Katy Trail FKT

 

The calm before the stupid.

The conversation went something like this…

Chris: "So I'm thinking of finally running the Katy Trail."

Mom: "Oh, I've always wanted to bike it. I could do it with you!"

Chris: "I plan to run over 100 miles per day and not stop to sleep…"

Mom: "I think I could do that."

 

This is the woman who's idea of no-nonsense parenting could be summed up with the following catch phrases: "quit your bitchin", "tough shit", and, my personal favorite, "life's a bitch and then you die." Yeah, I think she's got what it takes to bike 238 miles non-stop without sleep!

 

The Katy Trail is one of the premier rail-to-trail projects in the country. A stretch of crushed limestone spanning most of the width of Missouri along the old Missouri-Kansas-Texas railbed, connecting multiple rural communities and traversing endless agricultural fields and Missouri River flood plains and bluffs. From the moment I moved back to Missouri in 2019, I knew I wanted to eventually go for the Fastest Known Time on it.

 

Somewhere in Missouri.

 

 

There are long stretches without any services, making a speedy effort particularly tricky. After a few loose discussions, the idea of sharing miles with my mom seemed pretty cool. She could serve as a "rolling aid station" and we could meet up every 30 miles or so for access to the next round of calories and gear. Have some meals together, take some photos, enjoy an adventure! Call it "quasi-self-sufficient".

 

Well, then my sister, Courtney, got roped into the works, on account of my mom starting to get concerned about the problem of sleep, or lack thereof. And the next thing I knew, there'd also be in-laws in an RV! An over-the-top crewing proposition, of which I had no intention of maximizing its usefulness. But if it offered my 69 year old mom -- with her engineered joints and a history of sleep issues after decades of hospital night shifts -- the opportunity to forge ahead of me a few times to nab a couple hours of shut eye, well, then I was all for it. Also, it meant I might be able to push a bit harder! Spoiler alert on the crewing front: my mom never once stopped to sleep, but we did get around 8 solid bouts of support, some of which may or may not have included a niece smearing sticky bomb pop juice all over the legs of an exhausted, crabby runner.

 

My mom ringing the bell to start the journey.

Fine. I'll waste some time and ring the bell 3 minutes after we'd already started the clock.

 

 

Fast forward to Mile 215 or so, somewhere near Who-The-Fuck-Knows, Missouri. Dead of night. Sleep deprivation taking its toll. I am wracked with intense levels of déjà vu, constantly. I've been here before! I've seen all of this!

 

This isn't your typical every mile looks the same kind of déjà vu. This is much different. At one point, I start to have … pre-visions. I am a precog in a Running Man crossover film. I know, for a fact, an absolute fact, that in a couple of miles we will cross over the highway we're paralleling, at a pedestrian crossing angled at 45 degrees to the roadway. I know this because I've been here before. Even though I haven't. Ever.

 

I inform my mom of the inevitability of future events. She has no response. And then, a couple miles later, it happens. Road crossing at a 45 degree angle. Just like I'd pre-visioned. My world is turned upside down. This kind of thing must have happened a half dozen times, but that roadway crossing is the one that really breaks me down.

 

Reality is an illusion. I must be dead. Is this some sort of after-life test or replay of my life? My mom must be dead too. Are we in Purgatory? Does god really exist? What the fuck is happening?!

 

Hours of nothing but this.

 

 

The crippling uncertainty of reality shakes me to my core. The déjà vu I can understand. My brain is tired. I can convince myself that something unique is just up ahead, and then I see a rock or a tree by the trail and think yup, there it is, that's unique, wow, so crazy! The fluidity of time is breaking down. Neural pathways are going haywire. The feeling of déjà vu can be explained. But not the foresight. I don't simply feel that I've been here before, I know what is going to happen before it happens.

 

And then, eventually, with maybe 15 miles to go, deep recesses of my brain open up and everything makes perfect sense.

 

Last year, Google released a "trail view" of the Katy Trail. I'd sat down and thumbed through stretches of the trail, particularly the final sections. I knew what was about to happen because I'd fucking seen it on the internet! One less existential crisis to worry about!

 

As we near the end of the trail, though, the déjà vu keeps popping in and out. And I eventually realize that while checking out that Google trail view last year, I'd also been trying to envision myself running the Katy Trail, what it would feel like running those final miles, straining to break 48 hours or whatever. And, I think, I may have even had dreams about running the Katy Trail. This all comes ebbing and flowing, memories and dreams and feelings mixing and conflicting with reality, getting stronger as the end nears.

