From 0 to 100k - Part 8: Recovering From My First Ultra, and Planning a New Adventure

A beautiful August day at Cape Spear.

At the conclusion of the previous post, I had just received an email on the evening of July 31 informing me that the Steep Ultra race scheduled for September 5 had been cancelled. There had been rumours circulating amongst the trail running community for a few weeks that it was unlikely the race was going to go ahead, but getting the news while sitting in a hotel room in Terra Nova, after spending the previous day and a half driving across the island and back for a test run on the course, was still a bit much.

I woke the next morning and completed my drive back to Mount Pearl. My legs were not feeling great, which I chalked up to normal soreness and fatigue from running a 50k the day before. I would later discover that this was not the case, as my legs actually felt much better after longer efforts later in the year. While I can't definitively state that driving for 6-7 hours immediately after the 50k was the cause, it is the one important variable that was missing from those other, longer efforts. Needless to say, I won't be making that choice again in the future if I can help it!

Thankfully, I was able to get back to running pretty much right away. My 50k took place on a Friday, and I was out for a VERY slow shuffle on Sunday. Monday was another super easy run, but by Wednesday I was back to normal running, and I did a speed workout on Thursday. It was definitely a big confidence boost to be able to bounce back so quickly after my first ultra distance run, and it helped solidify my belief that I could manage a 100k later in the fall.

The problem was that at that moment, there was no longer a 100k race to run. This left me trying to decide how to follow through and accomplish my goal.

My first instinct was to attempt to travel to Corner Brook as planned on Labour Day weekend and run the Steep 100k course unofficially. My friends Justin and Catherine Warren were planning to be there to help pace/crew me for the race, and my parents were intending to be there for support as well. I checked with Justin and Cat, and they confirmed that they were going to travel for a vacation regardless of my plans and that they'd be willing to help out if I did decide to run.

Any thoughts of following through on this plan were ended when my parents informed me they had already cancelled their plans, and no longer had any intention of travelling to the west coast. I will confess to being (unfairly) annoyed at this development at first. I had worked so hard to get ready, and I really wanted to run the course I had been training all year to run. But, I knew I couldn't do it without a bunch of support, and so I had no choice but to drop this plan and begin brainstorming another.

As the second week of August approached, the idea of running a 100k on the East Coast Trail (ECT) began to move to the top of the list of options. The ECT 50k race was a course I had been interested in running since I started trail running, and given the fact that I had been preparing for an out and back 100k all year, running the course in both directions seemed like a natural fit.

At this point, I had run roughly the first half of the route, covering Stiles Cove Path and Father Troy's. There were 3 additional trail sections (Silver Mine Head, Cobblers Path, and Sugarloaf Path) that were basically unexplored by me, having only run a portion of Sugarloaf with Dan Meades back in May.

With Dan being by far the most knowledgeable trail runner I knew, and someone with a wealth of experience on the ECT, he was the first person I contacted to help flesh out the idea of an ECT 100k. He provided some great input on the relative difficulties of the various trail sections, as well as his thoughts on which direction made the most sense to run first. Dan also volunteered to assist in any way that he could; knowing I'd have a veteran like him as part of my team was very reassuring.

On August 13, I emailed my coach and informed him that the ECT 100k was the most likely option at this point. He replied and requested as much information as possible about the route and my plans, a request he probably lived to regret once he realized how particular and detail-oriented I can be at times!

(I'm going to step outside the main timeline for a moment, to comment on a separate decision that I made regarding the planning for my ECT 100k, which relates to some of the mental health issues I have discussed in earlier blogs. I've talked openly about my anxiety, and in particular how it makes it very difficult for me to reach out to others.

Knowing this, and since tackling some of my mental health issues head-on was another goal of mine in 2020, I made the decision not to rely on my family for support during my ECT 100k. I have no doubt that had I asked my parents and siblings to help out, they would have done anything possible to assist. But, that would have been much easier for me than asking for help from others.

