Or, The Happiest I’ve Been To Be Almost Dead Last
06:17am - What began in the cold and dark ended in the cold and dark…
I found myself in the Utah desert on a cold, dark evening in late January 2020, bone-tired and cold after a hard day on my feet. I was buoyed by a quiet surge of profound elation that cut through the exhaustion. I was running through the cold darkness, exchanging encouragement and support with a total stranger I’d met a few miles earlier.
A small but lively crowd welcomed us, the rear guard of the back of the pack, as we ran into the glare of portable lights in a field alongside a highway, semis screaming past in the murky darkness. The goal: a portable arch decorated with a cheesy plastic banner. I crossed the sensor mat about 15 minutes ahead of the 12 hour cutoff time, placing 88th in a field of 94 finishers. My first fifty mile ultramarathon was over.
I had picked the race and the distance to celebrate turning 50 and to mark my planned retirement earlier in the month. Only one of those happened, but I was psyched to measure myself against the longest distance I’d ever run.
Along the long path of the late January day in the Canyonland scrub, I diverted myself from my tiredness and the accumulating physical misery by making a list of what I’d learned getting to the finish line. I had thought, and learned, a lot about performance during the journey to that day.
Thanks Where They Are Due
Several people helped make this possible and shout out are due to, among others my running coach, strength trainer, and physiotherapist. But helpful as they were, nothing mattered more than Wendy’s constant love, support and encouragement. Thank you!
And what I learned:
Don’t Go Alone If You Don’t Have To
“You got this!” is a popular greeting among trail runners, particularly when it looks like the other person actually doesn’t so much have it. We’re a surprisingly positive and social group, particularly on long runs. People routinely offer apparently sincere congratulations for doing better than they are. The first time someone gave me a shout-out for the great job I’d done passing them at the end of an off-road half-marathon, I almost ran into a tree.
The last five miles of the Arches 50 were...mentally challenging. The course crested a hill which gave a view of the finish line on the other side of a highway. Runners had to watch the lights get bigger and bigger, and then run past them for a good mile or so, looking for a craftily hidden pedestrian tunnel, cross under the highway, and then run back to the finish line they’d already passed once. It was dark again, it was cold, the road was covered with ice: ingredients for misery. But I had company, spending the last five exchanging support and encouragement with a total stranger. But for that hour or so, we were besties.
08:20am - The snow stopped and a stunning landscape emerged.
Slow Down To Go Further
In general in running, there’s a steep trade off between endurance and speed. A classic rookie mistake in races (been there!) is to go out too quickly, only to find a few or many miles later that you’re out of energy. What’s true tactically is also the case for strategy. Being in too much of a hurry to get to a big goal is a great way to burn out and practically an invitation to injury. So, maybe paradoxically, slowing down can speed your ultimate arrival at a goal.
I spent a couple of years building up to the 50 miler after my first marathon. If I go out of my mind and decide to do a century, it’ll probably be another year or two of training before I hit a start line. It can be an ego hit, to be sure--but ultimately, you have to be realistic about things. What’s a bigger hit: going slow, or a DNF from under-training?
Smile. Seriously.
People who know me will doubt this actually happened, or blame it on dehydration or some sort of hallucination induced by stress. But it’s true: I made a point of trying to smile during moments of pain. And at other runners, both passing me and who I was passing, while saying hello and offering canned encouragment. It really did, I think, help break up the monotony, not to mention the anger, stress, pain and other, similarly helpful emotions which took up most of the last, oh, 80-85% of the run. (Kidding. It was more like the last half.)
Seriously, though: endurance sports offer tons of opportunity to marinate in self-imposed mental and physical suffering. And if you let them, those things will undermine your effort in no time flat. So while I’m unlikely to mistaken for a mobile fountain of sunshine in regular life, I took every opportunity I could during the race to find something to smile at. It was really simple, and it worked super well. I may even try it during regular life, too.
Pick Your Battles
10:32am - One challenge turns into another one. The snow is starting to melt.
I started the day with three goals, agreed upon with my coach in the warmth of an Arlington, Virginia Starbucks—which seemed improbably far away in both time and space. I had a pace goal, a fuel and hydration plan, but above all was one imperative: “Finish.” Like all plans, mine tarted to collapse almost immediately when it came in contact with reality and I had to pick which parts to keep.
Keeping to the food and water plan was relatively easy. Adhering to it was a key to finishing, no question. “Finish” was harder to do than I’d expected, but it got dug into my brain and while I wavered, I never let go of it. The pace goal, though, disappeared in a swirl of pre-dawn snow. It was very quickly clear what had worked on the C&O Canal towpath was not going to hack it in a snow-covered desert that turned alternately muddy and then icy.
You Can Do More Than You Think
This entire venture was an experiment in pushing my boundaries. It took me probably the best part of thirty years of 5K/10K/13.1s to get to 26.2, but “only” two years and change to get to 50 miles. In 2015, I would have never thought I could have finished that distance, and it wouldn’t have occured to me to try. (Reasonable people may disagree about whether I’d have been better off if it hadn’t.)
And here’s the thing: success builds on itself. Overcoming small challenges leaders to the confidence to confront larger ones. This provides resilience when, inevitably, things also go wrong.
Listen To Your Body
12:10pm - Alleged dinosaur footprint on the slick rock.
There is incredible power in being aware of what’s going on around and inside you, without becoming too attached to it. Paying attention to the body’s messages and understanding them was critical. For instance, you can run through a lot of discomfort. But, you need to be able to tell the difference between merely routine pain and the early signs something is seriously wrong.
For example, several hours into the run my left IT band flared up where it joins the knee. This is really unpleasant--but I knew that it was something I could run through as long as I didn’t stop for too long or sit down. My mental dialog was “This is what it feels like when my ITB flares up. It’s painful, but I understand it.” On the other hand, when a searing bolt of pain shot up something that had never bothered me before, I recognized it as a signal to slow down. (I walked it out, and it went away.)
Your Emotions Will Trick You
The run was a roller-coaster. There were moments of euphoria (very short and not common, at least until the finish line) and moments of almost despair. The thing is, both were lies. They were, I’m sure, true enough in the moment I felt them. But neither extreme was a good guide to what I could or should do to finish the race. And following either of them would have been a disaster.
The truth for me was that for the most part, the run was a slog. I approached it with as much positivity and determination as I could--I remember standing on a bluff looking out over a spectacular landscape thinking, “I get to do this...wow...” What got me through was not either the high or low points, though, but in a sense the average of what I felt the entire time--
2:20pm - The weather starts to close back in.
It’s Worth Trying
We doubt ourselves for good reasons, and bad ones. The trick, I suppose, is in being able to tell the difference between them. That takes practice. I started this journey because, in a sense, I wasn’t sure I could do it. One of the things which helped bring me along was realizing that at some point, things had switched from “win or lose” to “win or learn”. If I hadn’t finished this run, I would have taken away from it lessons that would have still made it worth having tried.
The indelible part of this won’t be how I placed or any of the details. It’ll be that I tried, and I overcame my doubts.
If anyone takes just one lesson from this, I hope it’s that.
Annex: Elements of Performance
03:59pm - Still majestic.
On a technical level, these are the “other” set of things I learned. I’ll write about them more in future, and perhaps for different audiences. But all of them came together to help get me to the two finish lines: the one on the ground, and the one in my mind.
1. Mindful effort
2. Deliberate practice
3. Cross-train
4. Realism
5. Mindset
6. Train for the event
7. Respect limits
06:47pm - Dirty, tired, and very happy.