Well I finally finished the long day.  It was really really brutal.  The weather couldn't have been better, instead of the awful heat we were promised we got clouds which kept the heat down.  But in order to make sure I made it I decided to walk the whole way which meant I was out there for 26 hours.  I walked pretty much the whole way with Sam (who is one of the race organizers) and Colin.  It was nice to have some company but I kind of wish I had run some of it just to reduce the amount of time on my feet.  The feet are now really torn up, the last 35K was extremely painful.  My feet are just on fire and I've been done for 5 hours now.  22K of sand dunes tomorrow is going to be awful because my shoes will be filled with sand the whole time which will make my blisters feel awesome.  Not to mention it is about 1000 degrees here in camp, you've never experienced heat like this.  Thankfully I will be done or have given up by this time tomorrow.  All in all I'd have to say I haven't enjoyed this experience all that much.  I don't think I'll be doing this again (sorry Braddan, you're on your own for MDS). 
 
But it's mostly over now, the last day is shortish and then it's back to the hotel and civilization with showers and actual toilets.and non-freeze dried foods.  I just heard from someone (and I don't know if it's true or not) that it's 124 degrees here.  I know I said several times that at least it wouldn't be humid here, but it doesn't matter, it's still horrible.
 
I'll probably see many of you before I get the chance to update the blog again.  Thanks a lot for all the e-mails, it really helps more than you can imagine.  I don't think I can descibe to you how hard this has been and it's been wonderful to hear from people and get all the encouragement.
 
Thanks again.

Stage 4 was a bear.  The first part was pretty easy and I got to run most of it.  After the first checkpoint we started on the sand dunes and those were brutal.  After that fun though we had sandy canyons for what seemed like forever.  And on top of that it was super hot.  I walked from the sand dunes to the end and had to stop a couple of times to empty sand out of my shoes when my toes were starting to get crunched.  Tonight we staying at some weird historic village in a museum.  The stay in someones home last night pretty much sucked.  It was hot, there were flies all over me and the locals got really loud after we all went to bed.  Some kid screamed for about an hour at around 9 o'clock.  Then we had to get up at 3 AM to take a bus ride to some really crappy desolate part of China.  We started in a vineyard and that was the last of the living things I saw for the day.  It was like being on Mars. 
 
Tomorrow is the long day and it's supposed to be really hot.  Hopefully we'll start early because we have 100K (62 miles) to cover before we're done.  Hopefully the terrain will be easier than today because I don't know if I can handle 100K in this heat over all those hills and sand dunes.  I know my feet can't.  I got my first blister today, not too bad so far but with all the sand in my shoes I know I'll get plenty more tomorrow.  My stomach is doing better so hopefully I can eat properly today and sleep good tonight.  I'll need all the energy I can get.  Thankfully I'm doing better than the guy who just finished.  He just threw up about 5 times.  Thankfully I haven't done that yet, but there's still about half the race to go.  Hard to believe there's still that much to go.  Everyone keep your fingers crossed for me.
 
Thanks again for the e-mails, it's great to get them at the end of the day.  I probably won't finish until sometime Friday morning since I'm expecting the next stage to take about 20 hours or so.  If the terrains bad it might be longer.  But I'll have lots of time friday after I finish to read more e-mails.

Really good day today.  The conditions couldn't have been better, fairly cool and cloudy.  The course was good too, pretty rocky at the start but then some decent runnable terrain.  I adjusted my backpack this morning so my shoulders didn't really hurt at all today which was huge.  I walked for the first 10K (6 miles for you Americans) because it was in a super rocky river bed.  Lots of ankles got turned I'm sure.  After we left the river bed we were on a road for the next 11K (~7 miles) and I ran a good portion of that.  It was glorious to actually run, I finally got to do the race I was training for.  It was a lot less green for the rest of the stage but still pretty scenic.  This desert is huge.  Tonight we're staying in a "town" in someones house.  Still going to be sleeping on the pad on the floor.  But at least it isn't going to be as windy or cold tonight.  Last night was pretty rough because I had some digestive problems so I spent a good deal of time in the terrible toilets they have here.  Took some Immodium last night so I'm a bit better today but this problem is going around camp.  Despite that I felt great today so I'm encouraged about the rest of the race.  Should be pretty hot tomorrow which won't be much fun but at least now I am not worried about walking since my pack is feeling better.
 
Thanks everyone for the e-mails.  Especially my girlfriend who finally got on board   Keep them coming though, it's really great to get connected to home, you cannot believe how remote this place is.

