Newark, DE
3:47 ish for 28 ish miles (pace unknown)
1st place overall (out of ~60)
What the heck kind of results are those? What is all this ‘ish’ crap? Didn’t you run a certified race? Ha! Ummm. No. Welcome to the most memorable and obscure marathon I have ever run.
Stumpy’s marathon started 7 years ago as ‘a joke’. The marathon is put together by a group of friends calling themselves the ‘trail dawgs’ in Northern Delaware. There is no entry fee for this race and you get exactly what you pay for. I have run races with varying entry fees, from ~$30 (considered cheap!) to over $100. For those entry fees you get course marshals, well stocked aid stations, finishers medals and usually a t-shirt commemorating the event. When you pay $0 for a race, you don’t get much.
I drove to the area the day before. Somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania, I hit the edge of Tropical storm (formerly Hurricane) Hannah. Stef was kind enough to take some whether.com screenshots of the area a mere 15 hours before race start. 
The storm ran right over Delaware soon after these shots. You would think the trails would be horribly muddy after getting 4-5 inches of rain in 10 hours, but luckily the summer here has been very dry so the hard ground absorbed very little water. The course conditions in that regard were great.
Two weeks ago I started a race and VERY early on (2 steps!) I was in second place and stayed there for the entirety of the race. This race, after a half a step I was in the lead and stayed there for the entirety of the race. For regular readers of this blog, I normally don’t like the lead as I do poorly, tending to go to fast and crashing later. I seem to have gotten over that. Maybe I am learning, who knows.
After about 800m of dirt road, off we went on to single track trail. Up, down, left, right. All day long. One person’s GPS watch said there was a total of 12,000’ elevation gain and loss for the entire race. I am not sure if it was THAT much, but it was a lot. For local readers of this blog, the trail was much like the mountain biking trails at Ella Sharp Park in Jackson. The course had been marked the day before with flags, chalk and flour but that was done before Hannah rolled through. Early race morning many volunteers went out to sort of ‘touch up’ the markings. The (numerous) turns were well marked for the first 14 or so miles. Then the wheels fell off, so to speak.
At about mile 14 I passed an aid station with 5 or so guys standing there. They said ‘You cannot be the lead runner’. I said I was and they got a little concerned, telling me that the next part of the race was not so well marked. I filled my water bottle and pushed on and soon met an unmarked Y intersection. Both ‘paths’ were equivalent and there were no flags or signs. I went down one trail about 50m and saw nothing and went down the other 50m and saw nothing. Walking back to the intersection I looked down and saw the faint remnant of a pile of flour looking as if 5 inches of rain had fell upon it. Ok, cool, this is the way to go. I figured I lost about 2 minutes there, no biggie. I continued on and soon came upon yet another intersection that was (as far as I can tell) also unmarked. This is a bad sign. I search for flour for about 30 seconds when I guy comes running up on me and says, ”You are going the right way, straight here”. This was Angus, one of the nicest (and fastest) Trail Dawg volunteers. It is him in my finishers picture above. He was sent out to (literally) make sure I went the right way. There was another group of guys who would go with the second place runner and mark the path, but I didn’t have to follow markings (there were none!) because I had Angus. We would come up on intersections (dozens by race end) with no markings at all and he just ‘knew’ which was to go.
Angus is a very nice guy (a chemical engineer who works for a local company owned by Dow Chemical) who lives mere miles from the park(s) we ran through and does ultramarathons, including 100 mile trail runs. He had done 25 miles the day before and surely would have won this race had he ‘entered’ it and not volunteered. It turns out we ran a few ‘loops’ of the course in the wrong direction, went around one side of a mountain when everyone else did the other side, but we ran ‘just as far if not farther’ than everyone else.
There was one major 50’ river crossing with fast moving water about waist deep. I actually took the time to take my shoes off before crossing. I have been burned before with completely wet feet and I wanted to avoid that again. Later, after about 20 miles we came to another stream crossing and met up with some runners going the other way. We crossed this stream (again about 50’ wide, but only knee deep here) and met up with one of the other volunteers on the far side. After some conversation, we realized that we should have NOT crossed there, so we went right back through the stream again. That, I admit, was a little annoying, but in the grand scheme of things, not unexpected.
Somewhere around here my GPS watch failed, which was good because ended up going long and very slow and I really didn’t want to know how much farther we had to run nor how long I had been running. After what seemed like forever, I asked Angus how much farther we had to go. He said ‘probably less than 5 miles’. Ugh. Not the answer I wanted at all. Then, after what seemed to me to be another hour I asked him once more the same question. “A little more than a mile. I think”. I stopped asking and just kept moving my feet just trying to get closer to the finish. Finally I came out of the woods, did a quick right turn and arrived at the finish, completely exhausted.
With the late start, long run, and long drive home, I only stayed for a brief period of time. I grabbed my finishers ‘rock’ (no medal, just a rock with a cool sticker on it) went back to the hotel and took a quick ice bath (just my legs) for only ~5 min. I think it helped, and I will try it again in the future, for sure. A quick shower and I was on the road, this time with no rain.
Had I know any of the following beforehand, I probably would not have driven the 9+ hours to this race A. The course record is ~4 hours B. course is not so well marked C. Many thousands of feet of elevation gain/loss D. Multiple river crossings. Going in this blind made all the difference in the world :).
Two weeks ago in Wyoming I met a woman who I swear I had seen before I asked her about it. She has a ‘memorable’ hairdo. 
We could not figure out where we had met each other and so said goodbye. Well, there she was again, Sunday morning at the start of Stumpy’s race. We talked again and realized that I had seen here at the Grand Island marathon (she ran the 10K, her friend the full) After some more discussion, we figured out that we will see each other again in October in Rhode Island. I took their picture for proof It is a small world, us crazy marathon freaks.
So, Rhode Island, is not exactly nearby. In fact, to get there from Michigan you need to roll through Ohio, Pennsylvania, Parts of New Jersey and New York, and even the long axis of Connecticut. It ended up being about 14 hours of driving, so I broke it up into two days of driving both ways. As such, I got to the town of Newport about 2 pm the day before the race.
Race morning I stood outside my hotel room for 10 minutes at 5:30 am trying to decide what clothes to wear for the run. It was about 40 degrees, and I ultimately decided that shorts were not the right choice. I was not racing, so I wanted to be comfortable, so running pants it was. After a 30 minute bus ride up to Bath, NY and I had about 30 minutes to hang out. The temperature stayed crisp, and the fog was very dense.
Last year I decided to be creative in my personal quest and got a ‘PR’ (personal record) tattoo. Putting my ever diminishing marathon PR on my ankle. To add to it, the words ‘Rejoice! We Conquer! is placed below the numbers. This is in reference to the man whom the marathon is in honor of, 
Ok, so this is not a formal race (no t-shirts or anything like that, not even numbers) but I raced against a bunch of people and got an official place and time, so I am going to do a race report.