Weeks after completing the Vol State, it’s still difficult to put it all in perspective and to write a coherent narrative of the experience. However, forced by the iron-fisted editors of our fine newsletter to produce or risk having my new running shoes fed to wild dogs, I will try to share in words some of the experience, inadequate as they may be. In my opinion, there are about 4 things runners look for in a race report: 1) A race and course description; 2) anecdotes to give the reader a sense of the race; 3) an objective post-race analysis; and 4) a bottom-line recommendation or race rating.

Race/Course Description: The Last Annual Vol State Road Race is a 267.33-mile* race across county and state roads through mostly rural Tennessee. It actually starts on the Missouri side of the Mississippi River, makes a ferry crossing and cuts through southwest Kentucky for about 13 miles, and then it meanders in a general southeasterly course through Tennessee finishing up Monteagle Mountain at the city limits of Monteagle, near Chattanooga. It is the brainchild of native Tennesseean, ultrarunner and “ultra-wanderer,” and writer well known in American ultra circles, Gary Cantrell. It is a small, low-key event. Even so, Gary has divisions for relay, aided (where a runner is supported by a crew in a vehicle), and solo (where a runner is prohibited from accepting any aid whatsoever from anyone associated with the race). It is run in late August when conditions are generally inhospitable. The race description advertises mostly rolling hills, and that is generally true; it does not, however, advertise the ever-present cars and trucks along the entire course and the narrow-to-no shoulders making for a harrowing trek. The course record, set by DeWayne Satterfield, Ph.D.—a physicist working for the US Army in Huntsville, AL—was 4 days, 17 hours, and change. This year, Gary had 10 entrants start in all three divisions.

*Note that although we didn’t use a GPS, we suspect the course is longer than advertised since Mark Schultze, my crew, measured many of the segments using his truck odometer and found them to be consistently longer than the detailed race instructions indicated.

Anecdotes (a.k.a. Tales from the Road): Perhaps my favorite observation came at the prerace dinner held at a large catfish house in Union City, TN, the night before race start. Runners and their crews sat at one table, pigging out and regaling in ultratales, while locals enjoyed their Friday night “out on the town” under the same roof. None of us ultrarunners and crews had any idea of what awaited these good folks over the next days—whether they’d be working farms, visiting, or preparing for a bake sale. Meanwhile, they must have viewed us as a bunch of strangely clad oddities that were laughing and eating as if it might be our last meal. I could tell most in the room looked on trying to figure us out, but had no idea what we were and certainly not what we were about to embark upon in the early hours of the next day. It would have been futile to try to explain—the gulf being far too wide for most folks to comprehend. So it was, even in a room full of people, we were insolated and isolated and alone—much like we would all be a few hours later and how we would remain for days. It was strange, but none of our group missed a beat. It was our last few hours of civility, of civilization, of certainty and predictability. Tomorrow, everything would change and we each knew it.

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Vol-State Run shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And ultrarunners across the land
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us in the Vol State Run.
William Shakespeare’s Henry V, parodied by DeWayne Satterfield, Ph.D., and spoken with
passion on the ferry just before we reached Dickson, KY.

As the ferry stopped and we dismounted, runners stopped to pose for a few last photos before almost grudgingly heading for the vicissitudes of the long, long road before us. The relay team, made up of 3 US Army Rangers and a GA Tech guy took off like it was a 10K—and for them it was, but just a whole bunch of them back-to-back. That would be the last time any of us saw them, although their periodic “course reports” and cautions over the next couple of days—not to mention phone calls of encouragement—proved invaluable, at least to me. The rest of us remained largely together over the first few miles, walking and talking and trotting and getting acquainted and reacquainted. DeWayne and I eventually pushed ahead and got to know more about one another and about each other’s plans for the race. Certainly, we were competitors, but there was a strong mutual respect and admiration. Although I’d never met DeWayne before, my previously developed assessment that he was a southern gentleman and a great guy was only reaffirmed somewhere along those cornfields of KY. Because our pacing strategies were different, I eventually pulled ahead, although not giving in to the desire to take off. “This is a very long race,” I’d remind myself, “you can’t win it in the 1st day, but you can lose it.”

