This morning I woke up at 5:30 am, ate a piece of peanut butter toast, drank a boxed chocolate soy milk, and drove 2 and a half hours down to Indianapolis for the, so called, Outback Scramble. If you imagine a navy SEAL training camp hosted by the Mario Brothers then you'll have some idea of what this race was like.
I made it to the race early: google maps overestimate. I tried to find a real course map. There were none. There are comical made-up maps posted around, but they don't represent anything real and they have lots of fun silliness in them such as areas marked "here there be monsters". So, stymied in the map arena I warmed up and was able to slowly shed layers as the sun finally warmed the air above 20 degrees. I still ran with spandex bottoms and an under armour top on and it's a good thing too.
The race announcer explains that the course is marked by pink ribbons tied to trees through the woods. He makes lots of jokes. He says only a few of last year's runners are still missing on the course. He asks who is new to the race. A good three-quarters of us raise our hands. He mutters a joke about people not coming back. I'm mildly amused. I must admit I was feeling pretty cocky. How much "real XC" could they really throw at us? I looked at last year's times. The winner averaged a 6:12 mile over the approximately 5 mile course. I'm thinking; this is going to be too easy.
The race announcer also explains that there are hats strewn about the course. If you finish with a hat they will drop a minute from your time. You get nothing extra from two hats. These are our powerups. Mario has mushrooms. We have hats... apparently. Big, grass, Huck Finn-esque hats that are died funny colors. I'm feeling so cocky that I decide to let other people take these hats. Why rub it in after I blaze the course? Also, I don't see a single person wearing spikes, so I don't wear spikes. Nobody likes the out-of-towner that spoils the fun run by crushing everyone in spikes and using the "fun" hats bonus to make it worse.
The race starts off flat and clear for a little under a mile. It starts off slow too. I get out in front and cruise along at 5:50 pace. There is a hairpin turn so I end up running back past the whole crowd of 250 that I'm in front of. Somebody yells out, "you're going out too fast." Whatever, you have no idea who I am.
We enter the woods and I make a wrong turn right off the bat. I did see pink ribbons, but apparently I'm color blind and they were actually red herring. I yielded to the peer pressure of others as the top three behind me failed to make my turn and went right on by. I got back in the race quickly and moved up to second. We began barreling through a trail very much like Broad Brook in Williamstown: crossing the same creek six or seven times just to end up on the same bank that we started on. I'm enjoying myself. We are all splashing through the creek and ducking under or leaping over fallen trees. My eyes are scanning a mere one or two seconds ahead of me; just enough to keep me from tripping and killing myself.
The lead guy crosses a ravine as nimble as a monkey by running over a tree trunk that fell across it. I stop short and curse. My heart is racing and I'm trying to delicately walk across a slick log in my training shoes. This was pretty darn stupid, but I committed myself and it was probably faster than lowering myself down one side of the ravine and climbing up the other.
Now the lead guy is 10 seconds ahead of me and things get interesting. Not only am I trying to play catch up by plowing through a densely wooded trail-less trail, but the course gets more dynamic too. I come to a steep hill. There is a rope tied to a nearby tree. It's dangling down the hill. A race volunteer advises my use of the rope. Yeah right, I'm still feeling cocky. Then I slip and fall on my ass. The whole hill is wet mud covered in leaves. I have to sort of roll over to reach the rope and ease myself down.
Now I know I'm way back from the leader so I start going extra fast. Naturally I catch my foot on a root. As I'm careening forward and downwards I grab a small tree with a trunk about as thick as my arm. It turns out to be dead and all nine feet of wood comes crashing down with me. I bang my shin on a log too.
I realize my race strategy needs revised. I resolve to run at a safe speed through the nasty parts and I reason that there must be some clearings where I can gain ground. Even if this monkey can swing through the trees with the greatest of ease I can still beat him endurance-wise, right?
Next I come to an uphill with a rope. It is clear that the rope is necessary. I grab on and start pulling myself hand over hand up to the top. Half-way up the rope goes taut behind me from the pursuing runners. Despite all my missteps they don't seem to be making gains.
Turns out I'm not very good with rope. The damn thing keeps wagging and my hand misses repeatedly as I grab again to pull myself up. At the top I just grab some trees and haul my body over the lip.
