I ran the Ridge for the third time on August 13, 2022, and took a different approach to my training. I studiously avoided looking at my times from my previous two races, and I avoided the ridge in my final few training runs. I decided that I had been spending too much time training the in the Bridgers. I needed to branch out and run up other mountains in the Bozeman area. I was rewarded on Chestnut Mountain with running through vast fields of wildflowers on its south facing slopes that I didn’t know were there, and with ascents of Mounts Elephant and Blackmore in the Hyalites on a cool Saturday morning while also surrounded by fields of wildflowers. These distractions worked in the sense that I slept better the night before the race. I got four or so hours of sleep. I had also read in Trail Runner Magazine that alcohol dramatically impacts our body battery, so I studiously avoided any adult beverages for the two nights before the race. I was as close to a Zen state as I could achieve leading up to the race. If I did poorly, it was on me, not due to mistakes I had made.
The forecast was for warmer weather than my first two Ridge Runs, so this affected my strategy. Warm weather slows me down and burns me out. I didn’t want to waste myself by going out to fast, so I decided to try and pace myself better early in the race in hopes that I didn’t drag too badly late in the race. It didn’t work. I managed to go slower early in the race, but I ended up going way slower late in the race anyway. I never reached the depths of “Dead Man Walking” that I suffered through in the 2019 race, but I was slow. Compared to my 2016 times, I was 2 minutes slower at the top of Sacajawea, 11 minutes slower at Ross Pass, 26 minutes slower at Bridger Bowl, and then I really slowed down. It took everything I had to keep putting one foot in front of the other when climbing Saddle and Bridger Peaks. By the time I reached Baldy I was 56 minutes behind my 2016 pace.
The question of why I slowed down so much gripped me. Four possibilities flow through my brain: age, weather, training and foot issues. I’ll start with the last one first. My left ankle has been an issue for months now. My PT tells me that my ankles aren’t flexible enough and that my regular trail runs on uneven terrain are causing strains that eventually manifested in my Peroneal tendon. The stretches the PT gave me have been helping, but I wasn’t yet 100 percent, and about halfway through the race, it was swollen and aching. I also managed to develop a quarter sized blister on the bottom of my right heel on the descent from Sacajawea. Every time I run in the Bridgers in warm weather, I have issues with the bottoms of my feet burning on the long steep downhills. The friction caused by the feet shifting forward with each step is a problem I have been unable to completely solve. I have tried a variety of socks and I have tightened my laces steadily with each run. I am making progress. My left foot stayed cool throughout the race, but my shoe was so tight that it may have contributed to the building irritation in my left ankle as the race progressed. However, I hadn’t imposed quite the same death grip on my right shoe, and a blister quickly formed. I’d like to say that I can blame my poor performance entirely on foot issues, but I can’t; the blister didn’t become a big issue until the downhill from Baldy, and by that time, I was already way off my best time, and my left ankle pain required a little extra care with each step to keep the pain in check. At best, foot issues cost me 20-25 minutes.
How about weather? Can I blame my poor performance on hot weather? No, I don’t think so. We climbed Sacajawea in full sun in the cool of the early morning, but then we ran mostly in cool shade until we were back atop the ridge after the Wall of Death. Even then, we were up above 8500 feet most of the time and it was cool and comfortable up there. It was a few degrees warmer than either of my previous Ridge races so this may have added a few minutes to my time, but heat stress wasn’t a major issue in any part of the race. Even on the descent from Baldy, when the sun usually beats on my exhausted body, clouds rolled in along with a streak of lightening, a peal of thunder and a few drops of rain to keep the temperature in check.
So, if it wasn’t feet or heat, it had to have been age or training. I think it was both, working with each other and against me. One thing about the Ridge Run that struck me this time is that the climbs never end. There are the climbs up Sacajawea, to gain Ross Pass, up the Wall of Death, then there’s a climb leading to Bridger Bowl, another up Saddle Peak, then Bridger Peak, then Baldy. Even after Baldy, that final descent contains two small climbs, but on exhausted legs, they are still climbs. Some of my training routes have nearly as much vertical and distance as the race, but they never have as many climbs in them, and the climbs are never spaced out the way they are in the race. It's much more typical to face one or two big climbs, usually in the first half of a training run, and then a long decent on better trail than that which descends from Baldy. There was one big exception to this. In 2016 I trained for the Ridge Run in Maryland at Sugarloaf Mountain Preserve. There were no 4000-foot ascents or descents. To put together a training run with 5000 feet of climbing I had to be creative. Sugarloaf had 5 hills. One lap cresting all 5 produced about 1560 feet of vertical gain and descent over about 5.6 miles. Three laps and a portion of a fourth lap that included the largest hill were required to assemble the training vertical and distance I wanted on my hill running weeks. This gave me a total 16 hill climbs spaced one after the other from beginning to end. Short bursts of intense climbs—in eastern heat and humidity no less—may have given me an advantage that I never considered before.
David Roche, writing in Trail Runner Magazine, discusses the advantage of short intense hill-sprints for training. Even though the sprint distances do not match race hills, these intense bursts build the capacity to handle the biomechanical demands of race days even if the size of the hills you train on are much smaller than the hills on race day. He offers plenty of caveats that the research on this point is weak, but also adds that short hill bursts have become part of many current training programs. The research, it seems, is being conducted with many highly trained athletes as specimens.
This matches my experience, though the six years that passed in between are clearly also a factor. So, here’s my thinking. If I am to try this race again next year, I have to mix up my training to include more short intense hill training on the foothills around Bozeman. I already do a weekly 10K run on the hilly roads in my neighborhood, but mixing in interval training on these same hilly roads or in the foothills might be a plan. Let’s face it. Neighborhood roads have the advantage of immediate access and roads are in better condition than trails much of the year. I probably also need to do more of my big training runs up on the ridge. I need to get stronger on the poor footing up there and I need to follow the big climb to the ridge with lots of hard hill climbs while I’m up there.
But will I do all this and try the Ridge Run again? I’d like my last Ridge run to be a success story, and that’s a strong incentive. But a year can be a long time. Things change, so we will see.
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