High Five By 55

Yesterday I got a reminder of perhaps the skill I most need to work on. A skill that a have bizarre mix of real strength and profound weakness. A skill that will really determine if I'm able to finish this project or not. The skill: mental strength. What do I mean by this? In the context of the High Five By 55 project, I mean the mental strength to continue to endure. Endure in the face of adversity. Endure in the face of pain, of boredom, of fear, of uncertainty. Just like the physical training is designed to build the capacity to physically endure the demands of an adventure like High Five 100, I was reminded that I need to mentally train to mentally endure the demands of the same adventure. Yesterday, I ran a fitness test to try to gauge my current fitness as I really begin to dive into training for California International Marathon. The test was a simple one: after a 5 minute warm up, run 25 minutes at a pace roughly between half and full marathon pace, then without any rest ru...

I have never used a coach for running or any of the mountain ultramarathon adventures I have taken on. I haven't done it for a variety of reasons. Chief among them, this is just a hobby and I don't really feel like spending that much money on a hobby. Coaching seems an expensive extravagance for a hobby. I've had a couple informal coaching relationships here and there, but nothing robust and nothing paid for.  I've also found (and had confirmed to me by people that really know) running is a fundamentally simple sport to engage in and even do fairly well at. The concepts and building blocks of a solid training plan aren't tricky to grasp. Applying those fundamentals is not overly challenging. Sure, there are absolutely behavioral aspects that a really in tune coach could help with. It would absolutely be helpful to me to have someone says "just sit this one today out, Nathan." But the building of a training plan and understanding the purpose of the differen...

One of the things on my mind as I think about the High Five By 55 project is putting together a list of skills it would be helpful to build before I try running High Five. I'm not sure what needs to be on this list. I have some items I can think of right away, but more wondering about those things I don't know that I don't know. Wondering about those is what will keep me up at night. So, I'll try to figure out what those unknown unknowns are over the next several years. And I'll get started by putting together my Big List Of Skills that I want to or need to develop. The list so far: - Wilderness safety - my thought is to take a NOLS Wilderness Safety course. Unfortunately, those are not really offered locally, so I'll have to do this during some travel - Understanding rock quality - for the two class 3 climbs, I think it would be helpful to be able to identify between good rock and rotten, crumbly rock - Reading the weather - it'd be great to be really stron...

For the most part, I try to do "all the things" in my running and training. I run consistently, try to sleep well, eat well more often than not, and so on and so forth. I'm not a zealot about all things. For example, I am a bit spotty on keeping up with strength and core work, but do try to make that a habit. I do occasionally pig out (THANKSGIVING!) or eat just for pleasure. But mostly I do just about everything to train reasonably well for a hobbyist. Except recovery. I don't really do much of the recovery stuff. Yes, I am very particular about following a long or hard effort with a really easy one. After my Sunday long run, I try to stay off my feet and eat a bit extra. But that's about it for recovery. I have never tried any of the other recovery things. No sports massage. No compression boots. No red lasers or yoga (okay, maybe yoga for a short while) or recovery drinks or meals. No ice baths. No cryotherapy. No ART. No special supplements. None of it.  I oft...

One of my desires as I pursue this High Five By 55 project is to have a larger impact than just what I get it out of it. I'm not sure what I even mean by "larger impact", yet the idea bobbles in my head. These types of adventures are fundamentally selfish endeavors. Time training. Time away from family. Money spent on gear and to travel and to race. All for me. For me to pursue something. For me to push and find my limits. For me to experience places. Me. Me. Me. And I often struggle with that notion, the selfishness of it. Yeah, there are ancillary benefits that aren't totally selfish. I'm healthy by doing these things which means I should be able to be around for my family longer. My mental health is improved and I'm a nicer and more patient person when chasing big goals and wearing myself out with exercise. I get to help others as they pursue similar goals and projects. But at the end of the day, the pursuit is a pretty individual and selfish one. I'd l...

