How It All Began

While I was always athletic, running was something that I dreaded doing for the first 30+ years of my life.  I was an athlete that was described as strong, powerful, and other like terms but never one that was associated with any of the qualities that one typically attributes to a long-distance runner.  The idea of running a 5K, let alone an ultramarathon, seemed an unreachable goal.  Until one day when I decided to actually give running a try.  I was overzealous and my pace way too fast but I managed to push myself for a mile before succumbing to breathlessness.  The next day I set out to do the same thing again and I made it further.  This got my competitive side intrigued and made me start to wonder, how far could I go if I kept this up for a few weeks?  Of course, trying to set a PR every day is not long-term sustainable, but by the time I reached that point it had become a habit and I looked forward to going for a run. It had become a form of moving meditation for me that I could use to let the stress of the day fade away and find solutions to elusive problems. A habit I kept up and eventually ran a number of 5K, 10K, and half marathon length races.  Although anything longer than a half marathon still seemed like an impossibility. 

The sport of OCR than began to become more prominent and I, more importantly, formed a group with a few friends that would do the events (primarily Spartan races) together.  We started with the Sprint and moved up to Super, which got us curious – could we tackle a Beast?  As the distance got longer, the group grew smaller but pretty soon a few of us had conquered the Beast?  Could we do the Ultra? 

While the group was very small at this point, it turned out that a couple of us could.  At that point, it was by far the hardest thing I had done athletically and even though there were times during the event I swore I would never do such a crazy thing again, the reality was I became hooked.  I have since gone on to complete two more 50K Ultramarathons and am yearning for the bigger challenge of a 50 miler.  Just one problem – I’m a back of the back runner who will need to up his running game. This blog is my reflections on how I approach and overcome challenges as I progress towards 50 miles (while still trying to improve strength) in the hopes that it helps someone else.