Forge The Gorge

Here's an email I sent to a couple of friends. The race took place on Thursday evening, August 19, 2004 at Fillmore Glen State Park in Moravia, NY. Now that I have this blog, I felt compelled to add this report. My only concern is the order of these posts in my blog. This report of an "older" race will appear above a report of a "newer" race. That might be confusing. So, if you've gotten this far (yea, like anyone beside me and my family members got this far), please note that there's another "newer" report of a race (The Alpine Classic) following this one.

---

the race started out in the grass. nice level, soft grass. then you turn sharp to the left, cross over a wooden bridge into the forest and take another sharp left along the bottom of a freakin steep hill. i mean steep. very steep. oh sh*t steep. and at this point i'm looking up the side of this hill and thinking that i'm screwed. and i was. so, its a very hard right hand turn to the bottom of a flight of stone stairs that go straight up to heaven. and i know that's the only way i'm getting to heaven cuz i was swearing alot when i saw that. oh yea, it was also getting dark, it was hot, muggy and everything was very slippery due to the heavy rain from earlier in the day. everyone in my section of the pack walked up the steps. i don't know what the front runners did but anyone who ran up that hill gets my total respect. i'll have to ask evan what the fast guys do. so finally, at the top of this hill [about 18 lung busting hours later :-) ], it evens out as we go along the ridge of this gorge. here's the mental image: heavily forested, lots of roots (slippery roots), and a severe drop on the right hand side of the path. not only do you have to worry about twisting your ankle in the fading light (made even darker due to the heavy foliage) but you also have to worry about going down and then rolling over the edge and down the slope/cliff.

somewhere along the top end of gorge, we crossed over a dam that i wouldn't normally have dared to even walk across without ropes attached to me. god only knows how deep water is on the left (with steam/fog drifting off of it up into the trees - very beautiful if i would have been in the site seeing mode instead of the survival mode) and a very high fall off the dam to the right with just a hip-high wooden rail separating the very sweaty, tired, fat, old, what-did-i-get-myself-into, white guy running on slippery concrete from falling to his untimely demise. after more stairs to get past heaven into whatever is above heaven, we finally turn to head back down towards the starting line. so there was a slightly downhill portion on a road (thank the merciful gods for smooth roads) before heading back into the forest. the path stayed on a slight downhill grade for a good portion at this point and was the smoothest path i can recall out of the whole trail. so between the road and the smooth path, i finally got into a groove (if my slow shuffle can be called a groove). then, everything fell apart again as the path plummeted into the depths of hell. trust me, i know hell. that's where i'm gonna spend eternity. i had to walk down some spots cuz when i get this fat body moving too fast down a slope it ain't gonna stop for something so minor as the impending doom of going over the edge of a cliff.

so, finally, back near the entrance where we started, there's a water table and a chance to bail and only do half the course. by now i'm totally soaked and really sucking oxygen (since there wasn't any in the air - it had all been replaced by water). so i keep going for the full course. i had to. i had no choice. besides, it was too much fun. also, imagine how boring this description would be if i had only done half!

the second half runs back into the gorge but down low along the water with bridges that cross back and forth over the stream. there's rock pathways, crumbling shale, the bottom of the cliff with the accompanying risk of getting killed by falling runners, a path eroding away to like 6 inches wide, pools of standing water and mud. but thankfully, no roots cuz no tree is stupid enough to live there; they are all up on the the "hospitable" section we just left where they get at least some hope of getting sunlight. the last time the sun got down into the bottom of this gorge was back before god invented trees. that was a long time ago. but, it is nice. i actually take a chance to look at the scenery since the potential fall is only about 10 feet versus the 30,000 foot potential fall from earlier in the course at the top of the gorge. now i'm thinking this isn't too awful, at least the climb back into the gorge isn't as severe as the initial climb was. i even passed a couple of runners on this section! so, what do i get for being so damn smug? right. another stairway to heaven that felt even steeper than that first rise at the beginning of the race. this is true: if i had stood still and put my arm out in front of me at a 90 degree angle, i could have touched the ground in front of me. now, that's what i call steep.

finally, i get to the top of that killer and there's another water table manned by the race director who informs us that after the next short climb, it's mostly down hill for roughly one and three quarters of a mile to the finish line back along the portion of the path we started out on. for most of that distance, the only thing i had to worry about were the tree roots that were even more slippery (since all the other runners had already covered them twice) and harder to see (cuz it's getting darker by the minute) than the first time on that section. then i get to the section that we climbed up originally after the start. i walked back down those treacherous stone steps that we climbed out on, carefully crossed the first wooden bridge and sprinted across the grass into the finish area.

syracuse has the mountain goat? utica has the big bad boilermaker? ha, what a joke. i'd like to see some of the people who run those races go out on these trails. it would make them cry. curl up in a ball and sob. get into the fetal position and cry for mommy.
what a trip.

i can't wait till next year :-)