Transylvania 100k — The Women's 100 Miler Project

May 22, 2024

Welp, looks like we’re losing more than a day of Romania due to our flight out of Cleveland not happening. I love traveling once on the ground in other places, but sure do loathe airports and air travel. (Still hoping for teleportation to come along in my lifetime and put every last airline out of business!)

Trying again tomorrow. At least Gnorma is taking it in stride..

May 23, 2024

3:00PM (EET)

Continued Adventures in Trying to Start Our Adventure

Me a few months ago when we were booking the car: oh, but, Green Motion is awful. Worst rental experience in Orlando ever.

Lee: looks like they’re the only one of these companies that will let us pickup in Bucharest and drop of in Budapest though

Me: well, maybe it was just a fluke experience. I’m sure they’re better in Europe, I guess book it..

After three flights, we finally arrived in Bucharest. Since we received an email that very specifically said go to departures and meet the shuttle van with the Green Motion logo on it upon arrival, we waited two hours, with multiple calls to customer service, for the shuttle, and of course we ended up being the idiots, because why wouldn’t we have been looking for the rainbow van, with no Green Motion logo, that said Rental Car Center.

All of this to finally get there and find out they cancelled our reservation, even though Lee had alerted them right away that we would be a day late when we had flight issues, and they said “No problem”

After over an hour of getting that sorted, they’ve rebooked us, but they rented out all of the automatics (which we’d booked) but it’s okay, Lee took three stick shift lessons from friends over the past few months just in case something like this happened. I’m sure this will go swell in the Carpathian Mountains.. What can possibly go wrong?

Gnorma is handling this how she handles everything that comes her way in life, with a drink in hand..

6:00PM (EET)

Bran

Our Bran Airbnb, The Tiny House Retreat

May 27, 2024, Transylvania 100k

Prelude

It was November of 2019. A few weeks prior I’d completely broken down in my therapists office whaling, “I hate my life. I fucking hate my life!! This is not MY fucking life. How did this happen? How did this happen????! I let it! I let it happen! and now I have to live this fucking ground hog week over and over and over and over again until I fucking die!!!” I croaked it out through sobs, snotting all over myself, draining her tissue box trying to keep up with the flow. It had happened so slowly. It crept up on me, until one day I woke up, looked back and said, “What the fuck?!” Now I was trapped in the most boring mundane life imaginable, one that someone else had designed for me, and the most exciting thing to look forward to was potentially a kitchen remodel.

“You made this grave, now you have to lay in it”, used to be morning pep talk. So inspirational, I know.

But I’d burnt it all to the ground. I’d decided no more and I’d packed up a single suitcase full of shit and taken up lodging in my mother’s attic. I was now living out the reality of my previous “I can’t because”es - I can’t change my awful circumstances because [insert all the reasons here (I’ll lose my house) (I’ll lose my kids) (I’ll lose my car) (My in laws will hate me) (Everyone will know) (I’ll lose my friends) (I’ll accumulate more debt) etc etc etc.

I was so incredibly lonely amidst the separation, I reached out to everyone and anyone I could think of in the Cleveland area. I’d not made a single friend since moving back, nor had I any success in reconnecting with any old ones. At first, I figured my ex girlfriend’s ex girlfriend, Lee, was off limits for friendship, but once I started training for my first 100 miler, and had a falling out with that associated ex, I figured, ‘eh, what the hell, why not? It would be so incredibly nice to have friends also training for this nonsense.’

Lee, of the dozens of people I’d reached out to, was the only one to reach back. We started training together, and quickly moved from mere acquaintances to good friends, having considerable overlap in interests, bucket list items, and self improvement goals.

I was sitting on the bed alone in my mother’s attic. My phone in hand. My heart pounding. The night before I’d been out with Lee. We stayed up late talking about races and adventures, and she showed me pictures from the Transylvania races. “They have a 50k..” she told me, as a possibility for me, though she was interested in the 100k.

