It was a half marathon in a May that she can’t quite put a finger on, but Moosic’s Robin Mancinelli remembers vividly how the day ended.
She had signed up for a pace team for that first significant race and at the end of the 13.1-mile journey, the pacer of her group dropped a bombshell on the 53-year-old emergency room nurse.
“At the end, she told me I wasn’t a half-marathoner or a marathoner,” Mancinelli remembered.
Expecting to be told she just wasn’t cut out for running, her pacer told her she was cut out for ultramarathons, races that run much farther than your standard 26.2-mile marathon. Like 50- or 100-mile races.
“Everyone else is like, why do that?” Mancinelli said. ‘It put a seed in my head.”
From that first race – the JFK 50-miler in Boonsboro, Maryland – Mancinelli has fallen in love with going the extra miles, and will be using Sunday’s 19th annual Steamtown Marathon as a training run for her next 100-mile race, just like she did when she ran last weekend’s Wineglass Marathon in Corning, N.Y.
“I wanted to do 100 miles in a 24-hour race,” Mancinelli said. She’s come close, 100 miles in 24 hours, 31 minutes. So she figured that running back-to-back weekends will help her get in the extra mileage for next month’s race.
Unlike most of the runners in the 26.2-mile trek from Forest City to Courthouse Square in Scranton, this is just a warm-up for Mancinelli.
“A 50-miler is a lot easier than a marathon,” Mancinelli said. “And a 100-miler is lot easier than that.”
The added distance also thins the herd. While more than 2,700 are expected at the starting line for Steamtown, an ultramarathon might draw 200 to 400 competitors, and most know or recognize each other.
“You recognize same faces,” Mancinelli said. “I asked someone if you mind if we run together. We exchanged emails, phone numbers and started traveling together.”
Texas, Vermont, North Carolina, three of the states she’s been to, and while some Steamtown runners may pass the miles listening to their favorite tunes, there are no such luxuries for ultramarathoners. For safety reasons – narrow trails, generally – most races don’t allow iPods or similar electronic devices.
“You learn to talk to who you’re running with or be quiet in your own head,” Mancinelli said. “Talking makes the miles go faster. You do think about everything and nothing. It truly is fun.”
Like her job at Regional Hospital can do, ultramarathoning takes her outside a comfort zone.
In a recent race through New York City, Mancinelli was more concerned with the two-legged predators than the four-legged ones she might encounter while running in the wild and the dark.
Oh yes, the dark. Most ultramarathons start at 5 or 6 a.m., run through daylight, into another night and finish in the daylight of a second day.
“Half of it is run after dark,” Mancinelli said. “It’s physical, too. When I went to the Rocky Raccoon (100-mile trail run in Texas), it was three steps, hit a tree root, trip, fall.”
Repeat.
“After a while you just have to just keep getting up,” Mancinelli said. “If I don’t fall, it wasn’t a race. Not a little graceful fall, either.”
Usually, one of those body part-over-teacup falls that leaves Mancinelli bloodied in the knees and elbows. Not a deterrent to her.
“I’ve run in mud up to my hips,” Mancinelli said. “I went through four or five pair of shoes I threw out after the race.”
And extra shoes are always a necessity.
In her ultra box, are extra shoes – one pair a half-size larger and another a size larger, because that kind of pounding for 22 to 30 hours, will make your feet swell. Her prep kit also includes candy, three or four pair of new socks, gators to go over shoes and socks to keep out keep small pebbles, red licorice, greenleafs, trekking poles, spikes for the bottom of shoes for winter, Tylenol, Motrin, stomach medicines, wipes.
Carry it in a purse for a child at one time, it’s probably in the kit. And then some. Especially nourishment.
“The main problem for most people who don’t finish is not the training, it’s the nutrition,” Mancinelli said. “Some people hallucinate, some get nauseous. It’s hard when you are constantly moving like that – hiking up the hills, running or taking a running break – to have to keep eating. Or get dehydrated. I’ve been very lucky not having that issue.”
She’s finished every race she’s entered.
Being deserted mid-race? That’s another story.
After 70 miles in the Vermont race, competitors are allowed to have a pacer, a volunteer runner, join them for the final 30 miles.
“We get about three miles in and it’s a hike up,” Mancinelli explained. “He says, ‘my legs are tired and I’m really sore.’ I’m thinking that he’s not supposed to be telling me that.”
Three more miles and her companion takes a bathroom break. Mancinelli keeps moving so her muscles don’t tighten up, only to turn and see the headlamp from her pacer leaving her, lighting the trail in the opposite direction.
She keeps going.
“I get to the top of the knoll and here are the coyotes,” Mancinelli said. “You hear cracks in the woods and you’re thinking, ‘Oh my God. I’m going to die.’ I hear them howling, I trip and fall, trip and fall, and I’m bleeding. Great, now I’m bait.”
Alone in the woods of Vermont, surrounded by unseen wild animals, a worst nightmare coming true.
Think those 26.2 miles in Steamtown are daunting?
Not for Mancinelli. This is just a warm-up.
Contact the writer:
mmyers@timesshamrock.com @mmyersTT on Twitter
Originally Published:
