It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding: Scenes From the Breakneck Point 42k

Midway through the marathon, I looked down at the watch on my left arm and watched the seconds tick by. 3:04:59, 3:05:00, 3:05:01... "No BQ today. Ratz."

In fact, I was barely past the half marathon distance.

Then I took another good look at my right arm﹘the one I'd torn up into a bloody mess two hours and nine miles ago. "This ain't Boston. This is Beast Coast."

I'd been in a good groove on the first major decent around mile four, where the course drops 1,000 feet in just over a mile. One moment I'm enjoying the cool, crisp air as my legs can finally rest from the first big climb and the rocky, rolling slopes. The next moment I'm picking dirt from an open wound on my palm while the road rash (trail rash?) on my forearm tastes like burning. I guess it goes to show that at a race like Breakneck, you can't lose focus for even a split second.

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Held in mid-April, the Breakneck Point Trail Runs 42k and 21k serves as the Upstate New York trail and ultra running de facto season opener. It's the first major trail race of the year to have a regionally competitive field and a large turnout

Latergram: A Retrospective Look at the 2016 Breakneck Point Trail Runs

Looking back toward early 2016, I realized I never wrote any kind of a race report about the Breakneck Point Trail Runs back in April. By now, seven months later, my foggy memory will have distorted the experience more than a heavily filtered Instagram post. When registration went for Breakneck 2017 went live a few weeks ago, it was a stark reminder of just how incredible that course is and how enjoyable the marathon was this year. It was by far the "longest" marathon I've done, and the only one that crams 10,000 feet of vertical into 26.2 miles. (There's also a half marathon option.) Rather than write an