Bloodroot 50-miler - 2025

(Originally written for Facebook on May 11, 2025.)

For those who are unfamiliar with the beginning of my running journey, I came to this race in 2023 with hopes of running it as my first 50-miler. I got injured and with this being a tough course with a tight cutoff, it became my first DNF.

In 2024, a friend of mine ran the race and also received a DNF so Gabriela, Annie, and I started talking about running it together. As Gabby put it, the idea made it out of the group chat and we found ourselves signed up and training for the 2025 race. The idea itself is wild. The Bloodroot Ultras, and Ultras in general tend to be male-dominated, so finding two other women who wanted to attack such a brutal course with me was like striking gold. Annie and Gabriela, you both amaze and inspire me and I am so glad to have you in my life and I was so glad to race with you this weekend. Annie and I have the same coach, Adam, who also flew out and as luck would have it, my own athlete and amazing pacer from my first 100-miler, Josh, also ran the race with us, with special guest appearance by Dan Teabo, who I ran BSBU with back in March and had the pleasure of seeing on course.

We kept our eye on the forecast this week, and with a turn of events that seemed could only happen in a nightmare, there was a flood warning for the area advised on Thursday evening to last through Saturday night. Between Friday and Saturday, it was expected to rain 1.5 inches.

This course has 4 major ascents up mountains in Vermont in addition to 5 moderate ascents to total an elevation gain of 10,000+ ft over the course of 50 miles. Hard enough, right? Now the entire thing is covered in slippery mud and standing water and by Saturday morning, it was still raining.

I was thinking going into this that I was going to set out and absolutely crush things. I was angry after BSBU this year and wanted to finish a chapter that had been left open in my running story. With the rain and the added difficulty to the course, I truly no longer knew if I would be able to complete within the cutoff. The night before I was filled with nerves and some tears about how shot my confidence already was after my last race and what type of blow this one could deliver if I left with another DNF.

I talked with Luis Escobar the night before the race and told him about my DNF and how I was out to finish what I had started a couple of years ago. When I DNF’d, he had me cut my own wrist band off and that memory has stuck in my head since, contributing to the type of runner I’ve become. It taught me to push and not give up because when I give up on a race, it has a tendency to haunt me…loudly.

I started in the front of the line. Not because I was after a win (I truly just wanted to finish) but because I want women to have more representation in the front of the start line. Ladies, do it. Just start in the front. You deserve to be there.

Our initial run out was going really smooth. The first ten miles didn’t seem too difficult to navigate, and it wasn’t too muddy or wet by my standards. Then we hit the middle section of the 50k loop and it went downhill from there. I had my first fall, straight into a stream (yes, I loved it), followed by two more. When I finally got my footing and my handle on the mud and water, the enormous climbs started to get into my head. Training in Chicago provides no opportunity to simulate the type of climbs there are in Vermont. As I was staring up Bloodroot Mountain, I began to crumble emotionally. There were already some tough climbs but those climbs had nothing on this one.

One promise I had made to myself for this race is that I wouldn’t stop for even a moment. As soon as my foot hit the ground, I would begin the push off into my next step. No pause, no stop, just constant movement to get me where I needed to be and maintain my composure mentally.

I’m not sure how I remembered this in the moment with all the fear of the cutoff and the emotion I felt staring at the mountain that was about to destroy me, but Jasmin Paris had started chanting the names of people in her family to keep herself moving through the Barkley. So I tried it.

“Evelyn, Benji, Julie,” With each name, I took a step forward and started again, “Evelyn, Benji, Julie.”

I felt my feet fall into a rhythm and start pushing off the ground with more power and force as I began to climb. I kept my eyes just ahead of my feet, not looking at how much further I had to climb, “Evelyn, Benji, Julie,” and with each step, continued propelling myself to the top of Bloodroot Mountain.

When I finally reached the top, I felt a sense of relief as the descents began. But if you’ve run this race before, you know the descents are actually not a relief. They are just as difficult going down as they are going up. If you were to full-send down Bloodroot Mountain, you would fall hard and fast and probably not get up. After the difficult descent, we were right back in a cycle of hard climbs and hard descents, never ending for the duration of the first 50k loop.

