83.267 km is HOW far?!

I've done something crazy. After not getting to go to my race in Portugal I felt the need to do something that would really test my limits, in other words, punish myself. So when Depika's boyfriend, Xavi mentioned this 84.267 km hike with 5,980 meters of total climb - and just as much descent - I thought, "hey, I can do that!" How much exactly is 84.267 km and 5,980 meters of altitude? Well, onlineconversion.com says that it's 51.74 miles with 19,619.42 feet of elevation. Nothing, right? Well here you have the profile of the race:

And if anyone has any interest in doing this masochistic feat in the future, I'll give you the sight's homepage in Catalan:
http://www.cegracia.cat/mm/
and in English:
http://www.cegracia.cat/mm/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=27&Itemid=48

I won't recommend it or discourage you, but you can decide for yourself after reading this. I've added some pictures that I thought were fun to lighten up the mood towards the end.

The race started at the top of Coll Formic, or The Ant Hill (named for its shape and not its size), a name that strikes fear into the hearts of all Catalan cyclists for its famed steepness. I'd never been. At 3:00 in the afternoon Silvia dropped me off in Plaza Joanic and me and my backpack got on the bus. My backpack weighed about 20 pounds and contained:
~a huge pea-green raincoat, borrowed from Silvia
~a mini maglite flashlight with one extra battery (borrowed from Joolie)
~a fleece vest
~2 extra pairs of socks
~my camera
~2 cheese sandwiches
~a bag of almonds
~3 power gels
~2 power bars
~a bag of Werthers Originals hard candies
~a baseball cap
~deodorant (to prevent blisters)
~8 euros
~information about the course
~a 2 liter camelback bladder
~my house keys, cell phone (that's right, Pam), metro card, and other daily necessities.

The bus drove for about an hour to Montseny (which does NOT mean "breast mountain" as I once thought), and then grunted and roared another hour in the traffic jam to the top. The left side of the bus got a view of all the people peeing at the side of the road during the traffic jam. I did not see anybody pee, but this was my view from the bus. *note to self: vehicles are NEVER a good place to take pictures, I should stop doing that*:

When the bus finally gave up on the traffic jam and set us free to walk the rest of the way to the start it was cool and rainy. The way they did the start was, depending on when you turned up they gave you a time. Twenty-five people set off a minute starting at 5:30. I left at 6:49, about mid-way through. Who knew there were so many people crazy enough to do something like this (about 2,500)? Here's a picture of me at the starting line, looking like a big tool:

While waiting I talked to a woman named Sol who I recognized from when I'd gone to sign up for the "excursion". She looked really familiar, but we'd never met before the sign-up day. Sol means "sun", but the name did not fit her at all. She didn't hardly smile at all, and when she did it looked like it hurt. And her voice was one of those voices that makes you want to fall asleep or kill yourself. Anyway, we exchanged numbers because she's always looking for other women who do crazy things like this. She wants to start a club or a team or something. (I don't think I'm going to sign up). Sol will continue to turn up occasionally throughout this story. There were only three porta-potties (three porta-potties is vastly insufficient), so when I had to pee the second time I decided to forego the 20-minute wait and find a nice bush somewhere. This was hard, not for lack of bushes, but because there were people everywhere, no matter how far back into the woods I went. While I was looking for a nice, private place where not too many people could see my white ass I found a herd of big old cows grazing right around all the hikers. I took a picture, but it didn't turn out so well. They look more like big hunks of cheese than cows.

The start was uneventful. There were some nice views, from the top of the mountain of which I took pictures. The sun came out a little bit as I was walking along the top of the mountain and you could see the sunbeams coming down through the clouds with the mountains in the background. Here are the pictures I took before the sun set around 8:30.




Also on top of that mountain I saw a flock of goats grazing. Did you know that goats have sideways pupils? I didn't until this weekend. And here's another bad picture of the goats. Can you tell I'm a city girl?

