At the Whistlestop Marathon in northern Wisconsin , we had a great time without having great (running) times. We were both disappointed with our races. But it was a fun time. We’d recommend it to anyone. It’s a good area to visit this time of year. Just be careful with the race.
The trip’s a little pricey. You have to fly into Duluth , Minn. , (a tiny airport) and rent a car to take you to Ashland, Wis. That drive is about 75 miles. We found a cool little motel in Ashland – the River Rock Inn and Bait Shop. It’s a new place (2007) with a hunting/fishing lodge motif with some nice folks to help you in the bait shop/motel office. Some of the bait fish were surprisingly large, but then we saw all the photos on the bulletin board—fisherfolk proudly hanging onto or displaying gargantuan fish of various types. The whole area is geared to hunting and fishing. There are a lot of older, small, basic motels. And it seems like there’s a little bar every few blocks. That area has about as many bars as Myrtle Beach has pancake restaurants. Ashland also has some murals on its downtown buildings showing some of the local history and people from its past.
The fall colors were great this time of year – particularly birches and maples. We recommend going up on Thursday before the Saturday race. We took a little side trip to Bayfield (about a half hour from Ashland ) on Friday and then again on Sunday. It’s a nice drive through the countryside and a couple of small towns. One place near Bayfield was all decked out for Halloween with all of these funny hay-stuffed characters, some of them pulling a boat, others pushing a plow, peering out from trees, or sitting in an old farm wagon. Bayfield has a lot of shops and restaurants and a marina. We took a three-hour cruise on Lake Superior that takes you around islands that are part of a national park. That’s worth seeing, although we didn’t have a great day for it on Friday. It was rainy and cool that day. There’s a cool place to eat, especially brunch – Greunke’s First Street Inn (JFK Jr. stayed there in 1995) – and a great place for fudge (hey, we had to do some carb loading!) – Sweet Sailing, both on Rittenhouse Avenue.
Later Friday we went to the expo. It was rather small – took up about half of the local hockey rink. But we both found really nice souvenir shirts. And we saw the medals and the dark orange finishers jacket. That was rather nice and gave us something to look forward to. They had the typical pasta dinner (served up by the local scout troops, it seemed) that night there in the hockey rink, accompanied by a not-so-typical fish boil as well. We passed on the fish until Saturday night.
The race the next day was point to point, so we took one of the buses from the finish area up to the starting line. When we got there it looked like we were pulling into somebody’s private home, but it was a cabin lodge campground where they had the starting area set up. The weather had cleared up and was about 45 degrees or so at the start (the high that day was 69). They said it was much colder last year with a little bit of snow. The half-marathon started at the halfway point. About 900 or so registered and 754 finished the marathon.
Almost the entire marathon is on a rails-to-trails trail, except for the first mile and a half on a country road and the last mile or so in a city park. It’s mostly flat and even downhill between miles 8 and 22. Parts of it are rather soft, with even some sandy sections. There were also a few log bridges along the way. We were disappointed that we didn’t see any cows wearing bells, which we were expecting. But we did see a few horses.
Now, since our race experiences varied some, we’ll each briefly tell what happened…
Jack: I started out too fast. It’s easy to do because there are no hills to slow you down. I knew I should be slowing down, but it felt good to go faster. I was surprised by the number of spectators who were out along the trail. It wasn’t a huge crowd but more than I expected. By the halfway point, I was about seven minutes ahead of my goal pace (1:46, compared with about 1:53 pace to hit a 3:45 marathon). Before the race I had hoped to run a 1:50 first half and 1:55 second half. I was doing great until mile 18 or 19 when I started getting twinges in my calves. They really started getting bad a couple of miles later. By mile 21, 3:45 was out of reach. Then I was just hoping to break 4 hours again. With less than a mile left, some guy told me: “you’re about there; you can break 4.” That was enough to give me that last little push to come in at 3:59:31. Disappointing certainly, but just a minute off of my PR. I’ll do better next year.
Carolyn: After having a brief scare late summer about whether or not I had a stress fracture in my hip (I didn’t, it was literally just a pain in the butt that required some massage & physical therapy) I was happy to be able to run the marathon. I decided to start slower and hydrate better this year, to avoid the stomach cramps I’d gotten the two previous years. As the race started, it was nice and cool and the fall colors were beautiful. Things looked good! But the ground was softer than I expected—softer than the ATT or Umstead trails, and I was surprised to find myself running on sand some of the time. I found I was able to maintain the pace I wanted, though. And I remembered to drink—I was actually proud of myself for needing to make a pit stop—that was a first. Then, as I reached mile 12, my hamstrings started whining a bit—way earlier than they should have been! I tried the trick mentioned in Runners World a couple of months ago—imagining I put the pain in a drawer and slamming it shut. Slam! Slam! By mile 14 the imaginary drawer kept popping open, and I had to walk some extra time and loosen up my hamstrings a bit. Then I switched to shorter intervals and continued on, but knew my pace had slowed. Couldn’t figure out why my hamstrings were bothering me so soon, but my best guess is that the soft surface, especially in the first half of the race, had fatigued them faster. Rats! Well, a few miles later it became increasingly clear that the goal would just have to be to finish—a PR was not meant to be this year. But hey, no stomach cramps! So it wasn’t all bad. You can still maintain a sense of humor and have fun talking to people when your legs are screaming, unlike stomach cramps. So, I got to know other back-of-the-pack-ers, several of whom liked the interval walk/run idea and admired my gaiters (saved me from getting rocks in my shoes!). As I neared mile 20, I suddenly remembered that I had a packet of Biofreeze. Yahoo! That should feel good on my hamstrings. Then I realized I’d never put it back in my waterbelt after going through airport security with it in my gel/liquids bag. Argh. Dark moment. The last couple miles, I felt a bit nauseous and was surprised to see waterstop volunteers offering cookies and marshmellows.. Me interacting with a marshmellow at that point would not have been pretty, so I passed. Anyway, I lurched on, obeying my interval watch in my hollering hamstring, nausea, declining brain function haze, when suddenly some man told me not to walk, that I was almost finished and I should keep running. Whew! I careened across the finish line, happy to be done, but soon discovered that it was pretty darn painful to sit down!
That evening we went to a lakeside restaurant and sampled some of the local fish. The bait shop guy recommended the walleye and the trout, and they were both tasty. Later there was a brews and blues festival. Dozens of local brewers had samples, and they gave you a good amount unless you told them otherwise. Some of them were rather good, and some had names that were fun (Bitter Woman, Spotted Cow, and Moose Drool, to name a few.). The bands were good, too. One actually played some blues songs; the other was basically a dance band. It was a fun way to cap off the festivities. And Carolyn is convinced it must be all that beer that kept her muscles relaxed and prevented her from waking up a hamstrung invalid!
To sum up, we had a good time and learned a couple new lessons: 1) for running on gravel, gaiters are a good investment (ours cost all of $15); 2) a flat and downhill course sounds easy, but it’s a good idea to do some long runs on soft trails in preparation (maybe even the beach!); and 3) resist the temptation to start too fast! (Hey, maybe that’s not a new one…).
