Posted on the Ultralist:
Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 09:58:43 -0400
From: Daniel Fox
Subject: Ohio run report – long
Cody’s Run (Rita & Dan’s Trek Across Ohio)
Summary
256 total miles
May 11 through May 17, 2008
Cities we stopped in overnight:
Cincinnati
Wilmington
Washington Courthouse
Columbus
Mt Vernon
Loudonville
Medina
Cleveland
3.73 mph average
16 mpm average
36.6 miles per day average
69 hours of “road time”
This pace would yield a 26.7 hour finish in a 100-miler w/similiar elevation loss/gain.
The pace figures are based on accumulated mileage divided by total run time. Total run time started the moment we left our room in the morning, and ended at the threshold of our hotel in the evening. It includes all our activities eg. meal stops, picture taking, potty breaks, etc. during that period.
Not having a Garmin to plot our mile-by-mile progress, I’m not sure if there’s much meaning in these stats. In general, we used the time we had no matter what the distance. IOW, when we had a short day we slowed way down; when the day was long we went faster. My guess is that we averaged
11 mpm when we ran, and about 18mpm when we walked, with the overall average dragged up to 16mpm because of the time when we weren’t making forward progress.
The Trek
We played hooky from ordinary life. We were outside our normal adult world, cast back into childhood when we had seemingly endless days of opportunity for adventure and were untroubled by adults (as long as we were home when the sreetlights came on). All of us remember the breathless excitement of venturing way, way too far from home. The time I remember most was a bike trip to Public Square in Cleveland from my neighborhood on W.117th. An epic 12 mile round trip to the heart of the world! My comrade and I celebrated our arrival at the square with a milkshake, and instantly headed back home. No exploration of our goal: the journey was as much as we could handle that day.
So Rita and I put on our short pants and tennies and headed south from Cleveland to Cincinnati on a Greyhound bus. The bus solved our logistical problem of retrieving a car, and it was cheaper than driving – $66 total for both of us. Plus it was exciting: the driver got lost heading into Mansfield. A passenger finally set her on the right path. We spent the night couchsurfing (www.couchsurfing.com) with a young photojournalist at the Cincinnati Enquirer. But we had far too short a night of it – with the longest segment of the trip scheduled for the next day (52 miles ) we wanted to be on the road by 6am.
It was already raining as we left the apartment, walking the deserted night-city to the Ohio river a half-mile away. We gazed past the stands of Paul Brown stadium to the towers of Cincinnati, their lights reflecting from low clouds. A slight hesitation, adjusting packs, and then we were off. Past the silent bridges standing over the river, leading to roads we wouldn’t take that day. Following the river north we began the long gradual climb out of the valley onto the glaciated farmlands of southern Ohio.
The early going that day was wet. At times the downpour was torrential: at one point we stood on a bridge over the Little Miami river, swollen with rain, and we laughed out loud at being surrounded by the deluge above, to the sides, and below us. The wind had just enough warmth in it that we weren’t chilled or cold. A single long-
sleeved tech shirt and our rainjackets were all we ever needed the whole week. We both had one change of running clothes, and used the extras to wear to the hotel room door when the pizza guy would arrive, the road clothes being wet from rain, or from a washing in the sink.
Up past phalanxes of new condos boasting river views, early 20th c. rehabs, and light industrial buildings with a little age on them. After a time we turned away from the river and passed through mild suburbs, across interstate highways and on up through thinning population until gradually we were into the farmland. The newly planted soil looked rich and dark from the rain. We passed through miles of very slightly undulating fields that stretched away on either side of the road to treelines that seemed, at times, a mile distant. We ran through 90 miles of this farmland south of Columbus, and more like it to the north, in all weathers. Rain, sun, early morning fog and mist: we watched the light move over it as each day wore on. The miles went slowly by and for once there was enough time to really look around.
There is a kind of unity of purpose in all that space outside of built-up towns. Nearly everything is in some way connected to the pursuit of farming. The scale of the landscape is, by necessity, really vast. Compared to city dwelling, where you can be in a different neighborhood – a totally different life – in minutes, it takes a long time to see anything much different in farm country, even going along at 60 mph. Of course, I’m a naive observer of farm country, and will miss the distinctions that are obvious to “natives”. Still, the distinctions are close variants of a single culture – farming. Much closer than, say, a dense urban neighborhood and a museum-lined boulevard. I wonder if the long work days of farming conspire with the distances to produce that homogenous commercial milieu.
My senses seemed to be wide open in the farmland. Maybe it was the excitement of the run and the novelty of the surroundings, but it was a delight to take notice of everything. It seemed important and necessary to follow the contours of a field that produced the swollen stream; to watch the sky and carefully follow the line of cumulous visible a long way off, just above the treeline; to look for the signs of new budding life in all the trees and flora; to see that barns are black or white or red or unpainted and why? How much of what we are seeing is driven by efficiency, and how much is tradition, now autonomous from its’ origins?