Stage 2 is complete.  It was a much better day today because I walked pretty much the whole time.  I decided after yesterday I'll need to rethink my race strategy since the terrain and the backpack are making it hard to do any actual running.  So my legs feel really good but my shoulders are hurting pretty bad.  We had a pretty short stage today that was actually shorter than they told us.  Maybe to make up for the much harder than advertised stage yesterday. We had some hills today but not quite as bad as yesterday and they came at the beginning so that made it quite a bit easier.  The rest of the stage was on roads or in a dry river bed.  There was one slightly damp river bed but that felt fantastic since my feet were pretty warm at that point. 
 
I'm expecting tomorrow to be pretty hard and hot.  In our little booklet it says moderate to difficult and the first 2 days were moderate.  Thankfully I slept much better last night and with the higher temps expect to sleep pretty good tonight.
 
The scenery here is pretty amazing.  There is a lot more green than I was expecting and the mountains are pretty amazing.  There's actually snow on top of the big mountains.  There should be pictures and videos on the website so you should check them out.  I'm wearing my 2010 umstead marathon shirt so I should be easy to spot.  Also you should send me some damn e-mails since I didn't get any today.  I'm feeling lonely here.

Stage one is complete and it was super hard. At the pre-race briefing they said today would be easy but they were dirty evil liars.  When they said rolling hills what they really meant was killer cliffs of death.  It all started out innocently with about half the stage being on a fairly flat road with a nice valley of cows.  They it went uphill, I can't describe how steep those hills were, I almost wanted my rope.  I did want my rope to go down some of them.  Currently I feel like someone took a sledgehammer to my shoulders but my legs feel okay since I walked most of the day.  I think it didn't help that I didn't sleep at all last night.  It's actually really cold here.  It would be pretty good if it wasn't for the constant wind. It blows here all the time.  But I will sleep tonight.  Like Greg says "Happiness through chemicals is still happiness", well sleep through chemicals is still sleep.
 
Thanks for the e-mails everyone and keep them coming.  It's nice to read them after a day of killing myself.  Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

After all the preparation it's time to get myself on a plane and head out to China.  I've got my fingers crossed that I've got everything well sorted out.  The past 2 weeks have been nothing but stressing about foods and gear.  The gear part was pretty easy to deal with (except for the patches, as all of my former girlfriends can attest I'm not exactly a wizard with an iron so I ended up taking my shirts to a seamstress to get the patches sewn on. What's the deal with the patches anyway, is there some reason we need them or is it just marketing?) but the food was a chore.  2000 calories a day seems way too small considering I eat more than that on a regular day.  But that's about all that I'll have room for in my backpack so I'll have to make due.  The fun part was walking around the grocery store comparing foods to see which has the most calories instead of the least.  Turns out pretty much every bag of potato chips on the shelf has 150 calories per ounce, and I know because I looked at every single one.

Honestly I'm more nervous about getting around China and making it to the start line with all my gear than I am about doing the actual race.  I feel like my preparation has been good and I've trained enough.  My training hit a snag a few weeks ago when I hurt my neck.  It's a challenge to carry a backpack around when it causes your neck muscles all sorts of pain.  Hopefully that's healed though, I've run the last couple of weekends with the backpack and it's gone okay.  I did end up getting a new backpack fairly late in the game (last week).  I opted for a backpack with a frame to help keep the load off my shoulders and neck, hopefully preventing any more injuries during the race.  We'll see how that turns out.  It is nice having a pack that's long enough for my torso, having that waist strap tight around my stomach was not comfortable.

No more preparing though, tomorrow I get on a plane and head to Beijing.  I'll be traveling around China for a week before the race, trying to squeeze in as much of the fourth largest country in the world as I can.  I'll get to see the great wall, forbidden city and temple of heaven in Beijing.  Then I go to Xi'an to see the terracotta army.  After that I'll head to Yangshuo for a few days to relax before making my way to Urumqi.  That should be ample time to find some food that will make me sick, just to add a little extra difficulty to the race.  Until the previously mentioned food poisoning incident I thought I had a pretty tough stomach.  I now know different, so that's something that's worrying me a bit. 

I'm looking forward to getting there and meeting all my fellow runners, especially the ones I've already talked to for advice.  See you there!

This past weekend I embarked on back-to-back marathons in Kansas and Oklahoma.  It was my first time ever running that far in one weekend so I was a little nervous.  Adding to the nervousness was a case of food poisoning I got the week before the races leaving me feeling weak and afraid to eat.  Luckily I'm American and a fear of eating isn't something that's likely to stick.  And by Friday I was feeling pretty much back to normal so I was hopeful for a great weekend.  The plan was to camp all weekend so I could get a good feel for sleeping on my race gear while also running marathons but the food poisoning caused me to wimp out and only camp for the marathon in Kansas.  And although the hotel in Oklahoma City itself was pretty nice, we did drive through a somewhat scary neighborhood to get there, so I didn't totally wimp out...

The race in Kansas had options for either 100K, 40 miles, or a regular marathon.  I had thought about only doing one race for the weekend and running the 100K... but thankfully I opted not to do that.  Turns out it had been a bit rainy in that part of Kansas so the trails were a bit muddy.  When I say the race was challenging I don't mean challenging in the usual "running a marathon is a challenge" sort of way, I mean it in more of a traveling-through-Mordor sort of way.  Running in the mud is so difficult because you're not just going forward -- every step can take you in an entirely new direction from the one you had planned so you're constantly fighting to keep upright and moving forward.  This recruits lots of muscles that you don't otherwise use too often.  I think after this race my abs were more tired and sore than anything else.  Mentally it's a lot more of a challenge as well because you can't just zone out -- you're aware of every single step you take.  Luckily I was able to run a large part of the race with a nice guy named Jim so I had someone to talk to about how hard the race was.  Afterward I spent a solid 15 minutes bitching about mud and how much I hate it.  All in all though it was a good time.  I love the aid stations at trail races because they have good food and are always staffed by people who really know what they're doing because they've run way more and harder races than anyone else.  After 5 hours and 10 minutes I finally finished.  I was soaking wet, cold, and covered in mud so what else was there to do but go stand in an even wetter and colder lake?  Post-race there were some yummy hamburgers and advil, then off to the showers and into the car bound for Oklahoma.



Thankfully Shauna was there to drive me which gave me the opportunity to stare out the window at all the cows grazing away.  I don't know if anyone else has noticed this but there's a lot of cows and grass in the midwest, and not much else.  We arrived in Oklahoma, picked up my race packet from the nice young lady who had picked it up for me since packet pickup was closed by the time I arrived, ate dinner, and then it was off to bed in preparation for an extremely early 6:30 am start the next morning.  It's amazing how different marathons can be. Saturday morning there was a handful of people just milling around till someone said "Go!".  Sunday morning there were thousands of people and lots of speechifying.  I had a tough time just getting to the starting corrals because the crowd was so huge.  Having a great big backpack on didn't help much and I'm pretty sure I whacked a few people with it on my way in to the start.  The race itself was pretty uneventful for me.  The big things I remember were the incredible amounts of wind and aid stations.  Saturday -- 3 aid stations; Sunday -- maybe 35.  And while you don't get crowds like Chicago or New York or Boston, the city really did get out to support the race.  One nice family even had trays of bacon around mile 8!  I ran a good portion of the race with a guy from Texas but after 16 miles I was on pace for about a 4:15 marathon so I decided to slow down and take it easy.  By that point the pack was getting pretty heavy as well.  I finished marathon #2 in about 4:27 which was a pretty decent day for me.  Faster than my first marathon.  My post-race recovery was a cheeseburger, shower and a brief attempt at a nap before the way-more-difficult-than-it-needed-to-be trip back to Durham.  I think the flight back was probably the most difficult thing I did all weekend.

Kind of a short week of training this week as I'm tapering a little bit before my back to back marathons this coming weekend.  Saturday I ran 1.5 hours, then did a 4 mile race (without the backpack) at full racing speed, then put the backpack back on and ran another 2.5 miles to my car.  I suppose it's good training but that was a brutal day.  Of course I had to top that on Sunday when I ran 2 hours with the backpack and then went skydiving.  The skydiving turned out to be a pretty bad idea since I ended up getting pretty sick.  Thankfully I didn't throw up on the instructor that was strapped to my back... but it was awfully close.  I think it must have been food poisoning instead of just regular motion sickness because it's now tuesday and I'm still feeling pretty bad and I can't imagine motion sickness lingering for 2 whole days.  This should make the back to back marathons just a bit more interesting though since I ate a few graham crackers yesterday and managed to keep down a couple of glasses of water.  I think that 100 calorie day, down from about 3000, might explain why my legs feel so weak and I'm dehydrated.  I think the moral of the story is that, while loads of fun, skydiving is probably not good training for a race like this.

I took some advice kindly left by Hamish to repack my backpack with actual stuff I'm going to carry instead of rice this week.  It's not quite everything yet but pretty close and I'm pleased to say that my pack is going to end up lighter than I thought it would.  I'm hoping it can come in around 18 pounds instead of the 20 I was expecting.  So with my lighter pack I embarked on 7 total hours of running this weekend followed by a trial of a couple of freeze dried meals.  The running went pretty well.  4 hours on Saturday felt pretty good, I ran almost all of it, only walking on a couple of the steeper hills at the end.  After that I tried the Mountain House Rice with Chicken.  On the whole it wasn't terrible but not really good.  It was a lot of calories for the weight though so I might have to bring some along.  Sunday I ran another 3 hours and that went surprisingly well.  Not even any real shoulder pain and no lower back chafing (thank you for the advice Hamish).  Post run meal was Backpackers Pantry Shepherd's Pie with Beef.  I'm not sure if it was because I had my backpack pretty tight on my waist at the end or the Shepherd's Pie but my stomach wasn't pleased about things Sunday afternoon.  The Shepherd's Pie was pretty tasty though so I'm going to have to try it again.  That amounted to about 40 miles (65 km) this weekend and I ran pretty much every step so I'm feeling pretty good about things.

