Preparation
The Plain 100 is an Ultra Marathon in the Cascade Mountains near Stevens Pass Washington. Runners can choose to compete in a 100-mile event or a 100-kilometer (62.1-mile) race. I signed up for the latter.
True to the name, Plain is plain. There are check in stations, but no volunteer or race staff will feed, water or otherwise aid you along the course (to accept aid is to drop out.) They won’t even tell you which way to go. You will have a map and directions and you should figure it out. The food you eat is what you carry in on your back, the water you drink is what you find along the trails.
The trails are almost entirely rugged single track, made for dirt bikes., The 100K has about 12,000 feet of elevation gain (about 24,000 feet of gain for the 100-miler.)
I knew that to do this race, I stood a high chance of becoming lost, miserable, exhausted, shattered — and there was a good chance I would drop out.
So why?
Good question. I wanted to push something and I wanted to see if I had the mettle to do a long distance mountain run. Having run a 50-mile race the last summer, I felt the need to go up a rung.
I have spent weekends this summer running trails in Olympic National Park, and have enjoyed figuring out how to run and power-hike the long switchbacks and how to turn my legs over quickly on the downhills. Some of my best runs were between 30 and 40 miles and included up to 8,000 feet of elevation change.
I planned on doing a 100K that had aid stations. A major mountain climb would be OK by me, though I’d hoped not to do over 10,000 feet of it. Unfortunately, several of the 100Ks in the Pacific Northwest were already booked up by the time that I decided to move. The Plain 100 was the only race left.
I sent an email to race director Tim Denhoff, asking if he thought a newbie ultra-runner like me had the chops to take on Plain — even the truncated 100K version of it. After he sent me an extensive description of the challenges of carrying food and water on a tugged course he wrote, “Tom, I want you to consider what I’m telling you, not discourage you from coming and giving it your best shot. Hope to see you at Plain!”
When I got to race headquarters at the Lake Wenatchee Rec Club for the mandatory meeting the day before, there were just over 30 participants who showed. Only eight of these were running the 100K. I felt Junior Varsity next to the 100-milers.
I spotted one or two longhaired distance gurus in the crowd, but they were the exception. Most of the runners had a sleek, efficient haircuts and the bearing of attendees at, say, a business management convention. The runners I talked to did seem to have well-paying professional jobs, such as mineralogist and lawyer. It is tempting to wonder whether the same competitive instinct that helped them succeed in business also motivates them to thrash their bodies in the primal competition of ultra running. But I’m just a kayak guide. What would I know?
The runners were at ease swapping war stories from previous races, commenting on notorious runners they’ve encountered through the years. Many pulled out their phones during their conversations to check out each others stats on the Ultra Sign Up website.
At my table, there was a man from British Columbia, from the UK, and Japan — who was based in Seattle now.
They pulled my name up and apparently the computers had already projected that I would win the 100K. The computers get it wrong a lot, I heard
Race directors Tim Stroh and Tim Dehnhoff gave us a war room-style briefing, complete with oversized maps on the table for us to pore over elevation differences and watering holes. There would be a few check in stations along the course to make sure the runners were coming along and not getting eaten by Bigfoot, but these would offer no assistance. We would give the stations our race numbers and tell them “I’m a warrior!” when they asked “What are you?”
I hadn’t studied the maps much beforehand and now I was playing catch up, marking my own map with a pen as the presentation went along.
There were two long waterless sections for eight miles and a 14 mile section that would include a 5,000 foot climb. I run further than this without water all the time on the roads. On the trails, I knew it would be another matter. Tim Stroh, said he personally carried a gallon up the mountain and drank all of it.
The water was just one piece of the gear, clothes food puzzle that I was putting together. The main question was how I would have everything I needed without an elephant on my back.
Here’s what I threw in my pack:
Food
It was bette to have too much than too little. I had bonked on a couple of previous runs when I tried to cut the pack weight down and came up short of fuel in the last miles. I was determined not to repeat the same mistake for the big race, but in retrospect, I went way overboard.