On top of Monseny I met a guy who introduced himself as Pedro, but I suspect his name was Pere. I hate it when people with Catalan names introduce themselves as the Spanish translation. "Pedro" told me that he'd done the race last year in 21 hours. He wasn't going to lie to me, it was long and difficult, but the deciding factor would be the blisters. He brought a pair of extra sandals for just this reason. Since Xavi had forgotten to give me his head lamp, all I had for light was a mini-Maglite borrowed from Joolie. So as night fell I stuck with "Pedro" to take advantage of his headlight. In the last moments of twilight we passed by this cottage and a crude fence that I swear I'd seen before in a dream or something... Then "Pedro" and I got to this descent that felt like it took hours to get down. It wasn't quite rock climbing, but it was damn close. The rocks were wet and slippery from all the rain from the last week and there were thousands of people scrambing over rocks and each other to get down. It was the kind of climb where you can't concentrate on hurrying, but only on finding your next secure foothold in the dark. "Pedro", who kept slipping, commented on how sure-footed I was. I felt proud. Not only can I swim in the Pacific without a wetsuit, but I can climb mountains in the dark without slipping as much as "Pedro" with his booby sticks (hiking poles). I lost "Pedro" for awhile and when I found him at the bottom of the decent he'd already started to get some blisters and had sat down to take care of the situation.

For hours I went back and forth between trying to take advantage of other people's lights and turning on my own when I passed pockets of people. After a few hours we passed through a little town called Aigua Freda (Cold Water), where there WAS a fountain. I have no idea whether it was cold or not because I didn't stop. I was going to kick ass in this race and finish before the pack. Oh yes, I am hardcore. Directly after Aigua Freda we climbed a hill that went up 200 meters over only 3 kilometers. It was like climbing the Merrill hill (at UCSC) for an hour, but the ground was even and the dirt was hard-packed and I felt great. I got to the top sweaty and energized. Somewhere in the ascent Sol passed me running (I will refrain from a tempting pun about the rising Sun, you're welcome).

After the hill after Aigua Freda the night is a bit of a blur. My mind settled into the "edurance mode" where you feel like your only purpose in life is to keep going and it begins to feel like you've been doing this your whole life. You forget that this will ever end and your life before this day seems like ancient history. If you start thinking about the finish at this point you'll never get there. Checkpoints were few and far between and food as well, not like I could eat the food anyway. I did eat some cookies at one and some chunks of really bad (egg) tortilla at another, but I had to keep trucking and munching Power Bars on the go. I wanted to finish at 9am, mostly because most people don't finish till after noon, but also I wanted to get in a nap before going to volleyball with Silvia. I missed Silvia. Of course, I didn't take any pictures at night, but because I'm enjoying these photographic non-sequeters I'll show you a picture of Emma and her friend Sonia having an umbrella fight in motorcycle helmits:

I was truck, truck, trucking along, munching on power bars and sucking on hard candies and passing people left and right when suddenly my flashlight seemed to be getting dim. I had people around and I thought maybe it was because of the ambient light, but soon my flashlight gave no light at all. I changed the batteries, but it kept dimming about a minute after my turning it on. Sometimes less! I had no more spare batteries. Then we came up on another rough decent and my flashlight stopped working alltogether. It was only 2 in the morning, and there were many more hours of night to get through. I had a few close calls with twisted ankles, but had the luck to find a group of three guys, one of whom had run out of light but the other two had halogen headlamps and together we all got down the rocky descent and I stuck with them until the next check point going as fast as my little legs would take me to keep up with their 6.2 kilometers per hour. We passed a guy who was puking his guts out at the side of the road. The kind of puking where you're puking so hard that you're yelling but nothing comes out. Then he would make sounds like a horse. What was he doing so sick so early in the night? For over an hour I walked with the 3 guys with 2 headlamps without opening my mouth. Then one turned to me and said (in Catalan), "Women must be so much stronger than us, because they spend the whole time chatting and I can barely keep going let alone talk". Clearly, he thought I was Catalan, and in the dark I'm not sure if he knew I was a woman. We talked a little bit on the easy bits about who we were, why we were doing the race, etc. but mostly the only words we exchanged were "puddle", "look out for the rock", "this way". It wasn't really that I'd joined the group, but that everyone was there to help eachother along as long as they were around, and people would come and go at their own pace. We never learned each other's names and I lost them at the checkpoint. I was starting to get stuff in my shoes and the soles of my feet were starting to hurt. I got in line for food and picked up the lamest sandwich I've ever eatten in my life (that cheap white bread with sesame seeds that they use in gas station sandwiches, some shreaded lettuce, and about 1/4 of an egg crumbled up). When I turned away from the "buffet" I saw Sol looking miserable (as she always does). I asked how she was and she said she was freezing and thinking about dropping out. There were people lying around all over the ground looking exhausted, most of them looked like they didn't plan on getting up again. We'd just passed the half way point and this was the point where most people drop out. Sol was tough though. She'd met up with a friend at about nightfall who had convinced her to run it, and she'd been running ever since... until about 2 hours before when they came to a killer descent. She'd stopped running to get down safely, but he'd kept running, lost his footing, and broken his ankle. She had to help him all the way to the aid station (a trip that she said took about 45 minutes), and said that when they got there he was almost fainting from the pain. I asked how he'd gotten there, with "a couple of balls"? She said, "that's the expression, but really that's what happend. He really was tough." Speaking of testicles, here's a note I left for Maria a few months ago when she asked me to buy eggs for her at the supermarket:

They'd taken him away in an abulance, but she'd gotten so cold that she didn't know whether to keep going or go home. I cleaned out my socks and finished my sandwich and the two of us set off at a good clip. I was dying to pee, and for once we had to walk through a town for like half an hour before finding some nice, dark bushes. Then we set off with Sol and her light ahead and me scrambling behind (again, refraining from a pun about Sun's light). I could barely keep up, but I didn't want to admit I was struggling, until we got to an ascent where you need to use legs and hands to get from one rock to another and she pulled ahead leaving me in pitch dark. I called out for help and she looked back every few seconds to give me barely enough light to memorize the next few yards and try to catch up. When we got to the top she said, "best if you put yourself in front, because if not I'll keep going on without you". Sol was a bit of a bitch. But when I was in front of her I couldn't see where I was going for my shadow. So when we got stuck behind a big group I used my good ballance and my sure-footedness of a mountain goat to pull ahead of a lot of people and lost Sol in the crowd. I don't think she made a special effort to find me. At this point it was about 4 in the morning and I'd given up on going superfast and just tried to stay with the people with the brightest lights. At one point where the rock face dropped off (god knows how much) right next to us and the guy I was following had to give up and sit down. I had to stand there in the dark at the edge of a cliff and wait for another light to come along. To tell you the truth, I have no idea how I didn't fall or break something the whole night. By six in the morning I had a feeling that I wasn't even trying to see anymore and I was just walking over whatever and just catching myself when I slipped. Who cared? I was tired and I wished the sun would just come up.

I thought, the sun can't possibly rise later than 6:30, and there'd be light before that, but the dawn didn't even start until a little after seven. I don't even remember the sunrise. I stopped at an aid station to drink some orange juice and eat a doughnut (actually, Mica, it was "un donuts") and clean out my socks and when I left there was light. They say that when the sun comes up it's a lot easier because you know you've gotten through the whole night walking and now you could see Montserrat, but as soon as the sun came up and I was no longer firing adrenaline from not knowing where I was stepping fatigue set in * like that. We walked through a town that looked a LOT like Monterey with the steep hills and really nice houses with intimidating gates and alarm system signs. The hills were still very steep (the kind of thing that even I would have to walk my bike up), and the concrete was worse than trying to walk on slippery rocks and dirt. The town with all the streets named after birds seemed eternal, and I still couldn't see Montserrat. Finally, around eight thirty in the morning (now back in the woods) I came over a ridge in the mountains I could see Montserrat. There it was, still fucking far away. I took a picture. Looks close doesn't it? Now imagine like you have to walk all that way. Nah, you wouldn't feel like doing it either, huh?

I must have had another 20 kilometers to go at that point, some 13 miles or so. A half marathon. Of all up and down, up and down. Nothing was flat. I was starting to get a little disorientated. I don't know if it was from the exercise, or just pure exhaustion and fatigue from not sleeping all night. It took me about half an hour to do the calculation of how much I had left because I kept forgetting all the parts. Was I starting in kilometers or miles? Was a mile shorter or a kilometer? I couldn't remember. Was I at kilometer 65, or was that how long the course was? What was I trying to figure out again? Shit.