Pulling into Union City (where we’d stayed the night before), with Dewayne a few hundred meters back, I came to an intersection. I was supposed to turn left, but didn’t remember and went straight. Mark Schultze (my crew) eventually came and got me back on the course. He must have come to a grim realization at the time that he would really have his hands full trying to keep me pointed in the right direction for the next 255 miles! Fortunately, I’d only gone about a half mile before being rescued. Later in the race, others wouldn’t be so lucky. After I caught back up to DeWayne, I heard him “WOO HOO” only a few feet in front of me and discovered he’d found a $20 bill on the side of the road. Dewayne was only in the lead for a few minutes and he’d already happened upon a windfall! That’s when I started to push a little harder; whether there were twenties or finish lines ahead, I was going to find them first from here on out.

I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow of the rest of the trek. Upon reflection, it was a blur of towns and town squares and country houses and barns and cornfields and roadkill and an incessant stream of cars, pick-ups, and big trucks. Sometimes there was enough shoulder; most of the time there was not, and many miles there was none at all.

Prettiest things I saw:
1. We had an extra LED blinking light that Mark affixed to the truck window. He would park with it facing towards me during the night and turn it on. Whether cresting a long dark hill or rounding a long dark corner, finally seeing that blinking beacon represented comfort in the distance, and seeing it knowing that I’d almost made it to another aid stop was beautiful. There, blinking in the distance was another break from the loneliness, another break in the silence, another refuel/recharge and go, another recalculation of the gameplan, a brief but needed refuge from the darkness, another increment done and a few miles closer to being done—that’s what that blinking light was to me, over and over again.
2. On wide shoulders, very few cars, and two working knees, I crested this really tall hill on the morning of Day 3 to overlook this fog-filled valley at sunrise: The rolling trees poking out of the cotton-like fog created a tapestry of light and dark greens accentuating fluffy grays stretching below like a comforter as far as I could see—just beautiful beyond words.
3. Southern mansions all along an old street of this town I can’t remember around 9p.m. were gorgeously adorned and illuminated. I wanted to knock on one of their massive doors to ask if I could take a bath. Then again, I might not have EVER left if they’d have let me.
4. An older horse-owner training his Tennessee Walker somewhere outside Wartrace at about 0700. He was sitting in this little 1-seat contraption with tiny wheels harnessed behind this gorgeous, powerful sorrel prancing rhythmically and effortlessly as he issued these staccato commands in a near-whisper. I don’t know much about horses, and nothing about Tennessee Walkers or training them, but I can recognize beauty when I see it, and that was pure art in motion.
5. Mark and Gary atop Monteagle Mountain pointing at the Monteagle City Limit sign. Trust me, it doesn’t get any prettier than that.

Ugliest things I saw:
1. Two nasty chicks who tried to pick me up in the early evening hours of Day 1. It defies description. Suffice to say that anytime later in the race that I began to dally around the truck too long during an aid stop, Mark would suggest that those chicks were coming back to “kidnap” me (their words) and I’d always somehow find the will to haul ass. ‘Nuf ced.
2. Roadkill beyond what I could imagine.
3. Roadside trash—all the way to Monteagle. (Hey Al Gore, isn’t this YOUR state eco-boy?)
4. Narrow shoulder disappearing to no shoulder just when I was finding a rhythm and a zone. It’s just about the ugliest thing I can think of…just freaking brutal and cruel. For those who have tasted the discomfort the ultra distance brings to the runner, this probably doesn’t need explaining; but for those who have not yet: When running extremely long distances, runners must be able to overcome extreme discomfort (a.k.a. PAIN) in order to keep going. This discomfort is most pronounced when restarting after a stop; once going, the runner can rely on the rhythm or cadence of the running to redirect thoughts and to drive the body to keep pushing through that pain. Without a shoulder on the road, every time a car(s) would appear, I would have to get off the road (which nearly always required a stop because there was no runnable surface) and then restart…again and again and again….It was every bit as emotionally draining as it was physically.

