the next crew-accessible aid station was at 66, 16 miles down the trail! Oops. Good thing Stef was sort-of hoping to do more than 12. We were also glad that they both took headlamps since it was already 5 pm and we knew the 16 miles would take at least five hours. The biggest concern was this meant Dad could fall a bit behind on nutrition…
Oh well. No point worrying about that too much. What was slightly worrying was how long it took them to arrive at the 66 mile aid station. At the 50 mile, he was three hours ahead of cutoff, which is pretty comfortable. At 66, he came in at 11 pm, and was only 90 minutes ahead of the cutoff.
I was dressed and ready to go when they came into the 66. We had him reloaded and we were on our way in just a few minutes. The next stretch was… interesting. He was starting to come apart a little, mentally. Complaining about lots of little things. The trails seemed effortless to me, but he was taking way too much time over roots and even the slightest of inclines.
A little while later, I started doing the math. He was still slowing down, by the time we got to the aid station at mile 76, he was down to around an hour ahead of cutoffs, and I finally realized that he didn’t realize that he was slowing down. Leaving our crew, I was unsure that we would make it to the next one on time. The next two aid stations were not accessible by crew, we would not see them again until mile 92.
How do you tell somebody they are going too slow and are getting close to being pulled out of a race? I didn’t know how he would take it but I just told him straight up what was happening. That we had been averaging 20 minute miles, and he had two hours to cover the next six miles to the next aid station (this works out to making it JUST in time. In order to be sure that he could get through the aid station, he had to speed up). I told him if he really wanted to do this then it was time to start working for it. He said later that this scared him. He DID want to finish this race.