Big Island Math Teachers, Young and Ravaglia, debut at HURT 100

When Justin Young crossed the finish line at Sunday’s HURT (Hawaiian Ultra Running Team) 100-mile Trail Race, he was filled with excitement and a wide array of emotions. It was everything he expected it to be and so much more.

“Wow, I can’t believe that I just ran that far and that long and I actually did it,” Young told himself when he saw the finish line. “The whole atmosphere of the race and the feeling of accomplishment, it was just awesome.”

The 41-year old Pahoa resident completed his first HURT 100 — Hawaii’s toughest trail event — in a fantastic time of 31 hours, 57 minutes and 36 seconds. placing him 33rd overall. Oregon’s Nate Jaqua and Colorado’s Sabrina Stanley were the overall male and female winners with their times of 22:37:54 and 28:28:06 respectively.

For Young, it all began with a simple idea just to see if he could do it.

“It was the allure of the HURT challenge and it’s really the only 100-mile trail race in Hawaii,” he said. “But it’s been years in the making. I ran my first marathon nine years ago, and then I did my first Ultra 50K, the Hilo to Volcano race, two years ago. Then I ran the Epic Man 100-mile a year and half ago that went from Kona to Volcano on the road. So I knew that I could get through 100 miles, but HURT is just totally different because you are on the trail and there’s so much climbing.”

HURT race organizers designed the 100-mile trail course into five loops, with each loop equaling 20-miles over rocky single-track trails throughout Oahu’s famous mountainous rainforest valleys Manoa, Makiki and Nuuanu.

The course is noted for its grueling and technical terrain interspersed with gnarled roots, exposed ridges, vertical embankments and 20 stream crossings for a cumulative gain of 25,000 feet. Participants for the event are chosen via a lottery selection process, with entry limited to just 125 participants and a 36-hour cut off time.

Kilauea Eruption

Young’s quest to compete in Hawaii’s famous endurance trail event began two years ago when he entered his name into the lottery in 2017.

“I was put on the HURT wait list but I was so far down,” he said. “So I had that whole year to just think about it. Then I started training for it with Bree (Brown) last April with hopes to get in the 2018 lottery (for the 2019 race). Then the volcano erupted.”

On May 3, Hawaii Island’s Kilauea Volcano erupted, spurting lava near the island’s eastern edge. While the eruption was preceded by hundreds of earthquakes, the earthquake that took place the day after measured at a magnitude of 6.9 — the most powerful to hit the island since 1975 — and opened fissures inside Leilani Estates.

Approximately 1,700 residents were ordered to evacuate due to on-going and dangerous lava activity that wrecked havoc on homes, and sent toxic fumes and black ash into the atmosphere causing poor air quality. Young, his wife and their twin four-year old daughters were among the evacuees.

“We live in Leilani Estates and our house is about a quarter mile from Fissure 8, on the backside of it,” Young said. “So we were evacuated and were out of the house for a total of seven months.

“We couldn’t get back into the house for five months. But in the middle of September they let us back into the house but we couldn’t move in because the house was not in livable condition.

“Everything was rusted, all of our appliances were shot, so we had to gut the house and start over. We had to get all of our electrical fixed — we had to replace our meter box and all the outlets and switches. We needed new plumbing, and I had to fix the catchment tank. And everything was covered with black ash. So it basically took from the middle of September till Dec. 1 to fix everything before we could move back in.”

After being evacuated, Young and his family stayed with his sister in Hilo for a couple of weeks before securing a little studio apartment — measuring 8 feet by 20 feet for another month and a half. Then, they finally found a place to rent in Hawaiian Paradise Park, while renovating their home, until they were able to move back on Dec. 1.

However, it was during the summer that Young secured a lottery slot to compete in the 2019 HURT 100. While a bit bittersweet with everything going on in his life, Young said he continued to train on the trails of Waimanu Valley since it provided just the outlet needed to briefly escape the reality that changed his family’s life.

“I continued training, it was my release, my outlet for all the craziness that was going on,” he said. “I remember that being on the trails up at Waimanu helped me to take my mind off the whole thing. The air was so fresh up there, so rejuvenating, while the air in Pahoa was thick with S02. So it helped to give me focus to just keep going and became a good parallel to my race on Sunday which was, ‘to just keep going, everything is going to turn out fine.’”

And that became his race mantra.

Young’s HURT 100 Race

Crew Members: Grant Miller, Janet Higa-Miller and Amy Young

Young said the most challenging aspects of HURT was the time it took to complete five, 20-mile loops of some of the gnarliest trails, the climbing, and needing to encourage himself to keep going despite the sun setting into complete darkness on his third loop.

“It got dark at the beginning of loop 3,” Young said. “The first three miles of it had light but the next 17-miles were run in the dark. Then all 20-miles of Loop 4 was in the dark, so basically 37 miles in the dark.

“It’s really hard to see, it’s muddy, and the roots are there and you are really slowing down, so that was hard. Not so much physically, but mentally, just trying not to fall and hurt yourself,” Young added. “I only had a headlamp on so I’m thinking that if I had a waist lamp, it would have helped to see the shadows of the roots better. It was hard to go with any type of speed during that time.”

While this race is famously known to put people through the hurt box, or some really dark times when quitting may enter their mind, Young said he never had any thoughts to quit, continued with his mantra, and felt a sense of excitement when he reached the fifth and final loop.