- Six peanut butter flatbread burritos (two with raisins)
- Twenty Oreos
- Two Gerber baby food packets (bananna oatmeal)
- One Clif Bar
- Three chocolate bars
- Six packs of sports gel
- Eight sports drink tabs to add to water
- Three Kind bars, hickory smoked with almonds (Thanks Mom and Dad!)
- Two other energy bars from the pre-race goody bag.
- Multiple empty Gatorade bottles and one half-full bottle of juice.
I ended up eating two of the burritos, one full chocolate bar, the cliff bar, 16 oreos, three or four gel packs, the granola bars, 1 gerber pack and two of the Kind bars.
Clothing
This was to be another crucial part of the game, especially because the forecast called for rain, and there were bound to be extreme changes in how warm or cold based on elevation or effort
I carried:
- A synthetic T-shirt
- Ball cap
- A North Face shell
- A fleece
- My Fargo-style synthetic fur hat with ear flaps.
- Compression shorts
- Synthetic socks
- Zero-drop Altra running shoes.
Other Stuff
- A backpack to put everything in (borrowed from a friend as my normal pack tore a strap at the last minute)
- A headlamp.
- A Luci solar light (backup)
- Extra batteries.
- An SOL micro bivvy sack with heat reflective sides (for an unplanned night in the woods.)
- A nylon pack cover.
- A med kit that included gauze, band-aides, athletic tape and a small tub of petroleum jelly.
I ended up carrying map and directions in a see-through plastic portfolio that I carried in one hand for quick consultation along the trail. The system I had rigged seemed comprehensive, but I soon realized that it was amateur-hour compared to what other runners had.
When it came to mental preparation, I had some, from the 50-mile race I’d run last year, to numerous trail runs throughout the summer. But the fact remained that this was the longest, hilliest run I’d ever attempted. Also, I should have invested more time going over the maps, not just for the race course, but getting there.
Disaster
It was 5:00 a.m.: the race start time, but I was not at the starting line. I was driving way too fast over dark country roads, wondering where the hell the starting line was.
I loosed a steady stream of invective as I tried frantically to look at the map and drive at the same time, and then call a friend to get me better directions off the internet. The feeling of failure felt like a weight crushing down on my chest.
This is what you get for being sloppy and stupid and cocky and now you’ve wasted your whole summer running and you’ll have to tell all your friends that you didn’t run the race because you’re such an idiot. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Just as I had begun to resign myself to the idea that I had really screwed the pooch, I saw a truck coming up from the other direction.
I flashed my lights and stuck my hand out the window.
The truck stopped and I saw a guy with a headlamp stick his head out the window.
“You know where the starting line is?” I asked.
“I was wondering the same thing.”
I decided to follow him. Somehow, within 15 minutes, we found the turn, which was on the other side of the road then the directions (because I’d gotten turned around somehow.) The runners were already on the course with headlamps shining in the dark. We were the assholes spraying them with dust as we drove by.
When we got to the start line, were 37 minutes late. The director allowed us to proceed ahead. It wasn’t the first time someone had started the race early. It was not a promising start, but it was a start.
Recovery
The two of us started running together in the dark. His name was Phil. As luck would have it, he was one of the six runners who were only doing 100 miles.
As our headlamps swung together through the dark, we talked about ourselves. He was 48 and administered psychological screenings. I talked about my travels and work as a guide. Talking about anything was far preferable then fixating on our late start. We also were able to coordinate navigation together with him looking at the written race directions and me looking at the race map. Eventually, we let ourselves talk about how freaked out we’d been that we were going to miss the race.
If I’d been running alone, I might have told myself that the race was hopeless and that it was stupid to go out and get lost in the woods for a race I wasn’t ready for. I might have been tempted to run hard up hills, trying to catch the competition. Though this would have felt satisfying at first it would have been bad for my energy long-term.
