Canadian Death Race spectator report, from afar

I promise you'll get a nice, juicy race report from Jeremy in a few days, but in the meantime, I'll give you my report of following his progress on the Canadian Death Race from afar.

The red stuff is an elevation profile of the race.

The CDR is a 125km ultramarathon in the Canadian Rockies. Over the course of the 125km, there are 15 check-in points. At these points, the runners' names and times are relayed by radio (?) to race HQ. This info is then dumped online for us friends and family members to nervously sift through. It's all very low-tech, but it at least tells us who has made it how far along the course. If someone's name doesn't appear, it might mean they dropped out, or that they're way behind schedule and if you just keep refreshing the page every minute, they'll show up...eventually.

In addition, the CDR has several cutoff times for certain points on the course. If you don't pass through that point before the cutoff time, you're out. There is an overall cutoff time of 24 hours for the finish line. This is fairly standard ultramarathon stuff - at the Chiemgauer 100km in Germany last year, Jeremy missed the last cutoff and ended up completing "only" 80km of the race. So it happens.

I started tracking Jeremy (and racing buddy James) first thing Saturday morning. It was so great to see them come through the first checkpoint. And by "see them come through," I mean that I pressed refresh on the results page and their names and times popped up right next to each other.

Results page excerpt

At one point after about five hours, however, James showed up and Jeremy was nowhere in sight. Numbers are great for facts, but they don't tell the story at all - was Jeremy struggling? Was James just feeling stronger? Had Jeremy quit the race? Was he injured? There was no way to know. I just had to keep checking and hope that Jeremy's name showed up soon. And it did, a little over an hour after James. So he was still in the race.

From then on, Jeremy was getting closer and closer to the cutoff times. After a long day of tracking him (and getting to know the runners' names who were around his same time - when their names popped up, I knew to start expecting his name), my brother Blair and I were obsessing over a spreadsheet he had made to project finish times. At 1am, it looked like Jeremy would not be able to make the finish line before 24 hours were up. Then Blair went to bed. At 2am, Jeremy was still making cutoff times, but it seemed impossible that he would be able to finish in time. I went to bed sad and worried.

I woke up a few times during the night to keep checking the results. Things turned around at about 5am when my calculations told me that if he could run 13km in two hours, he miiiiiight be able to pull off a finish juuuuuust within 24 hours. (Note: I know 13km in two hours is not fast, but this is not a track he was running on. It was mountainous terrain and included crossing a river. Earlier in the race, he had been running around 5km per hour, so 13km in two hours was going to be a stretch.)

When I woke up for the day, he had finished!!!!!! With 21 minutes to spare before the 24-hour deadline. I looked at the numbers again and again and tried to piece together what had happened. I was going crazy thinking of all the possibilities.

Later in the afternoon, I got a brief email from Jeremy shedding some light on those lists of numbers and names: he'd been pulled out of the race at a checkpoint fairly early on because he was doing poorly (high heart rate, bad color, shaking, etc.) and a medic wanted to observe him. After an hour, he was let back in the race to resume running. Soon after, he had to sprint to make a cutoff time and did so with only seconds to spare.

He said there is lots more to tell, and I can't wait to hear it tomorrow when he gets home! It was so stressful "watching" him race with only time stamps to go by - and not even knowing when or if those time stamps would appear. This is a very difficult race (obviously, with a name like that). According to the results, only 121 out of 326 solo runners finished the race. That means that more than half of the runners either dropped out, or were pulled off the course due to missing cutoff times. It's amazing that Jeremy was one of the 121!