Scariest things I saw:
1. Traveling up what we dubbed “the highway of death”—a constant and unrelenting stream of high-speed cars driven mostly by jacked-up teens after a Sat. night football game between the two rival towns between which I was running…at night—two motorcycles that I didn’t know were motorcycles were riding side-by-side. They appeared to me as the round headlights of an older pick-up. When the one closest to the centerline started to pass the other, it gave a VERY REALISTIC appearance of a truck running off the road right at me! It put me up a scree wall into some briars and my HR was probably 250 or so before I heard them roar by without threat. I was shaking for 15 minutes and was close to puking I was so scared. It was THAT REAL!
2. On the same “highway of death,” a car behind me passed a truck and jerked his car off of the shoulder just before clipping me from behind (even though I was lit up like a Christmas tree); just moments later, an oncoming car decided to pass on the right shoulder (of a 2- lane road!) just in front of me narrowly missing clipping me from the front.
3. During a mental lapse, I was kind of day-dreaming trotting along as this truck came by. At the last second, I noticed this pipe or fencepost sticking way out of the bed coming straight for my head. I ducked and it missed me, but just barely. Note to self: Pay attention!

Funniest things I saw:
1. A cross with a picture of a guy named “Bubba” dressed in a camo “wife-beater” shirt with a beer bottle hanging on the cross on the edge of this 200-ft. ravine. I wonder what happened there? Sorry, Bubba.
2. Mark Schultze (who is from So. Africa), dancing like an African native while he played African music on high volume and yelling, “Mark, you are Texan, but you must run like the Africans. You are Bushman!!!” He was trying to cheer me up/pick me up in the latter stage of the race. It worked. I still laugh thinking about that image.

Funniest thing I thought of:
1. There were three segments of the race I named for the distinct insect populations: The Valley of the Gnats (part of my 10,000 calories/day!), the Valley of the Lightning Bugs where they were so thick that their glowing bodies littered the road still glowing making for an bizarre run, and the Valley of the Sand- and Horse-flies, which made me wish fondly for another Valley of the Gnats.
2. Q: What do you get when you cross an ultrarunner with a hottie? A: An orgasm that lasts for 3 days.
3. While stinking so bad I could smell myself on the highway while running, with 2-3 days of sweat, salt, dirt and grime caked all over me, and 4-days growth of beard, I seriously wondered if I might meet a beautiful lonely farm girl who might invite me off the road to shower and enjoy her hot tub. I promised myself that the next pretty farm girl I saw, I was going to ask if I might borrow a shower and inquire about her hot tub. Then I analyzed how I would get word to Mark who would surely get worried. I seriously analyzed and reanalyzed this whole scenario for about an hour, trying to figure out how best to do it all. Then I stopped dead in my tracks….looked at myself and started howling like a mad man and just kept running shaking my head. I’m not sure that qualifies as a hallucination, but just how far from reality does the mind have to go before it’s truly insane?

Post-race analysis: In the final analysis, there were things that I did right, and things I did wrong.

Things I did right:
1. By far, the most fortuitous thing I did right was ask Mark Schultze to crew for me. Without him and his skillful orienteering, upbeat personality, prudent coaching, ultrarunning experience, nutrition ferver, time management, work ethic, comedic flair, web-meister and photojournalist skills, etc., etc., I would never have made it. Period.
2. ONLY at the never-wavering, constant insistence of my crew-turned-storm trooper, I ate more per mile than ANY race I’ve ever run in my life! I truly believe that I am probably the only person who has ever GAINED weight by the end of the Vol State. We did some rough calculations and it was somewhere between 7,000-10,000 calories a day, and it saved my ass as I still had the strength to keep going to the end. I also never got sick or even nauseous, a common malady of ultrarunners.
3. They say necessity is the motherhood of invention, and the old adage proved true in my race approach. For months before the race, people asked my about my race strategy, and up until a couple weeks before kickoff, I had none. The reason was that it was too difficult for me to mentally digest 267 miles as a distance, having run races of 125, 135, and 200 miles (although that latter was a 4x50 staged race). I finally settled on the approach of viewing the race as a timed race, such as a 48-hr. (which I had run before) plus whatever’s left. That last-minute “lightbulb” proved genius as the race became centered around time as opposed to miles. I could do time, and keeping a steady pace, the miles would take care of themselves. Had my knees not given me so much trouble at the end of day 1 and all of day 2, I believe that I could have just broken 3 days, but that is just that—a belief. As it stands, 3 days, 7 hours and change was good enough to carry the day, and I’ll take it. But by viewing the race in terms of time, I avoided the pitfall of imploding when mileage goals—dreamed up in the comfort of one’s office or home—weren’t met out there on the road. By not tying my success to mileage, I made myself, in a way, failure-proof: “I’m going to run the 1st 24 [hrs]; I’ll run the 2nd 24; and then I’ll run whatever’s left [hoping it’s not too much more than 24!].” Nonetheless, when I realized, out on the road that 3 days was possible, my Day 2 struggles almost threw me into a terminal low, but I was able to readjust and reengineer a recovery.
4. I’m not exactly sure how to explain this one, but something different happened to me out there on the Vol State as a racer. The best way I can summarize is that something inside was just hard-wired for push-to-the-finish. I remember stopping for my first rest at the end of Day 1 from about 0400-~0600. After getting cleaned up a bit, I got to sleep on my mat beside the truck by about 0430, but just snapped awake at 0600, before Mark. I started getting ready hurriedly and couldn’t get out on the road fast enough. Similarly, after a miserable Day 2, and taking a longer sleep break from about 0300, but I snapped awake by about 0530 and went to get us breakfast and get us going. Again, I couldn’t get on the road fast enough. Something inside just motored far beyond what my body had ever been able to do before. I rarely got sleepy on the road until the wee hours of the 3d day, and was able to just keep pushing, even during the inevitable lows. Just push, push, push.

