Sometime around 5 a.m., as the first few hints of dawn came over the small horse track in Paducah, Melissa Mann passed the 40-mile mark. It had been a long haul, running 80 laps around the track, but she wasn’t finished yet.
Start: The countdown clock at 8 p.m. Saturday. (Photos by Paul Long)
In that part of the day when time moves slowly, Mann trotted over to our aid station. She wasn’t looking for water or food. Instead, she picked up her knitting needles.
Only then did she do her final few laps around the ½-mile track, knitting her blue and green and purple yarn, smiling broadly and waiting for the finishing clock to count down from 10 hours to 0:00:00.
“I told myself I would do whatever I wanted as long as I was having fun and living in the moment,” said Mann, who lives in Edgewood. “As a joke, I even brought my yarn with me in case I got bored on the track.”
She was one of close to 200 people who traveled to west Kentucky this past weekend to participate in Run Under the Stars, a 10-hour endurance race held at the horse track in Carson Park.
I’d been thinking about doing it for a while because it seemed like a low-pressure way to get in a lot of miles. As its website says, “run, jog, walk, rest, stop and start as much as you’d like. The objective is to see how far you can go; however, you can stop at any time if you’ve reached your goal, or if you’ve had enough.”
Melissa Mann, knitting as she runs the final laps.
When I learned several runners from Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati had signed up, I decided to tag along as crew — getting together water bottles, Gatorade, grapes, food, and knitting needles, and perhaps running a few laps with them when things got difficult — and see how it went.
It was a blast.
The runners went in with high hopes, dreaming of hitting 50 miles or more. But temperatures of close to 90 degrees with high humidity at the 8 p.m. start soon put a damper on that.
“It quickly turned into a battle of survival, and a constant readjustment of plans to ensure you were still standing in 10 hours,” said Eric Kavalauskas of Edgewood. “But it was a great experience that I enjoyed more than I thought I would. More than anything, I enjoyed sharing this experience with my running friends.”
Some were able to overcome the heat and finish strong. A Cincinnati woman, Michelle Barton, beat back some flaring hip pain in the first half of the race to finish first among all women — and third overall. She was credited with running 58 miles in the 10 hours.
“I honestly can say that was the hardest win ever,” she said. “I had to fight for it… Everything that could have gone wrong the first five hours did. But I turned it around the only way I know how — and that was to smile, throw out the negative thoughts, and zone out and go. My last five hours were faster than the first half.”
The Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati team at the start of the race: Andrew Wetterer, back left, Jeremy Hurm, Michelle Barton, Eric Kavalauskas, Melissa Mann, and Erin Meyer Webb.
Runners took creative ways to while away the hours. Kavalauskas and Erin Meyer Webb spent one lap seeing who could count the most tents in the infield — after spending the previous lap determining the rules of the game.
“I remember counting the bugs one lap too,” Webb said. “Your mind becomes very creative when it has to.”
Despite the heat and the humidity and the pain and the bugs — they were big, stinking cicadas — it was a fun race to watch and participate in. The track, made of dirt and crushed limestone, was easy on the legs. The racers started out running counter-clockwise, and to switch things up, every two hours they would change direction after passing the electronic lap counter. Two real, clean bathrooms, with soap and running water, were on opposite ends of the track.
“Who wouldn’t be intimidated by the thought of running for 10 hours straight?” Mann said. “Better yet, running around and around in circles the whole time? Even I thought I was crazy. But I knew I would never find out unless I put my sane thoughts aside and jumped in with both feet… More than anything though, I wanted to help my friends along the way — because those are the adventures that really make running good for the heart.”
Among the other benefits to the race and the endless oval track: The ability to set up your tents and tables in the infield, or as we did, on the outside side of the track, next to the horse barns. (Yes, we had sleeping horses just behind us, although the signs warned us not to feed the barn cats.) Inspiring music roared from speakers scattered around the track. A green-haired girl in a Nirvana shirt stood on the track for the entire race, giving high fives to every runner every time they passed her. The organizers — who did a wonderful job — brought in free pizza at midnight, and plenty of other snacks and drinks were available at the public aid station set up alongside the track. A really cool medal, which lights up, was given to all runners.
End: The countdown clock after the last runner ran the final lap at 6 a.m. Sunday.
Also, you had the opportunity to meet and talk to rookies and veterans of the nine-year-old race, and everyone in between.
“I found the atmosphere of the race, and the race itself, to be very inviting, fun, and challenging,” Webb said. “Everyone was very friendly and open to conversation. I met an older gentleman who was running his 200th ultramarathon that night, and he has also run 200 marathons. He was a retired UC professor, an incredible man, and it was an honor to talk to him.”
Her favorite part of the race was when most of the lights around the track were switched off at midnight. (The park is in a residential area, so leaving the lights on all night would not have been neighborly. Along a small portion of the track, farthest away from the houses, the lights were left on.)
“Everything looks different, and I was remembering where everything was by foot,” she said. “One of the highlights was watching the sunrise. It was beautiful, and you knew things were coming to an end.”
Paul Long, on the road (Photo by Kris Payler Staverman)
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
