Learning to Ice Skate

Shippey 2025

The world doesn't need another race report describing how I ran a lot, ate a lot, and complained a lot. Probably why I have a 1 year backlog on race reports….

(10minute read)

I thought this one could be fun.

The weekend before MLK Day, I took another crack at my local 100 miler, 10 minutes from my house, on some pretty sweet trails in a Boy Scout camp. The trail conditions were … performance limiting … to say the least.

I thought I'd give a run-down of the winter weather and trail conditions that we experienced at Shippey this year, to shine some more light on this stupid sport and what it's like to run for a long-ass time in the dead of winter.

The Run-up:

2 weeks before the race, STL got hit with a winter storm. Hours of sleet and then 4-6" of snow. All of the early sleet formed sheets of ice multiple inches thick, screwing up transportation (and extending Winter Break) for an eternity. Then, another round of snow a few days later.

A week before the race, a bunch of us got together to run sections of the course, frolicking in a winter wonderland of fresh powder. It was glorious!

The 2 days before the race saw sun and temps reaching nearly 60. Snow melted, water run-off was everywhere, and all that was left was dense packs of ice and crusty snow. …Oh, and then it rained the night before the race. …And then a polar vortex sent temps plummeting. Forecasts were for the wind chill to steadily decrease to 0 throughout the race.

Screws? Nah!:

At the pre-race meeting, a few folks discussed adding sheet metal screws to their shoes (or using yak-tracks). I quickly brushed aside the idea. I am smarter, tougher, more experienced, and cooler than everyone else, and I say that screws will be unnecessary!

Let's Make Things Unnecessarily Difficult:

In 2023 when I ran Shippey, I ran it self-sufficient -- stopping only twice, at Mile 37 and Mile 70, to restock my pack. For 2025, I decided to up the ante and attempt to run completely "unsupported", starting the race with everything I'd need, save for a planned stop somewhere in the race to refill water, as if I were stopping at a creek in the middle of nowhere during an FKT attempt. Spare gear and over 6000 calories clocked in at exactly 15 pounds strapped to my back. If I ran into a problem, my solution had to be somewhere in my pack, or else.

I strolled up to the starting line looking like a complete idiot!

Loop 1:

From the get-go, just before dawn, in 30 degree temps, it became clear the ice was thicker and stronger than I had anticipated. Despite south-facing hillsides being nearly devoid of ice or snow, there was still a surprising amount of slick stuff on the trails. And anywhere that wasn't south facing … woah boy! Everyone was sliding and falling constantly. The rain and temps had coated the entire area in a deathly glaze of ungodly slick ice.

Even in places with barely any ice on the trails, it was still treacherous. The RD likes to leaf blow the course ahead of time to help shore up the often underutilized trail network and make it more pronounced, for the betterment of all. But, it has a cost. If there is a winter freeze thaw cycle during the race, it can create a muddy mess on the trails because there's no leaf matter to bind with the mud. And this year, even the slightest fraction of an inch of ice now had a firm foundation of solid ground to prevent footfalls from cracking it and breaking it up.

For many stretches, particularly downhills, there was a fun gamble to be made. Intentionally run just off the trail in the hopes the ice was thin enough and that the underlying layer of leaves/grass/sticks/whatever compromised the integrity of the ice layer, letting you crush your way through it with each footfall, providing much needed traction. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes you just fell on your ass as you careened downhill into one tree, and then another, hoping, praying the ice would crack.

At one point, there's a particularly steep hill -- The Water Cistern Hill -- around 25%. It faces northwest so it never received enough sunlight to melt the ice and snow away, and it received head-on wind after the rain came down the night before. Slick as an ice rink. I could not for the life of me toe-in to get any traction. I scrambled and dove for trees alongside the trail, but kept wiping out and sliding back down. Finally, I gave up and pulled out my cheater poles in the hopes of gaining the tiniest modicum of grip. It took me an eternity to get up that stupid 200' hill. Perhaps the single most frustrating moment of running I have ever experienced.

By the end of the loop, my pack felt like a ton of bricks. I rolled in a solid 2min/mile slower than my Loop 1 from 2023.

I really, really wished I had screws. But I didn't start out with them so it violated my unsupported mentality. That said, a lot of people later complained that even screws didn't provide enough grip into the ice. Also, rumor has it crews bought out the entire region's supply of yak-traks during the race.

Loop 2:

The sun came out. I could benefit from everyone else who'd used screws or yak-tracks and ever-so-slightly ground out particles of ice that spread along the surface, creating a small bit of grit that the sun and wind froze into place. There were tons of ice scratches all over the place where other runners' screws kinda-sort-but-not-really bit into the ice on the prior loop.

The jeep road sections were icy slush, formed from the surface layers over the mud puddles being cracked and broken. And a lot of south-facing stretches of trail turned to muck from the mid-day water runoff. I only lost my shoe in a vat of mud one time!

