Let’s Get Back To Writing

I’ve gone silent here. Actually, I’ve gone silent in with any writing, really. I had a rough spring of waves of getting sick and then recovering and then almost immediately getting sick again. Four or five big waves. It was not fun. It put me in a real funk for many months. It’s not what led me to DNFing at Bighorn 100, but it certainly contributed. I was not as well trained as I would have liked to have been, which was in my head from the beginning of the race.

But alas, I want to get back to writing. Writing is rewarding to me. I don’t need anybody to read it, I just need to write. Though when people read and comment positively, that makes me feel good, too. I want to get back in the practice of writing daily. Today I begin taking a stab at that.

I’m thinking a theme in my next bit of writing is to explore some basic truisms or tenets of running, in particular mountain ultra running, I can lay out for myself to lean on when things get bad. What do I mean by this? I’m not sure. An example might be, control the controllable, ignore everything else.

For example, I DNF’d at Bighorn because of an injury. Not controllable. I tried to continue for 30 more miles after I got injured, but was moving too slowly and with too much pain and a cut off was going to happen. Not much of a lesson to learn there. Not much to do. I got injured. It happens. You DNF. Or you don’t (some people would have pushed through, I’m sure) and then pay for it on the back end.

But there were things in my control on that day I could have focused on better. I wore a pair of shoes that I really loved, but that had also given me problems in training. I ignored the problems because they did really feel great, and paid for it on race day. My feet got shredded within the first 50K of the race. I could have made a decision not to wear those shoes and to pay attention when they gave me problems in training.

Once I got injured, I stopped paying attention to my nutrition. My total focus became on assessing how bad the injury was and if I could keep moving or not. So I underate and underdrank. I didn’t fuel well. I didn’t take care of myself. When I finally had the opportunity to change shoes, I did so, but didn’t bother to fix my feet. I just slapped on shoes that felt better and carried on.

The DNF was going to happen no matter what. I had some weird acute pain in my foot and ankle, so intense that I’d see fireworks each time I really tweaked it. But it only happened when going downhill, and only when going downhill and stepping on something that rotated my foot toward my midline. Problem was, the second half of the race was overwhelmingly downhill. So, I was able to work my way to the halfway point, mostly uphill, and mostly at a reasonable pace. But every downhill was at a snail’s pace, slower than my uphills. That was not sustainable. The DNF was going to happen.

Even so, I could have practiced controlling the controllable.

So I think I’ll spend some time working on what I think might be 4 or 5 truisms that I keep with me in races. And who knows. Maybe I won’t write in this space for another 6 months again?

For now, it’s time to start thinking about crewing and pacing at Run Rabbit Run. I’ve got some bags to pack.