Rocket City Runner: A Rough Dizzy 50K and My Hopes for Becoming the Hulk are Dashed

The Dizzy Fifties 50K 2017

A New Course

I will get to the Hulk story in a bit, but I will start with my history at the Dizzy 50's. I've toed the line at this race five times before, and one year I did the 40 mile option, along with Suzanne Erickson. I was training for something, I guess. Anyway, over time, things changed and Ryan Chaffin has taken over as Race Director and along with that, he laid out a new course. I'm going to say it is much more difficult than the old course, simply because I clocked a terrible time on this course - 7:39:37.

Before the race, I was feeling pretty good about the race, because I had dusted off my old Youngren training plan from the Graveyard 100 in 2015, and re-purposed it for the Lake Martin 100, which I'm going to be running in March. I was well into training, putting up a 60 mile week before Dizzy, and running another 60 mile week with the inclusion of Dizzy.

However, my mistake was that I had run most of the miles on the road, with very little trail running at this point.

Once again, as part of my overall training for Lake Martin, I had signed up for the Huntsville Track Club's Grand Slam. The Grand Slam consists of completing the Dizzy 50K, the Rocket City Marathon, Recover from the Holidays 50K, and a little ol' run on Monte Sano called the Mountain Mist 50K. All of these races take place in roughly a 10 week span of time.

(A picture of this year's Grand Slammers, before the start of Dizzy)

(Tim Pitt getting dialed in before the race.)

Let's Start the Race

Ryan Chaffin gave a few pre-race announcements, pointing out the layout of the course, which only served to confuse me. Anyway the race started with a shout of go, followed by a late air horn blast, by James Hurley, which was pretty funny and good for a laugh as things got rolling.

The course consists of a north loop, which is pretty technical, followed by a south loop which is less technical, but it's where I like to fall - a lot, just to spring me back into the moment. There's nothing like falling on a gravel road to make you feel like a true trail runner.

(This is a picture coming up a climb on the South Loop. I look deranged.)

(A couple more pics.)

The Loops Keep Coming

The Dizzy consists of three full loops that are approximately 10.5 miles. As I came through my second loop, I see my friend, Cary Long sitting down in the pavilion. He said two loops were all he was doing today. Cary had come off the Barkley Fall Classic, and had not been doing a lot of running since. I felt his pain, but I decided to keep pushing for the finish, even if it would mainly consist of the "Shar Shuffle" - a horrible name that has been given to me due to a few slow finishes, when I fake running by simply swinging my arms, and kind of shuffling.

However, I think we will have to call two loops at the Dizzy -- the Fun Run.

(Cary Long before his Fun Run)

Now the Story of the Incredible Hulk

I was on my last loop at Dizzy when I see Collen Wilson-Hodge catching up with me. Her husband Andy had already witnessed at least two of my spectacular falls -- but I digress. With Collen closing in on me, I knew I had a great opportunity to find out if I could get hit with enough gamma rays, could I become the Incredible Hulk -- which would be really cool.

Collen is a NASA scientist, and the Principal Investigator (or PI as those of us in the community call it), on the Fermi Gamma Burst Monitor.

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Collen:

"When we built GBM and launched it on Fermi in 2008, we designed it to detect gamma-ray bursts well," said Wilson-Hodge. "Back then, it was only slated to fly for five years. Today, GBM is at the forefront of an entirely new type of science, ushering in this new era of multi-messenger astronomy."

Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the cosmos. Since beginning operations, GBM has triggered on over 2,000 gamma-ray bursts. With 14 detectors pointed in different directions, GBM sees the entire sky not blocked by Earth. It's sensitive to X-rays and gamma rays with energies between 8,000 and 40 million electron volts (eV). For comparison, the energy of visible light ranges between about 2 and 3 eV."

So, I asked Collen, if I could get hit with that level of Gamma radiation, could I become the Hulk?!?

As, she passed me, she said, "No, you would die."