Some stretches, the sun just made things worse. By the midpoint of Loop 2, I probably bit it 15 times in the span of 3 hours, failing to adapt to the changing trail/ice conditions. Landing hard on my ass here, sliding off the side of the trail there. After one of my falls, which capped a stretch of maybe 5 in a half hour, I simply laid there in a modified child's pose and treated myself to a little meal of gels and granola bars until I built up the resolve to carry on.

After 40 miles, I'd felt like I'd run 80. Every minor muscle in my legs was completely shot from all of the slipping around. My core felt like I'd been punched repeatedly.

Loop 3:

This was a transition loop for the trails in the late afternoon. Plenty of grit was accumulating on the icy stretches, but it was also peak mud.

A unique feature revealed itself on the Water Cistern Hill. Postholing from the prior week of course scouting and flagging left shallow depressions in the ice layer, like mini moguls. Enough runners with screws and yak-tracks had used these barely-visible depressions and carved out additional nanometers of the ice. Sometimes it was enough for cavalier steps, and sometimes it was still too slick. For me, the hill resembled a rock climbing route that I had to plan out. See that pyramidal rock sticking out 2mm from the ice?! Can you lock one of your shoe's lugs on it to get enough grip? Can you make it over there to the rotten log barely sticking out of the ice? Oooh, look at that series of depressions! You'll probably only slip off 1 or 2 of those this time around!

One section of the course has 3 creek crossings within 30 minutes. Bone chilling cold that would numb your feet for miles afterwards. The first 2 loops they didn't bother me. But by the 3rd loop, I would've happily spent 10 minutes at each crossing devising a complicated series of rocks and logs to cross over safely. Too bad all of the rocks and logs were encased in inches of ice! My neuroma was shocked by the cold water every time, and the next few miles felt like running on thumbtacks.

Loop 4:

Night set in and the muck started to freeze. Stretches of jeep roads had fields of razor sharp ice shards sticking out of the re-freezing mud, always surrounded by sneakily slick ice patches. There were a few times where I thought, "If I slip and fall the wrong way, I just might impale my neck and bleed to death out here … awesome."

Miraculously, most of the water runoff began to dissipate, and many stretch of mud hardened over into fairly runnable chunks of trail. But picking up the pace was always a daring proposition because there was still tons of ice littered along the trails and putting your foot down 1cm from where you intended would result in your feet flying out from under you and crashing hard onto the frozen hellscape.

Loop 5:

Trail conditions actually improved as the temps plummeted. More and more grit accumulated on the icy surfaces, and more and more mud turned to ice-free dirt. But the cold hit hard and I found my bottles freezing rapidly. I spent much of the final hours of the race persistently chewing my bottle nozzles, trying to break up the ice before it completely blocked the flow. With 2 hours to go, my nozzles were frozen shut and the liquids in the bottles began to freeze, too. My remaining calories were all gels, which froze solid. For the final 90 minutes I consumed nothing, save for whatever snot and ice accumulated on my mustache. But hey, there was a heck of a lot more runnable trail. Tradeoffs!

I'd break out the course conditions about like this:

• 20% runnable dry ground -- mostly the tail end of the race after the mud re-froze
• 15% mud
• 30% ice
• 35% crusty snow and ice that sometimes had enough grit, if you were lucky and stepped in just the right spot with just the right amount of force and momentum

Etcetera that no one cares about…

After each loop I spent 7-10 minutes to sit down in the Start/Finish building and re-organize my pack with the next round of nutrition. Reflecting the way I'd operate if I were doing a 100-150 mile unsupported FKT. It was good to feel out that process.

I spent 30 minutes on course not moving -- swapping gear, organizing something, eating, desperately looking for a way to cross a creek without soaking my feet, figuring out another way to strap those godforsaken poles to my pack so they didn't clang or get loose or dig into my side.

I started out with a nano puffy that works well in sub-30 temps. I thought it'd be fine given the lower level of effort required from the slower running conditions and the wind chill, but there was still plenty of dead-air hollows throughout the course, and the morning sun had me changing gear within 90 minutes of starting the race. For most of the race I had a mid-weight long sleeve and a Houdini wind breaker. Sometimes I had to take off the Houdini during the day. But I had so much shit in my pack that I couldn't simply wrap the Houdini over the pack to take it on and off. Anytime I needed to take it off or put it on, I had to stop and take off my pack. I'm honestly a bit amazed I finished the race wearing just a long-sleeve and a Houdini when some of the ridges clearly had wind chills in the range of -5.

God help you if you tried to get something out of your pack or open food packaging while running! After the first couple crashes from attempting to multi-task while navigating ice patches, I either had to wait for strategic locations on the course, or just stop dead in my tracks.

I usually love running in snow, and I have many fond memories of winter long runs in Shenandoah and Rock Creek Park in DC. I find it peaceful, the crisp, cold, clean air, just you and the crunching snow beneath your feet. But man oh man, I did not enjoy a full day on ice. I really hope I don't have race conditions like that ever again.