 

Do I have déjà vu about shitting my shorts in the final hour of the Katy Trail because I've done that before in other races, or because I imagined it in my race vision, or because I dreamt it, or because small amounts of diarrhea and gas are leaking out of me in the here and now and my brain is so exhausted that it simply feels like it has already happened? Well, I mean, yeah, technically it did already happen just 1 mile before, but still, you get the idea. I can't make sense of anything anymore. I just need to be done with this stupid run!

 

My mom and I finish, unceremoniously, in the dead of night, at the Machens Trailhead, 238 miles from our starting point in Clinton, after 45 hours and 37 minutes of bliss and joy and peace and stress and frustration and cool breezes and oppressive sun and beautiful views of endless fields and midnight strolls under towering bluffs and, yes, even a dash of existential crises.

 

I stop my watch. We ring the bell to finalize our travels, and then we spend about 10 minutes struggling to take photos and videos of ourselves as the cold and the sleep deprivation and the exhaustion sets in. And then we hobble our asses another mile along a "private" road (that isn't private) to the imposing barrier local farmers put up to keep cyclists from accessing the trail, where my sister is parked, ready to whisk us back to the real world after our 2 day leave of absence.

 

What a stupid hobby.

 

Glad that's finally over!

More bell ringing.

Pretty sure she'll never do anything this stupid again!

 

Worthless details that really only matter to me:

 

Pacing strategy:

I wanted to attempt a 9min run / 3min walk strategy. Why? Because I thought it closely reflected an optimal 72hour effort and long-term I'm interested in exploring just how far I can go without sleeping or substantially compromising running efficiency, and I think it's somewhere in the 60-72hour range.

 

I maintained this well for 25+ hours. I occasionally skipped a walk stretch, or shortened it to 2 minutes; but a lot of times that was to compensate for, say, a quick bathroom break or a food stop.

 

Someone should tell them it doesn't actually take that long.

 

 

In the 2nd day, that plan disappeared to counter the unforgiving sun and exposed trail. I couldn't justify walking in the exposed sun just because my watch said that's what I should do. So instead, I did a lot more running, mostly to get to the next patch of substantial shade, which was few and far between. It meant covering more miles with the pointless allure of setting an even more massive FKT, but I was also tiring myself out.

 

As the sun set on Day 2, I started to struggle to keep the daytime pace, and it began to frustrate me. I eventually decided that I had to give up trying to maintain pace. The FKT was well in hand, and it truly didn't matter if I finished in 45 hours or 44, so stop trying to force it! It was a weight off my shoulders. I could finally start enjoying walking breaks at night and enjoying the stars like my mom and I did with Night 1. Except right about then my left achilles became noticeably stiff and achy. Yup, my bad achilles was rearing its ugly face again. That meant transitioning from walking to running was absolutely exhausting. It was less painful to keep running and limping along rather than limp-walk and then try to shuffle into a limp-jog over and over again. But it was also more exhausting, mostly mentally, to just keep running.

 

Selfies with the Missouri River (and a mouth full of food).

 

 

I didn't kill myself in the final hours, but it certainly was not a cakewalk. And the final few miles were filled with exasperated sighs and heavy breathing as my body began to sense the end and desperately wished to finally give up. It was all normal, I told my mom, as she repeatedly asked if I was okay.

 

Splits of note:

First 100M: 19:00

24 Hours: 126M

200M: 37:45

Final 100M: 19:15

 

Dobies-style chart showing how awesome I am at pacing

 

 

Fueling strategy:

I went for a fairly optimistic, for me, plan of 300cal/hr. It'd be split into 100cal of Hyle in 10oz of water, with the rest of my liquid needs coming from water whether that was 1oz extra per hour or 10. Then I had 100 cal of a gel or chews or those Spring wolfpacks or whatever. And then 100 cal of solid food in the form of belvita crackers, fig bars, candy bars, etc.

 

Organization!

 

 

And then a couple of regular meals each day, compliments of my sister picking stuff up from Sonic or McDonalds or gas stations or wherever.

 

Also, I tried to down 15-25 grams of protein every 6 hours or so.

 

The fueling worked perfectly for 26+ hours. Then the heat and sun had me distracted and my calories went down a bit. In the final hours of Night 2, I cut way back on food as my insides just wanted to expel everything out the other end. That also meant not drinking much of anything for the final couple of hours to try and shore up my stomach.

 

All told, I burned about 24,000 calories, and consumed around 12,000. There's no other diet on earth that can deliver 4 lbs of fat burn in 48 hours!