I skipped my morning run today. It wasn't a big run. Just 30 minutes at a recovery pace. A run of pretty low consequence in my training plan. But I skipped it, and that bugs me like crazy. It'll bug me all day. I'll think about where I might squeeze in a 30 minute run into my work day. And I shouldn't do that. I should just skip the run, let it slide, and move on into my track workout this evening. Why'd I miss the run? I woke up in the middle of the night with an absolute cracking headache. An absolute whopper of pain. I was eventually able to get back to sleep after a heavy dose of ibuprofen kicked in, but then woke up to my alarm still with a background headache and extra tired having lost an hour or so of sleep. It was no longer that same initial pain, but enough to feel really uncomfortable and not at ease. So, a bit tired and a bit uncomfortable, I decided to skip the run. A few minutes of extra sleep. Some moments to try to feel a bit better. Had it not been ...

There has been a small wondering. What if I do this whole High Five By 55 thing, spend the next 7 or 8 years collecting Hardrock lottery tickets, volunteer at Hardrock to boost my lottery chances, and still don't get picked in the lottery? What if demand for Hardrock continues to skyrocket and a 5-10 year window for likely selection becomes 20 years? Will this all have been a failure since it all began with the idea that I wanted to get into Hardrock and run the race, not just volunteer and crew and pace? No. Definitively no. Absolutely no. Purely pragmatically, if I've run 7 or 8 years of qualifiers and have done all the learning I hope to do, I should be absolutely ready to run and finish High Five 100 irrespective of whether I run Hardrock or not. I could simply jump into Ouray 100 in place of Hardrock for that final preparation race, and probably wouldn't require that anyway. So no, this will not have been a failure from that perspective. But far more importantly, no. N...

 My thoughts are a bit focused on CIM at the moment. The race is just over 11 weeks away, and I'm entering the heart of training for race day. High Five By 55 still bounces around in my head pretty much constantly, yet CIM dominates the thought process. And I am planning to pull out pretty much all the stops for CIM. High volume training. Really sharp intensity work. Finding just the right shoes and other gear. Working on my sleep habits. A focus on day-to-day nutrition and a touch of weight management. And I'm going to try something new I've not done before, very deliberate gut training. It's not that I haven't practiced with race day nutrition in the past. I absolutely make it a habit to use my race day nutrition in a few long training runs. But this time I'm going a step further. I'm going to work to train my gut to be able to handle consuming a much higher level of carbohydrates during the race than I ever have in the past. I'm going to target taking...

While I do have this idea and focus and thinking going on around High Five By 55, I am actually training for something completely different right now: trying to run a personal best at California International Marathon (CIM) in December. I feel like at age 45 I'm probably at the end of the line of much pace improvement in running, even though I have not really been running all that long compared to lifetime runners. So I thought I'd put in one more big go at a marathon and see how low I can go.  My goal: 2:4X. So, any time in the 2 hour and 40 minute range and I'd be absolutely delighted. I have no idea if it's possible, if I'll be near that. If I'm being honest with myself, I do think I could run under 3 hours fairly comfortably right now on my current training. I ran an "easy" 3:05 last December pacing a friend on zero specific marathon training, which should also be encouraging. But there's a huge difference between getting under 3 hours and bein...

As a part of this High Five By 55 idea, I will be running a series of big mountain ultras over the next 10 years. They'll be of varying difficulty and with different challenges at each. Some more vert. Some more altitude exposure. Some with bigger logistical challenges to even get there. But they'll all help prepare me for the eventual shot at High Five 100. At least, that's what I'm counting on to happen to get me ready. But I'm truly going to approach each of these races not just as a race, but really as a training opportunity. An opportunity to test something very specific. I will be putting together a list of skills and knowledge I want to learn and earn over the next 10 years, then will pick something off that list to really make the focus of each of these races. For example, when I was training for my first Ouray 100, I ran the Long Haul 100 in Florida earlier in the year. Now, other than both being about 100 miles, Long Haul and Ouray have about as much in co...

I have a large format poster on my wall. It's a photo taken at Ouray 100 in 2022 of me and my pacer heading down some single track at 12,000 feet just after crossing over Hayden Pass. The Red Mountains dominate the poster in the background, while my pacer and I appear to be tiny humans in a massive landscape in the foreground. When the work day is challenging or frustrating or boring, I look over my monitors and spend a moment falling into that mountain landscape. I've wondered why the mountains call to me so. I've wondered why the San Juans do so in a particularly powerful way. It's no answer, but when I ask myself the question I always return to the same memory. Well, a series of memories really that have all become one. The memory is from childhood, me traveling with my family to Switzerland. We'd turn on the TV in our Swiss hotel room in the evening and every single time there would be a channel playing a show with some mountaineers working their way up some loc...

Yesterday I ran a wonderful Sunday long run. Sunday long runs are my favorite runs. I've been running a 20+ mile run on Sundays almost every Sunday for four or five years now. And for those four or five years, pretty much the same route up and down the A1A avenue along the Atlantic ocean. Sunday long runs leave me feeling both wiped out and low energy, and fulfilled and joyful. It's social engagement, comfortable discomfort, pretty views, experiencing the world before most people are awake. Just glorious, even on days it doesn't feel so fun. I love the Sunday long run. I run largely for the Sunday long run. Without it, I probably wouldn't run. Will my chasing a High Five 100 finish in the next 10 years mean I can't regularly run the Sunday 20+ mile long run? Will I need to focus my training more on climbing and descending? Will the Sunday long run be detrimental to my pursuit and training? Every time I dive into a big mountain ultra project, I have this same wonderi...

Is it really going to take me 10 years to get myself ready for High Five 100? That seems like a darn long time. I'm reminded of something I read or heard somewhere years ago and can't attribute properly, unfortunately.  People have a tendency to overestimate what they can get done in 1 year and underestimate what they can get done in 10.  I think this is true. I think I could be ready for High Five 100 far more quickly than in the 10 year period. But that's really not the point, though I've asked myself the 10 year question a few times. Why 10 years? Because I think the likelihood is it will take 7-10 years to actually get picked in the Hardrock 100 lottery and actually get to run that race.  This journey or project or adventure or whatever it should be called isn't just about finishing High Five 100. In fact, it's very little about that. High Five 100 is just the little carrot at the end, the incentive to keep my moving forward and fired up. This really is abou...

I’ve been stuck on idea, a thought, maybe a life philosophy. The idea is simple. This is all a giant cosmic joke. Our lives. Even more so, the cosmic joke is the huge egos we humans have been endowed with when the reality is we’re utterly inconsequential on a cosmic scale, on a geological scale, even in the history of humanity scale. This little life is nothing more than a flicker in time which will be entirely forgotten within a flash of it ending. The joke: we think we mean a damn hell of a lot while we really mean absolutely nothing. What does this have to do with my High Five By Fifty Five idea? Well, everything. We get just a flicker of a moment of time here. To me, that idea is freeing and relieving of pressure. What I do really, really doesn’t matter. Yes, it may matter to me and my family and those who rely on me. But we don’t really matter, not in any real and permanent sense. So, if it doesn’t really matter, how does one choose to live a life? I think that freedom of not mat...

Am I old? Will I be and feel old by the time I get to take my shot at High Five? What is old? These are some questions that rumble around my head as I think about this entire project.  I’ve been told somewhere around age 45 to 50 it becomes much harder to get any fitter and better as a runner. Somewhere in that time period, the chase moves from improvement to being able to maintain what you already have. And then, you get about a decade of fighting hard to maintain before fitness eventually begins to fade…slowly, then fast. So over these ten years, I could move from the end of my improvement period to deep in my “fight to keep what you’ve built” period. Does that mean I can’t finish High Five since I don’t think I really have the fitness today? I hope not. And I don’t think so. I do think I can still become a better climber. I know I can become a better descender. And, far more importantly, I don’t think fitness is going to be the limiting factor in being able to finish. I expect t...

This bit of writing comes out of a new journey I’ve been thinking about, talking about with a few people, and excited about. I want to document this new journey, writing about whatever might come to mind as I work through it. Maybe I’ll share some of this writing publicly someday. Perhaps it all stays for me. Who knows.  It’s a big journey, a journey that will be a big physical challenge and an emotional challenge and a kind of rite of passage from youth (nay, middle age) to that which comes after middle age.  Earlier this year, I paced a friend for many miles at the Hardrock 100 Run. I had an absolute blast being back in the San Juan mountains, hiking and running for miles through that environment and all the different weather, hanging out with other friends who were also pacing and crewing. It refreshed the soul…even while completely draining the body physically. (Being awake through two nights, then trying to sleep on a red eye home the third night will do that!) I was remi...