Night on the Newton B. Drury Parkway brings out the creatures. Giant salamanders slink across the road, quiet moist feet creeping along the asphalt. No birds except the owls cry out. Flashlights bounce off of glowing eyes in the brush. For one night back in November, six men were alone on that road, 40 miles deep into a run over 100 miles long. For some of them, that was the best part of the trip; for others, the worst; one man thought it was fun, but didn’t feel he hallucinated enough. 

The six runners gathered and left at 7 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 22 and the trip was not over for 37 hours, 48 minutes, and 44 seconds, give or take. It is 107 miles from the Arcata Plaza to the Oregon border via Highway 101. 22 of those hours were spent running. Excluding time spent resting and the seven hours they slept, they spent 12 minutes and 20 seconds running every mile. 

Those are the statistics that tell part of the story, but the runners tell the whole thing through a long series of anecdotes that range from the disgusting to the sublime. On a group run through the Arcata marsh, they shared many of them.

###

“You have to ask about Colby’s feet,” West Wood said. “And the cat. Ask about the cat.” 

Wood, 22, is a surfer and an ultrarunner, but classifying him by the way he spends his time is reductive. Wood’s the man who was saddened by the lack of hallucinations while running Newton B. Drury. On other ultramarathons, he’s seen dead cats stalking him, but it’s not a thing that bothers him. 

The runners at the start. From left to right: Thomas Nolan, Colby Calabrese, Damian Morton, Austin Nolan, Max Miller, and West Wood. Photo courtesy of Thomas Nolan.

“They’re a bit gnarly,” Wood said, “but they let you know you’re working hard!”

A fierce advocate of colorful clothing and toe socks (“They were a game changer for me!”), Wood helps run the Raccoon Running Club along with Thomas Nolan, 31. The RRC is where most of the group met each other. Founded by Wood and Nolan in 2023, about 20 people meet every Monday night to crank out a couple headlamp-illuminated forest miles. It’s a space that attracts the kind of people who believe spending an entire weekend running to a different state is worth the time.

Nolan was among the six who ran up to Oregon, though it wasn’t his first time doing something similar. In 2023, he and Wood ran on as many trails as possible from McKinleyville to Crescent City, running dozens of miles through old-growth redwoods and up beaches. The November voyage was pretty much all on Highway 101, except for brief forays through Newton B. Drury and Patrick’s Point. 

Nolan has run several 200 mile races, a few “backyard” ultras (essentially a winner-takes-all, run-’til-you-drop race), and too many other mind-boggling feats of endurance to list without getting boring, but his affair with running started fairly recently. At a bar for his 25th birthday, he told some friends he was going to run 25 miles to celebrate. 

“The next day, I woke up and I was like, ‘Well, I guess I have to do it now!’” Nolan said, laughing. “It just about killed me.”

The recovery took a few weeks, but when he felt back to normal, Nolan decided he had to try running 30 miles. He did that, and 30 miles became 50, and 50 became 100. He got into Strava, a social media site tailored to endurance athletes, and founded the Raccoon Run Club. It’s a lifestyle for him, and when he saw an Instagram post from a friend with the idea to run the whole way to Oregon, he knew he wanted in. 

On Highway 101.

The idea came from Peter Ciotti, another Humboldt-based ultrarunner. Ciotti and Nolan have done some wild things together — one morning they ran 175 laps around the Arcata Plaza — but 100 miles requires a different type of strength. Ciotti wound up with a knee injury and instead brought the runners food and supplies, but his plan had some legs to it. Along with Wood and Nolan, Nolan’s brother Austin decided he’d join, as did three other people who had never run even close to 100 miles. 

Before he decided he’d join, Colby Calabrese had never run more than 31 miles in a single go, but when he heard the plan he knew he couldn’t pass the opportunity up. It was Calabrese’s last semester at Cal Poly Humboldt before he left to do Peace Corps work in Peru, and running was how he connected with Humboldt.

“I heard this idea, and I was like, ‘Well, I think I would regret it if I didn’t do it,’” Calabrese said. “I had told them I would do a 100-miler maybe about five years after my first ultra. That turned into just a few months.”

Calabrese’s inexperience hobbled him. He brought enough chocolate chips and turkey to blow out a strap on his backpack before they even hit Trinidad, but only brought a couple pairs of socks for the two-day run. By the time they shuffled into Smith River, Calabrese was ready to drop and had a case of low-grade trenchfoot. Thomas Nolan promised him a foot massage, and that was enough to get him there. When Calabrese peeled his socks off after 90 miles of running, his feet were covered in blisters and had what Nolan called “deep canyons” in the skin of his feet. Crew member Damian Morton (who ran with them until they got to Crescent City) pulled up behind them and gave them a pair of crabber’s gloves. Nolan made good on his IOU. That massage, and a random stray cat that hung out with them, got Calabrese to the end. It was another two weeks before his feet were completely healed. 

The supplies Morton and the other members of the crew brought were indispensable, as were the morale boosts. One drop-off stands out in everyone’s minds: steaming bowls of chicken noodle soup delivered to the runners underneath an awning in Orick, protected from the November rain. They’d hardly eaten anything except snacks all day, and eating the soup was nothing short of a religious experience. It was liquid euphoria for the starved athletes, and gave them the energy to push through Prairie Creek and up to Klamath to rest for a few hours. 

Starting the next day was hell. It rained most of that day, and they were forced to run through some heavy downpours. There were moments of levity in the pain; Wood found a Tesla wheel in the ditch, popped the logo off, and turned it into a necklace. The group stopped and huddled for cover in a bathroom when the clouds started dumping. The view over Crescent City from a vista point was gorgeous.

There are few types of exhaustion more total than the aches and pains ultrarunning blesses faithful adherents with. Summiting a speed bump turns into a climb that requires a Sherpa. Downhills are just as evil when legs feel like broken 2x4s. Every step is calculated, because a poorly placed foot supporting a body with no strength means an unscheduled meeting with the concrete — and then you have to rise and keep chugging. 

The last few miles were torturous. Everyone was exhausted. It was dark and foggy and painful and something had to be done. A few of them pulled their shorts down and ran in the moonlight, one could say, and in that fashion they reached the stone and wood monument that marks a different state. “Oregon welcomes you!,” it reads, and for most travellers all that means is the gas is a bit cheaper and you don’t have to get out of your car to pump it, but for the five that made it all the way it meant THE END. 

All were exhausted and ecstatic. They stopped long enough to take a few photos, hopped in the car, and came back to Humboldt. 

None of them would change too much if they did it again. Calabrese wants to bring more socks and fewer chocolate chips; Wood needs to run through the whole night, damn the sleep deprivation; and Morton thinks a bigger group would be even more fun. 

They all had fun pushing their personal limits and finding out what their bodies could do, they all loved trawling through dark roads crawling with the North Coast’s finest fauna, they enjoyed the scenery and the ocean’s constant pulsing, but there is no subtle way to disguise the sappy revelation that the best part was simply hanging out with a bunch of friends for a while. 

“The people were the real tickets,” Thomas Nolan said, his footsteps on marsh gravel easy and silent. “Seeing Damian run so far, and watching Colby and Max finish — those were the highlights. Nothing compares to that.”