I wrote the following for the bi-monthly newsletter of the Boulder Triathlon Club. A few things to note, first, I ran almost the entire distance in Vibram five-fingers. The days I didn't wear them were so cold, slushy and nasty I considered trying to run in my snowshoeing boots, but almost 400 of my total miles came in Vibrams. Second, I finished with a grand total of 423 miles, good for fourth overall, though I consider it to be third. Some guy didn't log any miles until the last night. Imagine running a race and having someone pull off an invisibility cloak as he crosses the finish line five feet in front of you. It's a shady move.
Without further ado... An Ultrarunning Tale.
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I'm not fast.
Even before I moved to an area populated by the likes of Dave Scott, Tony Krupicka and Scott Jurek (who moved here in January) and which regularly plays long term host to people like Macca, Chrissie Wellington and the Japanese Olympic marathon team I knew that the likelihood of me placing, much less winning, in an individual athletic event was pretty low. Which is fine, I don't run or bike because I want to win, I do it because I love it. This particularly applies to running. I once commented to my grad school classmates that the only thing better than running is sex. Not the sort of comment you live down, but I still believe it.
Being less than gifted in the area of acceleration I was shocked last March to discover that I had placed thirteenth among men, sixteenth overall, in that year's run focus for the USAT Challenge. Sure, I had stepped up my training mileage after deciding to take a stab at running Leadville (an attempt that dissolved halfway through training), but I hadn't been pushing all that hard, had I? How did I manage to finish 16th out of 1200+ competitors? I stared at the rankings for a while baffled. I absent-mindedly did some quick math while looking at the leaders versus myself and found myself thinking an odd thought.
I could win this thing.
So while the run focus of the USAT challenge is not a race per se, the 2010-11 edition is the first athletic competition I've entered where I went in with the goal of winning. Anything less would be a disappointment. The 2010 winner had 350 miles, I targeted 400 as my goal. I didn't just want to win, I wanted to rock it and not have there be any doubt about it.
I wanted to rock it because 2011 is a huge running year for me. The USAT 400 is a target that I set both because I want to win it and because it will lay the foundation, partly physically but mostly psychologically, for the rest of my year. Even if I just get my 400 for the USAT and the miles from the races I plan to run this year I'll log over 900 miles on my feet. Coming into the year my calendar was blocked out for four 100 mile race, one 50 mile race and two marathons along with a handful of shorter races. The confidence from having run 400 miles in one month was something that I felt could really help me through all of that.
There was a catch though, the competition didn't open at all like I expected. One woman, Kathleen Brush, opened the month with almost 200 miles of running in the first week. Last year's winner, Hunter MacLean, also opened up extremely strong. Meanwhile I had decided to dial back my first two weeks a bit to avoid tipping my hand. I quickly realized that not only was that not going to work, but I was going to have to step up my mileage significantly. Looking at that first week's results rattled me and I had to come to grips with the fact that this competition, which I had set my heart on winning, might be out of reach.
A combination of that gut check, bad weather and allowing myself to get distracted by social engagements put my second week off to a poor start and I totaled only nine miles the first two days of the week. I managed to recover though with a strong weekend, I woke up feeling great on Sunday after doing 28 miles on Saturday, so I put in 13 more. I'd have gotten even more in that day, but a midday break to take care of some chores turned into an all afternoon hassle and I didn't get outside again.
Week three I opened with a roar, faded a bit in the middle due to some some soreness in my hip, then wrapped up with a 40 mile effort on Sunday. The hip soreness was troubling, but I was positive it was muscular as opposed to skeletal and a renewed emphasis on icing, and cold water baths after my runs kept it from returning. With week four about to dawn, I braced for war.
Maclean had been posting a ton of miles and wasn't showing much sign of letting up. I had been tracking his daily mileage and figured I had to average 30 miles a day just to catch him. Hopefully he was wearing down a bit while I was preparing to hit my big surge. I considered backing off, shooting for the 400 as I originally planned and having some semblance of a personal life the final eight days, not to mention some well deserved rest. However, with the way my friends and coworkers had been pulling for me, and with how badly I wanted this, I decided to keep going for it. By the end of the week though, it was clear that it wasn't going to happen.
MacLean had put on a surge of his own and by Friday I figured I would need to average 40+ miles per day the last four days of the competition in order to catch him, he was on pace for 540 miles! To that point 40 miles had been my single day high for the month and while I had a 50 miler planned for Sunday, I knew I couldn't do 40 miles a day for 4 days, not as tired as I was and not with work and other commitments. I briefly toyed with the idea of skipping work on Monday and doing an all-day run, starting at whatever time I got up and ending at the stroke of midnight, the close of the competition.
That was the moment when I realized there had to be something very, very wrong with me. I had to be demented to call out 'sick' at work in order to do a fifteen, sixteen or even eighteen hour run with no organized support the day after a fifty mile run to win a competition that no one outside of a small community had ever heard of, and even fewer cared about. That was when I discovered I really was an ultrarunner.
As of this writing, the event is not over, it's Friday and I have logged 350+ miles. This weekend I'll do my fifty miler and wrap up my 400. I'm not going to skip work in order to make an insane attempt at catching MacLean the day after a fifty mile run and hurt myself (the Moab 100 is in four weeks after all). I may not have won, but I have gained the confidence I felt like I needed. I've run more miles in February than I ever really believed I could, I enjoyed just about every step of the way and I felt far better than I really had a right to feel.
I'm not fast and I may be crazy, but I'll never let either fact slow me down.
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