Tomfoolery at the Gorge Waterfalls 50k Ultramarathon (or, “Overly Loquacious Race Report”)
(Photo credit for above photo: James Holk)
Last month I ran the Gorge Waterfalls 50k, staged out of Cascade Locks, Oregon. I signed up for it last year but had to cancel because Shannon booked us a family trip to Cancun subsequent to my committing to the race. This type of tomfoolery from Shannon is forgivable because she’s cute and has a respectable job, and also because she likes me, which, if you know me, is impressive. When I explained last year to the organizers of the Gorge Waterfalls race that I needed to cancel because a hot girl invited me to Cancun, they gamely agreed to put half of my 2023 entrance fee toward a future entrance fee, should I experience a second lapse of judgement and decide again to run 32 miles in one go, which I did, because my life is essentially one continuous lapse of judgement.
The Gorge Waterfalls 50k is so named because the point-to-point course traverses a portion of the Columbia River Gorge and passes several waterfalls. The event draws all kinds of runners, from those who come with a legitimate shot at the prize money doled out to the top few finishers to those who simply have specific affinities. As I waited for a chartered school bus that would ferry us to the starting point, I asked Avery from Tucson, Arizona why he’d come all the way to the Portland area to run a long race. “I like waterfalls,” he said. Hard to argue with that logic.
We like waterfalls.
Although I grew up in the Gorge, it’d been years since I’d spent time there apart from just driving through. For this reason I found myself surprised that I was surprised at how cold I felt when I stepped out of my rental car at dawn in Cascade Locks, a tiny town on the Columbia River 45 miles east of Portland. The rocky walls and cliffs on either side of the wide river funneled wind from the west and through my breathable running clothes. I stood there for a moment, cold and shivering, beneath the first winks of sunrise with stretched out cotton ball clouds bumping up against the tops of the canyon walls.
Chilled, I moved inside a small pavilion a hundred yards from the parking lot and huddled with dozens of other runners. I didn’t know anyone running the race, and the pavilion was crowded. There are four options in this scenario: 1) insert ear buds and listen to “Careless Whispers” by Wham!; 2) insert ear buds and sing along audibly to “Careless Whispers” by Wham! while gazing forlornly into space as you caress your own face with both hands; 3) loudly give yourself a motivational speech, emphatically lauding your training regimen, nutrition plan, and willingness to deploy performance enhancing drugs “if required to bring honor to the Great Leader and other excellent clansmen”; 4) try to meet people, like a weirdo. I opted for option 4.
Jason moved to Portland from New Hampshire several years ago. He works on windmills. That’s a cool thing to do, unless you’re scared of heights, or wind, or both, which I am, so, good career choice for Jason, bad career choice for me. Kelsey is from Southern California but moved to Oregon, like most Californians, because nobody with a modicum of common sense wants to live in California, especially not when awesome Oregon is so close. Kelsey is an outdoor school teacher. That’s a cool thing to do, unless you like money. Kelsey flashed a winning personality and sported sparkly mascara. I don’t know how she afforded that. Probably she was nice to someone at Walmart and they gave it to her.
Here’s us climbing the first big hill. Not a lot of racing going on. Just hiking in a conga line with a lot of people you don’t know.
The race starts at a trailhead beneath Wahkeena Falls. Something like 300 participants milled around, heading up the trail in four waves. You got to pick your own starting wave based on your self-assessed forecasted speed. I asked for wave 3. This choice balanced hope and pragmatism. I was pragmatically conceding that I can’t keep up with anyone who is either, A) young; B) fit; C) committed to eating only leaves and dirt clods. But I was also hopeful that I wasn’t as slow as runners who were either, A) octogenarians; B) beset with tuberculosis; C) sperm whales who somehow entered a land race.
Within a fifth of a mile from the starting line the trail began switchbacking up mossy, craggy cliffs. We settled into a long line of purposeful hikers. A few intrepid runners passed to the left, but most of us found a good place in line as we gained 1,500 vertical feet in the first two miles. I followed directly behind James from British Columbia, a jovial fellow with an undistinguished moustache. We visited for the better part of an hour. He said he slept in his car the night before the race and intended to drive back to Vancouver immediately upon finishing. My respect level for him somehow soared and cratered at the exact same time. When we reached the forested plateau high above the river, where misty morning clouds flittered among damp tree trunks, I bid James farewell and accelerated.
This is where I mistakenly believed I could run faster than the people behind me.
The course soon dropped back down to river level via another set of switchbacks, this one taking us past the iconic Multnomah Falls. Early-rising tourists cheered us on as we glided past. I felt very accomplished and able, four or five miles into the race, with fresh legs and perky strangers telling me I was amazing and inspirational, both of which seemed quite apt descriptors for my bad self at this point in the race. Then we stopped going downhill and connected with the rolling Gorge Trail. Reality set in. Reality is the place where I am 44 years old, eat an impressive amount of processed food, and have a surgically repaired lower spine. James jovially passed me, and so did lots of other people. I stayed calm though, running my own race, only crying when no one was around.