We talked about how cool that would be and fantasized about what that trip would be like, but I was quite used to people who liked to talk about one day doing such things, and yet having no follow through when it came down to it - “oh, uh, sorry, but my great aunt’s best friend’s sister’s cat just died, so can’t this year after all.. ”

Despite that, I could barely fall asleep thinking about it when I got back home. I needed this. I made up my mind that I was going to do it regardless of what Lee or anyone else did. I clicked the confirm button, with my credit card information already entered. I screenshotted the confirmation, and texted it to Lee with the caption, “I’m going either way, but it would be more fun if you came along.” She responded, “Oh. Wow!!” and then, much to my surprise, sent a screenshot of her confirmation back within minutes, with a “let’s do it!”

I could still hear our friend Jessica Vandebush’s prying voice, “So you guys aren’t dating, aren’t interested in each other, but are going on vacation together??” she raised an investigative eyebrow at us. We genuinely thought we were being truthful. “What? Ew, no! We’re like ‘bro’ friends! No way!” we’d say. (She would go on to recap some of this in her speech at our wedding years later.)

When we had realized she was right, what to do about Transylvania was a hot topic for awhile. Could we go on such a trip now that we were dating?? By the time March of 2020 came along we were very much in love, exclusive, and knew we absolutely could go on the trip. In fact, we looked insanely forward to it, and planned out an entire itinerary together. By May, the month of the race, it was cancelled due to COVID. It rolled over to the following year, and cancelled again.

In 2022 and 2023 we didn’t have the heart to try for it. We were worn down by the disappointment, but finally, by 2024 we had some restored faith. I, of course, now with many 100 miler finishes under my belt, also registered for the 100k, instead of the 50k that I’d registered for in 2019.

The Bargain

A few days prior to leaving for Romania, Lee and I expressed our growing concerns to each other over the amount of unrecovered we were from Hellbender 100, a race we clearly underestimated when making the plan to do Hellbender and the Transylvania 100k two weeks apart.

Lee suggested that we just hike this one out together with the plan of just staying slightly ahead of cutoffs and enjoying the scenery. I very much liked that idea, given the circumstances, but did suggest we lay some ground rules, since the last time we ended up syncing up and staying together for most of a race, in Panama, we didn’t have any open communication about it, and ultimately it caused frustration, hurt feelings, and finally guilt.

Ultimately we agreed neither of us would have to DNF for the other, and if one of us felt like our finish was in jeopardy, we could and should leave the other. Otherwise we’d stay together.

Reflection

The day before the race, over dinner in Bran, we found ourselves in serious discussions about race stacking and our future with racing. Discussing how it was nothing short of idiotic to run Hellbender two weeks prior and how we impulsively keep doing this even though it does not serve us well and makes for some misery out on course (Forget the PR 50k a week before Cocodona 250. Fat Dog 120 three weeks before Swiss Peaks, etc.)

I tried to figure out where it came from. 100 milers, in many ways saved my life. I guess I’m afraid of losing that, but the change has already happened, along with its entire domino effect, and it can’t be taken away, Additionally, because of that change, my relationships with running and racing have changed, and I’m no longer in a place where this amount of racing is what is going to make me the healthiest or the happiest I could be.

Regardless, of our reasons, here we were, and we’d have to make the best of what was sure to be a difficult time on course.

No Sleep

Having a day shaved off of the front of our trip, due to the nature of air travel, didn’t just take away from the itinerary, it took away from our time to acclimate to the seven hour time difference. With a 5am start and 3:30am wake up time, we tried to go to bed around 9pm, which would have been 2pm at home.

Sleep didn’t come easy, and when it finally did we were woken up by fireworks a little after midnight (for a minute I thought we were back in Old Brooklyn, where every day is friggin Fourth of July, and we frequently play “was that a lone firework or gunshot?”)

After that, every dog in the valley was barking and howling (also very old Brooklyn-y), which didn’t help us with our sleep endeavors.

Then we were hungry.

Failing to fall back asleep, we ended up succumbing to our growling stomachs at 1:30am, getting up for snacks, our bodies accustomed to a hearty meal at this point in the circadian cycle.

