When I took my shoes off I could see the physical evidence of what I’d been feeling for the past 10 miles:  Blood blisters spread across the balls of my feet like a crimson Rorschach Test.  What do you see?  Pain.  What about now?  More pain.  I felt every rock, root, and stick over the final stages of the Umstead Trail Marathon, turning each stride into a careful placement to maximize the chances of a smooth landing surface.  Rocks felt like nails, roots like iron rods.  By the end of the race, it felt like quarters were embedded in the soles of my feet, as if there was nothing between my skin and the trail.  An American poet once said, “You feel your strength in the experience of pain.  It’s all in how you carry it.”  For days to come, I would carry that pain through a hobbling gait, with sore feet and shredded IT bands acting as aching reminders of my race in Umstead Park.

I grew up in North Carolina, but didn’t really come into my own running marathons until I moved to Manhattan and needed a release from life in the city.  Before I left, I remember reading about crazy races like the Umstead 100 and the Uwharie Mountain Run 40-miler, thinking, “Those runners are insane.”  I’m not a 100-miler, or even a 50-miler, but I can now appreciate and understand the challenge and the thrill of testing your limits beyond road marathons.  (And now my wife thinks I’m the insane one).  The Umstead Marathon’s website promised “a challenging race with many hills and some single-track sections consisting of narrow trails with rocks and roots.”  Perfect, I thought.  Not easy, but not too hard either.

One thing I’ve come to loathe about running most marathons is all the work it takes to simply get to the starting line:  Rushing to register online before the race closes, massive packet pick-up crowds, complicated transportation to the start hours before the race, and then fighting through tens of thousands of runners to line up in a starting corral.  The Umstead Marathon is a sanctuary from most of the hassles of other marathons.  I think they only take 250 runners (there were 179 finishers this year).  When I arrived at packet pick-up at the Great Outdoor Provision Company in Raleigh, I was one of four runners there.  It took all of 5 min.  At the race, I never ran in a pack, even at the start.  For long stretches, I could only see one or two runners far ahead of me, if I saw anyone at all.  At times it felt like I was on my own private long-run through the park -- sort of like Forrest Gump running across America -- but with many nice volunteers offering me water and Gatorade every few miles and then cheering me on as I left.  A few minutes later, I could hear them doing the same for the next runner.  

The Umstead Marathon is an incredibly well-run race.  Its only problem stems from it’s popularity.  With such a small field, if you don’t register as soon as online applications open, you’re not likely to get a spot in the race.  The morning registration opened last November for the 2013 race, I beat my son to the iPad and had my application through within minutes of the site going live.   Registration closed a few hours later.

I knew the race’s popularity from past experience when I started the 2011 Umstead Marathon two years ago.  After many road marathons, it was my first attempt at a trail marathon.  Naively, I didn’t change my training or even my race strategy.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep my normal marathon pace on the trail, but when the starting gun went off, I shot out running 7:15 miles to get ahead of most of the runners before the single tracks started, when I knew passing would be difficult.  Big mistake.  Just 50 yards into the Company Mill Trail, the first single-track on the course, I heard a stick snap under my left foot.  On my next stride, I realized the snapping sound I heard wasn’t a stick.  It was my ankle that had rolled over rather badly.  

I kept running, thinking (hoping) the pain would go away, or at least would be manageable enough for me to finish the race.  It wasn’t.  I stumbled up hills, over switchbacks, and across creeks, falling twice, the second time nearly hitting my head on a tree stump.  The race had hardly started and I was already wondering if I would even be able to make it out of the woods.  Once when I fell on the trail, I laughed out loud at how badly the race was going for me.  I struggled on for another 10 miles or so, until I finally hung it up on the South Turkey Creek Trail, and limped back five miles to Camp Lapihio, more embarrassed and demoralized than anything.  I passed many older runners, plodding along happy as they could be.  And there I was, young, fit, and walking back to my car -- a modern day Lane Myer,failing to make it down K-12 (“Look Charles, I gotta do this. If I don't, I'll be nothing. I'll end up like my neighbor Ricky Smith. He just sits around crocheting all day and snorting nasal spray”).  At least I had two bloody knees that gave some outward justification for my DNF.

