Every Wish That We Put Into Motion.... (comments welcome!)

[nancipants]

Yessssss! You did it!!!

Time to share one of my favorite instagram reels:

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View this content on Instagram

 

[WillRunForPizza]

Yayyyyy!! Congratulations!

 

[Herding_Cats]

Yessssss! You did it!!!

Time to share one of my favorite instagram reels:

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View this content on Instagram

Accurate.

 

[avondale]

Woohoo! Congratulations! And with time to spare! What a huge accomplishment!!!

 

[garneska]

Nice job! Now I will tell you I cried during my 50k when I was completely alone and not sure I was on the course. I was and once I hit that last aid station I saw people. I was lucky the last 4 miles were on roads in the park and man did that boost my mood. Plus I started passing people caught everyone who past me on the climb on the trail.

Can’t wait for the recap!

Great job! Be proud!

 

[The Expert]

Yesss!!! Congratulations and GREAT time! I hope you wear the medal everywhere you go for the next week. LOL!

 

[jmasgat]

Congratulations!

 

[accm]

Congratulations!!! What an accomplishment! Also, I'll never complain about runDisney medals being too big again. That thing is a MONSTER!

 

[Herding_Cats]

OK. The next 2.5 days are going to be a whirlwind as we recover from this weekend and pack to leave Wednesday morning for a camping trip/XC meet 7hrs north in the UP. That's Upper Peninsula for anyone not familiar. DH is pulling the camper with his pickup, and I'll be following along in our other car, which is apparently going to also be hauling all of our coaches' camping gear since they have to bring along 4 or 5 kids whose families aren't able to take the time off from work. WHEEEEE!

North Country Trail Run
"The 26th year of the North Country Trail Run is August 23rd and 24th, 2025. It is the home of the largest 50-mile and 50k ultra marathon medals in the United States, 3rd largest marathon medal, and the largest half marathon medal. Every participant receives one after they cross the finish line." Yes. That's accurate. It's huge.

Race as a whole:
Saturday offers a HM, M, and 50mi race. Sunday offers a HM and the 50k. For those truly crazy enough, you can double a-la Disney. One women who finished just behind me did the HM/50k double. There are no challenge medals that I know of, but if you are doubling, your bib starts with NC (for not crazy?) It was incredibly well marked. I was never nervous of taking the wrong trail at the many intersections we ran through. The aid station workers were upbeat, really supportive, and a good energy boost. As you exited each aid station there was a large sign telling you how far it would be to the next one, which was very nice.

They had an extensive list of the things that would be offered on-course at the aid stations. In my opinion, this was not accurate. BUT. I was also at the back of the pack, and it's possible that they simply ran out. According to the website, there were basically 2 different groups of offerings at the aid stations with food. They alternated around 4 kinds of fruits, candy, cookies, and salty things (chips, nuts, etc.) But also listed were things like ramen noodles, broth, turkey and cheese sandwiches, PBJs, and grilled cheese. I didn't see any of these items, or even a setup for any of these items. While I would probably have grabbed some noodles or a PBJ, it definitely wasn't any kind of deal breaker or big disappointment for me that they were not available. Free photos were also a listed item (in past years they've done a google drive and sorted pictures into folders by bib number) and I didn't see a photographer on course anywhere. But again, I feel like that could be a timing thing.

However, I do wonder if some of these missing things were a result of things discussed in a lengthy fb post from the [former?] race director. All social media for this race was silent from October 6th until July 24th, when bib numbers were release. In that post the RD apologized and was very open about struggling with severe depression that was very impactful during the winter. It seems that the mantle of RD is in the process of being transferred to someone else as he does not feel he can adequately do the job; removing social media was something that helped him and you can't really effectively promote a race without it. It's possible that this transition made them cut back on a few things, but that's just conjecture on my part.

Saturday's HM had 458 finishers.
Saturday's M had 216 finishers.
Saturday's 50mi had 57 finishers.

Sunday's HM had 157 finishers.
Sunday's 50k had 82 finishers.