It was around mile 18 that I stopped at an aid station and was told by the person checking me in that I was second in the 50-mile race. I kind of shrugged it off, imagining second woman, because I didn’t expect to hold the position and imagined there were tons of other men ahead as well, until he added, “and lead woman.” That was a bigger deal to me. I suddenly wanted to know how far up the first man was, how far behind the second woman was (I was running with her, it turns out, and she was a very skilled climber which scared the shit out of me), and what my chances were to overtake him and keep her at bay. I was not at all prepared to push the way I began to push after I found that out. There was no more rest, no more wasting time.

I began to run into the final stretch of the 50k loop and was clocking an 8:45 pace to put some distance between me and the second woman who was SIGNIFICANTLY better than me at climbs. I texted my coach on the way in that I was almost there. Both he and Randy quickly changed my shoes, fixed my pack, and sent me back out.

The first 10-mile loop wasn’t as steep as the 50k loop but with all the switchbacks, it felt slow. I maintained the same pace I did on the 50k loop but mentally I was checking out because it felt so close to the end but it was also so far. Half of the trails were actually running streams because of the recent rain and covered in mud from the 100-mile runners squashing the earth with their feet over and over again in the rain storm. I fell twice more this loop around these rocks. There were also 2 or 3 flooded streams that you had to completely submerge your feet to get through, but at this point, my feet had been wet for almost ten hours and I had given up on keeping them dry.

Coming in from that first ten mile loop, I got another shoe change, saw both Josh and Gabby in addition to Adam and Randy, and was told by both Adam and Josh to “drop the hammer”.

…at first I thought, “There’s no way, I have nothing left. How could they expect me to give more when I’ve already been through hell with this?”

But if they thought I had more, I probably did. If we are being realistic, I think very few of us realize what we are capable of doing, especially in moments that we are being tested.

So I dropped the hammer. Mostly to see if there was a hammer to drop. I still didn’t know. But what I found was that although my legs were tired from climbing, running was still easy. So I ran more on that final stretch than I did on the previous stretch, forgetting about navigating the streams and mud and just running straight through whatever mess was in front of me. In these moments, I didn’t care if I fell again but surprisingly I remained upright.

I had decided that for this loop I would race the sun. I wanted to finish the race before sundown, and while it went down a few minutes before I finished, I came in before last light, securing my 2nd place position overall and my position as 1st woman for this year. And yes, I was capable of running that loop faster than I did the first time.

It seems silly that I was worried about not making cut off, doesn’t it? But even as the winning woman for the day, I only made cutoff by less than two hours. The difficulty of this race is very real and each year it chews runners up and spits them out. I finally got my chance to do the same to the course. I wanted to rip it apart. As proud as I was of myself for my performance in 2023 despite my DNF, I was out for blood yesterday. I did not like thinking that there was a race out there that got the better of me.

This is one race where it was very cut and dry: The hard work I’ve put in over the past two years has paid off. On a perfect day (despite the foot nag) in 2023, this course ate me alive. Now, two years later, even the rain and mud couldn’t stop me from getting a finish.

As a fun side note, this was the first race Adam had trained me for. Being able to come back to the course with him a couple years later and not only finish, but win, was a very full-circle moment and a day that I won’t be forgetting any time soon.

Coming up to the finish line, I did miss Erik and start to cry a little. I know he would have liked to be at that finish line with me after seeing the DNF himself two years ago. And I owe him a lot of thanks as he has been patient with my post-BSBU identity crisis, hard training, and for holding down the fort while I went away for the weekend.

Major thank you again to my husband Erik, Adam for coaching me, Randy (and Josh) for crewing me, Gabriela and Annie for running with me, Luis Escobar for lighting that fire in 2023, and Andy and all the volunteers at Peak Races for all the support this weekend.

If you fall down, get back up and keep on running.