And on I trucked. Hours later, at the next check point I thought I looked at the map and saw that there were only 10 km left, but then the next time I looked at the map an hour or so later THEN it looked like there were only 10 km left. I think I thought I only had 10k left for about 5 miles. Up and down, up and down. I thought I had stuff in my shoes, but when I took them off to shake it all out I had huge blisters everywhere. When I thought I was stepping on pointy pieces of sand, I was actually pressing on big, bubbly blisters. I changed my socks, but it didn't help too much. While I was changing my socks a man I'd never seen before in my life sat down next to me and said, "Hey, it's the American!" One of the guys with the headlamps? I have no clue. I didn't much care about hurrying anymore. I was just going. Many, many hours (or years) later I got another view of Montserrat. I swear, I've never seen a more horrific sight in my life:

What? You think it's beautiful? Well look again. Look at all that space between where I am and the mountain. Around here I saw Sol again. Actually I'd seen her at the last check point while I was changing my socks, but just pretended like I hadn't seen her. She could see that I was not fine. I said that I was hurting, but nothing I couldn't handle. She said, "Tranquila, you have your music, your job now is just to keep putting one foot in front of the other." Maybe Sol wasn't so bad.

I reached the final town at the foot of Montserrat and there were hikers lying on the sidewalk and propped up on buildings all over the place. I refilled my camelback bladder and I think I only kept going because it annoyed me too much to see other people were still alive. We passed a train station and I wondered why I didn't just buy myself a ticket home. I really didn't care if I finished. I didn't know why I signed up for this damn race in the first place. I didn't give a flying fuck about my pride or about what people would think or that damn trophy at the end. I just didn't give a shit. But I kept going. I think because I'd started and I'd been doing this for my entire life and I just didn't know how to stop now. At this point the descents hurt so much that I couldn't wait for an ascent until it came and then I couldn't take that either. I couldn't even take the flats.

Halfway up Montserrat I got to the final check point. All I wanted to know was how much was left. It couldn't be more than a few hundred meters, maybe a kilometer at the most. I wanted to ask, but the guy at the aid station was smiling and so I certainly didn't want to ask him. I'd lost my map. I wonder how that happened? Everything that was put in front of me was a gigantic effort. There were a lot of newley felled trees from the storms that we had to climb over, and it was like climbing another mountain each time. Then we started to see fresh hikers coming down. Some of them commented to eachother how strong you must be to do this, but one guy who was coming down the trail with a fat girl said, "Look at this one, now SHE really IS moving slowly". I gave him the dirty look of a lifetime. Imagine my dirtiest look, and then imagine me half dead and covered with 18 hours of sweat and grime and give me a sunburn and blotchiness from dehydration and you might get an idea. It was a nice day, a perfect day for hiking, but the sun was killing me. It got to the point where every step I took I had to steady myself before taking the next one. Everyone that I asked how much was left said, "it's not far". Finally I lost it and started screaming at this guy, "just give me a fucking number!" He said, "you'll be there in 45 minutes, maybe more. Prepare yourself for another 3/4 of an hour". He offered me water to wet my head and I set every ounce of my will power to putting one foot in front of the other. I think I was thinking that I might have to go to the hospital and that if I fainted here then there would be nobody to take me there, so I had to get to the top before I passed out. I got to a turn where there was a guy sitting there with his head in his hands. He had a picture of a toddler around his neck and he looked like he was going to cry. I asked him if he knew how much farther it was. He said, "it's just around this bend and then several more stairs". I made it pulling myself with my arms on the railing as much as I walked with my legs past alarmed-looking tourists and got to the top of the stairs. Here in the home stretch "Pedro" passed me. I hadn't seen him since nightfall, which gives you an idea of how much I'd slowed down in the last 10k (and all those kilometers that I THOUGHT were the last 10k). I asked the first person I saw when I got to the top where I could get water. He pointed to the cafeteria and I thought I was going to cry. No, there was no great sense of achievement, just a need to attend to my most basic human needs: water and rest. I'd been walking all night, for 19 hours straight and didn't give a rat's ass anymore.

