My First Nighttime Trail Run
Rough #6
Written: 2012-01-06
Published: 2022-11-03
My first night run was only about ten years ago, and at that point it was mainly a pragmatic thing that fit my schedule. But when I wrote about it, it was all about performance-related things (I was still mainly a performance-oriented road runner at that point, or at least I still had that basic psychology)
From my journal, 6 January 2012:
I did my first real nighttime trail run last night over in Patton Woods/Scotia with Renee’s Petzl headlamp on. It went surprisingly well and I don’t mind it very much. In fact it’s sort of a good way to enforce a slow and easy pace on yourself on a recovery day, without feeling guilty about running so slowly.
My rough guess is that I was about 2 minutes per mile slower than I would have been on this same course in the daylight. But it didn’t really feel like I was going slow, and I think it might have been hard for me to go faster without having it become too dangerous to be acceptable. I’m alright with that and I think it was a really nice change. The bad thing is that one of my last excuses for putting a run off until the next day is gone now…
It will be a beneficial thing for me to do that every so often, I believe — not just for its enforced discipline, but because I think it will improve my foot work and make me more confident and faster in the daylight. Running over the roots and rocks of that trail in the light of the headlamp felt like more of an instinctual thing than normal running, like I had to rely more heavily on multiple senses to get the footsteps right — and also just to find and stay on the trail at some places.
It could also be a bit spooky, I think, especially if that big and bright moon had not been up, if it had been harder to see beyond the light, and if I got into the mode of imagining what might be out there and hearing things in the dark and so on. I guess that effect might be much more significant if I were in the dark in the summer time when the view would be further obscured by all the leaves and undergrowth, and when the air would be full of animal sounds. In the cold and snow, it was very crisp and still and I really could see a lot from the moonlight and I probably could have gone without artificial light if I needed to (or chose to).
But the cold did have some effects from time to time, like the slight problem of visibility when the steam from my exhaled air rose up in front of the light and fogged me out momentarily each breath at certain place where the wind was right for that. And there was the hypnotic effect of the mottled snow and dead leaves on the trail surface that at times gave me the same feeling I get in a snowstorm when I’m driving at night and the snow is going through the headlights and you lose your depth perception and it all becomes dreamlike and hard to focus, hard to remember where you are and what you are doing.
This happened a little bit on this little 4-mile run that I did in a very fresh and rested condition, and it was an interesting sensation but not a problem at all. But I was extrapolating from that to the way it must feel on say a hundred-miler when you have been awake for a long time and are physically and mentally exhausted and don’t have your full faculties to keep you oriented.
I can understand those stories, people’s accounts of those long dark hours. It reminds me a lot of how it was in the Army to be on a night patrol and trying to stay awake on guard duty in the middle of the night and how you really do start to see things, how stumps and rocks and so on become other things in your mind, and you see things that are not there and sometimes don’t see some things that are there.
It’s a place I’m not sure I want to go, but if I get into any of the longer ultras (which I am not at all saying I intend to do) I will have to deal with that. For now, I’ll just consider it an interesting sensation, and I’ll empathize with those who do go long and meet that nighttime monster world.