DH did say that while he was waiting at the finish line that they announced that all of the runners were through the last aid station (3mi out from the finish) and would be allowed to finish. It looks like the last person across was at around 9:14, which is interesting because I looked through previous years' results and never saw a finish time past the 9hr cutoff. I assumed maybe they just didn't publish their results, but there are around 5 people who finished past 9hrs this year listed.

If you're looking for a trail race, this is a good one. Yes, the end of August can be a scary time of year for a race, but you are in the shade for the entirety of the race, and it's very well supported.

 

[Herding_Cats]

Friday:

DH and I made a chiropractor appointment for just before lunch, and then DH worked another 2 hours before coming home for the day. He hooked up the camper, we tossed most of our stuff in the truck, and headed south to set up at the free camping area. I've already discussed this, but again, some participants have around 4 acres 1 mile away from the start that they allow runners to camp on. We got the camper leveled and set up, and headed over to bib pickup. The line was long. DD was with us, so while DH stood in line we wandered around the finish line a little, taking pictures. I noticed, now that I had a different angle, that there were 4 large orange signs with race distances on them, and 4 people handing out bibs. Of course we were in the HM line because that was the one that extended back the furthest. And no wonder! More than 600 people were running the half this weekend! There were several groups that had gotten in line behind us who were also discussing the long line (also first timers) so when I walked back to DH I loudly announced to him that there were 4 lines and that we needed to be in the line for the marathon and 50k on the right. And then at least 10 people followed us up the hill to a line with less than 15 people in it.

I was also on a mission to make sure I was hydrated (but not too hydrated....because bathroom stop are a time killer) for Sunday and drank somewhere between 80 and 100oz of water.

 

[Herding_Cats]

Saturday:
Race day for DS2 & DS3. Our school hosts a big XC meet on Saturday a week before Labor Day. This was one of the major deciding reasons that I picked this race; there was a Sunday option. DS3 ran in the open race at 8am and finished in about 20:35. He will be dual-sporting with middle school soccer and XC this fall as long as his grade stay up. He was hoping to be sub-20 but he's spent too much time on an xbox this summer to manage that this soon. DS2 ran in 18:25, which he says is 10sec slower than the clock read when he went through the finish. Still a good start to the year. I'm really hopeful that he'll get into the mid-to-low 17s this season.

Even though there were still 3 races left, I packed up DS3 and DD to head out to my parents' house to drop them off for 2 nights. But on the way to the car my friend who was also signed up stopped me to ask some questions and also said that he was considering running the first half of it with me and then maybe taking off on his own. I tried to very politely discourage this because he's a lot faster than I am, I know that my legs have been very troublesome the last couple of weeks, and I didn't want my issues to hinder his race day experience. Plus, I'm used to being on my feet for a long time for races and he's not (because he's never run more than 12 miles!) He also had a lightbulb moment when he realized his MIL lives 15min from the race start, and he could easily just sleep there instead of at home where he would have an hour drive in the morning.

Once the kids were settled at my parents', I drove back to the school for the end of the awards and our team/parent meeting. We came home after that, got cleaned up and ate lunch, and then packed up the rest of the things we needed for the overnight (water, chairs, the puppy, and our food coolers since DH didn't want to run the camper fridge off the propane.)

At the campsite we quickly discovered that we basically had no service. And I still had to coordinate with SIL about her pacing me in for the last 7mi of the race. I could *receive* messages, but couldn't get anything to send. We ended up driving about 15min (DH wanted to fill the truck up with gas so we didn't have to do that on Sunday afternoon with the camper hooked up) and I called her to finalize the details while we were out doing that.

Then it was back to the campsite to make dinner (grilled chicken and cilantro lime rice.) While we were there, other people camping kept walking past and wanting to say hi to the puppy. She's very cute, and needs to socialization. And every single one would look at DH and ask him
Person: Did you run today?
DH: No. She [points to me] runs tomorrow! I'm the support person.
Person: What are you running tomorrow?
Me: I'm running the 50k!
Person: Oh wow! Have you run here before?
Me: No. This is my first trail race.
Person....
[Person blinks with big eyes/Pastes on a big fake smile]
Person: "Your first trail race is a 50k?"
Me: Yep. It's a lot. I know. I came and did a 20 miler here last month so I know what I'm in for.
DH: And she's run 5 marathons. She'll be fine.
Person: Well it's got a good time limit too. So you can always walk a lot of it.