I finally fell asleep at around 3, just in time to be sleeping soundly for my alarm to wake me up harshly at 3:30.

“I’m in no mood for it today” was the theme of that first hour awake.

Show Time

The race starts at Dracula’s castle, which is actually Bran castle, but it fits the geographic description in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and it’s suspected that Dracula was based on Vlad the Impaler, aka Vlad Dracula, a prominent historical figure of the region, so it’s gotten it’s nickname.

The Transylvanians have embraced the theme. There is no shortage of bat ‘merch’ in the area, and the race itself has adopted a bat logo, which was also on the race flagging.
From the castle, the race starts with a stretch of road, mostly uphill, that, in true vampiric form, the running field took off on like bats out of hell. Lee and I chuckled, about fifteen minutes in, when some blue flashing lights made us turn and we realized it was the trailing police escort for the runners was behind us. We were just about last for a bit.

Eventually we got to the woods and the climb steepened.

The first collection of climbs are the worst climbs of the race, which isn’t at all to say the other climbs aren’t awful.

If gentle switchbacks are your thing, you won’t find many here.

For hours we climbed. It was crowded single track and I know at times I pushed harder than I should have. The sound of someone else’s trekking poles about to go up my asshole tend to have that effect on me.

It was pretty early on that I told Lee I needed to sit. We were about 5000 ft up and the altitude was hitting me unusually hard unusually early, likely given the level of tired and unrecovered that I was starting with.

I had some salt, a tums, and a ginger candy, and we carried on.

Part of Why I Choose the Hole Over the Pole

We ended up, most certainly, in last place, having been passed by eager runners with trekking poles on the climb.

We often get picked at, especially across the pond, for not using trekking poles, but here’s the thing, next came the technical down, and no one with poles in any kind of proximity could hold a torch to us. Their efforts were, in fact, pitiful.

On the downhill we overtook many and were overtaken by no one. As we flew down the mountain, the contrast between us and the trekkies made me more conscious of my own methodology. I realized what a deeply sensory, particularly textile, experience it is for me as I surfed on my shoes and grabbed branch upon branch for stability, or even how brushing leaves and tall grass with my hands as I flew past them secured my balance and orientation.

When it comes to trail running this is my gift, and it’s something that you simply cannot develop or experience using trekking poles on the downs like most of the field was doing. The average person would blow their quads doing what we do anyway, but our training supports being able to do this, and there is no time in life that I ever feel more free or more integrated with nature. I’m not interested in assisted devices, just adaptation of my body, and most people (or should I say MEN, because it’s only ever men who tell rather than ask, about no poles) who have the audacity to negatively comment, end up leap frogging with me/us, or ultimately way behind.

The Chimney Climb

This descent lead to the first aid station. We were in and out, on our way to the next climb, which eventually revealed the infamous Chimney climb, and would take us up over 8000 ft.

I should mention the morning proved hot. Once the sun came up I rolled my running pants up to my knees, ditched my jacket, and continued to sweat in just a T-shirt.

I’d been unsure if I should start in pants or shorts, and ultimately had my shorts in my pack just in case. Multiple times I thought about ducking behind a tree and changing into them. Now though, we were so high there was snow and it was obvious it was just going to keep getting colder for a while.

When it came into view I recognized the chimney climb from pictures immediately.

In the distance we could see little black dots moving vertically up the snow between the rocks.. runners.. though I can assure you, none of them were running.

The race strongly recommended snow spikes, so we brought them, even though the weight of the mandatory gear in our packs was already overload.

I don’t think we actually thought we’d use the spikes. Wrong we were. The majority of runners put on snow spikes for this climb, and the ones who didn’t had even more difficulty than the rest of us in trying to step up rather than slide down.

The chimney climb was hard, but thrilling hard. It’s the kind of thing that makes you laugh, say, “this is insane!”, and appreciate that you can be out there partaking in such shenanigans.

It’s after the chimney climb, however, that things ramped up.

