Back in May, Kelly and I signed up to run our first race in Romania. If it had just been a 5k on the road, I for sure wouldn't be writing about it on the blog, but it was a 15k in the mountains that starts at 10pm. The "Iorgovanu Night Run." The only rule for the race is that you bring a headlamp. A bit more exciting than usual.
As soon as we signed up we knew we needed to really begin training RIGHT THEN because we'd been on part of the race's course before and it's rough terrain. I got the chance to hike the route with some kids from our church a few weeks before the race. You begin with 3k going slightly downhill on a road, after which you take a left into the woods and the uphill begins. It gradually gets steeper and steeper for the next 3k until you reach a shepherd's hut with a very friendly water spigot. There's still 1.5k of uphill after the hut (in which you climb about 1000 ft), until you finally arrive at Drăgșanu Plateau and it's flat for a kilometer. The 2k after that is where it begins to get really tricky--it's an uneven, rocky area of unclearly marked trail that goes over around 2 small peaks, the higher one being 1988m tall (you start at 1100m above sea level). After these peaks, you arrive at Piatra Iorgovanului (Iorgovanu's Rock), the race's namesake. As the legend goes, Iovan Iorgovanu was a Robin Hood sort of character in this area who slashed the rock into jagged valleys to create a better setting in which to fight a monster that had been terrorizing the shepherds. After the rock, it's 4k down to the finish line in which you have to descend all 3000ft you climbed at the beginning, the first half being through sharp rocks and the second half on a delightfully soft forest trail.
Atop Piatra Iorgovanului during our test hike...
The 15k hike took us about 7 1/2 hours to complete with the kids and a thunderstorm got pretty close to us while we were in the open space around the peaks. Like, there was lightning striking the other side of the mountains from where we were. Kelly had said that she was okay with me not sticking with her the whole time, but when we were descending, I got scared that something bad would happen while we were running down a mountain over sharp, possibly wet and slippery rocks at night. I told the kids later that day that I had been feeling good about this race until this hike when I remembered that I need to respect the mountain and be a little afraid of it.
Two weeks before the race, Kelly and I did a test hike, and we had a GREAT time. When it's not pouring and thundering, the trail is comfortably challenging and the area is beautiful. Sometimes you can see mountain goats running around on the rocks, and there's usually a herd of horses running around somewhere. We did the route in 4 1/2 hours walking, which made us feel better about the race's 5 hour time limit. Kelly told me I could run as fast as I wanted, though there's a part on the descent that takes you about 10ft away from a 100ft drop down. She told me to slow down there. I said yes.
The day of the race, we made sure to take naps, and headed to the park at 7. We would camp by a lodge in Câmpușel (the little field) that night after running. We set up the tent and then went to the technical meeting at 9. The race director, Laurențiu, went through the course with us on a map and showed us where all the food and other control points would be. The course was marked by reflective tape placed every 20m along the trail and by big, pulsing lights from runways at all the peaks and control points. He told us to be careful, use common sense, and have a great time.
At 9:50, we were at the start line, marked by a row of torches. And then the music got really loud. And then we were counting down from zece to unu. And then we ran.
The start and finish are flanked by torches...
Now, I don't want to brag, but Kelly and I ran really smart. I remember from high school cross country races everyone running the first few hundred meters with extra bravado and me passing lots of them in the next hundred meters. At the Iorgovanu Night Run, apparently the thing is to run fast while you're on the road. I'm pretty sure that when I looked behind me after 10 minutes I saw the last people in the race and almost everyone else was ahead of us. We were confused and wondering if we'd gotten ourselves into really tough competition, but we knew that if we had to do that whole route, we weren't going to run any faster for the moment.
Once we turned into the woods, Kelly let me go as fast as I wanted. I gave her a kiss and ran. And passed most of the people in the race somehow. It got to the point where it was impossible to run the whole time, so we'd go back and forth from walking up the steep parts and then running the flat parts. And then there were no more flat parts. And then it kept getting steeper. I was behind a guy with hiking poles wearing a red long sleeve and black tights (that's how I identified people since if you try to look someone in the face you blind them).