Instead, I ended up walking the steep hills along a switch-backed road into the mountains. I was going a little slower than I planned, but I didn’t know what was ahead and it seemed wise to go conservative at the start of the race. Phil guessed that we would be out there until around midnight. This seemed insanely late to me, even though it was close to the time that it had taken other ultra-runners to go that distance.
Yeah, but I was going to run down the hills faster than the other guys, I thought. I held onto this illusion that I was going to finish early for long into the race.
Dull illumination crept up behind the clouds as the morning spread over the land.
Soon we were at the top of Maverick Saddle, which was the first check-in station, and the beginning of the trail running.
“What’s your race number?”
“Three!”
“And what are you?”
“I’m a warrior!”
We left the roads for the Mad River Trail and the rocks and roots that would fill up the hours to come.
Striking out
We took our first water break out of the Mad River. I drank right from the source, raising my torso so that the water could run down my throat without choking me.
We turned onto the Hi Yu trail and climbed onto a ridge line. I was starting to feel energy from the trails, which was the thrill of moving myself over the rough terrain, maintaining momentum. I pointed out a few thimbleberries growing along the side of the trail and we grabbed them.
I sensed that Phil wanted to be more conservative and take more walks on the uphills than I did. He had more race experience than I did and maybe he was right to go slower. But it wasn’t right for me to push him to start his race faster than the race he wanted to run. I told him it had been awesome running together this far and then started running down the trail.
In a little while, I started catching runners.
The boost of confidence I got from passing people balanced out my nervousness that I would be on my own after I left Phil.
The other runners ran beneath ponchos to keep out of the rain. I waited to put on any rain protection because I worried about getting soaked from sweat. Still, I knew that it if it kept raining, I would eventually have to stop and put new layers on. The process would sacrifice time and sacrifice heat.
I drank from streams and lakes directly, not bothering to treat the water — most of the runners weren’t willing to sacrifice the time. These hydration stops were vital, especially leading up to the long mountain ridge section, which would go for miles without water sources. Nonetheless, I was keenly aware of the minutes going by as I stopped to fill bottles in my pack. I played leapfrog with other runners as I made these stops, and they made stops of there own. Every stop also put my body temperature into a tailspin; I would try to pull out by gunning my engines harder on the trail.
The veteran ultra runners were far more efficient with their re-watering and refueling than I was. They seemed able to drop their bottles or Camelbaks into streams and pluck them out without breaking stride. The fact that I had a rain cover on my pack added another layer of slowness that cut efficiency.
Cold
Cold finally caught up to me on the way to 6,820-foot Klone Peak. With the light rain falling, I knew it was only a matter of time before my core temperature took a dive. I shed my soaking shirt and put a windbreaker over my naked chest. The jacket kept the whipping winds at bay while the armpit zippers offered some ventilation to prevent things from getting overly clammy.
Some of the runners in front of me were already doubling back down from Klone. “The climb sucks, but the view is worth it,” one of them told me. Of course, when I got to the summit, all I saw was a cloud blanket.
Going back down the mountain, the trail went through burned out forest where there had been a wildfire the previous year. There had been no Plain 100 in 2015 due to the flames. Now acres of charred branches whistled ominously in the wind, a post-apocalyptic landscape worthy of The Road. The trail lead to a series of switchbacks on a long descent toward the Entiat River. Every turn was banked with concrete blocks for the dirt bikes who used the trails.
I’d read accounts of runners struggling not to slip on these blocks, and indeed I did feel as though I needed to pay more attention to my steps as I went through these sections. I was relieved to find they were far more manageable then I’d anticipated.
The narrow trail rut did cause some trouble, because my left foot always came down at a funky angle.
I focused on my running form, twisting my body so that my legs followed into the curves. The repetition of switchbacks distracted me from fatigue. I could see the Entiat River valley emerge through the fog, but it was still a long way down.
I passed two runners on the descent, then popped out at a paved road where there was another check in station. There were a couple of turns coming up that seemed ambiguous to me, and the other runners who had done the race before gave me guidance.
“How’s your race going?” I asked one man with a handlebar mustache. “I’m cold and wet and not having much fun,” he replied. He was doing the 100 miles. We were maybe 33 miles from the start.