You guys. This happened like 3 or 4 times. And it was always some version of this person turning away from DH who, out of the 2 of us, "looks like a runner" with this holy cats are you serious, get your face together so you're not rude look to then talk to me. I'm not insulted by this. It really was very amusing.

As we started to eat dinner, my friend texted me because he had a couple of questions about drop bags, and after having calls not go through (I knew texting wouldn't work) we drove back out to the main road where there was cell signal and I called him. He had misread the site and thought we had 3 drop bags (the 50mi info was right above the 50k map) so he had some re-packing to do. We made a plan to meet up in the morning, and then DH and I drove back to the campsite.

I was in bed by 8pm, and sleeping before 9. I made it all the way to midnight before I woke up the first time. I took the puppy out to potty and walked down to the portas. The sky was sooo clear and beautiful because there's almost no light pollution down there. If I wasn't getting up at 5am I would have been tempted to stay out and stargaze. I forgot to pack the melatonin, so I was nervous that I wouldn't be able to get back to sleep.

 

[nancipants]

After the second time, I would have messed with them. "Actually, I've never run before! Gonna see what I can do!"

 

[Herding_Cats]

Sunday: RACE DAY!

Getting ready:
I woke up about 10min before my 5am alarm. I had obsessively organized all of my stuff the night before so I wouldn't be panicking about where things were. I had packed my gallon ziplocs for the drop bags earlier in the week, and checked the weather a bunch of times and had a plan with DH to hand off my 2nd drop bag at that aid station (with SIL joining me) OR to bring me dry shoes and socks at mile 16's aid station if it rained. All of the contingency planning was done. I had my overnight oats, my cold coffee (because no electricity means no hot coffee,) took 4 motrin, and felt surprisingly not nervous. Why am I not freaking out? We drove to the start area at 5:50am where I used the bathroom for probably the 4th time that morning (OK maybe I was nervous?) and saw my friend and his wife parked right by the bank of portas. I said good morning, and headed back to the truck where DH was with the puppy. We figured out the drop bag tarps...the distances on them were for the 50mi, so they were not correct for the 50k and we correctly assumed that the lower number was for the first drop and the high number was for the 2nd drop. We were not the only ones trying to figure this out. I received some looks and some compliments on my sparkle skirt. One woman asked where she could get one of them because they looked really fun.

The director/announcer gathered all of us near the start chute to go over the race directions which included which flag color to follow (pink) and how the out-and-back in the first 2 miles shouldn't be confused with the other out-and-back on the same road and mile 22. For the beginning of the race we would turn right onto the trail, and later in the race we would turn left onto a different trail. "Every year we have someone come in at like 4 hours because they turned the wrong way and missed 10 miles of the course." They played the national anthems for Australia (we had a runner from there), Canada (runners from there), and finally USA. We started about 15min "late" but that was OK because I didn't have a headlamp and had we started on time I would have needed one. OOPS!

My friend started the race with me (he didn't want to go out too fast) and I figured that at some point he would take off at his own pace. I was prepared with a 7hr playlist and the most recent Rise and Run episode downloaded to try to keep myself out of my head about things. But he didn't take off. He stayed with me for 30 miles. And I needed it. I needed it SO MUCH.

The first 2 miles were really sandy, and we had 2-way traffic going on it because of the out-and-back. This was on a logging/access road, so there was space, but it wasn't my favorite. It's very slightly uphill on the way our, and very slightly downhill on the way back. At mile 3 you cross back in front of the start/finish area and we both stopped at the portas. I knew I would be stopping so we ran a lot more because of the downhill aspect to give some time buffer for the stop. Our miles were 14:45 and 14:27 (with the stop!) And then it was onto the trails and through the woods and my legs felt dead. But I knew the next 3 miles of trail, what the terrain would be like, and off we went. This is about where I realized I didn't take my Tylenol before the race started, so I took those.

