Erik Schlimmer tells the story of how he learned to fastpack the Adirondacks, a grueling 110 miles and 19,000 vertical feet of climbing, in five days with only 11 pounds on his back.
As I write this letter there is a scalding heat wave causing record highs in the Northeast.
Last May my friend Scott
mentioned that while on the Internet he had stumbled across a 203-mile race
called the Texas Independence Relay. He wanted to know if we were going to do
it. Of course, I said. We like to run, and so do our friends, so why wouldn't
we?
After 15 minutes of easy phone calls, we had a team of almost all twentysomethings: four mutual friends and two of my best high school buddies. From there, logistics were straightforward. The route followed the Texas trail of independence from the small town of Gonzales to the San Jacinto Monument in east Houston. Most of the $850 registration fee benefited a charity. With our all-male, eight-man team, everyone would run five legs, the vast majority between four and six miles long. The active runner would wear a red slap bracelet, with night runners donning reflective belt, a red blinker, and small Petzel headlamp. After naming ourselves BYAHHH!, a nod to one of our favorite Chappelle's Show episode, the whole thing turned into an elaborate joke of sorts—hanging out in strange parts of rural Texas, running a cumulative marathon, potentially winning some random race . . . what could be more fun?
Our projected 7:07 minutes-per-mile pace seeded us third overall, so we started at 12:35 on Saturday afternoon. Initially, we hung out at the exchange zones (a small tent on the side of the road), laughing and joking. Once the sun set, temperatures dropped from “91 and ridiculously hot and humid” to a cool 65, and, having trained through a New York winter, conditions became more manageable. After finishing a leg, each runner ate food, mixed Gatorade, and stretched out. Spirits were high.
The instant it got dark, though, it felt like midnight, and we vacillated between physical fatigue and emotional lifts including small-town entertainment—roadside BBQs, DJ booths, notoriety amongst the locals as “the New York team”—and bizarre events—Greg kicked an attacking dog in the face, and Terry petted a muzzled baby cow. Around two in the morning, we finally caught teams and boosted our morale by passing people. But when one of the vans, in hopes of sleeping, drove too far ahead, we lost 50 seconds on an exchange, and although we were averaging well below our splits at 7:01 per mile, we were getting sloppy.
By 4:30 a.m., despite being in second place overall, angst fused with anger. Scott couldn’t find any Vaseline in the disgusting vans, which were cluttered with food, wrappers, water bottles, papers and dirty, smelly clothes. Jim drove in circles in an empty bank parking lot and uttered nonsense about “the surreal.” Driving to the start of my fourth leg, we made a silly wrong turn, so when Terry came sprinting into the exchange zone, I was in still my sweats, barely out of the bathroom, costing us 10 seconds. And then we experienced the strange sensation of starting a run in darkness and ending it in daylight.
Forty miles from the finish in west Houston suburbs, everyone adopted the “now or never” mentality and trudged through their final leg, in spite of sleep-deprivation, malnourishment, bowel breakdown and general exhaustion. On the fifth-to-last leg, Silverman missed a turn and lost a half-hour, allowing the team behind us to make up considerable time. It was our only major mistake, but in our loopy state, it made us wonder why such a stupid race seemed like a good idea in the first place.
After I kicked in the anchor leg for a total time of 24:36:33, we ate complimentary Papa John’s pizza and drank soda under a tree in the rain next to the San Jacinto Monument (looking exactly like the Washington one). A half-hour later, the rain subsided, and under gray skies, next to a live band, and in front of a gathering crowd of tired yet jubilant Texans, we each received a D.L. Jardine’s sampler kit for winning the Men’s Open division. But no prize could appease our incense with finishing four minutes behind a team because Silverman got lost.
Monday morning, after 6 a.m. flights back to New York, my friend Greg and I joked about how being tired, sick and sore made us hate the race. He asked me if we were doing it next year. I paused and reflected. Then I smiled, laughed and said, “Of course.”
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