From 0 to 100k - Part 3: Making Progress, and Learning to Live Through a Pandemic

Three weeks ago, I posted Part 2 of this series, and for the first time in my life I really opened up about some of my mental health struggles in a very public way. My hope was that posting that blog would be like ripping off a bandage and that telling the story would be easier from that point.

Unfortunately, what I have discovered in the weeks since then is that the struggle remains, and continuing to unravel this story will be difficult. This is partially due to the nature of learning to be vulnerable and allow people into your world in a new and uncomfortable way. And it's also partially because my journey to running my first 100k may have ended 8 weeks ago, but my journey to understanding my mental health struggles is ongoing.

Nevertheless, this is still a story that I very much want to tell. So, I will. It may not happen as quickly as I'd like it to, but I will write when I feel up to it, and I hope that those who are interested will be patient and continue to read along. 

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A beautiful spring day on the North Head Trail.

As I outlined in Part 2 of this series, I headed into March 2020 with my running training moving in a positive direction, while my mental health was going the other way. 

At that time, I remember being a bit terrified to realize that the Steep 100k was only 6 months away. I had still only done a couple of runs on the trails, and my elevation training was still pretty minimal, as I climbed just under 1200 meters in February.

The benefit of having a coach guiding me through the process was that he was able to calm these concerns and modify my training a little bit to help build my confidence. I was only running about 4 times a week, but we added some specific workouts focusing on hills, and also shifted my long run focus to finding routes that provided lots of elevation gain.

In the first half of March, this led to me doing a couple of group long runs on the groomed trails at East White Hills. It was great to get out with some people who were more familiar with trail running than I was, and the climbing was just what I wanted. I even managed my first ever 1000-meter elevation gain run, which was a big achievement at the time, that became relatively normal as time passed!

During this same time, while my running was continuing to progress, I had no real idea of how to improve things in the mental health arena. I had a second visit with my psychologist on March 5th, and my experience on that day probably did a better job of illustrating the severity of my anxiety than any other that I have had.

The thing about dealing with ever-present anxiety is that you can become really good at subconsciously avoiding situations that force you to confront it. Your mind learns the things that make you uncomfortable, and it continually nudges you in the opposite direction.

As this particular session progressed, it became quite clear that if I wanted to move through the feelings of isolation and loneliness that I was struggling with, I was going to have to find a way to start reaching out to people. If you recall the discussion of my anxiety in the last post, this is my number one area of fear; naturally, thinking about this was somewhat terrifying. At the same time, the thought was still just a thought, and so my anxiety level remained relatively moderate.

My psychologist then moved the conversation from the abstract to the tangible, when he asked me if I'd be able to send a message to someone, simply asking them to meet for a chat. I responded that I wasn't really sure if I could do that, but that I could probably try. He then took the opportunity to put me on the spot and challenged me to do it before I left his office that day.

It may be hard to imagine for anyone who doesn't deal with anxiety in this way, but I had a visceral physical reaction to the thought of doing that. I'm not afraid of spiders or heights, or many of the other things that people generally associate with fear. But I have to imagine that the feeling I experienced at that moment was very similar.

My chest became extremely tight. I felt like I might be physically sick. And even though all I was being asked to do was send a message to someone close to me, asking them for help, I really wasn't sure that I could do it.

Ultimately, I managed to do it. I know that external motivation tends to work pretty well for me, and I think I knew that if I left his office that day without sending a message, the odds of sending one of my own accord were much lower.

So, I sent Ginny a message and asked her if we could meet for a chat. Of course, being an amazing friend, she said yes, which the rational side of me knew that she would. But as I discussed at length in my last post, my anxiety doesn't care at all for what the rational side of my brain thinks.

We arranged to meet on the evening of March 10th, and while she was already aware of many of the struggles I was having, it was freeing to be able to sit down and be honest with a friend about just how difficult things were for me at that moment. I left her house that evening feeling invigorated, and with the hope that I could build off this in the days and weeks to come...

...and then, the world flipped upside-down. I follow the news pretty closely, and so I knew that the Coronavirus (remember when COVID-19 wasn't the common term?) was causing havoc in many nations around the world. It was still a little jarring when the middle of March came, and life here in Newfoundland ground to a halt for many.

Now, as someone who was battling with strong feelings of isolation, the idea of forced isolation and quarantine was a bit strange. On the one hand, I was disappointed and frustrated. I felt like I had just taken a first step towards learning to break out of my isolation, and now many of the potential avenues for connecting with people had been cut off.

On the other hand, I had more experience with spending time on my own than most, so it was less of a shock to the system in some respect. Also, the idea of reaching out to those around you suddenly became all the rage. Strangely, this made it easier for me to fire off a text to some old friends just to see how they were doing. There was also a bit more of a conscious effort to "hang-out", in the virtual sense, so a few of my running buddies and I had some Friday night Zoom sessions. Looking back, I may have been one of the few people who was more social during the first month or two of the pandemic than I had been before it started.

Those experiences certainly helped boost my mood, and the other thing that helped keep me centred during this time was my running. In the early days of the lockdown, there was still a lot of uncertainty about how and when it was safe to be around other people. One thing that was continually stressed, though, was the benefits of getting out and exercising if possible. Obviously, this was music to the ears of runners.

Since I still didn't have much experience on the local trails, I had to get a bit creative in finding routes to give me the desired training. I did some runs that I wouldn't recommend to anyone, including one long run where I did 8 repeats of Farrell Drive in the cold and rain. I did some fun routes involving random exploring, via powerlines and other typically unused trails. And I did several loops around Signal Hill, which might not have technically been allowed at that time, but definitely provided more than adequate amounts of isolation. 

It was so cold and windy on this morning, but the view was still amazing.

All those runs accomplished the goal of getting more and more elevation gain. Heading into 2020, I had never surpassed 2000 meters of climbing in a single month. I managed to accumulate just under 4000 meters of gain in March, and I cracked the 5000 meter barrier in April. Those numbers definitely helped to alleviate some of the uncertainty I had been facing at the beginning of March as to whether or not I could tackle the climbing necessary to complete the Steep 100k.

During those months, I had another 3 sessions with my psychologist, and while our progress was impeded somewhat by the realities of the pandemic, we were able to dig deeper into some of the underlying causes behind my anxiety. One thing my psychologist likes to do is to compare the work we are doing to running training, in that you don't just go out and run a 100k starting from scratch; you build up the ability over numerous smaller runs. In that sense, these sessions were akin to a solid base of training, preparing me for the more difficult workouts to come in the future.

All things considered, I headed into May feeling pretty good about myself. This being 2020, that pretty much guaranteed that something was looming in the background to throw a wrench into things!

As this is getting pretty long, I'm going to cut this one here. The next post will cover the beginning of virtual racing, reconnecting with some running friends, finally getting acquainted with the East Coast Trail, and a big life change which tossed a level of uncertainty into everything else I was trying to accomplish.

Thanks to anyone who is taking the time to read along, and until next time, take care.