The terrain remains pretty much the same with thick woods, thorns and brambles, more rope climbing and rappeling. Half the time I'm running like a plow, the other half I'm running like Neo; dodging bullets and such. Turns out dead stuff is much easier to plow through than live stuff. A vine appeared in front of me at one point and I obliterated it as easy as finishing tape. Then I ran through the exact same type of vine later but instead of snapping like the rest of the dry twigs, this live vine clotheslines me and sends me to the ground. With the determination of the insane I shake it off and keep going.
The "clearings" I need are all short so I end up doing an extreme fartlek. I'm sprinting twenty meters, slowing to do hurdle drills over logs, sprinting ten meters with my arms up in front of my face to block thorns and sticks, slowing to ford a river (no wagon caulking option available), and repeating. I run to the edge of the bank of one creek and see the bank is a sheer face on the opposite side. As I've already done many times I freeze a moment and whip my eyes over the terrain. Both banks are more gradually sloped just to my right so I scramble that direction and I still have to crawl up the opposite side. Another race volunteer overseas this crossing. His sagely wisdom upon seeing my crossing, "You'll never catch him that way."
Jerk.
I haven't seen the leader in quite awhile. I did not have mental contact with him. For all I knew he was finished with the race already. However, I was running faster when I wasn't thinking about catching him.
Suddenly the race bursts out of the woods. The course follows a drainage ditch down one side and up the other. I can see the leader ascending the other side, about 15 seconds ahead of me. What's more! He is clutching one of the bonus hats! There is no way in hell I'm going to beat him by a minute so now I have to find my own hat and beat him. I've passed many hats along the way, but I figured the leader was ignoring them so I did too. Apparently he was devoted to the big W.
I ascend the drainage ditch and some of my problems are solved. Hercle! I spy a big green grass hat. I snatch it up and run straight into a field of wheat. There is a race volunteer on the far side waving a pink flag at me just above the tops of the stalks. I run the whole field with my arms up protecting my face. Wheat is crushed under foot and pods are exploding when I hit them, flinging grain up into my hair. I'm not running down a planted row, I'm running at a 45 degree diagonal to the rows so the footing keeps changing and one side of my body is getting smacked with a lot more stalks than the other side. It looks like corn was previously planted in this field. There are a lot of sharp looking corn stalks sticking out of the ground. One stumble and I feel like I'm going to get impaled like I fell into a Punji jungle trap. I'm not off-course, but I'm seriously wondering what farmer would let 250 people run through his unharvested wheat field. I have a malnourished African child on my conscience by the time I emerge from my ruination of the field.
Alas, my agro-terrorism is not over. I enter an unharvested soybean field next. Soybeans are much shorter than wheat and I can see that I am gaining on my opponent. He is about ten seconds ahead of me still. For the first time, it occurs to me he is wearing shorts. I, on the other hand, have full length spandex beneath my shorts. Have you ever run through a soybean field? It's like getting whipped constantly with beaded necklaces. As I run I'm picturing settlers being forced through Native American guantlets. That soybean field counted a lot of coup on my legs.
I emerge from the field into a real clearing. I'm near the start again, and therefore, the finish. Some spectators are cheering us on. My legs are fatigued from the hill ascensions and feel bruised from the soybeans. My left arm is sore from clutching this hat that my hand isn't quite big enough to palm. I've got about a half mile left. I start gaining on the leader. If he has got a kick left I'm done for. I see him look back. He knows where I am. With a quarter mile left I catch him. The way I'm feeling, I'm still very out-kickable, but as I pass he merely exhales a "nice job". I tell him nice job too and then sprint in to the finish. The spectators yell for me to put my hat on. It doesn't fit and the wind is trying to rip it off so I run into the finish with one hand holding a big green grass hat on my head. I'm about 5 seconds ahead of second place. Third place is over two minutes behind us.
We finished the supposedly 5 mile course in 28 minutes, not including the hat bonus (my personal best at 5 miles is 24:51 to give you an idea of how slow that is). Furthermore, I am convinced that the course is actually shorter than 5 miles so our pace was even slower than it appears; a testimate to the difficulty of the scramble.
The second place guy sits down and I see the fronts of his legs for the first time. They look like the passion of the Christ. He has got pocks, scratches, and blood everywhere. I am feeling immensely thankful for my spandex, though they are bristling with stickers and pricklies and burs. I peel up the bottom of my spandex to see the part of my leg that feels like it's burning. I've got a four inch vertical gash on my shin. That's my worst war wound and it's not bad. It probably came from my very first fall and it hadn't bled much.