While being out in the country was great, passing through towns was a kind of shock.
The towns had too much stimulus. Far from wanting to take everything in, it felt too chaotic to relate to everything. There was no long, slow pondering the landscape as we slowly passed over. The higher density of people and structures and many more vehicles coming from all directions seemed to demand decisions made quickly, and more dependence on rules of civility in order to accommodate all the disparate errands and intentions. I suppose an epiphany occurred: I glimpsed the city as a country-bred person might. If so, then this trek had produced a gift, and even though the gift was earned through hard effort, my feeling toward it was (and is) simple gratitude.
The trek seemed to go happily on and on. How great to do something fun and so fully engaging day after day! A friend of Rita’s joined us for a couple days somewhere in the middle, and his addition to our dynamic was welcome. There were definite changes to our attitudes toward the run as we gained ground and experience. Maybe we were doing a lot of things right, subconsciously, but we became confident and calm with regard to the hundreds of little challenges that a runner must deal with through the hours on the road. For example, initially I tried to place my feet on a consistent surface, mostly asphalt or the small gravel at the edge of the shoulder. I sought to maintain a rhythm that was fostered by the sameness of running surface. A few days later, I found that the rhythm came from somewhere internal, and I would pick a straight path, through asphalt, gravel, tall grass, hardened mud ruts, puddles, whatever appeared. Rita and I often run with she taking the lead, and it was a great pleasure, later in the run, to move as one over and around obstacles and traffic, wordlessly in synch, the lessons of the road having flowed to the same parts of our minds.
At the end of every day, we consciously started the recovery process as soon as possible. Once we got in the room, we rinsed our clothes , and arranged them to dry on the room heater. One of us ordered food, or went close-by to get it while the other cleaned up. After cleaning up we dealt with any blisters, cuts, chafes, etc that might be present. And then we rested with our feet elevated for the remainder of the evening. It was often difficult to sleep, so we were serious about expending unnecessary effort. Occasionally I would raise my arms to open another beer, but that was it! And pushing the tv remote buttons was a chore, so we would have a little more pizza to restore those calories. We also took whatever daily supplements we had at this evening meal – we wanted to get them into our systems by morning, Generally, we woke up every day feeling ready for the road. Personally, I took glucosamine/chondroiton along with Karl Kings Pre-
Race vitamins every night. S-caps occasionally during the day if it was hot. Not much Ibuprophen, though I had 4 on the last day to take the edge off some tendonitis in my right ankle. The tendonitis was a simple over-use injury, not debilitating, and was cleared up with about a week of low mileage/rest after the run.
North of Wooster, and certainly by Medina, it became unusual to see a barn as the outer suburbs of Akron and Cleveland grew closer. We had a fine, long downhill run from Hinkley to Rt 82 as we made our way into Cleveland. The most annoying running occurred as we approached North Royalton and Parma: no road shoulder at all! No sidewalk either. This went on for several miles, and it depressed me to think how insignificant the pedestrian had become. Foot travel is a complete anachronism outside of a few park settings. How this has come about is a good question, but we have surely not done well if we make it it inconvenient to use our legs to get around.
Rita and I arrived in Cleveland around 3pm after an “easy” day of 32 miles. We had taken it slowly. I had to stop at the expo to get my packet for the marathon the next day, so we jogged a little north to the convention center. All those freshly tapered runners! I was grizzled and old and slow by comparison, but wanted to finish off the trek in style by running Cleveland.
We were feeling a little beat up by the time we arrived at my place, mostly around the feet and lower limbs. The run hadn’t had the brutality of a 100-miler, yet I don’t think it would be a thing to attempt unless you have had some road experience. Rita, of course, had Vol-State; and I had done 100 miles last year. On this run things went very smoothly, probably because of that experience. There are hundreds of small decisions to be made every day, mainly how to react to various kinds of passing traffic, and the runner learns when to hang on to his hat, when to be aggressive and own the road, and when to run away, along with all the normal concerns like eating, drinking and finding the nearest tree or gas station. Sometimes it’s not very straightforward, so a little shakedown cruise helps answer these questions, or brings them into awareness. That said, do give yourselves an adventure sometime that is outside the structure of an organized ultra. It’ll bring out the kid in you, and you’ll see things with different eyes.
Finally, I dedicate this run to the memory of Rita’s dog Cody, and all the joy in that relationship. Cody and Rita ran many miles together, feeling the flow of things that runners share. I hope he’s sleeping well, because he was dearly loved.
May 27, 2008
Dan Fox/Cleveland
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