Having almost all of my gear packed was a pretty interesting experience.  Between the sleeping bag and sleeping pad a fair amount of the pack was full before I started putting in clothes and food.  What are people bringing for lunches?  I'm guessing there will be a lot of freeze dried meals for dinner but I'm kinda stumped on what to do for lunch.  And how many pairs of running clothes are people bringing?  Will we be able to wash clothes or anything along the way?

Pretty good week of training this past week despite the holiday.

Monday: 2 hours with 16lb backpack
Tuesday: Kettlebell class, lots of squats and lunges
Wednesday: 6 miles with Yvonne
Thursday: Kettlebell class
Friday: 6 miles with Yvonne
Saturday: 3 hours with 16lb backpack
Sunday: rest

I had planned to run on Sunday but I was at the beach with friends and we went kayaking instead.  The kayaking was fun though and sort of like exercise.  We got to see an alligator too, which is pretty neat.  And for the record that 3 hours on Saturday came after being up until 2:30am drinking on Friday night.  My legs actually felt good on the run but my stomach was none too happy about all the beer and wine.  I suppose that's good training since I expect my stomach won't be too happy about things in China either.

* When I say I ran with Yvonne that just means I ran a lot faster and without the backpack since I can't wear it and keep up with her.  9 minute miles is about as fast as I can go with the backpack and I think Yvonne might actually die if she ran that slowly.



Me and Yvonne after the Krispy Kreme Challenge.  Run 2.4 miles, eat 12 donuts, run 2.4 miles.

I had kind of a hard time finding a backpack that worked for me.  For starters no one in the US makes the kind of backpacks that you need for an event like this.  As much as I'd like to take a trip to Europe to do some backpack shopping my budget doesn't really allow that sort of thing.  So I had to do all my shopping on the internet which, for all of it's awesomeness in the field of time wasting, doesn't really help much with finding a backpack that fits me well.  So I ended up ordering 3 different packs, the Inov-8 Race Pro 30, OMM Classic 25L and the OMM Classic 30L.  Both the Inov-8 and the OMM 25L were too short for my torso (I'm 6'2") and didn't sit anywhere near my hips.  The OMM 30L is better but still not as firmly on my hips as I would like.  But I think it's the best I can do since they don't really make these sorts of packs in different sizes for different people. 

I've put in at least 100 miles so far with the pack and I think I've got it mostly figured out.  The biggest issue I had was chafing on my lower back and Body Glide seems to have fixed that.  I tried pads that they stick on bed ridden people to keep from getting bed sores and those came off after less than an hour.  I guess pads designed for people who aren't moving weren't the best option for running in.  After that I tried duct tape which was a really terrible idea and I can still see the marks left over from it.  It actually stayed in really well and kept the pack from chafing.  The problem was around the edges of the tape where it pulled at my skin.  It left some nasty torn up skin.  The body glide seems to work though and I've gone through several runs without any pain in the shower so that's encouraging.  The only other problem I have is that since it doesn't sit at my hips I have to choose between keeping it super tight around my waist and having my stomach unhappy, or having it looser around my waist and more of the weight on my shoulders which makes my shoulders unhappy.  If anyone has any tips about that I'd love to hear them.

All in all I'm pretty well settled with the pack now.  I'm used to running with it and until I've been running for several hours and my shoulders start to hurt, I don't even notice it's there.  I should say I don't notice it's there unless I'm running uphill, then I definitely feel the extra weight.

I first heard about this race in 2007 from a girl I met during the JFK 50.  She had run the race that year and when I was passing her during JFK I asked her about the patches she had on and she told me about the race.  Since then it's been rolling around in my head until this year I finally decided to take the plunge.  Besides, I would hate for all that Mandarin I've been learning to go to waste so I kinda have to go to China.

My training has been really good so far.  I'm up to about 50 miles a week (mostly in the form of 2 long runs on the weekend) with about 16lbs in my backpack.  When I got started I figured that I would be able to handle the running part but the backpack was going to be what really hurt me and, sure enough, my shoulders have been far more sore than my legs.  My long runs are usually around 18 on Saturday and then another 14 or 16 on Sunday.  So far my legs have been pretty good with the extra distance and weight so that's encouraging.  I'm planning to do back to back marathons in Kansas and Oklahoma next month so that should be a good test of my fitness.  Not to mention I'll be camping on that trip so I'll get to try out all my fancy new gear.