Canyons 100k, 2023

There was a lot wrong about this race for me. It was not the experience I had hoped for and I’m disappointed with the outcome. The days since find me carding out what’s an excuse and what’s an opportunity for growth. There are a lot of both, with their own percentages of legitimacy. The heat is an excuse.

Training:

Coming out of Rio de Lago 100 in November I was feeling wonderful because the race went so well and extremely fatigued because I had pushed myself well beyond all my limits. The only thing that let me go that hard was having the backing of a solid crew and I am forever grateful for their support. Looking ahead to Canyons I was thinking that I wanted to focus on running the race more solo. I was feeling confident after Rio and wanted to see how hard I could go independent of such a robust crew. Since the race is only 100k and didn’t allow pacers it felt like I could tackle this on my own. I signed up for the race not too long after Rio and I think without fully thinking it through.

I also wanted to ski. Before I was super into running, skiing was my primary sport and love. I haven’t skied regularly since 2008. This year I was able to get into a lease in Truckee and I got a season pass to the legendary Palisades. I Decided to just go for it, it turned out to be a historic year in Tahoe and the skiing was amazing. The years of running after my (telemark) ski life have made my legs quite strong and skiing again felt…easier than when I was in my early 20s. I also found that I had the same eyes as I did then and could only see the A lines. I was sending it and to top it all off I have a truly stunning purple vintage outfit too. I was having a freaking blast, some of the best skiing of my life. I reconnected with a much younger part of myself. I was focusing a lot of energy on being authentically me. If running is all about cultivating joy, skiing is just joy.

I skied a lot this season and I spent a lot of time alone. I didn’t ski with people very often and with my school-holiday calendar I was able to spend a full 3 weeks in the mountains, not alone-alone but pretty solitary. I welcomed this in, choosing to spend Christmas on my own too. I was intentionally spending time with myself, sorting out my values, doing the work. A big part of my mental health journey post-divorce is being okay on my own. I spent so many years partnered, it’s tough. Skiing again was interesting in this context because in many ways I left skiing for that relationship. I was remembering who I was then, trying to find that person inside of me. Its not tangible or articulate-able more of just a glow. I remembered that in my early 20s was I just beaming with so much passion and energy for life. I found a lot of self acceptance this winter deep in the pow.

Back in the city I was making up for lost time in the mountains. I was running as many miles as I could mid-week so that I could ski on the weekends. I figured if every run was a medium-long run then I would sneak by without actual long runs. Not hard science, but worth a try. I was averaging around 40–50 a week, even into the mid 60s. In 5 days with 2 days of skiing I was wrecked. Totally exhausted. Week after week. Just living for it, felt like the ski bum days again. Going hard, burning all the ends of all the candles embracing that solitude and getting it done for me.

Mid-week runs of 2hrs became the standard. When the exhaustion really hit me I realized that I was preparing myself for big weeks. If I threw long runs in, I could easily hit high 80s. I’ve never run a 100 miles in a week, I started to get curious. My training was going well. I felt like I could just run and run and run. In a lot of ways training for an ultra is easy, you just run as much as possible, whenever possible. When the snow slowed down and the skiing kinda mellowed I started to prioritize long runs and my weekly mileage exploded. This culminated in a 6 week block where I ran 520 miles. Including back to back weeks of 100 miles. I found a lot of self acceptance in those miles.

Tapering was tough. I reduced my mileage pretty hard over 2 weeks into the race. Going from 100 to 64 to 33. The training load started to hit me. My body got super tight, I got super tired. I told myself this was normal and ignored it. I was a little edgy, just off, not myself. Some anxiety crept in, I wasn’t sleeping great. I told myself this was normal and ignored it. I started to focus on my race plan.

I start these reports as part of my race plan process. I try to identify the themes of my training and then craft a narrative of how the race will look and unfold. If you’ve done the training I dont think its too helpful to think of the race through a physical lens. You either can or can’t do it based on the training. So much of running is mental, I think it makes sense to plan a mental strategy. I started to think of the race as 4 sections of 15 miles. Each section had a theme that I could use to focus my thoughts, taking a mental-reset at the marked points.

The first 15 was dedicated to radical honesty. I wanted to be honest about my effort and my pace. Physically, post Rio de Lago 100, I feel like I’ve leveled-up. I know this, but I find it hard to let myself run hard. To trust my body can handle it. The first 15 were about being honest enough with myself to run the way I know I can.

The second 15 was dedicated to the memory of the people who’ve left my life too early. I’ve lost so many over the years and I miss them. I miss so much. I wanted to honor them in this section, to think of their impact on me and who I am. I want to accept and integrate their role in my life.

The third 15 was dedicated to my spiritual connection to nature. As a little boy I felt left out because my family was one of the few who didn’t go to church. People were even told not to play with me because my family wasn’t religious. I used to play church, out in the woods. I created elaborate ceremonies. If pressed, I do think of myself as pagan or wiccan or agnostic, or lost. Part of my goal with spending Christmas alone was to decolonize my own celebrations and create new traditions. So far it involves candles and skiing.

