Our friend Adam Engst had this to say after running the 2003 Virgil Mountain Madness:

Trail races aren't like other races. That seems somehow overly obvious to those of us who run them, but it really is true, and no trail race this year has has brought this fact out so much as Virgil Mountain Madness. After all, Madness, as it's called more informally by those who have toyed with the insanity in the past, is roughly the same course as the Forest Frolic, though with some distance modifications. Frolic offers 7K and 15K races, where the 7K is merely the second loop of the 15K. Madness ups the ante to 30K, adding on to that second loop. And this year, Madness added a 12K for those of us who wouldn't consider racing 18+ miles. But where Frolic was mostly running fast in the woods (dogs notwithstanding for me), Madness was something different.

It all centered on the water. It's been a wet summer, in fact, a thoroughly sodden summer with isolated thunderstorms dashing across the state leaving ruined picnics and canceled baseball games in their wake. But Madness is no baseball game to be canceled because of a little rain, or had it happened, a torrential downpour. In reality, it rained only a little at the start of the race, although the woods provided after-the-fact rain whenever a breath of wind stirred the leaves into dripping on us. But the night before had clearly been more in the torrential downpour category.

I dressed for the occasion, foregoing my traditional High Noon jersey entirely, since I figured it would become soaked instantly and cling to my skin annoyingly the rest of the race. I also opted for my heavy trail shoes, hoping that their stability and traction would be welcome on trails made unpredictable by the rain. I was comforted in my choices by Tom Meyer, who had bought a pair of trail shoes the day before purely because of the promised soggy and slippery ground, and who ditched his shirt in agreement with my assessment of its utility. It's not like we were going to get sunburned.

As we lined up at the start, it became clear that the rain was having one extremely welcome effect - it had scared off many day-of-race registrants, particularly those fast people who always seem to show up from out of town to spoil the fun. There weren't that many pre-registrants either, perhaps due to many people not knowing about the new 12K course. It turned out that only 19 people ran the 12K, compared to 35 for the 30K (if you were to read the results, you might think the number was 36, but Derek Dean will have to explain the last "finisher").

So the gun went off, though I believe I use that phrase only metaphorically, and I dashed down the steep and rocky road that serves as the start for all of these races. In Frolic, I was well back from some of the leaders down that hill, in part because you need clear vision to see where to step, so this time I took the lead down the hill, turned left at the bottom, ran along the puddle-filled woods road briefly and then turned up the next rocky path.

There I received my first shock of the race. Normally, I'm a slightly fastidious runner, generally avoiding puddles and mud because I don't like getting dirty unnecessarily and because I've learned over the years that running with water-weighted shoes is just plain dumb if you can avoid it. But this thing I was running up wasn't a trail at all, it was a rivulet. Water was flowing down the trail! I'm not quite sure if you can hear the amazement in my voice, or imagine my surprise to see a trail I had run up several weeks before in a perfectly dry state, suddenly turn out to have actual current. I have never before had to think about whether I was running upstream or downstream, and if there was some advantage to one over the other, much as drafting is important in bicycle racing. The direction of current simply doesn't normally come up in running. Had I been hiking instead of running, I might have stopped to look for very small fish. Needless to say, all thoughts of staying clean and dry throughout the race vanished from my mind, and I instead began a strategy of hopping back and forth from bank to bank of this temporary creek, as I worked my way up the hill.

It was not an isolated occurrence. In areas where the terrain tended to the flat, the flowing stream was replaced by deep puddles that I had to skirt or risk soaking my shoes, making a run that one would not normally describe as straight ahead into one where an outside observer might wonder as to my sanity, given my apparent and uncontrollable dancing and bobbing through the woods. This is indeed Madness.

Then we hit the first stream crossing. In Frolic, crossing a stream is essentially an agility test, as I attempt to step only on the dry rocks that won't dump me into the water, all the while maintaining a fast forward pace. In Madness, there was nothing to do by say, "The hell with it," and blast straight through the water. The first stream was only a few inches deep, but that was more than enough for my sneakers to take on water that seemingly doubled their weight. I was increasingly glad I'd opted for the 12K race.

Having determined what the footing was likely to be for the next while, I turned my attention back to the competition briefly. I was still in the lead, but at some point where we were running up one of these small streams and thus making large splashing noises with each footfall, I was able to hear someone splashing along behind me. A quick glance at a turn in the trail assured me that it was Tom, and I knew he was running the 30K and planning to defend his title from the previous year, so I relaxed about the potential competition. My attention was going toward not stepping in some unexpectedly slippery spot, and not having to worry about running at full speed in those conditions (had such a thing been possible) was a load off my mind. As we climbed through the woods to the power line cut, Tom gradually faded back, as he should have given that he was running more than twice as far as I was.

