North Country Trail Marathon

This past weekend, I traveled to northern Michigan to participate in the North County Trail Marathon in the Manistee National Forest west of Cadillac, near Wellston.  It was my 27th long distance event, completing my 21st state on a quest to run a marathon or ultra in all 50 states.  I'm getting there, 26.2 miles at a time.

I will preface this by saying that I'm not a trail runner.  I don't really run trails, don't train on them, and as much as I want to like them, I'm just not sure they are my thing.  Going into this event, I initially had signed up for the 50 mile option last fall, but downgraded to the marathon this spring when my running priorities changed.

I'm in the midst of training for a 24 hour event next month in Cleveland, so I decided to train right through this run and not really treat it as a "race".  I did not taper at all, running high mileage (for me) for the previous 4 weeks, reaching a 30 previous day peak of 290 miles. So, realistically, I had no expectations for a fast finish time, although given recent road marathon times, I was shooting for 4:30, which in reality, was a pipe dream.  Ha.

The race is held in the Manistee National Forest in northern Michigan.  It has a lot of hills with 2250' of BOTH elevation ascent and descent, and it's mostly a single track sand trail with a lot of roots, but thankfully no rocks or mud.  It turned warmer in the last couple of days before the race.  Starting temp was in the lower 70s and finish temp was near 90 for me.

The course itself is a 1.2 mile out/back on the roads, then a 25 mile loop through the forest.  After a 30 minute delay because of a tree fall, we were running.  It was also very humid.  I live in humidity so I'm used to it, but it really affected me today.  Overall, the miles ticked off.  I walked the hills, ran the downs, and was having a pretty enjoyable time through the first 15 miles.  First half split was 2:18, just 3 minutes slower than I had planned.  But by then it was getting progressively hotter, even though we were under the tree canopy, but with the high humidity, I was sweating a lot and was soaked from head to toe. 

By mile 18, my stomach started rebelling, and I was getting pretty nauseous.  I "wish" I would have thrown up, it probably would have felt a lot better.  The heat was really getting to me.  I've run 3 extremely hot marathons in the past 4 months, resulting in a bad case of heat exhaustion on the first one back in March and also just recently in June, so I think the heat gets to me much faster/easier because of that. 

Any running by mile 19 resulted in feeling generally worse, which is unfortunate because there were a lot of runnable parts of the trail here.  So I decided to essentially walk it in mostly, deciding to not push it, and still tried to jog short distances when I could without spiking my HR.  A LOT of people were walking.  One guy was down on the trail with heat exhaustion, but he seemed fine and was talking and told me and others to go on.  But I just wasn't having a lot of fun in those last 6 miles.  I really hated the heat, the hills, the humidity, and I really just hated running in general at that time. 

I did finish with a time of 5:06.  That resulted in 7th out of 18 for my A/G of 40-44. The winner in my A/G finished with a time of 4:30, my original goal.  Overall, the race was very well organized, the aid stations were well stocked, the volunteers were fabulous, and the after party was absolutely awesome with beer, hamburgers, chips, beans, and just a lot of fun.  About 500 people total participated in the event, split between the half marathon, marathon, and 50 mile run.

This race also gave some of the best swag I've gotten for a race.  Because I was one of the first 100 people to register, I received a nice running jacket with my name screen-printed on it and a pair of tech running shorts.  We also got a canvas shoulder bag, and the shirt is a nice tech shirt, and the medal is about 7" in diameter, supposedly the 3rd largest marathon medal in the country, and weighs about a pound. It's like a small dinner plate.   Ha.

Another cool thing, Marshall Ulrich was also there.  I've read his book Running on Empty on Kindle, so I had him sign my bib instead.  He wrote, "Van, Good luck with your 50 States quest!  Dig Deep and Love More."  That last part is his signature line I think.   I also got to meet another forumite, mjsmith1223, whom I've chatted with on here for a couple of years at least, so it was great to finally meet him. 

Bottom line, I completed a fairly difficult trail trace in an OK time given all the conditions.  I really didn't have this as a goal race, and just used the event as a stepping stone to complete a race in another state. I didn't taper, and the hills with 2250' of both elevation ascent and descent, on single track sand, along with the heat and humidity, really made this a challenging race!  In retrospect, the trail was beautiful, and perhaps I will run another trail race some day in the future!