After hearing good things about this race over the last five years or so, I finally got myself up to the Catskills to run it.  This is a fantastic point-to-point course along the western escarpment of the Hudson, rugged and beautiful, starting at a trailhead on Rt. 23 east of Windham, NY, crossing several peaks including Windham High Peak, Blackhead and Stoppel Point, and finishing at the North Lake campground off Rt. 23A.  The race is limited to 200 runners, and requires about 80 volunteers, since all the water and other stuff for the aid stations has to be backpacked several miles to the trail.  Registration is cheap but doesn't include a shirt.  The free shirts go to the volunteers.  Most of the runners are multi-year veterans of this race.  If you want a free shirt, you need to run 6 (100 miles) or 12 (200 miles) Escarpments.  No awards. Anyone who finishes with a major injury gets a free "Broken Body Club" badge though.

Hunt and I took off Friday afternoon with my son Sam and his son Ollie, and headed up to Ithaca, NY, to drop Sam off at the Nike Running Camp at Cornell.  He's a camp counselor there, doing lots of running and getting paid for it!  We spent the night at Sam's house right next to Ithaca Falls.  It's a stereotypical student house, lots of empty beer cans but no sheets or towels.  We spread our sleeping bags on various mattresses and slept to the sound of the waterfall a couple of hundred feet away.  Sam took us to a North Campus cafeteria for a great breakfast, then on a tour of campus, including a walk through the fieldhouse.  We missed seeing Nathan Taylor, his XC/track coach, but the facilities were nice.  Then a 20-minute drive over to Groton for a quick visit with my daughter Becky at my ex-wife's house.

Hunt, Ollie and I left Sam in Groton around noontime and headed down I-81 and east on I-88, 23 and 23A to Tannersville, NY, checking in at the Mountain Bike Inn around 3:30.  It's a nice place in mid-restoration, run by Ernie Reale, a 30-ish expert mountain-biker and local history buff who mainly caters to skiers and mountain-biking groups.  It's only a mile or two from the entrance the North Lake campground where the race finishes.  Cheap too.  We headed down Rt. 23A to race director Dick Vincent's open house in Palenville, met a bunch of other runners on Dick's deck, which gives a commanding view across the Hudson Valley all the way to the Berkshires.  This is the 26th year of the Escarpment Trail Run, and Dick has directed and run it all 26 years.  He's 50, and has a daily running streak going back 27 years, will complete 10,000 consecutive days of running on Sept. 8, 2002. He is 13th on the Ultra Marathon World running streak list.  He was wearing an ankle brace from a recent injury, but still planning on running the race, of course.  I talked with a bunch of Canadians who regaled me with stories about race mishaps: the guy who went off the cliff, the guy who needed helicopter rescue and got charged $5,000 for it, etc.

After pasta dinner at a decent Italian restaurant, we drove up 32 and west on 23, ascending maybe 2,000 feet, to check out the start.  The trail narrows immediately in the grass, enters forest and starts ascending Windham High Peak fairly soon.  We explored some back roads on the return to the inn, called home, read for a while, and knocked off early.

We got up at 6, ate, and Ollie drove with us to North Lake for the 8AM bus to the start, then drove my van back to the inn for more sleep.  The weather was cool and cloudy, threatening rain later on.  On the bus I sat next to a high-mileage guy from NYC doing his 10th or 11th Escarpment, running with a heartrate monitor to keep his pulse below 130 (I can top 130 walking hills). As soon as the bus pulled into the parking lot across the road from the start, everybody scampered off to water the bushes.  A couple of people recognized me from the Triple Crown and introduced themselves.  After the second bus arrived, Dick welcomed the crowd, and then a couple of his henchmen took a roll call. (The volunteers count runners coming through the aid stations, check in finshers, and search for lost runners if necessary--very considerate.) After these preliminaries, we crossed the road to the trailhead sign, and a retired Escarpment veteran blew a horn to start the race.