My friend chattered away, and I felt bad that I was walking a lot and I knew that if this is how I felt early, that I would be walking most of the distance. Not what I was hoping for, but I was in it for the finish line, not the finish time. My uphill treadmill work paid off when that mile-of-uphill came in at 16:07. I started on the fuel with caffeine at around mile 7 (I think?) and about 20 min later you could definitely tell that it had perked me up considerably.

We stayed ahead of pace managed mostly high 14s and low 15s (17:21 was the limit for average pace to make the cutoff) until we hit mile 10. There was an aid station/drop bag at mile 9.5 where we refilled on gels/fuel and used the bathroom, and grabbed some fruit to eat while we power hiked. That mile's split was 21:20, but I wasn't upset because we had stayed ahead of pace every mile before then.

I had no experience with this part of the course because on the elevation map it looked pretty flat, and I was more concerned with figuring out how difficult the hilly section was in my training run. It was rolling hills, and thanks to all of the sugar and caffeine, we ran the downhills, hiked the uphills, and sorta did intervals on the flats. We yo-yo'ed with a women in front of us with a pink shirt and blue vest. She was also using intervals, although we was doing a much better job that me of sticking to them. At some point we had reeled her in quite a bit and there was a longer downhill coming up so we passed her and ran the whole thing. By the next aid station, she caught up and passed us while we were grabbing more fruit and using the porta. There was another woman we walked with for a few minutes who started asking me if they would pull you from the course if you got swept. And what was the policy. Would they let you finish, but there wouldn't be aid stations. I had no answers for her, and did some quick running math that she could do low 19s for the rest of the race and make it, and that there was no sense in stopping to wait for the sweepers if she could keep moving. She did finish about 10min after me, and had done the HM on Saturday, so she was really tired!

A new thing for me to experience on this race was massive amounts of something like vertigo when we would stop. I think it was the fact that I was running and looking at the ground so I wouldn't trip. When we would get to aid stations, or if I would loop up toward the sky, I would feel like everything was still moving by I wasn't. My equilibrium was sooooo far off. At aid stations I would stand with my legs wide, and near something I could hold on to while we refilled fluids and grabbed more fruit. On sections of trail that I could see there weren't really any tripping hazards I was self-talking aloud to look forward, eyes up, look ahead to see if I could alleviate some of it.

When we got to the aid stations right before the 2nd out-and-back we started passing people. This was unexpected because we had only seen 2 or 3 people pretty much the whole race. There was a group of 5 or 6 getting fruit, and then we passed probably 6 more people during the out-and-back part. HUGE mental boost. I figured I would finish last, so the fact that I knew there was for sure 2 people behind me, and then all of these others, I was feeling confident in finishing before the cutoff.

I had to DH/SIL that we would be at the 2nd drop bag aid station (mile 24) between 12:30 and 1:30, and we pulled in at about 1:15. DH and SIL handled refilling the fluids in my vest and stuffing more gels in the pockets while I waited in line for the porta. SIL and I took off from the aid station while my friend waiting in the line and got more items from his wife. At all of the aid stations this is what we had done because I knew he would have no problems catching up to me, and I didn't feel like I could afford to spend more time at the aid stations than I already was. (And looking at my finish time, this was probably an accurate assumption.)

But I was listing off to the side and almost falling over sideways at this aid station because of this balance issue I was having. Running forward was ok. Looking around while I was running was NOT. Tipping my head backward? NO! I didn't want ANY of the fuel I had, and the ONLY thing I wanted was Coke. I had filled up my 500mL soft flask with coke at the mile 24 station and was trying to get it to last until the aid station at 28. Running down the hill to that aid station I was starting to cry because it was sinking in that I was going to finish, and I was going to do it with time to spare. I wasn't going to have to find some energy from somewhere and try to crank out sub-15min miles to get there, we could to TWENTY THREE minute miles and finish in time! So here I am coming into this aid station trying to shove these tears back into my face, finding out that they have been out of Coke for hours and I can barely stand up because my balance when not moving is gone. "Do you need to sit down for a minute? Are you OK? Do you want salt tablets? Here! We have gatorade, let's fill your thing up with that." They were so nice, but seemed quite concerned.