 

Smoothies and hashbrowns!

 

 

 

"Drop Bag" / Crew Plan:

	Mileage	Distance to Next
Start	0	38
Sedalia	38	35
Boonville	73	48
North Jeff City	121	43
McKittrick (Hermann)	164	37
Klondike	201	37
Finish	238

 

Deviations from the crew plan were minor:

My mom carried an intermediate drop bag from Boonville for me to take at McBaine (Mile 95), splitting up the nearly 50 mile overnight stretch.

 

We made such good time overnight we texted my sister to skip North Jeff City (Mile 121) and meet us later at the next location, Tebbetts (Mile 133), giving her the chance to sleep past dawn.

 

Missouri. Pretty much what you'd expect.

 

 

And then our Klondike meetup was shifted back to Defiance (Mile 206) where my sister's family parked their RV for the 2nd night.

 

There is one major exception to the plan worth mentioning, so as to let you know it wasn't all roses and rainbows. In the heat of Day 2, I failed to remember 1) that there was no trailhead / train station water access between North Jefferson City (Mile 121) and Marthasville (Mile 187); and 2) that even though we bought water at the guest house by the Portland station (Mile 149), it was 15 miles to McKittrick/Hermann (Mile 164). Combined with my mom accidentally misreading the mileage to me not long after Portland (Mile 149), I believed it was 18 miles between Portland and McKittrick/Hermann (Mile 164), not 15. I'd only filled up 40 oz and skipped my 20 oz handheld because I had used it all of Day 1 and it was entirely superfluous and unnecessary then, with the water access at practically every station on the western half of the trail. In the heat, I began to panic … and get pissed off at Missouri State Parks shitty lack of funding allocation (seriously, how hard is it to install a couple of seasonal water fountains at your premier trail's trailheads?). There'd be no way I'd make it anywhere close to McKittrick. I'd be out of water long before that, and screwed. My mom had plenty of water and offered me some, but with my sun-baked brain I firmly refused. I was fine accepting water at one of our "aid stations", but taking it from her in the middle of nowhere was tantamount to muling, and I pull my own weight! She texted my sister and at some point, on a random intersecting road, I bumped into my niece sprinting down the trail with an ice cold water bottle in hand … a trail angel sent to save my day! My pity-party crabbiness is all rather amusing in hindsight, given that it could have all been avoided if 1) I'd just used a 3rd bottle, or 2) I'd memorized it was 15 miles between train stations, not 18.

 

A trail angel delivering much needed water.

 

 

Gear:

I started with Craft Nordlite Ultras. I really like how cushy these shoes are, even if they are 10+ ounces. They're like running on clouds! Except. Well, their engineers have gone with the new shoe trend of making stupid stiff plastic tongues that end up jabbing into the crook of your foot. This isn't something you really notice in normal running, but after a dozen plus hours, it gets to the point that it starts causing inflammation.

 

At Mile 133, I switched to Saucony Endorphin Pros, which are my favorite shoe of all time. They're meant for speedier running like lameo road marathons, but my feet never seem to mind 100+ miles on them. When I swapped shoes I accidentally picked up the pace to well over 6mph until the next train station. I was flying!

 

5-10lbs on my back at all times (I left the remote in the hotel room though).

 

 

I used my Suunto 9 watch and had tested a setup that was supposed to last 63 hours. A 6hr training run confirmed the battery drain rate. But 34 hours into the Katy Trail, my watch let me know I only had 4 hours left, and that switching to the crappiest update rate would only earn me 11 more hours, which was unlikely to get me to the finish. I hastily began recording on my phone's Strava app. My mom also called in my sister for an emergency meetup to bring a charger and power brick -- also, dusk was approaching and she'd forgotten to pack enough clothes to stay warm for the night, which was kind of important. When we met right around sunset, I was already over the run and ready to be done. I was crabby as hell. My sister gave me the charger for the watch but I refused to look her in the eye and grumbled that she shouldn't even be here, this wasn't part of the plan, this is unnecessary, I have my phone for a backup. And then the damn watch kept getting stuck in a stupid calibration loop when I tried connecting it to the charger, forcing me to wildly swing the hunk of crap in big figure 8s over and over again. I struggled with this for what felt like an eternity, all while stubbornly refusing anyone's help. Then I grumpily jogged on down the trail to begin the longest 10 hours of running of my life.

 

I also had a Garmin inReach Messenger to send a ping every 10 minutes so that my family could keep track of our progress. That worked like a charm.

