10th Annual 8-Hour Dream Endurance Race
On fun, failure, and (nearly) falling out in 95-degree heat.
For the last ten years, Todd Oliver and his cronies at CRRG Events have been putting on the 8-Hour Dream Endurance Race on Butler’s campus on the northside of Indianapolis. It’s always held in mid-July, so it’s always hot. The 8-Hour Dream is billed as an endurance race.
Translation: It’s supposed to suck.
Here’s how the race works. There’s a solo division and team division. Solo runners race against the clock and each other: how many miles can you run in 8 hours? Pretty simple and straightforward.
The teams-based competition is more complicated. Teams compete in eight different subdivisions: there’s 3-4 person all-male teams, 3-4 person all-female teams, and 3-4 person co-ed teams. Same breakdown for the 5-6 person teams. Then there’s the RC Cup, or Running Club Cup, and the FC Cup, or Fitness Club Cup. These latter teams are for non-profit running clubs (like Indy Runners or Carmel Runners Club) and fitness clubs (Orange Theory, F45, etc.), and tend to be a bit more competitive (i.e., faster) than the other subdivisions.
Fishers and Carmel, in particular, have a long history of winning the RC Cup, though in recent years Fishers has dominated. 2024 was no exception. The Fishers RC team finished first this year to make it a four-peat.
My own club, Indy Runners, was well-represented at this year’s 8-Hour Dream. We fielded a blazing-fast RC Cup Team that finished third overall, just behind Fishers and Carmel, as well as three other teams, Indy Runners 2.0, Indy Runners 3.0, and Indy Runners 4.0, that each competed in the co-ed team relays.
Indy Runners 2.0, a team composed of myself, Maddie McTigue, Jeff Dehler, and Rachel Chambers, finished third in the 3-4 person co-ed relay. But for much of the day we were in first, then second, and then… The heat, oh dear God the heat and humidity.
I don’t think of myself as an ultra-marathoner or even as an endurance athlete, really. As I’ve written previously, I view the marathon as the ultimate challenge. (If 26.2 miles was good enough for Pheidippides, then it’s good enough for me.) Tacking on extra miles just for the sake of it does not appeal to me.
But the 8-Hour Dream is different. For one thing, the team-based relay element of it makes for great camaraderie and a feeling of team spirit. Distance running can be a lonely sport, so opportunities to run with a team are always welcome. Most of the day was spent trying to stay cool beneath the shady canopy of a blue Indy Runners tent. We had quite a spread, too. Popsicles, watermelon, all manner of prepackaged granola bars and other fast nutrition, salty snacks, and ice. Lots and lots of ice. Runners Forum grilling burgers and hot dogs. Even Chik-fil-a was onsite, though nobody who was running wanted anything to do with heavy, hot fair food.
So here’s how the final hour of the race went down.
The 8-Hour Dream offers teams a bit of strategy. First, you have to follow the batting order that you set out at the beginning of the day. For my team, that was Jeff, Maddie, Rachel, then me.
Second, there are two courses that each runner can take when it’s their turn to run. One is a 1.89-mile loop, the other loop is 3.10 miles (a perfect 5K). Each runner is free to choose whichever route they prefer—in consultation with their teammates, of course—and depending on the team’s overall strategy for the day.
Third, each team must run the 3.10-mile course—the long course—for their first loop of the day. From that point on, it’s all about strategy…and survival.
Let’s talk about the course. Todd has outdone himself on this one. The 8-Hour Dream course is one of the toughest I have ever encountered in any race. In fact, it might well be the toughest, with the possible exception of the last five or six miles of the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon course, which is bad mostly because the roads on the westside of Indy are so bad. Running a race on the surface of the moon would probably be easier on the body. But I digress.
The 8-Hour Dream course starts, deceptively enough, with a nice, breezy jaunt in front of Hinkle Fieldhouse, which is pretty much the National Cathedral of Basketball, before a sloping descent around the Bud and Jackie Sellick Bowl down to 52nd Street at the bottom of the hill. From there, runners hit the Central Canal Towpath, a beautiful little stretch of gravel single-track that extends as far north as Broad Ripple and as far south as 30th Street and Riverside Park. On warm, summer days, running the towpath feels like you are anywhere but central Indianapolis.
That’s where the course takes a devilish turn onto the practice fields behind Butler, only to extend further down the towpath on the 3.10-mile long course, and then back to Butler for a final climb through the woods on Holcomb Hill—the “Bulldog’s Revenge.”
They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but in this case, cold would be an absolute delight. Instead, the final hill is designed to get you walking—crawling, even—through brambles, bushes, trees, and roots. It’s about a 25-yard uphill slog with an elevation gain of probably no fewer than 500 feet. Straight up.