The trail is mostly very well marked with blue discs.  The first 3 1/2 miles is a long climb to the top of Windham High Peak on pretty eroded trail; it's mainly used by out-and-back hikers to the summit   Most of the trail is very rocky.  I stubbed my right big toe hard only eight minutes into the race, was glad I'd had some ibuprofen before the start and hoped the injury wouldn't slow me down too much.  I was able to get back on pace after a while.  I passed Karen Shiley (figuring I probably shouldn't), hung behind Harry Smith for a bit.  There was sporadic drizzle, which made me worry about traction on the rocks.  My shoes loosened as they got wet, and I stopped to retie them tigher so my feet wouldn't blister too badly.  After the first summit, the trail is narrower but less eroded as it descends along ridge, then climbs again to the Blackhead range.  Someone behind me yelled about bee stings; I had an epinephrine pen with me (having reacted badly after ~20 stings at Conestoga in 2000) but never got stung; Hunt got a few later on though.  I hung in with a third-timer from Toronto.  Blackhead is the steepest ascent, with intermittent bits of hand-over-hand climbing.  Near the top at around 3,700 feet, the highest point in the race, the enthusiastic aid station volunteers had marked the trail with balloons.  I was carrying gels, but their M&M's and pretzels were a lot tastier.

Another descent, some of it barely controlled, swinging around trees and grabbing at roots, scrambling for safe footing.  Carl would have hated this part; it's tougher than Conestoga.  I slammed into a tree, bruising my left shoulder.  Then another long climb toward Stoppel Point along a more obvious ridge with some really steep drop-offs.  At a couple of the highest points I could see right over the low cloud banks obscuring the Hudson Valley below.  This is likely where they filmed those great vistas in The Last of the Mohicans.  I was part way up Stoppel Point, working up a pretty steep section, when I suddenly ran out of gas and could barely climb at all.  I looked at my watch and it was exactly three hours in--a classic bonk.  I struggled up to a more level section and was able to get running again, and felt a lot better in a while.  A half mile or so before the summit of Stoppel Point the trail goes right by the wreckage of a crashed plane; even if the occupants had survived the crash itself, it wasn't likely they'd made it off the mountain if they'd had any serious injuries.  The Stoppel Point aid station was the noisiest and most enthusiastic, and their cheering in the distance gave me a boost to the summit.  They had enough water to give my empty hydration pack a partial refill.

From there it was about four mostly downhill miles to the finish at North Lake.  The steep descents were tough, since my legs were pretty shot and didn't feel that reliable any more.  The really fast runners can boulder-hop down series of five-foot drops, but I was reduced to butt-scooching at times.  I was proceeding downward pretty conservatively, thinking how the hell can I train for this stuff in Delaware, when Gene Gatens came flying past me, and he's from New Jersey, dammit. I passed him again a mile later though.  It was a long descent, starting above the clouds, and at every opening I kept looking for the lake and only saw another big dropoff.  The trail marks got squirrelly too, but the volunteers had laid in ribbons, and there was even a course marshal who had made a long climb up to steer runners through a confusing section.  The last couple of miles I caught up with the Toronto guy again and a couple of other guys, and I felt good enough to pass them but didn't, figuring I probably shouldn't push my luck unless there was a decent open stretch to do it.  I'd had plenty of stumbles and other close calls, but no actual wipe-outs.

There was a guy taking pictures near the finish, right when you are looking and feeling your best, and they even had a warning sign ahead of time so you could fix up your hair and stuff for your photo opportunity.  A few more turns and I was suddenly over the finish line at the edge of the woods, finishing 65th in 4:20:13.  Ollie was there, well-slept.  The fog and drizzle moved in and out.  The refreshments were great: fruit, bagels, sodas, juices.  I got a change of clothes from the van, and flopped in the lake to clean off, and got into dry clothes.  Hunt came in at 5:13:58 with a few more wounds and several nicely-swollen stings, earning a broken-body badge.

We headed back to the inn for showers, then said goodbye to Ernie the proprietor and headed out around 4PM.  We took a detour to the Canterbury School in New Bedford, CT, to drop Ollie off for a week at National Guitar Workshop.  While Hunt and Ollie went through registration I sat in on a blues symposium where people from the previous week's camp took turns ripping it up on stage.  It was great.  We mooched dinner in the cafeteria with several hundred guitar maniacs of all ages.  Of course guys who run the Escarpment shouldn't comment about other peoples' obsessions.  Ollie went off to his audition for program placement, and we took off for home.