It turns out that the second place guy is a junior at Warren Central high school. That's the team that won the Indiana State meet. He is their fourth runner. Before anybody points out that I almost let a high schooler cross me off the list let me point out that not only had he run the course before, but he was also wearing spikes. If not for me, he would have won by over two minutes. Sheesh! The high school kids have no honor!
For my efforst I recieved a few prizes. First, I got to pick one prize out of a random assortment of items. No stuffed bears were available. All of these prizes were pretty lame. It looked like the race director was trying to clean out his attic. Second, I got a gift certificate for a free Chipotle burrito. I cashed that in for lunch. Oh man was it delicious. And huge. I stuffed myself till I wanted to crawl into a corner and die. Thirdly, I won a $75 gift cert to a shoe store. I didn't know going in that this race had any prizes so I was very excited to see this. I drove right down the road to the shoe store right after the race and bought some Asics shoes, which were, unlike my vision, 2020's. I told them I was a high school coach and they gave me a discount for that too!
Minus the entry fee, plus the shoe certificate, puts me at net $50 for this race. Add that to my post-collegiate total and I'm up $150. Gas not included. Small prizes like the burrito, and the folding chair I got at the last race not included either. They sort of cancel each other out. Ah the life of the professional runner 12 years of training to earn fifty dollars per month (only including the past three months).
(Of course I'm not really a professional runner. You know that right?)
All in all it was a great day. I recommend the run to anyone who finds themself near Indianapolis in early November. It is certainly possible to run without bloodying your legs. Also it is probably hilarious to be running with a group of people all fumbling in the mud and splashing through creeks to pass each other.
-Neal
All images are property of Tuxedo Brothers. I don't think they mind me using them.
© 2006 Neal Holtschulte
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Answers to the math question:
Century:
You talk about fields you ran through near the finish, I will postulate that
the woodsy part was uphill from the fields, AND since you mention the 7 times
crossing early, I'll assume you were going at least slightly uphill when you
did this. We all know that as streams run downhill, they may join with other
streams, and that people tend to give all of these the same name (there are
about 30 hemlock brooks in williamstown).
Thm: If the number of river forks that occur while you are on the opposite bank is odd, then an odd number of crossings will put you back on the same bank as you started.
Pf: Imagine you are on the opposite bank of the stream, and so have crossed 2n+1 times, for n some NATURAL number (not an integer, heathen). Assume the river has split k, some odd number (I always think that "thirteven" or "twone" are odd), of times. Then there are 2k streams between your bank and and the one you started on. To get back to your original side then you need to cross all these, and will have crossed a total of 2(n+k)+1 rivers, which is odd. BOO YAH!
-centch
Dan Klein:
Did the creek branch? If so, it's easy sauce to cross it $2n+1$ times
where $n \in \mathbb{N}$.
[Theorem. A creek with a simple branching point (where it branches into two) can be crossed $2n+1$ times, where $n \in \mathbb{N}$, leaving one on the same side as one started.
Pf. Direct proof by construction. We cannot make assumptions about the global topology of the creek $C \subset \mathbb{R}^2$. However, we can proceed locally. Let $D$ be a closed $\epsilon$-disk around the branch point of the creek and $S$ be the boundary of $D$. By assumption, we can choose $\epsilon > 0$ so that $L = S \cup (C \cap D)$ is homeomorphic to a wheel with three spokes; otherwise, the branching point would not be simple.
Obviously, a closed path $\gamma \subset L$ ends up on the same side as one started. But the the closed path $f$ that circles the branch point once crosses the creek $3$ times and the closed path $g$ that jumps over a branch and then returns crosses the creek $2$ times. Since the composition of closed paths is a closed path, the result is immediate.]
And I really wish there was a race like that around here. Maybe there is?
--Daniel
J0n0:
Also if you can reach the head of the creek, then you can just circle
in one direction around said head of creek as many times as you please
and end up on the side you started from after any number of circlings.
Of course, around and beyond the head of the creek, there are places
where it's unclear which side of the creek you're on, if either.
And if you don't have either a branching or an end, but just a topological segment that starts at one edgepoint of the region you can be in and continues to another edgepoint, then I guess you can do this if you, uh, have a meander in the stream and you can jump from one of the banks all the way over the isthmus and land on the far bank, on the same side, and you count this as only one crossing? Uh, I'm going to go to bed.
-J Dowse