We arrived to the shepherd's hut 46 minutes in. I was starting to feel my shoes rubbing on my heels, but I was quickly distracted by the water, chocolate, peaches, and mountain blueberries. And then it started to rain. The guy I was running with said something akin to "Screw it" and we both started going again. Definitely not running. When the trail was gentle enough to run on, we would, but it was mostly steep and rocky. Fortunately, it stopped raining. Our friend and college, Ile, was at the checkpoint at the Drăgșanu Plateau, so I yelled to her as I neared the flatness. Everyone yelled back. I got to them and pulled out my band-aids to put on my blisters. Ile gave me more band-aids and asked what I'd done with Kelly. She was pretty sure Kelly was going to be first out of the women.
I left Ile and began to tackle the plateau. It's a wide, grassy area between a few gentle peaks with a shepherd's hut to the right. During daytime the donkeys usually bray at you. They must have been sleeping this time. We were going along great until we entered the cloud that was covering the next 5k of the course. By this point, another guy with hiking sticks, a red long sleeve and black tights had joined us, so we worked together to find the trail. Whenever one of us saw the next strip of reflective tape, we'd call out and run on. There were a few times that we had to split up and look for it, and then hurry to catch up to the guy who'd found it. We were so willing to not lose each other in the fog, but we weren't really waiting around for each other either. Sometimes we could see the painted trail markers, but the trail wasn't obvious in this section at all, and there were plenty of rocks to be careful around. I was tense, but it all went by quickly since my attention was on not falling over or getting lost.
Once we got onto the trail that leads up to Piatra Iorgovanului, I felt great, and awful. I finally knew where I was and was sure that I wouldn't get lost, but I began to realize how tired my body actually was. Every step I had to take up made the insides of my thighs start to cramp up and it made my shoes rub on my blistered heels even more. They guys at the checkpoint were yelling pretty loudly for us to keep going, so I only had a little bit of water and blueberries before I began the descent.
There were two guys in front of me (my red-shirted friends had pulled away and fallen back) who were going a little slower than I wanted, but I figured I shouldn't rush. It had begun to rain again, and there are so many rocks to go over on the way down. I remembered Kelly's request about the edge. I was grabbing on to the scrub bushes to stay upright as we scrambled down. At one point I heard someone or something behind me, so I stopped to look, and there was a big sheep dog patiently following us down. Welcome to Retezat National Park. I passed the guys and tried to be even more careful. I was getting worried because it seemed like the rain was part of a thunderstorm that was getting closer to me from behind, which meant that it had probably already hit the people who were on the flat part. The lightning was bright enough to light up the area like daytime and the rain was making me worry that my headlamp would go out.
Every time that I had to lift my leg to run over a rock, it was in serious danger of cramping. I've never been in a situation where my body hurt so much but my breathing was so steady. Also, I've never been in a situation where running faster would actually help me escape a real danger. The lightening didn't make me instinctively duck anymore once I entered the woods, but it was steadily raining harder and harder. The last bit of the trail down to the field across from the finish line might actually be the steepest part of the whole course, but finally, I was running flat again. All I had to do was cross a creek and the road, and I was done. The torches had all been doused by the rain, but there were plenty of people cheering me on as I finished. This is me giving five to Laurențiu while he's asking me if I'm alright. I was.
Done done done.
The only thing I knew after I got my MEDAL (!) was that I needed to eat. Bananas. Blueberries. Apples. Peaches. Purple juice that probably had extra electrolytes or something useful to make up for the weird taste. Then all I knew was that I needed to take off my shoes. I got back to our tent and it started pouring. I got into rain gear and flip flops and limped back to the finish line to wait for Kelly.
So now it's my turn... this is Kelly writing now. At the risk of this becoming the Longest Blog Post Ever, we figured we might as well both tell our stories of Iorgovanu in one fell swoop. As Jack said, he finished the run in spectacular fashion, crossing the finish line in 8th place in only a little over two hours. I, on the other hand, was still somewhere up the mountain... and the rain was beginning to fall harder.
Jack and I had started the race together, and when we entered the woods and began climbing, he pulled away. Within the first few miles of the climb I had also passed many of the participants, and when we reached the shepherd's hut someone saw me and announced, "Prima domnișoara!" (First girl!) I was a little astonished, and knew that I hadn't left the other women far behind, so with a small group of other runners (a middle-aged guy from Lupeni and a guy my age with a reflective stripe on the back of both ankles... that was the only way I had of identifying him), we entered the last -- and hardest -- stage of the uphill. When we got to the checkpoint where Jack had needed bandaids, our friend Ile threw some to me too. Again the cry of "priiiiimaaa domnișooooara!" came from the group of Salvamont, which made me smile and laugh in surprise -- like, all I wanted was to finish this race without falling off a cliff or breaking an ankle. (Those of you who know me well may know that I have the tendency to trip while running...) By this time it had started to rain, and with the victory of finishing the hardest half of the race behind me, I couldn't help but grin. "I'm doing it!" I thought, as lightning lit up the sky above me. "I'm a mountain runner! (What a surprise!) This is so sweet!"
