Paul Long: Run Under the (Western Kentucky) Stars was still hot and humid 10-hour challenge

Six hours after we started running around the track at Carson Horse Park in Paducah, they brought us out the popsicles.

Now, these were not your fancy-schmancy, tropical-fruit flavored popsicles. Nope, these were your basic sale-priced, frozen-sugar-water-in-plastic treat.

But, oh, what a treat they were.

Mine was the color of a light, rust brown. I have no idea what flavor it was, or was supposed to be. Root beer, perhaps? Not one of my favorites — in fact, I dislike root beer.

But I really didn’t care.

With another four hours to run in the heat and humidity of a West Kentucky summer night, sucking on one of the those helped quench the fire of thirst. It was glorious.

Sometime in the early morning hours, and the going was easy. (Photo by Suzanne Livezey Peters)

The race we did some 10 days ago — I and some 200 others, including more than a half-dozen runners from Northern Kentucky — is called Run Under the Stars. It’s a 10-hour run that started at 8 p.m. on a Saturday and ended just after the sun rose at 6 a.m. Sunday.

Carson Horse Park is literally that — a horse track and stables, a half-mile crushed dirt and gravel oval track in the middle of Paducah. You camp in the infield of the track.

You start running around the track counter-clockwise, and every two hours turn around and run the other direction. Shortly after midnight, most of the lights are turned off — the track is in the middle of a residential neighborhood — and you run in the dark. However, lights are left on along the grandstand, and you always have the moonlight and the star lights to guide you.

It’s a race that encourages endurance over speed. You can run as much as you want, or as little as you want — although many seemed to run or walk around the track for most, if not all, of the 10 hours. It’s a low-pressure way to become an ultra-runner — someone who runs more than the marathon distance of 26.2 miles.

The shortest ultra-marathon is 50K — 31 miles. What you call a run that’s more than 26.2 miles but fewer than 31 miles, I don’t know. Perhaps a marathon-plus? Or a marathon with a rounding error?

Anyway. This was the first time I signed up to run the full 10 hours. Last year, I tagged along with some other running friends, and wound up running 15 miles over 3½ hours. It gave me a taste, and I was eager to try the full Monty.

So I did. Along with Melissa Mann of Edgewood, Theresa Baker of Independence, Brent Caldwell of Villa Hills, Jesse Megenhardt of Burlington, Kila Hanrahan of Covington, and Nick LaBoffe of Cincinnati, we drove 10 hours that weekend to and from Paducah so we could run 10 hours in Paducah. It made perfect sense. Trust me on this.

Our results? All good. Personally, I ran my first marathon distance (I’ve done five half-marathons, but never further, and my longest training run had been just under 20 miles) and my first ultramarathon, running 32 miles over the 10 hours. Mann and Baker completed 32.5 miles. Hanrahan also completed her first ultra, running 38 miles. Caldwell and Megenhardt reached their goals of running 40 miles, while LaBoffe — the experienced ultra-runner among us — literally sprinted to the finish line to complete 53.5 miles, good for ninth place among male finishers, and 12th overall.

It was a night of fun and pain, of running and walking, of chatting and going it alone. We found various ways to deal with the heat — the temperature at the start was in the 80s, and it may have dipped into the 70s in the early morning hours, but the humidity remained close to 100 percent. We drank a lot of water — and poured as much over our heads. Megenhardt began the night wearing a backpack of water, but ditched it as too hot and heavy a few hours into the race. A few more hours, and he ditched his shirt.

My strategy was simple: Run and walk as long as I could, as much as I could. I had hoped to run at least 31 miles. My goal was to run something between 31 and 36 miles.

With under three minutes to go, Nick LaBoffe sprints to get in another half mile. (Photo by Suzanne Livezey Peters)

It seemed easy enough. Forty miles would be four miles an hour, or a 15-minute mile. 35 miles would require a bit more than 17-minute miles. I regularly run 10-11-minute miles, but that’s over a much shorter time. Keeping that pace for an hour or so is easy. For 10 hours, not so much. And then there’s stopping to refill your water bottle, getting something to eat, going to the bathroom, or simply resting, all of which cut into your time.

I started out running the first mile. Then I started running a lap, and walking a lap. After an hour, I had completed 4½ miles. After two hours, I had ran eight miles.

As we switched to the clockwise direction, I caught back up with some of my running mates. We played insect cards  — really; it’s a deck of card with the names and habits of insects. The most interesting was the rat-tailed maggot. We played trivia games — other runners had a remarkably amount of information — not one question went unanswered.

We sang songs and tried to remember who first recorded them. I tried to get the group to appreciate the musical “Hamilton.” We gave out nicknames that will never be uttered again.

And we ran.

Come about the seven-hour mark, I was approaching the marathon distance. So I started running again — run a half-lap, walk a half-lap. I kept this up for a while, and completed the 26.2 miles about a half-hour later.

At that point, I realized I needed five more miles before I could consider myself an ultra-marathoner. With 2½ hours left, that would mean 2 miles an hour. I could handle that, I thought, if I had to crawl around the track.

With 15 minutes to spare, I covered an additional six miles. And I didn’t have to crawl.

Paul Long writes weekly for the NKyTribune about running and runners. For his daily running stories, follow him at dailymile.com or on Twitter @Pogue57

10 hours later, the group at the end of the race (Photo by Suzanne Livezey Peters)