I Didn't Finish Superior. I'd Do It Again.

Eight miles into the Superior 100, I started to settle in.

That is usually a good sign. You get through the early nerves, your legs remember what they are for, and the day stops feeling like an event and starts feeling like work. But settling in also means you start doing math, and the math I did at mile eight told me the miles ahead were harder than I had given them credit for. The heat was already sitting on the trail. Backing off felt like the smart play, so I backed off.

I came in with a plan. Eight miles in, the plan was already bending.

Then I came around a corner past Split Rock

A runner was stopped on the side of the trail, bent over a little.

I asked if he was okay. He told me he was seeing red and blue and wasn’t feeling good.

I fell in behind him. A couple of yards up the trail, he checked his watch and said his heart rate was pushing 170. I told him to pause and let it come down. He kept going. That is what we do out there. We are all on our own journey.

Maybe a quarter mile later, he said his chest hurt.

I’m not a doctor

I want to be careful here, because I do not know what was happening inside that man’s body, and it is not mine to guess at in public. What I know is what he told me and what I saw. Red and blue. A heart rate near 170. Chest pain. Three things stacked up inside of a mile, in the heat, eighty-some miles from the finish.

I knew enough to know that was bad. I didn’t know enough to know what kind of bad it was.

I also knew that if I ran on and something happened to him back there, with me the last person who had a chance to do anything about it, I would not be able to live with that. Not for a buckle. Not for anything.

So I stayed.

The decision I told myself I was making

I want to be honest about this part, because the version where I nobly gave up my race on the side of the trail is not what happened.

What I actually did was bargain. I told myself I would walk him to the next aid station, lose a little time, and make it up later in the night when things cooled off. Runners are good at this kind of arithmetic. We can talk ourselves into almost anything as long as the spreadsheet still closes.

We walked. The further we walked, the worse the spreadsheet looked. Best case, I was going to roll into Beaver Bay about twenty minutes ahead of the cutoff.

Eighty miles of chasing a clock

That is when the second thing hit me, and it was quieter than the first.

I did not want that race.

Twenty minutes of margin that early means eighty miles of running scared, doing math at every aid station, eating on the move because you cannot afford the chair. Some people love that race, and I have real respect for the runners who claw through a hundred miles that way. It was not the race I trained for. The race I trained for had stopped existing somewhere back past Split Rock.

So Beaver Bay would be it. I decided that while I was walking, I felt something I did not expect: relief.

We got to Beaver Bay wet and intact

A thunderstorm came through that nobody had ordered. We walked in soaked.

The medic at the aid station looked him over, and his family got him and took him home.

That is the whole ending, and it is enough of one. He was intact. I was intact. That word is doing more work than it looks.

What I’m left with

No regrets. I have turned it over a few times since, waiting for the part where I wish I had run on, and it has not shown up.

A buckle is a nice thing to have. It is not the thing. Superior is not going anywhere. It runs every September, and the trail will still be there, and so will the climbs, and so will the heat or the cold or the mud or whatever it decides to be next time.

And there is this. That trail is full of people moving alone through the hardest hours of their year, most of them a long way from the nearest road. What I would want somebody to do for me out there is exactly what I did. That is not a hard calculation. It only feels hard for the few minutes you are still pretending the race is the point.

And one more thing

Thank you to my daughter, my brother, and my mom.

They drove up to watch me run a hundred miles. That is not the weekend they got.

What they got instead was a soggy dad, son, and brother at Beaver Bay, and then a couple of days standing in the best atmosphere in Minnesota trail running, cheering our friends across that finish line as they came in. We had a great time. I am not saying that to put a bow on a rough weekend. I am saying it because it is true, and because I would take that weekend again.