Once a runner

"Why am I still trying to be a runner?"

This incredulous question pops into my mind with some frequency, still, as I near the decade mark of my running journey. I don't have a definitive moment when I decided to become a runner, but the first spark of genuine interest developed shortly after I finished the Tour Divide in the summer of 2009. I  wondered "what's next?" and gazed up at the mountains towering over Juneau. Everything beyond the jagged ridges was a mystery — fingers of rock stretching across the Juneau Icefield and beyond. I dreamed about the expanses I could explore in my limited free time, if only I were fast enough to cover the ground.

Unlike most adults who run on a regular basis, I have no running background. I was such an awkward ambler as a child that I failed the Presidential Fitness Test in seventh grade. When you're a striving tween who is given your first "F" because you couldn't break a 12-minute-mile, you're bound to take that failure to heart. Through my teens and twenties, I aggressively despised running. Then I entered a relationship with a man who was a collegiate cross-country star. Burnout led him to drop out of college, and by the time I met him a couple of years later, he was emphatically a non-runner. Several years after that, he picked up snowshoe racing on a lark. This progressed to mountain running after we moved to Alaska, followed by a meteoric rise in the ultrarunning world. I watched his progression to the top of the sport with some bemusement, because to me he was not a great athlete. He was the dude who went hiking and bike touring with me, and I could usually keep up. Maybe, I reasoned, running was not so hard.

He broke up with me before I ever gave running a go, so I can't credit him with much more than making the endeavor look entirely too doable. The Tour Divide led to some burnout with cycling, so after I returned to Juneau, I recruited my friend Abby to show me the ropes of trail running. We'd go out for slow jogs on the Treadwell Ditch Trail and other root-choked but flattish trails around town. Then I signed up for my first real foot race (at least the first one I intended to take seriously), the Mount Roberts Tram Run. The course was four miles up a muddy trail, gaining 1,800 feet. Abby and I lined up, and I asked her if we were going to race together. "Maybe," she replied, then disappeared into the crowd as the race launched. I'd go on to finish, red-lined and on the verge of vomiting, somewhere in the mid-pack, only to learn that Abby had won the race outright. As it turns out, Abby was a former elite cross-country skier. She'd been on track to compete in the Olympics before the pressure got to her and she walked away. She never shared this with me, her rank-beginner yet regular running partner. You might understand how spending all this time with elite athletes when I was young and naive might have skewed my perspective.

My enthusiasm for both running and racing faltered over the next year as I moved from Juneau to Anchorage to Missoula, but the following summer I fell in with another crowd of bad influences. A mutual friend introduced me to a Montana runner named Danni. She and I spent a weekend hiking in Glacier National Park, where I learned she was co-directing an ultra called the Swan Crest 100, slated the following weekend. On a whim I volunteered to help out with Danni's race. At the finish line, I met an enthusiastic Swiss runner named Beat. The rest, as one might say, is history. It becomes a long story to tell, but less than five months later I was in a new relationship and officially an ultrarunner myself, having completed my first 50K, en route to my "ultimate" challenge of finishing the Susitna 100 on foot.

That was early 2011, the start of my own meteoric rise. Although I would never venture anywhere near the top of the sport like Geoff or Abby, I enjoyed a fair amount of personal success early and often, and followed Beat's track of racing a lot. I finished 14 ultras in 2012, including another Susitna 100, UTMB (a shortened 110K course, still hard), and the Bear 100. I knew I would never be anything close to great, but I was still fairly certain I could go anywhere I wanted in this sport. My hubris hit fever pitch in 2013 when I enthusiastically signed up for and attempted La Petite Trotte à Léon. This spectacular DNF was the beginning of a slap-down that I might argue has continued, on some level, ever since.

"Why am I still trying to be a runner?" The angry voice echoed as I pulled myself up off the rocks and brushed dust and blood from my shin. It's @$%* 2019 and I'm still slapping the @$*! ground with some regularity. My crashes only seem to become more frequent as time goes by. I feel like I'm locked in a steady state of impact injuries, compounded by the embarrassment of being a middle-aged woman with scabbed knees and bruised arms. If tripping and hurting myself were the only indignities I had to endure, I could probably accept them. But I continue to rack up emotional failures as well. The reason I was out here on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, pushing my legs up the Betasso Link as fast as they'd climb until I lost control, is because I simply want to finish the Bryce 100 in three weeks. If I can manage this, it will be the first non-winter "A" race I'll have completed since I last finished the same race in 2013. In six years, my only breakthrough successes came from Alaska. And there were a lot of failures to fill in the gaps.

I write this as a confessional toward the deep emotional investment I've made in just finishing the Bryce 100, while simultaneously considering the endeavor to be foolhardy and a waste of time. Bryce is a beautiful course, and sure to be a memorable adventure regardless of the outcome. But I'm approaching the race with too much resentment and too little love. I've had ten years to become a runner, and feel the indignation of still being the same awkward ambler that I was in seventh grade, striving for a bare minimum that I might not meet.

It's been a tough week of training. I've posted about how my breathing has been good and overall I'm feeling strong, and that's still true. This week I pushed the volume; I wanted to log 20 hours of moving time, as I did in each of the two main training weeks leading up to the White Mountains 100. I managed 20 hours and then some with two weight-lifting sessions, 61 foot miles with 11,000 feet of gain mainly on dirt and technical trails, and a 53-mile road ride that had 5,300 feet of gain but actually was all enjoyment and no punishment, and did lead me to again ask myself why am I spending all this time trying to be a runner??

Beat and I logged our weekly long run in Golden Gate State Park on Saturday. Twenty-five miles with 6,000 feet of climbing, much of that on technical and rocky terrain. It turned out to be a bit early in the season for these trails. Most of the shady and north-facing areas were packed with snow and ice, with varying degrees of slipping and post holing. After my fall on Wednesday, I developed a little bit of what I call "trail vertigo," for lack of an official term. I was feeling wobbly, uneven, and vaguely dizzy for much of the run. To be fair I'd felt this way even before I took that hit. I think it's just something that comes on when I'm more fatigued. In the past couple of years I've associated my proprioception issues with poor breathing and low blood oxygen, but I had no breathing difficulties this week. I felt strong on the climbs, but weak and lightheaded on the descents. A friend visiting from North Dakota joined us for the final eight miles, and it was a nice distraction — slogging through shin-deep snow while talking about sled-dragging and layering for 30 below. These challenges are all well within my comfort zone. Trail running, on the other hand ...

So I ponder what, exactly, I'm trying to achieve. Way back in 2013, when I was arguably near the peak of my running success, I decided I didn't really love bike racing. Unless it was some sweeping adventure, such as the Race Across South Africa, the Tour Divide or the Iditarod Trail, I just didn't have the fire to focus on competitive cycling. Instead I wanted to ride bikes for fun, and test my limits in a way that was consistently difficult and enlightening — running. It is difficult to reconcile this zeal with the reality that there's absolutely nothing about running that comes naturally to me, and experience has arguably worsened my abilities as confidence continues to erode, and things actually could just keep getting worse, until I finally quit.

A hundred miles is a long way, and there's a lot of time for any number of issues to crop up that I might not be able to fix. It's silly and foolhardy to place so much pressure on my performance in this one race with which I already don't have a great history. Still, a success at Bryce, even the bare minimum, would be enough to justify positive answers to that nagging question ... why am I still trying to be a runner?

I have one more week of focused training before the taper. Hopefully I can get through it without meeting the ground yet again.