Falling Apart on Greylock

"I don't always fall during trail races, but when I do I almost always write about it..."
    -me

They can’t all be good ones. Sometimes I feel guilty of tending to write primarily positive blog posts or articles, maybe due to some neurotic need to fight my innate cynicism and pessimism with intentional optimism, or a desire to not offend certain race organizers, participants, or volunteers. If so, well… this should begin to set things right. Sometimes the glass is genuinely just half full of disappointing emptiness. And it’s best to tell it like it is. This is one of those times.

I got my ass handed to me at Greylock last week.

To be clear: it was all my fault. The Western Massachusetts Athletic Club (WMAC), awesomely salt-of-the-earth folks that they are, put on as excellent an event as ever (and that’s not me blowing sunshine for an article; I really love their races). The Mt. Greylock Trail Race half marathon (13.5 miles) is a well-organized, highly affordable, and hard-as-hell New England run, just as I’d hoped. And though it was warm, the weather wasn’t too bad either. Sunny and clear with a bit of a breeze up top. The race starts at 10 am, which is kind of late for a June race, and temperatures did climb into the low 80s by the time I was finishing, BUT… it wasn’t humid. At all. Which is huge, especially for me. And the field of runners is small enough that getting blocked in on singletrack trail is no excuse here; you can pass when/if you want to. As it turned out, that wasn’t an issue for me anyway.

My first mistake was simply being heavy. Or more accurately, heavier than I used to be. I weigh 10+ pounds more than I did last fall. Not fully accepting this fact, I set my hopes too high. I knew better, but didn't admit that there was no realistic way I was going to claim my “usual” spot near the top quarter-to-third of the pack.

My second mistake was starting too close to the front of the pack. I’m not yet fully recovered from taking most of the winter off due to an Achilles injury and subsequent PT, and my pace simply is not what it was even a year ago. 

Start of the 2016 Mt. Greylock Half Marathon. (Photo by Scott Livingston)

The race begins by a picnic pavilion in a flat field at Greylock Glen, but you immediately need to bunch down where the trail becomes a 2-person doubletrack path as soon as it enters the woods. The grade is gentle for about 500 feet, then starts shooting straight up the side of the mountain. I could tell right away that something was off. My stamina and lungs felt fine, but the power wasn’t there and I felt every extra pound on my frame. People started to pass me right away—a warning flag.

From the Glen the course ascends the Bellows Pipe, Bucket, and Whitetail trails before eventually coming out onto the upper part of the Thunderbolt ski trail. After a relentless series of sustained power-hiking grinds up steep switchbacks (and some occasionally runnable less-steep sections), I reached the summit. My watch said 55 minutes, which was exactly the time I’d secretly been aiming for. Momentary sense of relief and reassurance. The climb had been tough, but I genuinely felt pretty good.

Alternating grades along the ferny Thunderbolt Trail

top of the Thunderbolt Trail on Mt. Greylock

crossing the road just below the summit

Clearing at the summit of Mt. Greylock

The course swings around the path that circles the tower up there, bypasses Hogwarts, then drops past Bascom Lodge and reaches a water station. I quickly refilled my carry bottle and then took off again. The course then drops over exposed ledges in the forest to the road, then begins a grueling traverse of a very rocky and rooty section along the Overlook Trail on the mountain’s west flank. Really adept technical trail runners can excel here, and some did, but I just felt clumsy and decided to let the pack I was with slip away from me in favor of keeping my front teeth intact.

a highly runnable section of The Hopper Trail, a little over a mile from the summit

Eventually you reach a runnable stretch of the Hopper / Deer Hill / CCC Dynamite Trails, then you have to ascend the Sperry Campground access road for a bit to a second water station. I walked that uphill. After that there’s about a mile and a half out to Jones Nose. Compared to the first three miles it’s mostly flat, but there are lots of small dips and climbs along the way, and after catching a toe on a rock I fell hard while crossing a small stream. I let out a loud "Ow!" when I landed. The guy ahead of me pulled away out of sight, and the woman just behind me checked to make sure I was OK. I was—mostly just pride. But my pace slowed even more afterwards.

The descent off Jones Nose was steeper than I’d remembered and I was surprised that I wasn’t running faster as I picked my way down the ledges. Coming out into the spectacularly scenic open field section, a woman passing me exclaimed, “now THIS is bucolic!”; she was not wrong. 

The view that greets runners coming down off of Jones Nose during the Mt. Greylock Half Marathon.

Just after the final staffed water station (where I first realized how far behind my goal time I was), I recognized my final mistake: I’d forgotten to bring any salt tablets. It had gotten pretty hot by this point, and I felt the first familiar hamstring twinges soon after. Despite chomping on some cran-razz Clif shots and glugging as much water as I could, the actual cramps kicked in about a half-mile later, and they persisted for the rest of the race. As if on a schedule, my hamstrings seized up about every half mile, making me slow way down and occasionally walk to make the cramps go away. Frustrating.

I can’t say I love the final four miles of the course. It follows old fire roads down, then up, then dowwwwwn, and frankly the eroded ruggedness of it gets a little old, especially compared to the fun narrow singletrack trails earlier on. Another runner/blogger referred to it as "relentless loose-rock doubletrack"; not a particularly appealing description, right? Around mile 12 it gets nice again, though. There were a few steep drops, a couple more cramps, and a brief ascent before the final descent to the finish. My time was 2 hours and 56 minutes. A solid half-hour slower than I’d estimated and should have been capable of. I was disappointed in my time and pretty taken aback by my final place in the pack. 

My creaky finish. (Photo by Jen Garrett)

So how did I lose half an hour off my pace between the summit (when I was right on target) and the finish? I'm guessing 1/3 insufficient training, 1/3 hamstring cramping, and 1/3 plain ol' spare-tire-induced inefficiency (reality check: it's probably time to ease off the Newman-O's and goldfish, self...).

A guy I've seen at a bunch of Grand Tree trail races said to a friend just after finishing, "there is nothing easy about that race."

By the food at the finish, I spoke briefly with the winner of the race, all-around good guy Tim Van Orden of Bennington, VT, who must have not touched the ground much during his mere 1 hour and 43 minutes(!) of sprinting on the course (that is an astonishingly fast time). He suggested I try swishing some relish around in my mouth to make the cramps subside (something about the mix of vinegar and sugar). And by golly, he was right about that.

Again, the organization is great, the company top notch, and the scenery as good as it gets. And there’s a post-race barbeque. Plus I got to wash off in a waterfall about a quarter mile down the road, and Jen and I went to the nice outside patio by the bike path at CJ’s pub in Adams after that. But it simply was not the race I’d imagined.

So yeah, not my finest 3 hours. But, a silver lining: I set the bar pretty low for myself for next year.


For a more consistently runnable 13-mile loop on Mt. Greylock (except for the very steep ascent of Mt. Prospect), check out site #3 on p. 18 in my guidebook Trail Running Western Massachusetts.

An abridged version of this post appears as an article on page 21 of the July/August issue of The Sugarloaf Sun, the newsletter (that I am the current editor of) of the Sugarloaf Mtn. Athletic Club (SMAC).