Things I did wrong:
1. By far, the worst mistake I make had to be the shoes. Not being able to buy new shoes or get any donated, I decided to “dance wif da dates what brung me!” I had 2 pair of Adidas trail shoes so old and stinky that I could smell them on the highways and that I’d owned since 1997—they had, literally, thousands of miles on them; and, I had a pair of old Reebock trail shoes (which severely bruised my foot tops on Day 1). All of these were past their usable life, even for yardwork, but there I was traipsing across 267mi of highway in them. This killed my feet and probably my knees, but worse was not having multiple options to change out bad tires. That was a mistake born out of a sense of indestructibility, and one that cost me a LOT of pain and most assuredly time over the long haul. As I sourly noted to Mark on Day 2 as he was trying to get one pair dry for the next shoe change, “I took 10 pair of shoes to Badwater and used 1; I brought 3 uglies to Tennessee and could have used any of those 10!” It was like dreaming of filet mignon if you were starving on an island—there was nothing I could do, but it sure made for a miserable couple days.
2. I forgot 1 bag at the house before leaving Texas. It had, among other things, my 2nd bottle of ThermoTabs. Fortunately, I had ¾ of bottle (about 100 tablets or 50g of salt), but it cost Mark countless hours searching every little town to find replacements, and constantly estimating when we might run out given my usage rates and developing workarounds for when we did. He finally found them just before we ran out; however, I had my best stretch of running on Day 3 while he was searching and I outran him and another turnoff costing an additional 2.5 miles off-course. Note to self: Don’t forget a critical bag.

Recommendation/Race Rating: On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I would rate this race a 10. Mark Schultze said it best, “You know who I admire the most out here? DeWayne [Satterfield]; he’s doing this bastard a second time!”

Will I ever do it again? Would I recommend anyone else doing it? My answer to both would be an absolute “no.” Not because of the beauty (it was oftentimes very beautiful) or even the difficulty of 267 miles of hilly roads during a southern August—sure, it’s hard, but that’s why we do these things, because the ARE hard. I wouldn’t recommend against running this race not because of the people—racers or locals. Gary and all of the runners are some of the finest people in the entire world, and my arms grew tired waving at local passersby who waived in nearly every case. But I would not repeat this course or recommend that anyone else do it only because of the sheer danger—the grim reality that you are risking your life over such a long period of time and with so very many cars and trucks that just multiply the probability of a disaster. With that many vehicles passing so fast and so close with little (if any) room for error, it only takes one—a sleepy or drunk driver, a redneck-tossed bottle, a driver miscalculation, a runner error, a truckload shift, spill, or over-the-shoulder encroachment—one mistake and someone dies or gets seriously busted up. For that, and only that reason, I would not recommend ever doing this run again. That said, the challenge of breaking 3 days and the realization that it is possible—the attraction of that prize to those in quest of breaking barriers can blind them to the hazards of the road, and to the logic of probabilities, and to the grim reality of real danger. Time will tell whether this race was, in fact, “the last annual,” or if the race’s name is just that, a name only.