The Chase

At the next checkpoint (no aid, just a couple of volunteers who have hiked up the mountain to scan bibs and make sure you’re accounted for) a woman volunteer shouted in a thick accent, “You can do it! You can make it!” and that seemed strange so early on, but suddenly made sense when the man scanning us said, “5k to the next aid station and 50 minutes until cutoff.”

I will tell you something about Transylvania 100k - in many many parts of this race, 5k isn’t happening in 50 minutes. We, I realized, were chasing the cutoff.

The cutoff had not stuck out to us on paper as problematic or noteworthy because we wouldn’t have thought the first 14 miles would take anywhere near six hours, but now the “17 miles in seven hours” cutoff was closing in.

We pushed full force ahead anywhere it was runnable enough to do so. The thing was, unrecovered, middle and top gear were gone gone gone.

Even my fullest most exhausting level of exertion was taking me nowhere fast.

We made it to aid three minutes prior to the cutoff.

We grabbed what we could in a hurry, with no real time to tend to ourselves, and sped out. Once out of sight we began slowly walking.

We were both absolutely tanked from that level of exertion after so much climb, and now both calorie crashed since one does not exactly stop mid chimney climb to consume calories, it’s really a four limb effort to summit, and then we didn’t have time to put anything in during the last hour of impending doom.

With drooping eyes and heads, we stared at our feet as we slowly and pathetically moved them little by little up the next climb, which would be steeper than the last, and take us to the highest point of the course.

“I don’t have it in me to chase cutoffs all race”

“No, me either”

“I’ve done it, but it’s awful, and I just don’t have that kind of push or motivation today. I just don’t feel the need to endure that kind of misery just to prove myself anymore. Been there done that..”

“No, me either. I don’t have it in me this time.”I just don’t even care enough.”

The Highest (and Lowest) Point

We were only about 18 miles, and 7 hrs and 29 minutes into the race, but things suddenly felt like they were spiraling southward.

It didn’t help to look behind us and see just downhill some hikers, not in bibs, but holding bundles of yellow race flags. It was the course sweepers taking down the flags just after we passed them. We’d been the last of the 100k to make the cutoff.

We agreed we’d see what kind of buffer we had at the next aid station. That first cutoff was tighter than the 28 minute mile average needed to finish the race within the final cutoff, and the rest of the cutoffs were pretty much based on the average needed for the final cutoff, so it was reasonable to think we might still be okay.

We decided that when we got to it, we would only press on from the next aid station if we had enough time to properly hit our only allowed drop bag, and take care of ourselves.

If we only got there 5-10 before the cutoff, we would be done. With nothing to prove to anyone anymore, we just weren’t up for that kind of race.

We climbed bit by bit. Sadly, despite being calorie crashed, we hadn’t the time to get much at aid, and what we had on us wasn’t palatable. Usually, when moving slowly, I can eat bars, and so I brought a bunch of them, but I forgot that at altitude my stomach gets fickle and I have to treat it more like the late hours of a 100 in terms of what I can put in. We probably should have been force feeding ourselves, but we weren’t much.

As we got higher our spirits got lower, and then came the clouds and the wind. Then came the rain. Then came the stinging hail, relentlessly pelting us.

It would last for a long time to come. Soon I felt like I was running The Yukon Arctic Ultra and simultaneously decided I would NEVER run The Yukon Arctic Ultra.

It made the hailstorm on Mt. Mitchell during Hellbender seem like kid stuff.

We’d been heads down, hoods up, creeping one foot in front of the other through the storm, and I finally broke the silence.

“I’m sorry, but I’m dropping when we get to the top,” I yelled over the wind.

I could see Lee was as bad off as me, so I don’t know why I pre-empted the sentence with ‘I’m sorry’.

“I don’t know if they’ll let us drop there, I think it’s just volunteers that have hiked up to scan. No road access.. they might make us go down to the aid station to drop.”

I just wanted reprieve, but that aid station was at least ten miles away, and therefore possibly 3-4 hours away.

When we were nearing the top a cloud settled over us, we could only see a short distance ahead, the rain/hail/snow sleety combo continued to fall. We reached a path at the edge of the mountain that had been a product of hours of that precipitation - it was matted down ice snow, and if you slipped, you were going to have a hell of an interesting time ahead of you should you lived to tell the tale.