Once you’ve crowned Holcomb Hill, you wind through the woods a bit, only to emerge at the bottom of yet another hill, this one a tad more tame and gradual, that finally brings you full circle to the tent village in front of Hinkle and back to the start/finish. Running that final gauntlet as other runners and onlookers cheer you on gives a final boost of energy (or is supposed to, anyway). Though this doesn’t always pan out.
At around 5:30pm, with just 33 minutes left on the day (we started at 10:03am, so the official cut-off time was 6:03pm), Indy Runners 2.0 were holding fast to our second-place spot, only a mile and some change behind the first-place team, but a mere fraction of a mile ahead of the third-place team. Rachel was due back any minute, which meant that I would have right around 30 minutes to run the 5K long course before time expired. Failure to finish the loop before time meant forfeiting the miles. And we needed the extra miles. Finishing the long loop (3.10 miles) before time would give us a chance to not only secure our second-place lead, but also maybe finish in first, depending on breaks.
In consultation with my teammates, we decided that it would be most strategic to try for the 5K. I was tired, yes. Really, I was exhausted from the relentless sun, heat, and general mugginess. Plus, I had not really eaten enough over the course of the day. How could you? The thought of choking down anything resembling real food in that heat—and in race conditions—was totally unappealing. Last year I had made the mistake of eating a Chik-fil-a sandwich around midday and it came back to haunt me later in the form of a fried gut-bomb that hung around in my stomach and wouldn’t go away.
But could I run a 30-minute 5K? Sure I could, my lizard brain told me. My PR at that distance is 20 minutes even…with fresh legs on a pancake-flat road course. But it was one of those questions that, no matter the grave reality of the situation, you wanted the answer to be “yes, I got this.” Teamwork and all that. I didn’t want to let down my teammates.
And yet, that’s exactly what happened.
No sooner had I chosen the right fork for the 3.10-mile long course route did I start feeling pangs of regret. Everything hurt. Sucking super-heated air, I felt like I was getting very little in the way of oxygen. The heat and humidity hung in the air like stale farts. Most of my towpath runs are in the early morning on Saturdays, when even in the dead of summer there are cooler temps and breezes off the water. None of this was in evidence Saturday afternoon. It was a swamp, plain and simple.
But I didn’t want to let my teammates down. That’s all I could think about as I gutted out those last couple of miles. I walked the Bulldog’s Revenge—something I didn’t do even once at the 2023 8-Hour Dream, and had been wearing all day as a badge of honor—and as I arrived at the bottom of that awful final hill, I heard the 6:00pm bell toll from Butler’s main administration building. I had three minutes to cross the finish line or this was all for naught. Rounding the final corner, I saw that my teammates had come down the hill to run the final stretch alongside me.
I wish I could tell you that I rallied and made it to the finish in time. But it didn’t happen that way. We finished in third, with 57.57 miles, just a fraction of a mile behind the second-place team. Had I listened to my body (and not my ego) I would have run the 1.89-mile short course and crossed the finish line victorious. Well, in second place.
I was so blown away by the poise and sportsmanship of my teammates. After high school or college, distance running isn’t a team sport for most people, unless you make it to the Olympics or something.
By the time the four of us made it back to the finish, the race had been over for several minutes. People were celebrating and taking pictures at the finish line. We had to fight through a sizable crowd just to symbolically finish the race.
Needless to say, my final three miles didn’t count. But by the point, I think we were all so thrilled to have this beast behind us that it didn’t much matter.
The day was over. Air conditioning awaited.
Did you have an 8-hour dream last Saturday? Leave a comment. Tell us about your experience!
Paul, my friend, as a fellow member of Indy Runners 2.0, you have already heard the rest of your team tell you that you did your best given brutal conditions. And that we were all proud of your accomplishments throughout the day, and your willingness to go big or go home on the last loop. But this Highlight Zone forum is often about going deeper. I can't tell you how to feel, but I can guess a few things. 1) competitiveness - many runners know they aren't going to win, but we are competing against ourselves. We want to run farther, run faster, prove to ourselves that we can meet new challenges. 2) teamwork - each of us looked at the others on our team and said, "they are gutting this out, I can't let them down." 3) denial - sure you had already run a dozen or more miles in brutal heat and humidity, on little to no real food over the course of 7 1/2 hours, but we're not playing it safe now - bring on the long loop! The decision to go long was the same decision any of your teammates would have made just so we could be second place in one obscure category of a crazy race that goes mostly unnoticed by anyone except diehard distance athletes. But it matters to us. So we do what we do. And I want to do it again next year, with Paul Cook.