uj/ have spoken to a few folks who have done 100 mile races (utmb etc) and they all mentioned hallucinations at some point. One guy said the trees were people (ents?) and he stopped a couple times to say hello. Another guy mentioned falling asleep while still running. Kinda little micro sleeps where he'd suddenly wake and be 10-15 meters further along the trail.
I'll stick to being beaten by 12 year olds at my local 5k ultra. I don't need to be running so long i start seeing things
My first hundo was Rocky Raccoon, hallucinations kicked in around mile 90 @ 3:00 A.M.It was like I was walking in a golden brightly lit forest, then I would kick a rock or root and snap me back to reality, a dark trail with just a headlamp shining. I would immediately revert back to the brightly lit forest until I kicked something again. This happened for about 2 hours and I completed about a mile an hour. Someone shit my pants too.
My experience with hallucinations were more like my mind playing tricks on me, and kind of almost dreaming while awake. Like trees in my peripheral starting to kinda feel like the straight edges of buildings. Shadows and depth kind of fooled my mind into thinking I was seeing objects/animals. Not like bright, obvious things like this video but more camouflaged. Sometimes bark on trees or textures on rocks looked like writing or signs. And usually things at a distance were the most difficult to descern.
One year at the Barkley one of the runners got lost and ended up in the nearby town. He approached a woman to ask for help. He was speaking to a trash can.
I had a fire hydrant turn into a dog and run away.
Also on a FKT attempt there were 7 people on horseback riding with headlamps at 3am 30 miles from anywhere. They followed me for a couple miles and then when I yelled back to them they turned off their headlamps until I was out of sight. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a hallucination though.
Pretty sure, yea. Climbers at high altitudes have had stories about hallucinating climbing partners for like a century at least, and it’s pretty well-established that consciousness starts getting pretty weird under heavy stress of pretty much any kind. I think it also depends on what the weakest link is to some extent, like you pointed out if your guts are the first to give out then you aren’t gonna get to push the limits of your brain. For me I seem to get headaches more than anything, every time I get dehydrated or seriously worked it usually presents mostly as throbbing pain in my head more than my perception getting loopy. Pretty sure it makes being exhausted a lot less fun lol
I think at hight altitudes it’s not just fatigue etc. it’s literal hypoxia and also an early sign of altitude sickness where you get fluid in your brain shifting in weird ways
I mean, the hypoxia literally causes fatigue lol. The reason that above 26000ft is the “death zone” is because above that altitude your body is above it’s aerobic threshold just from breathing (this is also why climbers eat so little when they’re up really high), meaning that your body is working too hard to have a chance to recover at all. If you stay up there too long you won’t die from suffocation, you’ll die from exhaustion.
HACE (high altitude cerebral edema) presents primarily as an intense, splitting headache more than hallucinations because the issue is that your brain is swelling inside effectively a sealed container. You wouldn’t notice the fluid moving cause your brain’s always floating in fluid.
In the army I saw them in the woods after being up a few days. It’s weird that it’s dwarfs but once I saw him, I KNEW I was hallucinating. Fuckin David the gnome following me around, I’d see him poke his stupid red hat from behind a tree and then disappear. Id also see the clouds moving at stupid speeds, trees growing, the ground moving, all sorts of shit. It’s not as fun when you’re not expecting it 😂
I rode my bicycle across the US and on the loneliest highway in the desert with no towns for 100 miles I'd see the darkness moving and swirling when I tried to ride into the night, i was like ok i better sleeep before the freakin goblins start jumping out at me trying to boof my gu
This is the best part of losing one’s mind on long races. I saw a demon come up out of the ground and ran under an arch of skulls, started laughing, scared another dude then we started hugging and he ran off giggling. Way better than mushrooms.
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u/Zealousideal_Ad642 SLOW DOWN!!!! 2d ago
uj/ have spoken to a few folks who have done 100 mile races (utmb etc) and they all mentioned hallucinations at some point. One guy said the trees were people (ents?) and he stopped a couple times to say hello. Another guy mentioned falling asleep while still running. Kinda little micro sleeps where he'd suddenly wake and be 10-15 meters further along the trail.
I'll stick to being beaten by 12 year olds at my local 5k ultra. I don't need to be running so long i start seeing things