West Virginia Mountain Trail Runners

I’m not doing anything stupid in 2008. I’m leaving the stupidity up to my cuzins Randy and Bill, but . . . .

Terrapin Mountain turned out to be a beast. Similar to Promise Land as the race headquarters was in an idyllic setting at the base of Terrapin Mountain. You have one mile on the road, then onto a gravel road (up) which peters out into a nasty, rocky, trail. That sucker winds it’s way straight up for 4 miles and dumps you out right in front of the Camping Gap aid station or the second aid station of the infamous Hellgate course, except it’s daytime and you notice the shadow of Terrapin Mountain hanging over you like a dark cloud.

From Camping Gap, you follow the Hellgate course over to the Glenwood Horse Trail and then run the horse trail all the way around and UPHILL to Onion Mountain. Yes, the same course as Promise Land, but only BACKWARDS! We went up and over Onion Mountain and down to Overstreet Falls (the first AS of Promise Land). From there we turned around and headed back.  Running the horse trail backwards up to Onion Mountain was difficult, but having to run that 6.1 mile section a second time was mentally challenging because I knew we had not come close to meeting the 7,800 feet of advertised climbing and did I mention that the summit of Terrapin Mountain loomed in the distance?

Once you get back to Camping Gap, you basically run smack dab into a wall and that wall is called Terrapin Mountain. This is where the fun began. It was a rock scramble up to the summit of Terrapin and I was getting really upset at this point, but about half way up there is an overlook and the cars on the Blue Ridge Parkway looked like ants and I could almost see to China so my mood improved slightly and I kept climbing. At the summit there was a book (see pictures). The book precariously hung on the edge of a rock cliff (Think Barkley Marathons). You had to scale out on the cliff and tear a page out of this book. This was pretty cool especially because you could see the horse trail off to the south and knew others were still on the trail suffering, but then you had the down hill…

Descending Terrapin was steep, rocky and long, but I didn’t mind that too much. The trail took us through Fat Man’s Misery and the Devil’s Marble Yard. At the bottom of the mountain, I thought we were close to the finish, but Horton Junior (aka C. Zealand) had other plans. We got to the bottom of the mountain and there was a 90 degree right hand turn but instead of taking that, we had to run and additional 1 mile down hill to the aid station then hike back up to the turn. This is where the race got nuts. According to one of those wrist GPS units similiar to the one Lehmann and Young wear, the course measured 29.6 miles and I’m not sure why we had to run that additional mile down to the aid station other than it would have been a pain in the back for the aid workers to have to haul up the supplies to the turn, but boy it sure took the wind out of my sails.

There was 5 miles to the finish and we were on this jeep trail that kept winding around the mountain and UP! Think second part of Hellgate. I was getting really upset. This went on FOREVER! I ran the entire race with the women’s winner Jenny Anderson. We were back and forth and never more than 100 yards apart for the entire race. She had on an IPOD and I thought about wearing mine for but didn’t and I was kicking myself for not having the distraction. Maybe I could have tuned in to NPR and listened to Car Talk to help brighten my mood, but alas I was alone with no one to talk to. On a good note, I found one of Jenny’s book pages that she had dropped on the trail and she was very thankful for that. Jenny and I ran together until the last mile where we met up with Lew McGrath and whatever mood I’m in at the moment, Lew seems to make it better so we finsihed the last mile hand in hand. After the celebratory congatulations, I walked right over to my tent, crawed into my sleep bag and took a nice long nap as a cool breeze buffeted my tent and the sun beemed against my sleeping bag. Boy was that a nice nap.

Summary: Terrapin has the same elevation gain/loss as Promise Land with 2x’s more technical trail and 2-3 miles shorter. All in all, the most difficult “marathon” I’ve ever run. Horton Junior did a great job in organizing this event. Top notch aid stations and very cool schwag. Congratulations Clark.

Pictures of Summit: http://www.shutterfly.com/progal/slideshow.jsp?auto=0&aid=768a5498cf42e0835f66&idx=312

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