Still, I felt well at the first aid station 8 miles in. Volunteers saw me coming and treated me like I was in contention to win this thing. Somebody asked if they could take my water flasks and fill them while I ate. Others scurried about, asking what foods my body wanted. “What are you doing?” I said out loud. In El Salvador, where I do all my running and participate in the occasional ultramarathon, aid stations are, shall we say, less formal affairs. There’s usually a small pickup truck with a box of plastic bags of water in the back and, sometimes, bananas and, always, several stray dogs. Everyone speaks Spanish, and my Spanish language capacity is inversely proportional to the number of miles I’ve run. So, these Oregonian aid station volunteers were like an F-1 pit crew to me. They refilled me with water and electrolytes, stuffed a PB&J sandwich into one hand and Oreos into the other, then encouragingly nudged me back onto the trail before I even really had a chance to rest, which, secretly, was my aim. I somewhat dejectedly moped onward, good-naturedly robbed of a chance to hang out with the aid station volunteers and monologue about Sammy Hagar’s solo stuff.
Between aid stations 1 and 2 the trail dumped us onto a frontage road that parallels Interstate 84 for two or three miles. By this stage, 10-12 miles into an ultramarathon, you’ve usually found your people. You will move up a few slots within this group, then drop a few slots, but for the rest of the race you generally will not see many people outside this group. You’re not catching the next fastest group, and the next slowest group is not catching yours. My people consisted of a pod of young women in their late-20s or early-30s who had the look of folks who decided last month to run this 50k race — cotton t-shirts and gym shorts — and one middle-aged man who, when he ran, reminded me of Mario when you hold down the B button to make him run faster. I liked my people.
Me with some of my people. Points of curiosity: 1) you can somehow see my belly button through my shirt. This illustrates that light possesses a third principle beyond wave/particle duality, and that is that light hates me; 2) you can gauge my actual speed by the fact that the guy in the back of our little line is walking precisely as fast as I am running. (Photo credit: James Holk)
The second aid station featured access to our drop bags. You don’t really need drop bags for a 50k race, but if the option is available why not seize it? This also describes my relationship with cookies and Dr. Pepper. I threw a granola bar, a bag of energy gummies, and some pistachios in my vest, swapped out my sweaty hat for a clean one, and that was about it. A volunteer asked how I was doing. “Really well, actually,” I said. And then I started describing my training regimen, and the weather in El Salvador, and how I think training in high humidity improves overall well-being, and how funny I think it is that once you enter the fuselage of an airplane you cannot disembark for any reason. Based on his discomfited reaction to my friendliness, I realized that you should talk about nothing with aid station volunteers except potato chips and water and, to a limited extent, the virtues of M&Ms relative to pickles.
Somewhere around mile 21 we began a long climb of around 1,000 vertical feet over about four miles. It was at this point that I realized I had either A) overtrained, or B) run too slow for the first 20 miles. I had a ton of fuel still left in the tank. I power hiked upwards and started passing fellow runners who were clearly gassed. At mile 25 or 26 in this race, runners reach a cold mountain stream and a bevy of race volunteers at the top of the climb, and then turn around and retrace their steps back down. Here I came up behind a woman who told me I could pass if I wanted because she was deep inside her “pain cave.” This is a term distance runners use to mean that they have had it with this nonsense and want to stop but they keep going because they are factually and objectively out of their mind. I told Annie (because by this time I had learned her name) that the best way to exit a pain cave is to have a nice chat, so, although I probably had the oomph to pick up the pace, I settled in behind her for a good 30-45 minute visit, wherein we discussed refugees, our families, training tips, reality television, and Walla Walla, Washington, the town so nice they named it twice.
At mile 29 I pressed on alone. The trail sloped slightly uphill and Annie had had enough running and was ready to walk. She may secretly have also had enough of my opinions on whether Robert Stack was the greatest primetime television host of the 1990s (he probably was, sorry Marc Summers, Double Dare was not primetime). Either way, Annie urged me to continue on alone. With only three or four miles to go and perfect Pacific Northwest afternoon sunshine slanting through the pines, I felt irrationally unstoppable and stepped on the gas. I passed two ladies who had slowed to a walk, and a man who was so spent as to be utterly unable to stagger in a straight line. When I slowed to check on him, his eyes weren’t really focusing. He slurred his speech. It was like talking to a boxer mid-match, or a Limp Bizkit fan. We were a mile from the finish line, and only a hundred yards or so from the main drag of the town of Cascade Locks, so I gave him the rest of my water and a bag of pistachios and resumed running, reasoning that, armed with this nourishment, his odds of imminent death were reduced to less than fifty-fifty, which seemed like low enough odds to exonerate me in a court of law should his estate hunt me down for prosecution.
A few minutes later I was sprinting toward the finish line in a grassy park beside the river. People were cheering for me and ringing cowbells. None of them had any idea at all as to who I was, but when you can’t cheer and ring a cowbell for an absolute stranger, what kind of world are we even living in? One that’s significantly quieter, which doesn’t sound all that bad, if I’m being honest. I finished in a little over 7.5 hours and felt really strong. I waited around for ten or fifteen minutes for the nearly dead guy because I wanted my water bottle and pistachios back. It turns out he lived, and his grateful family returned my accoutrements with comments about my being such a kind Good Samaritan to him. I just smiled and accepted their gratitude, choosing to withhold the reality that I had basically just thrown nuts and water at their loved one as I ran past and left him to be eaten by bears or, worse, mocked by stoned Cascade Locks teens.
In the end I finished 198th out of 320 runners who completed the race, 45th out of 70 runners in my age group. With a little more effort I suspect I could’ve placed ten or fifteen slots higher. With a Petri dish of salmonella and a few friends willing to taint the jellybeans at the aid stations, I suspect I could’ve placed a hundred or so slots higher. But I’m staunchly opposed to both bio terror and trying harder than absolutely necessary, so I probably got what I deserved.