“Just keep going, don’t worry about anything else, just keep going,” is what Young kept telling himself. “It helped to break it up into sections and to just think that this is all I have to do. It was sort of calming in a way and I didn’t have to worry about anything else. Just keep moving.

“Besides finishing, the most rewarding was getting to Loop 5. It was the last loop, and I knew that I had enough time and I felt okay enough, so I knew I would finish (within the 36-hour time limit),” Young added. “It was a really great race for me, I didn’t think about quitting once. My body felt good, and I felt that I was really pacing myself good, so I never got to the point where I felt I was blowing up.

”It was amazing and I know that it doesn’t always happen and that it could change at any moment. So I was really lucky to have the type of race that I did. And my crew, those guys were awesome. Having the crew there was a really big help.”

Young and his family have lived on the Big Island since 2014. Young teaches high school math (grades 9-12) at Hawaii Academy of Arts &Science, a public charter school in Pahoa, while his wife, Michelle, is a first-grade teacher at Kamehameha Schools Hawaii Campus in Keaau. Their twin four-year old daughters both attend preschool.

Young, who plans to take the rest of January off before resuming training for his Boston Marathon debut in April, shared some training advice for anyone wanting to compete in an endurance event.

“Just go out there and start slow and run some trails, just don’t worry about pace. My longest training run was only 40 miles. All the research I’ve done all said to cap your mileage to 40 miles, anything more is too taxing on the body.”

Mark Ravaglia’s HURT 100 Race

Crew Members: Sylvia and Tiffany Ravaglia

The longest run Mark Ravaglia did before Sunday’s HURT 100 was a 54-mile trail race back in October.

All that changed when Ravaglia completed his first HURT 100-mile Trail Race on Sunday in a time of 34:57:59, and proceeded to cement his status as a new member of the HURT family by engaging in the famous finish line ritual — kissing of the sign that read in Hawaiian, “We wouldn’t want it to be easy,” and ringing of the bell.

“It’s hard to put into words but I felt a great relief that I made it,” said the 47-year old Kamuela resident. “It was emotional for sure. There’s a sign you kiss and you ring a bell and I’ve seen Sylvia (Ravaglia) do it five times, so it was neat to now be on the other side.”

Over the last four years, Ravaglia crewed and paced for his wife, Sylvia, who has finished five consecutive HURT 100 races (2014 – 2018). Watching her compete eventually led him to making it a goal for himself, and hoped he had a better understanding of what it might take to finish what is considered to be one of the toughest 100-mile trail races in North America.

“I think what really helped was pacing Sylvia on laps four and five over the last few years, and just knowing that things are going to get bad, then better, then bad again, but if you just keep pushing, then you can get it done,” he said. “I think doing 40 or 50-miles is pretty physical and a little mental. But it seems that getting into the 100-realm is more mental, and so I just wanted to see what it was like in terms of the attraction for me.”

Ravaglia, who has been teaching high school Math and coaching pole vaulting at Hawaii Preparatory Academy for the last 15 years, said Sunday’s race turned out to be a big learning experience for him.

“I let myself go out fast, but at the same time I really didn’t know how fast I should go since I was pretty new,” he said. “I ran with what felt good, but thinking about it now, it was probably too fast. On the other hand, it was cool because it was raining in Manoa, so I thought that I could go fast. It gave me some time buffer so I never felt really worried about time which was nice because laps four and five got pretty slow.

“And it started to get hard on the third lap, but it got hard in a different way than I thought. I found my pace speed-hiking uphill was slowing down but not by much, it was more the flat sections and the gentle down hills — the sort of thing where you can just open up and run on — I found that it got noticeably harder than I thought it would,” Ravaglia added. “My feet were hurting, I guess because the roots really tear up your feet and the wetness didn’t help.”

Ravaglia added that while his energy system crashed a bit due to deciding on a lower calorie intake to err on the side of caution for his stomach, more pressing was how bad his feet hurt.

“They really felt awful,” he said. “But looking at other people’s feet, I realized after the fact that mine weren’t really all that bad but I guess it’s just learning what’s it all about. I felt everything in waves and most challenging was on the fifth lap. It’s Sunday afternoon, you have been going for more than 24 hours and things start to get hard — you are hot, tired, slow, but know you just have to keep going.”

But now, having completed his first HURT 100, Ravaglia said he is addicted and plans to be back, and felt a renewed sense of appreciation for everything his wife has been through.

“I think now having done this, I can say I understand Sylvia a bit better — just kind of knowing what it is, why she does it, what it means to her and I think in a weird way, it has brought us all closer as a family which is kind of cool.

“She gave me a lot of good advice pretty consistently while pacing me, and she also did a good job of knowing where I was. I also realized that some of the pacing I did for her in the past was pretty good, but some of it was pretty awful. So I think now having done it, I would be a much better pacer in the future,” Ravaglia added. “And the HURT family is really neat. I’ve been to the awards banquet with her five times and since we keep going back, we’ve made a lot of friends so it’s always great to see them but I always felt that I was the ‘husband.’ So now, it’s neat to be on the other side.”

Coming Up

Sunday: Frozen Pea Productions presents Let There be Peas, Love and Play at Kaiakeakua Beach. Start time is 8:08 a.m. for the free half-mile swim and 3.1-mile run. A LavaKids Pea Wee course of a 200-yard swim and 1-mile run is available for everyone. For more information contact Peaman at 938-2296.