What a crazy season it has been. When I set this as a goal last year, it seemed so far away, but there were three new-to-me races I would be taking on in addition to Eastern States 100: Hyner 50K, World’s End 100K, and finally Black Forest 100K to complete the “Black List.”
If you had asked me which of these four races I thought would be the hardest, I would have said World’s End. I had heard a lot of horror stories about racing the cutoffs there. I knew I could do ES100 without issue; I had done it twice before. Black Forest? Well, I thought that was a joke! It was the end, an afterthought after I would have the most fitness built up.
Well, I know now it’s pretty dumb to ever underestimate running 62 miles with 13,400 ft of climbing. That’s never easy, but compared to the others, I thought it was going to be “easier.”
I was wrong. I was dead wrong, and DEAD LAST. I headed into the race with a time goal of 17:00 flat, just because I thought I could run a better race than I did at World’s End. I was HIGHLY mistaken and should have known that was going to come back to bite me. I would say it had more technical sections than World’s End, and the navigation piece of it was bad. The back half of the race wasn’t marked, and having never done it before, I didn’t know what to expect.
First off, I had the fitness. That I knew. But something very strange happened in this race. A pair of shoes I had worn a ton in training started to irritate my Achilles. This was a brand-new pain I had never felt, and it had to do with the rocky terrain and how the shoe was digging into the back of my heel. It slowed me to a crawl until I could get a new pair of shoes around mile 30.
Pacing was fine at the start. I was moving fast enough to offset the cold weather. No issues there. I stuck to my nutrition of homemade gels that I FORGOT to use at ES100. I froze them after that race and used them for Black Forest. A fun new fuel I used a bunch in the race was Nerds Gummy Clusters. They tasted AMAZING.
This season did identify a flaw in my ankle mobility that I need to address for next season. I plan to work on that over winter break and during my transition season.
For motivation in the race, I for sure had the goal of completing the “Black List,” which was the entire reason I was there. As for race day, running with Doug from the Hills and Friends VF group was the highlight of the run. A few things happened that got me across the finish line. One was that Doug corrected a miscalculation I had made of the distance to the aid station after I went off course. Had I not run into him, I don’t think I would have paced correctly to get to the aid station in time. There is an energy you feed off of when you are running with someone. I was stronger on the climbs, he was stronger on the descents, and we just kept trading places.
In my head, I was calling it a “mutually assured finish.” I knew I was finishing with him no matter what. Once we both left that aid station, I knew I had to keep up with him, and at times he knew he had to keep up with me. MASSIVE amounts of fear were driving my pace, and sprinting to the finish in the dark was insane! I tried to use the light on my watch to help see some of the rocks and roots, but I kept thinking, we can’t move this fast in the dark without going down. I would say luck was on our side, but we also both had the fitness. To pull off that long of a push was brutal!
Running groups and running with friends will be the biggest memories I take from this entire season. This season was so much fun. It was the group runs I got out on with people that had the biggest impact, and there were a lot of them. It was the people who made the season, not the individual races. We don’t remember days; we remember moments. I put the races on the calendar to create more chances for those magical moments to happen. Adventure may hurt, but it’s worth the risk every single time. Every race where I’m cursing my existence, suffering, or out in crazy conditions, I know that Monday is just around the corner.
Make sure to subscribe, as I plan to do a follow-up video on the entire PA Triple Crown / Black List journey that will include the lost Eastern States footage from the damaged camera.
Patrick is an ultrarunner and coach from Philadelphia who loves documenting his running career. His mission is to provide useful tips and tricks to assist others along their ultra journey. You can find his coaching services at https://ultraruncoach.com.
