The Hills Got Harder. The People Got Better.

Race Day morning

I have been directing trail races for about 15 years now. That means I have spent a lot of mornings standing in a state park parking lot in the dark, watching headlights come up the road.

Here is what those mornings taught me. Runners show up early. Way earlier than they need to. Packet pickup opens at six, and there are cars in the lot at five thirty, and nobody in them is warming up. They are standing around in puffy jackets holding coffee, finding each other.

I didn’t expect that part when I started doing this. I thought I was building races. What I actually built, or maybe just got to host, is a recurring reunion that happens to have a timing mat at one end of it.

The hills are definitely getting longer.

I will not pretend otherwise. The climbs I used to run I now power hike, and I am fine calling it that. The trails have not changed. Willow River is exactly where I left it, five miles from my house, same roots, same stairs. I am the variable.

Some years that bothers me more than others. This fall, it barely bothers me at all, and I think it’s because the hills were never really why I signed up.

Nobody passes you without saying something.

On a trail, the course does the work for you. Single track means you spend actual time behind someone, matching their pace whether you meant to or not, and there is nothing to do with that time except talk. You learn where they are from. You learn what they are training for. You learn their dog’s name before you learn their last name.

Then the trail widens, and they go by and say good luck and mean it, and you see them again at the aid station, and again at the finish, and then again at a different race in six weeks where they remember your name and you remember theirs.

Our races are cupless, so everyone is carrying a bottle or a bladder. It sounds like a small logistics detail. In practice, it means people hand each other water. I have watched a runner top off a stranger’s flask at mile eight of a ten miler. That is not race behavior. That is people behavior that happens to be occurring during a race.

The finish line is where I get to stand.

Best seat in the sport. From where I stand, a finish is not a time. It is somebody’s friend who drove two hours to yell in a parking lot. It is four people who started as strangers at the trailhead coming in together because somewhere around halfway they decided to.

And then nobody leaves. That is the real tell. A trail race finish line thins out slowly over two or three hours because people eat, sit on tailgates, and wait for the back of the pack so they can clap for them too. We put variety on the finish table rather than volume of any one thing, partly because it feels more abundant and partly because people linger longer over choices. Lingering is the goal. The food is the excuse.

About the roads

I love a road race. There is a purity to a flat, fast course and a clock that does not care about your excuses, and some of my favorite days running have been on pavement with a number pinned to my shirt.

But I have never made a lasting friend at mile nine of a half marathon, because at mile nine of a half marathon I was doing math. That is not a knock on road racing. It is just what the format asks of you. The clock is the point, and when the clock is the point, the social part gets pushed to the edges: the corral before, the beer tent after, thirty seconds of small talk while you find your bag.

Trails put the connection in the middle of the race, not around it.

Three more chances this fall

They get progressively harder, which feels about right.

In Yan Teopa is next Saturday, September 26, at Frontenac State Park. Five miles or ten, bluff views over the river, the kind of course where you will end up talking to somebody on the climb whether you planned to or not.

Trout Brook 10 Miler is October 10, right in the best two weeks of the year for running in this part of the country.

Then Icebox on November 7 at Whitetail Ridge in River Falls. 240 or 480 minutes on a loop, which is the most social format we run. You see the same people over and over for four or eight hours. By hour three, you are not running your own race anymore; you are running everybody’s.

Come to one of them. Get there early. The parking lot is where it starts.