I took my bare hands and clawed them into the snow on the side of the mountain, hoping it would brace me enough that if my feet slid out from under me I could pull myself up and not slip down the side of the mountain. When I made it across the two volunteers were there clapping and saying “Bravo!” They scanned me.

Lee was right, there was no salvation here, just two men who had hiked up, and were in warm winter gear.

I suppose there was some salvation in the fact that after them, the descent began.

Lee and I were both bad off, shivering horribly.

Like at Hellbender, we did have additional layers, but were too cold to stop and get them out and there was no way to do so without soaking them in the process anyway.

Without thinking about it logically I let myself believe it would be these conditions all the way to aid, and if that were true, the situation would have been extremely problematic for both of us, but we found a little spot where the wind was blocked enough and the precipitation had stopped enough for us to get additional layers out of our bag without them getting too wet. I also found my gloves, which I had been too cold to even dig for earlier.

The descent had many icy slick snow patches, but the farther down we got, the fewer they were, and the more tolerable the temperature. With our discomfort slowly dissipating we were able to get some calories in and we began to perk up some. We started discussing what we’d do with the extra free day we’d now have since we were dropping and wouldn’t have to sleep off the race. We also had a whole plan for when we got back to the Airbnb - cranking up the heat, piling all of the available blankets on us, while drinking hot tea. That moment could not come soon enough, and yet it was so far away.

The fact that aid may still be 2-3 hours away felt unbearable.

I didn’t feel really upset or mad at myself. I didn’t feel like this reflected on me as a human or meant that my entire life needed to be overhauled because I was DNFing. Sure, I felt like I could make better decisions about race stacking, and that I needed to remember that races across the pond are a different beast than in the land of guns and high fructose corn syrup (‘Merica’!)

This was a fundamental change for me. An indication that I’ve grown as a human.

We continued down and the lower we got the higher the temperature continued to get, until finally we were too warm. We stopped and stripped off some layers.

The descent unexpectedly dropped us, in contrast to the rocky snowy mountains, down into a spectacularly beautiful pine forest. In the pine forrest, with warm rays of sun beating down on me through the trees, I suddenly felt like I was in a completely different race.

The forest looked like something out of a fantasy, and I half expected to see fairies flying by or gnomes running about.

Almost as good, we turned a bend, and there, on the trail, was a stunning fox, only a few feet away. The fox looked at us. It was unafraid, seemed to take a second to sum us up, determined we weren’t neither food nor threat, and scurried right past us. These are the moments we live for and we became ecstatic, spending the next mile talking about how incredible it had been, with more pep to our step.

We would also go on to see a brown bear, albeit a retreating one. So really an ass; we saw a brown bear’s ass, which is more exciting than no brown bear at all.

I had assumed that at this point, having resigned ourselves to dropping, that we’d miss the cutoff anyway, since we stopped trying to move with purpose, and once warm enough had resumed a lot of picture taking, but now that we both kept saying how incredible this was, it seemed worth checking out the math.

We realized the math should actually beyond work.. but what about weather? Given the weather we’ve had to slog through in the last several races, we weren’t sure either of us had nighttime mountain hail storms in us, especially at our unrecovered pace that was making it harder to push and keep warm.

Lee pulled out the elevation profile and pointed out that the worst climbs were done and that none of the remaining ones looked to go above the snow line.

Just like that, we were back in it.

When we got to aid it was warm and sunny. We hit our drop bags, did our foot care, caloried and caffeinated, and were on our way.

Cluj

Up the next mountain we met a dog I’ve retroactively named Cluj, after the Romanian city. She appeared out of nowhere and stuck with us for many miles, making them more enjoyable.

She often led us by about six feet, and obviously knew the race course, as she stayed on it even when it went off the trail.

At one point, in the night, we thought she left us. We didn’t see her while we had to go some round about way up a mountain with some pretty rugged hard-to run-on lumpy uneven grass with holes, but when we got to the top of the mountain, no joke, we were surprised to see she was there laying down on the trail seemingly waiting, as if she took a more comfortable shortcut up, but knew we’d be coming up that way. She joined us for some more miles after that.

