The Birch Bay International Road Race

Just now I sit on my sofa with my dogs. I’ve got Dancing with the Stars on the TV. Today has been a non-running day, a day off, and I earned it.

This weekend we ran the Birch Bay International Road Race 30 K (18.6 miles for those of us South of the Canadian border) on Saturday and then the “Take Back Our Trails” 5 K on Sunday (more about that later; it deserves its own entry).

On the way up to Birch Bay on Saturday morning (about a 20 minute drive northwest from our house), wet snow pelted the car and quickly melted on the windshield. Snow at the end of March is almost unheard of here, but there it was. Have I mentioned how much I hate running in the cold and the rain? Ditto for the snow, only more.

I must say that if I didn’t live in Washington State, if I hadn’t become used to, and therefore nonchalant, about our fjord-like waterways, evergreen forests, our dark, mysterious San Juan Islands and the quaint artistic communities that inhabit them, I would think of this place I live in as the most beautiful place on Earth. If I were a visitor, particularly in the Summer, and I visited the Puget Sound area on vacation, I would go home to the Midwest or California or wherever I came from, sell all my possessions (which I would need to do to accommodate the impending rise in my cost of living – it’s expensive here), pack up my family and move to the Northwest.
But I’ve been here all my life and, given to complaining and whining as I am, most days I think of this place of my birth as an overly cloudy, dark, frigid, sopping wet terrarium which intentionally persecutes me with chill and drizzle ten months of every year of my life.

Still, I work hard to appreciate the gifts nature has bestowed on us here and to see the land and the water through the eyes of visitors rather than through the eyes of Seasonal Affective Disorder. And that is why I can say that Birch Bay is one of the most picturesque communities in our area.

On this 30 Kilometer run we were about to embark on, we would take in the scenery along the bay, look across the water to get glimpses of Point Roberts, that little peninsula of America that you have to cross into Canada to get to, meander through Birch Bay State Park and pass Drayton Harbor and the resort homes that surround it. If the clouds lifted even a little, it would be a gorgeous route. I was committed to doing this race whatever the weather for three reasons. First, I needed the miles due to my failure the week before (see below). Secondly, the Whidbey Island Marathon is in two weeks on April 13th and it could still easily be pouring rain daily at that point. I’d better try to get used to it. And third, I really admire the Girls on the Run program, for which this race was raising funds, and wanted to show my support, not only by giving them my money but by being a Woman on the Run (not to be confused with a Woman who Runs with the Wolves)!

Bill and I arrived at the race start, collected our race numbers and timing chips and climbed back in the car to keep warm. We wouldn’t be running this race together but we’d start together, and he would run backwards to meet me at the end if he was feeling strong. That’s our new strategy, we run long races nowadays at our respective paces and then he comes to find me and offer moral support. This has been working well. My iPod is a good pace keeper until the very end of a long run when I feel can kill someone sooner than run another step or listen to another disco song. At that point, it’s great to have Bill’s smiling face come over a hill and hear his, “Hey beautiful. You look great.” I know he’s lying but it always effectively cheers me and gives me a little bounce back. So this was the strategy for the Birch Bay International Road Race.

At the appropriate time, we hustled up to the starting line and, when the race organizer gave the signal for us to start running, Bill and I waved goodbye to one another not to meet up again for at least three hours. By my calculations, this race would take me three hours and thirty-six minutes. The weather in Birch Bay proper was slightly better than it had been on the way up, so at least we didn’t have the heavy snow to contend with – nothing more than the cold and a slight mist off the salt water. I’d rigged a face mask out of a fleece scarf decorated with snow flakes that I wound around my neck twice and tied in the front. I pulled it up over my mouth to protect my rebellious crowned tooth as I started to run.

I jogged in front of two women who talked about the next day’s run to “Take Back Our Trails” in Bellingham. I listened intently to their conversation.

“It was ten AM on a Sunday morning when that woman was attacked,” one said.

“It’s crazy!” the other concurred. “You should be able to run at ten on a Sunday.” We all agreed. There should be rules. Ten AM on a Sunday morning is not the time to be attacked. When a woman has tucked her pony tail into her shirt so as to minimize her femininity, when she runs in the daylight on a well-traveled trail carrying her cell phone and her pepper spray, she has done her part. Did these attackers not realize they were breaking the rules, that if she had been running at ten PM alone on a secluded trail with her hair freely blowing in the wind, we would understand what she had done wrong. But on a Sunday morning!

I realized as I eavesdropped that it was absurd to be more offended by the attack because the runner had followed the woman runner’s code-of-safety-ethics, but we were. We wanted to believe we had the power to keep ourselves safe. Somehow we were forgetting, momentarily, that any attack at any time of day is an affront on a woman’s right to move about freely in her life.

I slowed and joined the conversation these two women were having and the topic shifted to which trails we ran in town and the precautions we each took to keep ourselves safe, further colluding in the illusion that there were ways of preventing being attacked.

Our pace was faster than I usually run. I asked them how far they were going and they said they were both doing only the 15 K. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up their pace for the whole 15 K, but I was glad of the company for the time being, knowing that I would eventually be running alone.

At the four K marker, our time was 24 minutes, which meant we were cruising along at about nine-plus minutes per mile. This being almost three minutes faster than I was accustomed to running, I could only keep up with them for about another ten minutes before I had to slow down. I bid them goodbye, exchanging names with one of them who lived near me so we might meet up and run together sometime. As I plunged forward, I felt my pace was still faster than twelve minutes a mile, but I was comfortable.

I had spent my week eating carbohydrates, laying off the wine, cutting back on coffee and cheese, stretching and drinking water. My body was happy with me and cooperating accordingly. The race course, on the other hand, was not as kind. I plodded on at a decent rate (for me) not knowing how far I had gone. I kept an eye on my watch and calculated my distance based on what I thought my pace was, but there were no markers on the course. Suddenly, all the runners turned into the Birch Bay State park. I followed, ready for a change in scenery. I should have been focusing on the beauty of the place, but as I rounded a corner there, one hour and eight minutes into my run, was the 7 K marker.

I started doing calculations in my head. At the pace I was going I should have completed a 10 K by now. Did they mean 7 MILES? But there was no way I could have run 7 miles in an hour and eight minutes, even with my first three at nine minutes a mile, was there? I knew I had dropped back almost to my usual pace after 5 K. I couldn’t put it out of my mind. The times weren’t making sense to me. As we all continued on and as I dropped to the back of the 30 K pack, the few K markers placed on the course continued to baffle me. When I finally reached the half-way point I sped up to catch one of the only four runners I could see, a woman in my age group whose pace was very similar to mine.

“Do your times seem right?” I asked her when I finally reached her.

“No,” she affirmed. “I looked at the map. We missed a turn at the State Park and I figure we added about 2 K by going around it instead of through it.”

“I knew something was wrong.” I pulled out my own map and studied it as we jogged along. “There was supposed to be a turn around and we never saw that,” I said.

“Yep. We all missed the first entry to the park, so we’re going to end up going 20 miles total, I guess.”

Oh my god, I thought. This was sad poetic justice after last weekend when I cut my run short by five miles and took a ride back to my car.

“Well, I need the miles anyhow,” I said, resigning myself to the situation. What could I do about it now?

“Me too,” she agreed. She was training for the Eugene, Oregon Marathon in May.

I ran ahead again to tell the couple in front of us what had happened. I’d overheard them talking about how their pace didn’t seem right. The woman confided in me that she was worried they would get lost since the foible in the course put us further back in the pack than they had expected to be. I assured them that both the woman behind us and I had maps and that my husband would meet up with me at some point and run us in. I had been either slightly in front of or behind them since the beginning of the race, so I assumed they would track with me the rest of the way.

During the second half of the run, I struggled. We all did. My iPod turned against me at the half-way mark and completely stopped working. And the energy of the crowd couldn’t help me because there was no crowed anymore. There would be a total of 86 finishers in the 30 K, which I now thought of as the 20 Miler, and we would be among the last four to cross the finish line. I set my mind on four hours and watched the minutes tick away. The man in the couple, now running several yards behind me, got a nasty cough and, not knowing how far away our next aid station would be, I gave him some of my water.

I should be able to report on the scenic detail of this run, since I had so much time to look at it, but my mind was elsewhere – wondering if the aid stations would close down before we came along, wondering if the race organizers might even take down the finish line, wondering if I had missed the turn onto Semi-Ah-Moo Parkway while I was wondering about other things.

But my worrying was all in vain. With the exception of one deserted aid station, there were attendants at each of them and someone following us in a van to give us directions. My knees started to smart on the last major down hill, but I knew I was going to make it. Somewhere in the last four miles, I pulled ahead of the rest of my tail-end cohort and was only able to see the lone woman runner far in the distance.

I told each of the aid stations that there were three people behind me and I entrusted my fellow runners to the race organizers and volunteers. This was a mistake, it turned out.
Bill met me with only one K to go. He’d had a hard run and confirmed that most runners in the race had taken the wrong route. We ran in together and, because all the volunteers had gone home, Bill awarded me my medal as I crossed the finish line and heard my ankle chip beep. Victorious and exhausted I raised my hands in triumph, grateful to be done and sure I could pull off the Whidbey Island Marathon in two weeks (well, we’ll see, won’t we).

The race organizers congratulated me and patted me on the back as I crossed the line at 3:51:26. Panting and on the point of collapse I said, “There are three people behind me!”
“We’ve got’em,” one of the organizers told me. “We’ve been tracking with you.”

We waited as the other woman with the map came over the finish line. Bill awarded her the medal with little fanfare besides a high five from me. Next two women came around the bend together. Again Bill awarded them their medals, but I was confused. I didn’t know those two were behind me. Where was the couple I had tracked with the whole race? We waited. Nothing happened.

“There are two more,” I told the organizers as they started tearing down the tents and disassembling the timing clock.

“No, they’re all in,” someone said.

“No, they aren’t,” I argued. “There is a couple, about forty-ish. A woman with a long grey braid down her back and a man with a curly pony tail. There’s no way they came in before me.”

“We haven’t seen them.” I kept insisting that they were still out there and eventually, the race organizers took heed.

Several of us hopped in our cars and drove the course and all the possible routes this couple might have taken if they had missed a turn. No one was able to locate them. Bill and I spent almost an hour driving and re-driving the course looking for any sign of these two lost strangers.

Today, the race results do not reflect this couple’s times, and I’m still worried that they’re roaming around out in Birch Bay in search of the finish line. I know what it is like to get lost, to know you are last and to wonder if anyone takes you seriously back there, working your hardest to find your way in, knowing the awards ceremony was completed before you were half-way through. Being last is like an empty water bottle when you are thirsty, like the hunger for a missed meal. You’re longing for something that is out of your reach any time soon. I know what the fear of being left for dead smells like. It smells like the dust kicked up from others’ running shoes as they pass you, like empty power gel packets, like exhaust when the course opens back up to traffic.

If you’re out there, fellow back-of-the-packers, and somehow you read this, don’t give up the dream of the marathon you told me you were training for. Don’t let a disorganized race take the wind out from under your wings. Keep running!!!