 

For a solid hour to start Night 2, I kept looking at my watch and only 1 minute would pass (or, worse, I'd think that surely 5 minutes went by and come to find less than 60 seconds had elapsed since I last looked). Time slowed to a halt. Caffeine didn't help. A little bit of chatting with my mom barely made a dent. I finally relented and threw on some headphones. Music was a lifesaver.

 

Dead time:

At roughly Mile 15, I came upon my mom, with her bike flipped over. She had a flat. Already! The tires were pretty new and stiff, so it took us the better part of 15 minutes to change her tube (it didn't help that her shifters weren't responding and we couldn't get the chain to run down the cassette).

 

In Boonville, the trail no longer goes across the old railroad bridge, instead it winds through the town to the highway bridge. In the dark, I missed the terribly marked turn and went on to the dead-end bridge, wasting 10 minutes.

 

"Warning. Danger. Bridge Up. Do Not Go Beyond This Point." ... Does this mean I made a wrong turn?!

 

 

Then, immediately afterwards, I spent 20 minutes chilling at a gas station while my mom got her affairs in order for the long stretch of night ahead of us.

 

A couple other un-rushed stops and photo ops probably resulted in 60+ minutes of "lost time".

 

Relative Stupidity:

When I moved to St. Louis in 2019 the Katy FKT was above 72 hours. Denise Bourassa dropped that down to 70:22 in 2021. I don't want to come off as smug … but at 45:37, I think the record will still be in place when I die. Now, somebody go out there and prove me wrong! (nobody will, because that's a terrible idea and people have better things to do with their time)

 

If I had continued on to 48 hours, there's a half decent chance I would've hit 250 miles. That would've been enough to place me 3rd all-time among US men (if the Katy Trail were a certified course and a certified race … which it isn't). I'm starting to get confident that I just might have it in me for a push at the American Record of 270.6, and become #2 all time in the world. If I can accomplish that, then maybe I can finally stop all of this stupid flat running that keeps wrecking my achilles, and go enjoy some forests and mountains!

 

Memories or whatever:

I can't decide how much more enjoyable it would have been if we'd gone at a slower pace and tried to enjoy Day 2 a bit more with a couple of café stops and things like that. But on the other hand, Night 2 felt like a death march trying to get to the finish, and I really don't want to imagine having spent extra hours out there.

 

My niece making sure I was properly applying lube to my toes.

 

 

Seeing my sister occasionally on Day 1 was pretty cool, and then her family on the morning of Day 2. It was such an easy going day+. I was in a good mood, all was right with the world. I wish I'd tried to be more positive on Day 2 though.

 

I don't think my mom and I will look back on this adventure in the years to come and think "Wow, what a great way to bond. Family is the best!" It'll probably be more like "why the hell did we do that?" and "man, Chris can be a grouchy asshole when he runs". Either way, I'm super proud of what my mom accomplished. I'd venture to guess no one her age has ever completed the trail in that amount of time. Pretty freakin awesome!

 

Who's dumber? The idiots biking and running across the state, or the person who agreed to help them?

 

 

But, here are the good memories I have of the adventure:

• Unexpectedly bumping into Courtney along the trail in the early hours
• A nearly 4 mile stretch on Day 1 with prairie restoration on either side of the trail -- random bits of tallgrass and wild flowers, and milkweed, randomly interspersed with sumac (and absurd amounts of ragweed), separating the trail from fields of corn, soybean, and fallow -- exploding with birds and sounds of crickets and grasshoppers that freely bounced to and fro (sometimes viciously attacking me). The whole time you could see your destination off in the distance, as you approached the High Point of the Katy Trail.
• Sonic for lunch in Sedalia
• The incredible starry night sky as we meandered through the river bottom between Boonville and Rocheport
• Hours of nighttime running, framed by river bluffs on our left and the Missouri River to our right
• The absurdity of me and my mom trying to operate our cameras at the finish in the dead of night

 

 

 

 

Parting Thoughts:

 

Cocodona 250		Katy Trail 238
$1600	Entry Fee	$0
>$300 flight	Travel Cost	$34 train ticket
Hot exposed dry desert	Scenery	Hot exposed farmland
A buckle I'll never wear	Swag	Rocks in my shoe
+40K	Vert	0K
Would probably have to put up with Sensemen	Crewing/Pacing	Whatever I wanted
5+ days	Time away from Family	2.5 days
According to website, yes.	Life altering?	Debatable

 

(Most photos courtesy of The Red-Headed Step Child, aka: my little sister.)