Eventually, I got back on the single track and started going downhill.
I knew I could refill water at Tommy Creek, just a bit further ahead, and planned on stopping there, but wasn’t sure how far ahead it would be. I’d planned to delay eating until this refill point. But a sudden feeling of fatigue helped me decide to stop. This meant taking off my pack and messing with a bunch of stuff while other runners caught up to me. Of course, when I ran for a quarter mile further, I came right up to the Creek and had to stop again to fill my water stores before the long climb up Signal Peak.
“Noob move,” I muttered.
The Lonely Climb
Several other runners had picked there way down over mossy rocks to the river bank, and I got race news from them.
At least two of the top runners had gotten lost and wasted a bunch of time going down the wrong trail. The race directors had let several of the hundred-mile people know that they had a shot at finishing before the 36-hour cutoff, but there could be no lollygagging.
“I haven’t been lollygagging,” one women answered tersely. Indeed she hadn’t. I recognized her from much earlier on the race course moving at a much slower pace than me. She must not have broken her stride much at all in order to catch up.
“We’re probably going to finish the 100K around midnight,” another runner predicted.
Most of the runners seemed encouraged by this, though I felt the opposite way. The 100-mile runners were happy to take a break to refuel or nap in their cars, then slog out the remaining forty-odd miles. I was intimidated at the prospect of all those hours running in the dark.
The next 14 miles included a 5,000 foot climb to the top of Signal Peak and no water on the trail until Billy Creek. I remembered Tim Stroh saying he carried at least a gallon of water up the mountain. In the cold conditions, I decided to carry a little bit less.
I started up a long steep grade at a brisk hike. It was too steep to run it worth anything.
Switchback after switchback, I climbed alone. Despair began to show its ugly face.
What if I’m on the wrong trail?
The thought was unlikely, but carried deadly menace. A 5,000 foot climb in the wrong direction would almost certainly mean I would drop out of the race. I would have to carry my demoralized body to the last checkpoint and hope someone would still be there. My thoughts went to the tiny reflective mylar bag I’d stashed in the bottom of my backpack. That might be my home for the night, curled under a log somewhere, clenching myself for warmth.
I could see the jagged sides of the mountain ridge in front of me — there was plenty of hill left to climb. The sinking sun shimmered off of wet leaves in the valley below and cast a rainbow above the hills.
“That’s beautiful,” I said, waiting for the inspiration to carry me uphill. But the worries were stronger.
I’m through with this crap. What’s the point? This is physically damaging, mentally isolating and it doesn’t do a damn for anybody. There are a million other worthy things I could be doing right now.
Each time I thought I had reached the crest of the ridge, I found out that there was another switchback to climb. The wind became colder, making me put my jacket on.
The trail didn’t climb forever. It started going down where it merged with the Tyee Ridge Trail, the trail on the map. I was on course.
“Thank God!”
I immediately saw another racer in a blue jacket emerge from the trees. I recognized him from earlier in the course when he’d helped me with directions. He had gone to a spring a quarter-mile off the trail to refill his water stores. My relief grew. If there were someone else I could navigate the darkness with, I felt far more comfortable.
“I’m glad to see someone else out here,” I said.
“Yeah. Me too.” he replied.
“One thing I know is that I want to be off this damn ridge before nightfall,” I said.
We stuck together for about two miles until I felt a fresh surge of confidence and started running downhill faster. I used the written directions to take me onto Billy Creek Trail just as the orange light left the mountaintops and troubled grays began their creep across the landscape.
Slow Misery
I made my way past the next check in station station with a new burst of confidence. There were a number of switchbacks going down soft needles, that I was able to run aggressively. Soon I passed two other runners with their headlamps on, right as I went past two turns that I’d worried about missing earlier.
“Hey you might want that,” a runner warned me. The headlamp I’d been carrying in my map case had fallen out somehow.
“Thanks,” I said, feeling like a complete idiot.
When I announced that I was doing the 100K, the runners told me it must feel like I was the horse smelling the barn. Only about 14 miles left, one told me. That didn’t sound bad at all. I pictured the last segment of one of my training runs from the top of Hurricane Ridge to my apartment in Port Angeles, Washington. It had been about that far.
“There’s about a thousand-foot climb in four miles.” one of the runners remarked.
Details. I thought. Surely that was nothing compared to the 5,000 feet I had ascended earlier. I was about to find out.
The temperatures began to get warmer as we got deeper into the valley, boosting my confidence more.
The feeling of confidence first began to falter as I began pushing through thicker vegetation, that forced me to slow down and watch my step. I stopped for a quick drink and eat, allowing the two runners from earlier to pass me again.
The drop off into Jimmy Creek brought some of the steepest trail I had run yet that day. Under the narrow illumination of my headlamp, I ran down loose, jagged rocks, mindful of the drop-off on the other side. Switchbacks slowed me to an almost walk. I re-passed the two other runners shortly before we got to the creek below
It was no use though. I had to fumble in my pack to refill water for the first time in 14 miles; my two followers simply popped their bottles off their chest holsters and started running again.
At this point chafing in my shorts had worsened to the point that I had resorted to carrying my petroleum jelly in my jacket pocket. I reapplied, fumbled some more with clothes, and also with a headlamp strap that wouldn’t tighten properly. Eventually, I tied a knot in the thing, which seemed to work.
The trail left Jimmy Creek and started following the slow ascent through the Mad River Valley. The section where I had expected moderate difficulty was proving massively hard. The narrow confines of the headlamp beam only gave me so much time to anticipate and react to trail obstacles. Moreover, my muscles that had felt strong only half an hour ago, now seemed jelly-like and reluctant. I tried to run, but could only manage a fast walk.
Just four miles! I thought And then it’s literally all downhill. It was maddening to find my body, which had seemed to do so well on the downhill section earlier, suddenly rendered slow and stupid.
I heard the Mad River rushing below and desperately wanted to refill my bottles, but I found nowhere to get down its steep banks easily.
Eventually, the path crossed a small stream. I took off my headlamp and leaned over on my belly so that I could drink directly from the water. This required me to lift my head up periodically to get the water down. As I raised myself to swallow another mouthful, I found myself looking at a large toad sitting on a stone nearby.
I thought, I had drank enough, but at the next stream, I found myself drinking all over again. I was peeing plenty, but I couldn’t shake thirst.
I wouldn’t say I was hallucinating at this point, only that my mind was extremely motivated to see mundane things as things that were helpful to me. A circular cut through a log looked a lot like a trail sign announcing the end of the climb — until I got closer and saw it for what it was. Leafy branches looked like trail signs also. This happened several times.
I crossed the Mad River, drank again, peed again. I looked around a campsite for the road leading up to the last check in station at the top of Maverick Saddle.
The chafing was bad, causing me to tighten up my stride in fear of a bad rub causing fresh pain. I soon saw a jeep parked nearby and recognized the trailhead where I had started earlier in the morning. The check in was a couple hundred feet down the road, a Search and Rescue guy standing outside a truck. There were maybe four miles left in the race.
“Are you OK, Man?” he asked. That wasn’t exactly reassuring to mine ears. I must have looked worse than I thought. The last thing I wanted was to get pulled at the course this close to the finish line.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I just hit a wall in the woods back there. I’ve come back from worse.”
Of course, I nearly wandered off in the wrong direction, before I stopped myself and forced myself to look at the map more carefully. I checked my compass to make sure I was going south (and I was!) and then started jogging awkwardly along the cobbled road, downhill toward the finish.
Soon I heard footsteps coming up from behind. The cool light of another headlamp beam splashed across the road in front of me, and I knew I had company.
Finisher
At first I started to run harder, but this felt pointless.
A glance over my shoulder into the bright light revealed about my pursuer.
“Say, you wouldn’t happen to be the guy in the blue jacket from earlier?” I called.