So, to challenge myself to face my anxiety, I made the decision to recruit a team entirely from my circle of running friends. Now, I was also pretty confident that these people would do whatever they could to help. But that didn't change the fact that there was a very high level of anxiety in asking. I wrote way back in the introduction to this series about how this challenge was about pushing my limits. And while the idea of running 100k is an obvious manifestation of that idea, for me challenging myself to reach out to others for help was, in its own way, even more daunting.)

My first trip to Cobblers Path was foggy, but still a sight to see.

The weekend of August 14-16 ended up being a very busy one for me. On Friday afternoon I went out for a 3-hour training run, getting my first look at Silver Mine Head and Cobblers Path. Saturday I spent a bunch of time putting together information regarding the ECT 100k to send to Coach Ryan and to use in recruiting my team. Then Sunday morning I spent another 3 hours on the trail, doing an out and back from Maddox Cove to Cape Spear.

By Monday, I had sent Ryan a TON of information about the ECT 50k course, my initial plans regarding crew/aid stations/etc., and I had also emailed two separate groups of running friends who had indicated they may be willing to help out. At this stage, the plan was for a 4:00 am start, with a best-case scenario leading to a finish around 8:00 pm. I had 5 possible dates in mind, depending on the availability of crew, and after googling sunrise/sunset times I discovered that I'd have between 11 and 13 hours of daylight, which meant that at least 3 hours of the run was going to be in the dark. Seeing as I had never run on the trails in the dark before, this was going to be a challenge.

When my friends received a 700-word email with this plan attached,
it's safe to say they knew what they were signing up for!

By midweek, I had already gotten feedback from a couple of friends that some of my early dates didn't work. So the date had pretty much been settled on as September 26. This came with sunrise just before 7:00 am and sunset just before 7:00 pm, leaving me with 12 hours of daylight for the run.

I also had a phone call with Ryan, and dealing with the darkness was the main topic of our conversation. The 4:00 am start time would allow me to get some of the dark running done early, however, I'd be finishing in the dark, and the more I went past my 16-hour best-case scenario, the more dark running I'd be adding on the back end.

This issue was compounded by one of Ryan's main coaching points: go as slow as comfortably possible early on. The primary focus for this run was to finish my first 100k, and he stressed that going too hard early in the run was the easiest way to fail. He said it would be much better to feel like I'm going too slow at the start and have some energy left in the tank to finish, then to go too fast at the start and be suffering in the later kilometres.

My concern here was that if I did have energy left in the tank late in the run, the darkness would render it useless. I worried that my lack of familiarity running in the dark would make me unable to run at a decent pace late in the run, no matter how good I might feel. And I felt this would create a nagging feeling of pressure to go faster than Ryan was suggesting earlier in the run. A nasty mental battle would ensue.

Luckily, Ryan was there to provide a solution: why not start at midnight? At first, it sounded a bit extreme, but the more we talked about it, the more it made sense. The first 7 hours or so would be in the dark, and that would force me to go slower. And I'd have about 19 hours before it got dark the next evening, so that gave me a decent buffer to finish in the daylight. By the time the conversation was over, this idea was pretty much locked in...provided my support team didn't all bail when I suggested it.

After concluding my conversation with Ryan, I composed emails to my two groups of running friends, with the main purpose being to confirm the date, and gauge their willingness to participate given a midnight start. I will admit to being a bit nervous that some of them would back out, but I probably shouldn't have been. They were all super supportive, although most of them did insist on one change.

Up to this point, I had been intending to follow the rules for pacers that were in place for the Steep 100k, with no one running with me until I reached the 64k mark. Some of my friends had been pushing me to loosen up this requirement a little; when I told them I wanted to start at midnight, that pushing pretty much changed to insisting. Since the last thing I needed was a full-on crew mutiny, I relaxed this constraint and agreed to take on as many pacers as I could find.

I was not expecting this entry to be nearly this long, but with over 1800 words already written, this is a decent place to break. The next post will cover the continued recruitment of my team, a 3-day test run of the entire 100k course, and the final preparations leading up to the big day.

Thanks as always to anyone who is following along, and until next time, take care.

It doesn't get much better than this.