Engineered to Run

When I travelled to Corner Brook on July 30/31 for a test run on the Steep Ultra course, part of my plan was to write a blog detailing the trip and discussing the course, to help some of my friends, and any other runners, who weren't going to get a chance to see it before race day. After the race got cancelled, I lost the motivation to write that post, but I still think it's a good story that's worth telling. Unlike the rest of the posts in this series, this post (and the next one) will only cover a two-day window and will be focused entirely on that adventure. I hope you enjoy it. _____________________________________________________________________________________ When I woke on the morning of Thursday, July 30, 2020, I was prepared for a hectic and exciting two days. My plan was to leave mid-morning, drive across the province to Corner Brook, have a quick night in a hotel, wake up super early the next morning, run 50k, and then drive home. I was planning for all of thi...

Beautiful coastline on Motion Path. As the calendar turned to June 2020, I was coming off the high of completing the Limitless Vertical Challenge the previous week while simultaneously beginning to come to grips with the fact that I was less than two weeks from being unemployed for the first time in my life. The first week of the month was mostly spent allowing my body some recovery time from all the climbing I'd done during the challenge, while beginning to tie up any loose ends and preparing handover notes for my projects at work. I had a session with my psychologist during the middle of that week, and I remember him asking me what my first feeling was when I found out I was losing my job. It took me a second to respond, but the answer that I ended up giving him was, "Relieved." In hindsight, that response was very much a reaction to the feelings I had been experiencing relative to my work over the previous months and years. As the pandemic had dragged on and the impact...

 As April rolled into May, the day-to-day routine of living through a pandemic had become somewhat normalized. I was working from home during the week, which allowed a little more flexibility as to when I was able to run from Monday to Friday. And while all of the typical road races that I would run in the spring had been cancelled, I was signed up for three virtual races, which helped give me a little extra motivation in my training. The Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee (GVRAT) was created by Lazurus Lake, the organizer of the Barkley Marathons. I've mentioned before that Barkley was my first introduction to the sport of trail running, and so the idea of running an event being put off by Laz was immediately appealing to me. This event required participants to cover 1,022 km between May 1 and August 31, and we were required to enter our distances daily to the website, where we could track our progress across the state of Tennessee. Concurrent to this event, the Paradise Running ...

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. ...

When I posted the introduction to this series of posts a little over 4 weeks ago, I made two statements that I knew even as I wrote them might turn out to be contradictory: that I was hoping to publish a post every few days, and that I was going to talk about some personal things that would be uncomfortable to write. I posted part 1 a few days after the introduction, and I actually wrote a decent chunk of part 2 just a couple of days later. Then the timeline came to the part of the story where it got uncomfortable for me, and things ground to a halt. I've really struggled with exactly how to write the second half of this post for weeks now, and even as I finish it off today it is extremely difficult for me to actually post it. Ultimately, this is the story that I want to tell. Not because it's overly unique or special, but for exactly the opposite reason. While my struggle is my own, the truth is that we all have our own personal battles. I am a strong believer that the more we...

When non-runners hear that I spend much of my leisure time running for hours and hours on end, the responses typically fall into one of two general categories: "That's really amazing!", or "Why in the world would you do that?" In this post, I'm going to examine that question in two different ways. The first angle pertains to the internal factors that provide my drive and motivation towards running in general. As I move through that idea, the focus will eventually shift to the specifics that contributed to me choosing this particular challenge. The answer to the question, "Why do I run?",  is one I have spent a lot of time thinking about, and even after many hours of contemplation, I'm still not 100% sure of the answer. At the most basic level, I can certainly give some obvious answers. It keeps me in shape and boosts my energy levels, which in turn makes me feel better about myself. It forces me to get outside and enjoy the fresh air, something...

Often when I sit down to write, the hardest part is figuring out exactly where to begin. My last blog post was written almost 11 months ago, and it was part 2 of an intended 3 part series documenting my experience around the 2019 Chicago Marathon. I acknowledged then that I had no idea when part 3 would come, and it turns out that it never did. I sat down and tried to write it on a few occasions, but the words never quite flowed the way I wanted them to. After completing my 100k run this past weekend, I think I understand better why that is: the conclusion to that chapter was really the beginning of this next story, and I wasn't ready to write it partway through the journey. Now that this goal has been completed, I think I'm in the right place for the story to flow. The title I've chosen, "From 0 to 100k", has multiple meanings. At the most basic level, it neatly summarizes the distance that was covered this past Saturday. Taking it a step further, it references t...