The power line cut is a rough and rocky road used mainly by power company access vehicles, I suspect, and although it was festooned with massive puddles, they were easily avoided, and little of interest happened until I turned back into the woods at the next clearly marked turn. There I realized that, if I had had a topographical map, I could probably have seen how the watershed worked for Virgil Mountain, and a survey of the local plant species might have turned up some differences as well. On this side of the hill, there were no streams at all, and the trails had many fewer puddles. This may sound like an improvement, but in fact, it wasn't, since it meant more mud and more unexpectedly slippery spots. Until this point, I hadn't actually slipped at all, and I was being foolishly self-congratulatory about how I claim to have lots agility without much grace. I never actually did fall, leaving my self-image intact, but I lost footing several times on this stretch and came relatively close to crashing a few of those times.

Next up came the turn to where the Frolic 7K course had started, and the area of the trail I was the most familiar with. It was low, dark, and rooty, as it wound through a pine forest, and three or four minor stream crossings added to the difficulty, since it was just possible to clear them with a single bound, but the ground on the other side wasn't exactly a solid landing pad for such an effort. But I made it through without either tripping or missing a sharp turn and running into a tree, a not unlikely occurrence, and for a moment I was running in the clear along a wide and flat path next to a rushing stream. Scenic, yes, but also worrying, since I knew I was going to have to cross this stream in a moment.

In Frolic, this wide stream had presented a bit of an obstacle, since it was possible to get across without filling your shoes with water, but only just. This time there would be no escaping the soaking. The approach to the stream is tricky, with a sharp turn and step down in quick succession, and I stumbled slightly as I made the turn. Raising my head to evaluate the stream after recovering my balance, I was shocked to see how much water was flowing past. This wasn't a sleepy forest creek to splash through, this was a stream actively working on carving out the far bank to make room for next spring's runoff. I hesitated, perhaps even for several seconds, but even that time didn't reveal a course across that would be less wet, so I plunged through.

Okay, it probably wasn't waist deep, as I gleefully exaggerated at the finish line, but it was certainly in the general location of my knees at the point where I crossed, and water definitely made it to the vicinity of my waist, if you know what I mean. It was cold, which is actually a rather pleasant sensation in the middle of a summer trail race.

But through and out the other side I plunged, cursing the person who decided that a serious uphill should follow a stream crossing as my shoes spewed water with every heavy step. But here was where Madness seriously improved on Frolic. In Frolic, the stream crossing is the low point in the race, and there's a long, moderately steep uphill to a rock pile, at which point you feel like you've gotten to the top of the hill. You are, unfortunately, wrong, and the trail continues uphill for quite some distance afterwards, taxing both your muscles and your enthusiasm for spending what could have been a relaxing weekend morning running up a seemingly endless hill. But the Madness 12K course diverts to follow a new cutoff trail before you even start up the serious part of the hill to the rock pile, and although it's slightly uphill for a while, it's then slightly downhill all the way into the finish. In fact, the only problem with this cutoff is that the entire thing is on the side of this fairly steep hill, so you start to feel ever so slightly lopsided, and tall tales revolving around cows whose legs grow longer on one side start to seem increasingly realistic.

Eventually, though, I popped out on the road and ran the several hundred yards into the finish line for first place and a course record in 54:59. There's nothing like the first year of a race for guaranteeing a course record to the winner. As much as I'm relatively infrequently in that position, the field was fairly thin and it was nearly another seven minutes before the second place finisher came in, and more than another eight minutes before the third place runner crossed the line, with the first woman - Amy Rhodes - finishing shortly after that in 1:10:24. As it turned out, Tom's victory in the 30K was even less contested, to judge from the nearly 24 minute lead he had over the second place finisher when he won in 2:30:43, a full 43 seconds over his pre-race prediction of two-and-a-half hours. That's accuracy for you. Third place went to Becky Harmon, who was, I believe, the most prepared of any of us for the race conditions, to judge from the large canoe atop her car.

It is worth noting that the course was extremely well marked by race directors Dave Burbank and Gillian Sharp, and I never had the least hesitation about which way to go. Before the race, Lorrie (Marnell) Tily saw Boris Dzinovski, who has developed a bit of a reputation for getting lost in races, and asked if he was going to get lost again this race. "I am making progress," Boris replied in his Russian accent, making perhaps the understatement of the day, given his off-course turn at the rock pile to run the actual Frolic course, thus bringing him through the finish line not too much after me, and requiring that he run an extra four miles or so to get back on the course. He wasn't alone - four other people made the same mistake - lending emphasis to how trail races really are a different beast. You can't just head out there and assume you'll be able to find the course - some preparation and forethought goes a long way, as does asking at the start about any potentially tricky spots.

Overall, though, despite the psychiatrist bills, Madness was the most enjoyable trail race for me so far this year, and I'm not just saying that because I won. Any race where you're given pause to think about the competitive aspects of running upstream versus downstream is a race to remember.

cheers... -Adam