The trail levels out, sort-of, and winds its way confusingly around and across a series of peaks and rocky terrain before you begin the steep descent of the last 3-4 kilometers, and that's where the fog rolled in. Though the trail had been marked with reflective tape every 20 meters or so, there came a point where I was running alone and couldn't see far enough for my headlamp to catch the next flag. At one point I got so disoriented that I spent a good 10 minutes searching for the next flag, moving back and forth from the last known point in various directions, searching, eventually giving up and waiting for other runners to catch up so I wouldn't be alone. I don't know a whole lot about mountain survival situations (I know now that it's next on my to-do list of things to learn), but I did know that I needed to not panic, not waste too much energy or get too cold, and not leave the trail. Eventually a group came by and picked me up, but they weren't very good at sticking together... so it helped a little bit to be with other people, but not much, as they were all yelling in Romanian which was muffled by the wind, and none of us knew where the trail had disappeared to. As the wind and rain picked up, and the lightning and thunder got closer and closer, I started to realize that this competition was quickly progressing into something more dangerous than I had hoped for. With the race going so well and being the "prima domnișoara" well past the halfway point, I had started to get competitive, feeling excited about my chance to run well, even win for the women! But after 30 minutes passed of stop-start running and pausing, shivering and stumbling, blind wandering in sodden clothes across a wind-swept mountain peak, I decided that the competition phase of this event was over for me. It was just time to get down the mountain.
Eventually a ponytailed guy from Lupeni named Ionut offered me one of his hiking poles to keep me from blowing over in the wind (it had happened... plus, my loose shoelace had caught on a root and tripped me flat on my face... so I think he took pity on me). Then finally, the group we were with found the trail (and figured out which way we needed to take it, after heading the wrong direction for at least 5 minutes). That group splintered as we reached Iorgovanu itself, some of us stopping for much-needed energy-replacing snacks and others booking it off to the descent. (In a moment of wifely panic, I paused to ask the organizer if Jack's bib number had come through yet -- and as I looked over his shoulder at the rain-soaked list, I saw he'd come through in eighth!) Energized, Ionut and I took off in our sopping wet shoes, squelching our way down the mountain, wincing as hail hit our necks. The lightning was so bright that it would illuminate the entire mountain, suddenly exposing exactly where we were on the trail -- a part I was more familiar with after Jack and my day hike a few weeks earlier. Although we couldn't help but duck at the lightning, and could hardly hear each other for the pounding of the wind and the rain, I did hear Ionut offer a joke as he waited for me to climb over a downed tree -- "Well, at least if we die out here, we won't die alone!" Somehow it was comforting, maybe since it didn't seem like such an impossibility anymore.
The last half mile of the race was like a dream. The trail through the woods was so slick with mud that we were half-running, half-sliding down the steep incline, and when it finally emptied us out into the field at Campusel, I tripped and fell flat in my face in the grass (yes, again), unable to stop my momentum and adjust to the sudden no-more-downhill. But I bounced back up and sprinted off, through the Jiu River which was now a gushing torrent from the heavy rain, and crossed the road to finish, grinning. The rain hadn't stopped, and it was windy and cold, so most of the spectators were huddled in cars or tents rather than cheering at the finish line -- but I heard Jack's shout of "yeah, Kelly!" and then it was over.
In the end, I finished in a little over three hours. In the confusion of the fog and storm atop the mountain, I got passed by many groups (my lesson learned is to find a race buddy who knows the trail, and stick with them no matter what!), so I didn't place or finish in the time I could have. But as we slept that night in our tent in Campusel, listening to the wind howl and the rain pour, I couldn't help but smile, even as my sore muscles made me wince. And in the morning after, when we drove back to Lupeni and saw the many trees down across the road, I couldn't help but feel anything but grateful -- grateful for the fun experience, grateful that we made it, and grateful for the story.
And already excited for next year.
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