The wheels were falling off of the pace wagon by mile 27, which is also when there are a lot of uphills, and also I felt like I had been on my feet all day. (HAHA!) We were over-pace, but that was fine because we had been ahead in the beginning.

At around mile 29 my friend took off on his own. His knee was starting to bother him and honestly he probably felt OK with leaving me because SIL was there. He finished about 9 minutes ahead of us. SIL bossed me around when I started getting grumpy about the fact that MILE 31 WAS ALL UPHILL, and then we got to the scenic lookout spot and couldn't figure out where in the hell we were supposed to go to the finish because it was all roped off? OH. YES. Look back down this hill you just climbed to see a sign on the BACK of the one that said KEEP GOING to find out that the finish line is back that way. Why did I just climb this extra hill? BOOOO!


As expected, they were packing up the finish area AT the 9 hour mark. The buffet was getting cleaned up and put away. I got what I think was the last of the free unlimited root beer floats for runners. We got back to the campsite (DH had everything packed up) and it started to rain while DH was doing all of the hitch stuff. I discovered that I had an enormous blister on the side of one toe, and that my big toenail on my right foot was bruised (I'll probably lose it.) But other than that, I had no chafe spots, no other blisters, and I think that's a big win.

When we got home I got cleaned up while DH and the older boys unhooked and unloaded the trailer. I hopped in the hot tub for about 30min, and then got into bed for the night. DH brought me everything I needed...dinner, dessert, my contact stuff, all of it.

Nothing every really hurt during the race (I'm sure that was largely due to the 2000mg each of motrin and tylenol that I took) and even my feet only were cranky for a few minutes around mile 29. I'm very creaky and have tired, heavy legs today. But I have to motivate to go pick up kids, do laundry, start packing and meal prepping for our camping trip, and we have a vet appointment for puppy shots tomorrow in the morning and a dentist appointment for DD in the afternoon. Oh, and DS3 starts sports practice tonight. And we have to go grocery shopping.

I took VERY few pictures, but I'll dump what I have in the next post.

WHEW.

 

[Herding_Cats]

My obsessively laid out ready-to-go morning-of race gear.



5k in! This is so easy!



Exiting an aid station. We were told by station workers that we were very easy to identify because of the sparkle skirt and the flag shorts.


The sign telling you to go to the top of the hill (also example of the clear course marking)




But wait. What's this sign on the back? WHY did I go up that hill!



I legit almost fell over after I took this because I looked up.



SIL getting pics at the finish!


DH taking pics at the finish (and you can see SIL in the pink behind me)

 

[michigandergirl]

Congrats ultramarathoner!!!

So glad Mother Nature brought lower temps and lower humidity just in time.

 

[nancipants]

That vertigo sounds awful. I've gotten that a few times after waking up in the morning and it's the worst. Congrats on pushing through and finishing!

 

[Herding_Cats]

I also forgot....3rd in my age group! Woohoo!

Congrats ultramarathoner!!!

So glad Mother Nature brought lower temps and lower humidity just in time.

YES! The weather was just about perfect. No complaints from me for late-August race temperatures!

That vertigo sounds awful. I've gotten that a few times after waking up in the morning and it's the worst. Congrats on pushing through and finishing!

It was the weirdest thing. I'm sure I looked like I was drunk, weaving around, but physically I was OK.

 

[Mr_Incr3dible]

Well done!

 

[avondale]

Free photos were also a listed item (in past years they've done a google drive and sorted pictures into folders by bib number) and I didn't see a photographer on course anywhere. But again, I feel like that could be a timing thing.

Yeah, a lot of trail races do "free photos", but it's just a volunteer who stands at one place on the course while runners go by. Sometimes if it's logistically possible, they will also go to the finish line and try to get most runners coming in. So that may be why you didn't see him. But that's what you get for free.


Great race report! You did a fantastic job to keep moving and keep your pacing going.

That vertigo is really weird - I've had vertigo occasionally, but never while running like that. That's pretty freaky. Glad you didn't have a serious fall from it.