The 8-hour Dream Endurance Race (and Cat Nap 5K)

My first endurance race is in the books.

The Midwest gets muggy in high summer. Saturday morning started out with the threat of heavy rains, though these never truly materialized. Instead we had cloudy skies with intermittent intervals of punishing sun, as though someone was turning up the humidity to eleven just to mess with us.

The 8-hour Dream Endurance Race is sponsored by CRRG Events, which stands for Carmel Road Racing Group, and they’ve been putting on this event every year since 2015. The race takes place at the historic Hinkle Fieldhouse at Butler University, the largest basketball arena in the United States from 1928 (when it was built) until 1950. It is known informally as “Indiana’s Basketball Cathedral,” in part because the building itself looks imposing, sort of like a church.

The race, which had its ninth running on Saturday, makes good use of the beautiful and somewhat rugged land around the Butler campus. Butler moved to its present location on the northside of Indianapolis about a century ago; before that, it was located at College Corners, an area immediately northeast of downtown at the intersection of 13th St. and College Ave., near Ovid Butler’s house in the Old Northside neighborhood. (This, incidentally, is also my neighborhood.)

College Corners historical marker at 13th St. and College Ave. in Indianapolis.

Where Butler sits now is nestled at the west end of 49th St. between the sprawling, leafy residential neighborhoods of Butler-Tarkington and Meridian-Kessler, on the east and south, and the Indiana Central Canal on the north and west. The canal towpath runs alongside it from Broad Ripple all the way to the zoo on the westside of downtown. The canal towpath has long been one of my favorite spots for running and cycling because it doesn’t feel at all like being in a city. It feels like you’re scrambling down a lightly-graveled trail out in the sticks somewhere, with a pleasant little canal idly flowing beside and thick foliage on all sides.

But on Saturday, it felt more like a swamp. A low-lying swamp with hundreds of runners plodding around the 1.89-mile and 3.1-mile loops. One segment, on the back end of this devilish course, is known as the “Bulldog’s Revenge.” It’s basically a 200 foot climb up the side of a steep hill in the woods with branches jutting out and even a downed tree that no one bothered to clear before the race. I am proud to say that, while many walked it, I scrambled up this hill on each of my six laps on Saturday.

So here’s how the endurance race works, before I get any further into this race recap. There are two types of participants: solo runners and teams. The soloists do it alone. For the guts and the glory. The teams do it as a relay. The goal for both solo racers and teams is to log as many miles as you can in an eight-hour span (from 10:00am to 6:00pm, mostly in the heat of the day). There are several different levels of team-based competition, with the RC Cup being the highest (or most competitive). There were five teams in the RC Cup this year, which is open to official running clubs (like Indy Runners) and must be six-person co-ed (three men and three women). Other levels of competition allow for different permutations: some are all men, some are all women, some are only for three or four participants, etc. But to compete in the RC Cup, you have to abide by the rules, and they are pretty strict about it. There’s a cash purse on the line, as well as local bragging rights, so the competition has grown more intense and more fierce over the last eight years the 8-hour Dream has been in existence.

For example, the team that took home the RC Cup this year, the Fisher’s Running Club, has won for the last several years. But they just barely edged out a tough Carmel Runners squad by a measly 2.65 miles. That should give you a pretty good sense of just how competitive this event is at the team level. Our squad, Indy Runners, finished fourth overall in the RC Cup, a mere 1.2 miles behind the Indy Chinese Running Club.

I have the crazed look of a man who just ran 13 fast miles in the heat while subsisting on a steady diet of chicken sandwiches and Rice Krispie treats.

A significant part of the race strategy—besides stacking your team with as many lightning fast ringers as you can afford scrounge up (which some teams do with more…gusto than others)—is figuring out whether and how frequently to run the 3.1 mile course or the 1.89 mile course. In a wrinkle to the rules that was brand-new for this year, all teams had to run the 5K course on their initial outing. Since I was in the lead position for our RC Cup team, I ran the 5K first, then we settled in to running the 1.89 on repeat for the rest of the day. We finished with one 5K and thirty-one 1.89-mile loops for a total of 62.32 miles. Good enough for a fourth place finish.

The race organizers had put together a top-shelf mix of almost exclusively 90s music, which they blasted at our tent all day on loudspeakers. For example, you can hear some of Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy” in the video clip below. And Chick-fil-a was an official sponsor, so I ended up eating somewhere in the neighborhood of three or four chicken sandwiches before all was said and done. (Joni had some, too. She came later in the day to cheer us on.)

Sunday morning I woke up sore, needless to say. While I only ran 13 miles or so in total, the constant start-and-stop nature of the event was a totally new experience for my body. You’d run as fast as you could for 2 miles (for me that was in the 12- to 13-minute range) and then sit around and jaw-jack for close to an hour, before getting up and doing it all over again. Rinse and repeat for eight hours. Even choking down a handful of Advil wasn’t enough to keep the soreness at bay.

The best part of this event, hands down, was the team aspect. Running is not a sport that typically offers many opportunities for this kind of team-based camaraderie, and I loved that element of the 8-hour Dream Endurance Race. There was quite a bit of cross-team camaraderie and socializing as well. The best way I can sum up the experience is to say that it combines the best elements of a road/trail race with a festival atmosphere. Music, food, drinks, people sitting idly under tents. What more could you ask for on a hot summer day in the Midwest?

I’m definitely going to do this one again next year. But now I know a bit more about what to expect. Whatever the promotional materials may saw, there is nothing “dream-like” about this eight-hour endurance race, except for perhaps the surreal feelings you get from exhausting yourself in the heat and collapsing in bed at the end of a long day.