Under Caloried, Under Salted

It was smooth sailing until the witching hours where I started to lose Lee to the sleepies. I couldn’t snap her out of it and her state declined throughout the night, she was at a zombie walk, and I kept nagging about caffeine and calories. I myself was force feeding less than ideal.

You could have all the experience in the world, but showing up for a race as hard as this one, in the condition we showed up in, there wasn’t going to be any level of pace or intake management that was going to have our bodies and stomachs feeling good.

I tried to remain empathetic, but after hours of massive slow down, I felt frustrated that I’ve worked so hard on conditioning myself to pickup pace in the night, and was now somewhat tethered. As we approached the 51 mile aid station, I tried yo gently suggest we use that stop to get it together. When we got there Lee threw herself on the floor to rest and I got us both some soup. “I’m putting salt in these I said.”

I accidentally spilled half of my little vial into her soup. It was about four times what I meant to shake in.

“Oh, shit. Sorry! Well, maybe it’s for the best” I said, handing it to her. Sure enough, despite how loaded it was, she could not taste the salt.

Overall, it’s her story to tell, but it certainly impacted a few hours of the race, and after that stop it still was a battle to get her right again.

The Ultimatum

On our way to the 56 mile aid station, I realized at 30-40 minute miles, on terrain that we should have been able to pull 18-28s on, we were losing our cutoff buffer. We had about 12 miles left, and on this course that could mean more than four hours, so when Lee hit the ground again, in a state I’d not seen since Panama, I had to push, asking what the plan was and being firm about the reality that we may still have five hours left, and she could not just not have calories for five hours. I had to delicately allude to our agreement, and ask her point blank if she could get it together enough to finish the race under the cutoffs. It was basically a “hey, get your shit together at this next and last aid station” conversation and holy crap did it work.

At aid she did what she needed to do, downing salt and Pepsi, and finally, shortly after, came back to life. I almost regretted it because from then on I had to push pretty damned hard to keep up with her, and my own calorie deficit was catching up with me.

“It’s All Down Hill From Here”

As it always seems to go, even though the elevation profile makes it look like it’s pretty much all downhill to the finish, that wasn’t the case. There were plenty of climbs, and much of the descent was so steep it was painful and not runnable, including a steep down covered in roots, with the only thing to grab onto being an electric fence running parallel. “Lovely!” we thought, seeing the slope and the caution sign.

I was starting to crash hard, especially trying to keep up with Lee. I realized it was going to get ugly if I didn’t put in one last round of galleries. As I gagged my bar down, the course, I suppose for good measure, gave my a good hard jab in the eye with a tree branch. One last hurrah (and minor corneal scratch) for me to remember it by!

After what felt like an eternity, we finally emerged from the woods, and in the distance, towering over the city, was Bran Castle.

I could not see the finish line, but knew it was at the foot.

Down the road, through a court yard, up some steep stone steps, because of course we couldn’t REALLY be done with climbing, and across the line. Another one done.

Post Race

I’m beat. It will be a long recovery from the Hellbender/Transylvania pairing, but what an incredible experience.

Today in Sibiu we stood at the entrance of an old tower.

“It looks like you’re allowed to just go up,” Lee said looking at the winding stone staircase.

We pondered it for a moment.

“That’s less tempting than it usually would be right now.. I have no idea why..” I said sarcastically.

“I, too, am finding it relatively easy to resist right now,” Lee replied, and instead we went and sat on a bench for a few minutes.

With 20 official 100 milers in the books, two unofficial 100s, a 250 miler, and now one 100k, I can honestly say despite being a 100k, this makes the top 3 hardest list. It also makes the top three most epic and friggin amazing. I’m so grateful to have done this. All the more grateful to have done it with my best friend/incredible wife (despite her damned witching hour sleepies). In hindsight, I am really glad we stuck it out to the bitter end and didn’t end up tapping out at the halfway.