The fourth 15 was dedicated to being angry. I’m very afraid of being angry. I do almost anything to avoid it so I don’t let myself feel it, just like pain. Lately, some anger has been bubbling up and I used some of that on a run in training and it felt…kinda amazing. I remembered that in earlier eras of my running I would run angry all the time. I remembered how to use this. I wanted to create a space where I could let myself rage a bit and close hard. I wanted to finish close to 10hrs.

This was the plan. Things didn’t go as planned.

The Race:

On the Saturday of the race I was off. The running wasn’t coming easily. I was tense and each step was labored. I kept waiting for things to loosen up (particularly my glutes and hamstrings) but they never did. I tried to accept myself, that everything was okay and everything would be okay, to let the day happen. I charged on, still holding pace. The first 15 were just okay, I was running fast but it didn’t have the magical feeling that Rio did.

In the second 15 is where things started to come undone. I was having a hard day and I fell back onto my race plan to get me through. Honor the dead. This wasn’t a great idea. I love their memory, but in this particular moment it made me tremendously sad. Also, when I’m hungry I don’t get “hangry” I get sad. My blood sugar was down and this added to my worsening condition. I was slowly fading from the chase pack and I was slipping into a solitary section. I was feeling lonely and my race plan had me thinking of all the grief I carry with me. This wasn’t going to work out. I don’t know why I thought it would. Maybe I just want to believe that I’m strong enough to endure anything. I’m not and I know this. But I think I forgot. I forgot a lot about myself in this race. I wasn’t in a good headspace at all.

In the third section I came to terms that it wasn’t a good day and that I wasn’t going to hit my goal of 10ish hours. I started to get a more clear focus on what the day was looking like and what I was going to endure. I had some flashbacks to the recovery from Rio de Lago and I think I was a little scared of putting myself into so much destruction. I wanted to dedicate this section of the race to connecting spiritually to the course. However, this was a godless and unholy section of the course. Had I planned effectively I would have known this. We had a monster road climb in the exposed heat, and a massive trail climb with 8 miles of exposed hot as fuck drudgery. If I wanted to commune in nature in this section it would mean facing the obvious gloom of climate change and the scourge that is humanity on the Earth. I was done. Fuck it. Completely unprepared. At mile 40 I was honest with myself. This wasn’t fun. It hadn’t been fun for about 20 miles and I had a marathon left in the brutal heat. I took stock of where I was and decided to drop at Drivers Flat aid station, about 50 miles into the race.

Epilogue:

Two weeks out, the dust has settled and I am seeing the lessons from this race and training cycle. Firstly, my time goal of 10hrs was just too arbitrary and tied to being competitive. There wasn’t enough substance here for me to push myself to my limit. On race day I just didn’t want it enough. I didn’t have a B goal or C goal (beagle or seagull) to fall back on when the A goal wasn’t happening. A deeper take is that my mental health was suffering going into the race. I was ignoring it, chalking it up to tapering. But I went into the race feeling low on all accounts. I was down on myself. So much of the acceptance I found over the winter was tied directly to physical practice, the process. Running is when I feel like the person I want to be. During the taper, when I’m not running much, all of those doubts and insecurities and negative self-image fell on me hard. Running is amazing, but it can stop you from feeling what you need to feel, it can become an addiction. I might be addicted to this.

Feeling what you need to feel, doing the work, is not pleasant; like at all. Younger Jamie didn’t stop to do the work. I was always pushing to the next thing. Staying distracted, never really processing what was happening in my life. Skiing and running became coping mechanisms. This winter when I spent all this time reconnecting to my younger self, trying to understand who I am and what I value. I also called up the unsuccessful strategies of that era. I approached this race like I was in my early 20s. The mania, the maximalist approach, full sending all things. Yes, this is the passion of my youth, but it also holds me back. it ignores all the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I carry a lot of scars. I want to go back. I want to be that person who wasn’t hurt. Running helps me feel that way. But that’s not who I am anymore. I have endured a lot of hardships in these years. This race showed me that I was going about my journey for self acceptance in the wrong way. My years of running have taught me how to use the sport to cultivate joy, I ignored that lesson at this race. I ran to feel competitive and fast- not because its so blissfully joyful. I failed because I didn’t respect the lessons learned from my own experiences. In the days after the race I’ve realized that theme carried over into lots of other aspects of my life. Accepting myself It isn’t about emulating my best imagined qualities. It’s about honoring the life that led me here. I’ve experienced so much in my twenty years of adulting but in a lot of ways I haven’t learned much from those experiences. I haven’t accepted that I am someone who has endured a lot because that’s not the person I want to be. But it is the person I am. If I can accept that, then I can actually learn from the life of experiences I’ve had. A while ago a fond acquaintance (we’re not friends) told me that I needed to lean less into my youthfulness and more into my Daddy vibes. I think I can get what that means now. Well, I’m working on it.

Other plausible excuses:

My training peaked too close to the race and not enough taper- maybe I went into the race exhausted.

I really did just go out too hard and my body blew up around mile 20ish.

I didn’t have my poles. I think it would have been a much different day if I had them with me. The only reason I didn’t carry them was because I thought it wasn’t cool. Regret

Food. I’m not good at eating in the heat and I was carrying more of a cold-weather nutrition (copied from Rio).

No music. Maybe should have had music with me.