That kind of experience tends to stick with you.  So it was with great satisfaction this year when I passed the dreaded tangle of

roots that doomed my race two years ago.  I was very proud of myself until I realized that the place where I rolled my ankle was actually a tame, flat section of the trail with roots spread out pretty far, not the bed of roots I remembered acting like a steel trap clamping down on my ankle.  Two miles into this year’s race I had already achieved one thing I came for: redemption.

My strategy this year was to set an easy and deliberate pace to reach the finish line uninjured.  I started in the middle of the pack (if you could call it that) leaving Camp Lapihio up the hill to the Reedy Creek Trail.  (No elbows; no jockeying for position.  Just easy running.  Nice).  There is a short out-and-back at the airport overlook that lets you see where you are among the runners.  I figured I was probably about 30-40 runners back from the leaders at this point, running comfortably at about a 7:30 pace and feeling like I was right where I wanted to be.

The first ten miles of the course are primarily single track trails -- along Sycamore Creek, up steep switchbacks, and across root-littered trails.  What I realized this year was that the trails wouldn’t necessarily make my race, but they could certainly break it (see Lane Myer in 2011 above).  I took all three single track sections -- the Company Mill Trail, and both sides of the Sycamore Trail loop, -- slowly and deliberately.  This year there were no falls, twisted ankles, or bloody knees for me.  The hills are pretty challenging, especially if you are used to running nice rolling hills on a road course.  When I ran the San Francisco marathon last summer, I learned that no matter how much my quads were burning at the top of a hill, they would always settle down with a little easy running at the top and I could get my legs back under me and continue on.

The key to that strategy of course, is having some flat ground at the top of a hill for some easy running to shake out your legs.  All opportunity to do that ended when I reached the North Turkey Creek Trail, an out-and-back between miles 12 and 17.  The Umstead 100 website describes this as the “Sawtooth” section of the course.  It’s nothing but steep hills, down followed by up, and up followed by down.  No flat surfaces except for a  few short bridges here and there.  I came into this section with a couple of runners in front of me and a couple behind me.  By the time I made it back to the South Turkey Creek Trail, we were spread far apart.  I could see no one in front of me or behind me.

At this point, I felt like I had the hardest parts of the course behind me.  I’d made it out of the single tracks uninjured and still had my legs under me and moving after passing through the Sawtooth.  Like Frodo passing through Mordor, I was cruising back to the Shire... ahem, Camp Lapihio.  No tin ring waited for me.  Instead, my sights were set on the coveted finisher’s chalice -- the Umstead Marathon pint glass given to all finishers -- that slipped from my grasp on the Company Mill Trail two years ago.

Only, I was wrong:  the hardest part of the race still lay ahead:  Cedar Ridge Trail.  A 2.5-mile out-and-back at mile 21, Cedar Ridge Trail lures you in with a long, easy, downhill grade.  It initially provided some relief that helped offset the effort I was making to find even surfaces to plant my feet to avoid the rocks that felt like a bed of nails.  Slowly I began to realize that this long hill I was moving down would serve as a cruel ending to my race when I turned around and headed back up it.  It was every bit as bad as I thought it would be.  My legs were turning, but I felt like I was hardly moving forward at all, like I was running up a hill of sand.  On the way down I had passed others walking up, thinking, “How can you walk so close to the finish?”  Now I understood, and decided I could walk up this hill almost as fast as I was managing to “run” it.

And frankly, those few minutes of walking are what carried me through to the end.  By the time I turned back onto Reedy Creek Trail, I knew I had enough to get me to the finish line.  A little voice inside my head (with a strangely Cajun accent) kept on saying, “You can do it!  You can do it!”  On the final run back to Camp Lapihio, my feet were screaming, and I knew what they would look like after I stopped running and took my shoes off.  I crossed the finish line in 3:31:01 in 21st place, a full minute behind the runner ahead of me, and almost three minutes in front of the runner behind me.  With trace of sarcasm, the race announcer announced my name and hometown: “And here comes Coleman Cowan... finishing the Umstead Marathon...  all the way from New York City!”  (New York City?  Get a rope...)  After much pain, with more to come in the days ahead, I had the other thing I came for: the Umstead Marathon finisher’s cup.  My precious.