“That’s me,” the man said. “The name’s Ray by the way.”
He ran up alongside me and I matched his pace. Since he was doing the 100-miler, not the 100K, he felt less like my competition. Soon I felt the funk that had slowed me down earlier start to lift. There was no way I wasn’t going to finish this race.
I told him about the crash I’d felt earlier when I was going up toward the Saddle.
“You probably went too long without eating,” Ray told me.
Indeed, I had lowered my food consumption for the long waterless stretch so that I wouldn’t have to drink so much. Another difference, was that running with someone else made me feel stronger, much in the same way that it had helped when I ran with Phil at the beginning of the race. Coincidentally or not, my lowest portions of the race had come when I’d been running alone.
Now, the two of our headlamps swept together across the gravel road, and the added light made me feel more confident about what was in the path. Ray also had a small flash light in one hand to reduce the distracting contrast between light and shadow.
We made the final turn that indicated we had about three miles left.
I felt more than able to run the rest of the way in, but I did make a few stops to walk with Ray, who had helped me with directions several times along the course. His headlamp had started flickering, and I would have felt crappy about leaving him to run the course behind me if I went ahead. The spare flashlight probably would have covered him, but still. Whatever minutes I could have shaved in the last few miles didn’t seem to matter after 18 hours on the trail.
At the top of a small rise, we started running again.
“I’m going to finish this race as a runner,” I said.
A lighted tent appeared. around the curve. We continued up toward the light where a couple of people were preparing soup and burgers.
“Is this the finish for the 100K?” I asked.
“This is it.”
I eased myself into a chair.
It was 12:12 am, a full 18 hours and 35 minutes from when I had started — 19 hours 12 minutes from official race start time. I was fourth place out of eight racers, two of whom had dropped out. Winner Kyle McCoy finished the 100K in only 14:45. Steve Slaby won the 100-mile race in 29:22.
I let the volunteers serve me some minestrone soup, while Ray had a burger.
Many of the 100-mile runners were sitting inside their cars parked nearby with the engines running, trying to warm themselves. Here and there a door would open, a headlight would flick on, another runner would start off down the gravel. They had miles to go before they slept.
Afterthoughts
From the comfort of the chair at the end of the race, it was easy enough to speculate as to whether I could have gone on to run those remaining miles with the rest of the 100-mile crowd. It is even easier to speculate from the comfort of my room as I type these words. Ultimately, however, that is a test that only the miles can prove — just as only the miles could prove whether I was capable of running 100 kilometers to begin with. The Plain does offer the option to 100K runners who want to upgrade to the 100-mile mid-race, but I was in no mood to find out that night. For one, my chafing was pretty bad. Not having studied the map for the last section of the race also left me vulnerable to getting really lost.
Going as far as I had did give me the luxury of learning from mistakes and trying to be better prepared and more efficient for the next competition.
Some lessons for me included the idea of managing water and food more efficiently with a rig that has front pouches available (or even stashing more stuff in jacket pockets)
I would be tempted to get a Camelbak or similar hydration system for my next race, though chest-mounted bottles would work nicely too. A laminated map with a chest lanyard would be another efficient thing to have in order to help navigation. Also, next time, I will remember that directions to the start can be just as important as directions on the race course.
Another lesson I took away is that it can be immensely helpful and enjoyable to share the miles with someone else instead of trying to push through alone.
I ended the race with an abundance of food, almost half the amount that I had started out with, including four smashed up Oreos, most of the gel packs, two chocolate bars, a baby food pack and four of the six burritos. I never used any of the drink mix tabs except for the ones that I had put at the bottom of my empty water bottles before the start. The amount I had would most likely have made it for a 100-mile race, and if I did another unsupported competition, I might use the about the same amount of everything.
I didn’t end up using either my spare fleece, the mico-bivvy sack, or any of the first aid stuff aside from the petroleum jelly, but I don’t regret bringing any one of those. In a race when anything could have happened, including a twisted ankle on a cold dark trail, it was nice to have a measure of security.