I got in line in the cafeteria, but with Spanish customer service it was quite clear that I would be there for awhile and I wasn't sure if I would faint or vomit first, but I surely wasn't going to make it to the front of the line to buy some water. I went and sat at a table trying to figure out what to do next. I saw no sign for bathrooms. I saw no way to cut in line. Everybody was avoiding looking at me, so I couldn't catch someone's eye and ask them to stand in line for me. So I just sat there being miserable. Some awful rich-looking northern European women made motions like they wanted to sit down and I just shook my head. Finally I stumbled back outside to look for a better solution. I stopped a guy and asked him if he had any water and he gave me the few ounces that he had left. Thank god for the kindness of strangers. He told me that if I needed more I would have to climb up the ramp to where the bathrooms and water tents were. I was about to give up and go get on the train so at least I could die in peace when I saw Sol again. "You made it!" she said. "I'm not okay," I said. "I know," she said. She said that I MUST get up to the top to get some water, or else I wouldn't get home. I wanted her to get it for me, but she didn't offer. Sol was a bitch after all. It took me about 15 minutes to cross the small parking lot and climb the stairs (maybe about 100 yards total), but I got there and I got water and lemonade. I managed to find a seat on a step and tried to gather my strength to get back to the train. I looked at the line of people there to pick up their finisher's trophies. There were between 25 and 50 of them, all standing up and waiting. There was no way I could stay standing for long enough, so decided "fuck it" about the trophy. I looked with longing at the first aid tent, but you need to present proof of a social security to get medical service, so I made my way back down to the train.

This is getting kind of heavy, so I'll give you a picture of the last time I was at Montserrat (I went in bus that time). This is Lola being a penis (because of the phallic rock formations):

I stumbled my best back down to the lower level. Before crossing the parking lot to the train station I sat on a bench to gather my strength, then I lay down. Then I decided to try to sleep for a minute or two. As I was drifting off I heard a toddler crying hysterically and the mother telling him, "Don't worry, sweetie, we'll never do this excursion, okay? Nobody's going to make you do it." I guess we looked that bad. Who cared? I was so disoriented that I bought a kid's ticket back to Barcelona. Who cares? And I fell asleep on the platform. Who cares? And I smelled horrible and sat next to tourists. Who cares? When we changed trains to go back to Barcelona all the smelly hikers were sitting apart because of the stench. There was a guy with a rat tail sitting next to me. I congratulated him, and he congratulated me. We compared stories and fatigue levels. He really made me feel not so bad that I was going to die. He wasn't literally dying, but he knew how it was. When the train came he and I and one other hiker took seats in the same group of four leaving one seat open for whoever wanted to take it. We all fell asleep immediately. Every time I opened my eyes there would be someone new sitting in the seat across from me and the last person would be standing in another part of the car, far, far from smelly us. Who cares?

When I got to the station Silvia was there waiting for me and smiling. I've never been so happy to see someone's face in my life. The whole time I was on the hike, even before my light went out and I started to feel sore, even before things started to go bad, all I could think about was that I still wished I was home with her. Not that I didn't have a good time, or that the whole thing wasn't worthwhile, but I just would have rather been with her. The first thing she said to me was, "you smell like a dead rat!" How romantic. But she helped me up to the street and then she didn't complain when I almost knocked over her motorcycle trying to get on it, and she only complained once about having to drive across the whole city so close to smelly me, and she bought me a beer to help with my circulation and she helped me to the shower and washed my clothes for me and lent me some clean underwear and pajamas to sleep in and she made me some food and she helped me to bed and she didn't complain once about how I couldn't go to volleyball with her, not even to watch.

So this is the part where I put my final thoughts. I don't really have some huge sense of accomplishment. I went because I wanted to find my limits, and I found out that they were at about 49.5 miles. I went to try to decide what my athletic goals would be for the coming years, and I decided that I don't want to work towards ultraendurance events. I went because I wanted to show Lorraine, my friend and own personal hero who's twice my age and runs 100 mile races (and sometimes wins in her age group) that I could do it, and I did. I went, I did it, and I'm glad I never have to do it again. Today and yesterday I've been surprisingly not sore. Yesterday I was able to go to a meeting and teach a class. Today I think I'm going to go swimming. So life goes on, thank god. And thank god life doesn't force us to do these things if we don't want to, just like the mother was telling the little kid. I like life just fine and don't need the accomplishment of walking 51.74 miles to continue to enjoy it. That's it. That's the lesson I'm walking away with. That and no trophy.

As Kat would say, "The End".