How I Become an Unlikely Ultrarunner

Waiting on the start line of The North Face Endurance Challenge California 50k, I wasn’t sure if I could make it to the finish. It was my first ultra marathon and after mile 26.2 I’d be running into uncharted territory. It’s not that I think running an ultramarathon is more challenging than a marathon. Or even that a 50k is necessarily harder than a 5k. But while a 5k is a race of white hot intensity, an ultra is a slow journey into the unknown. I barely slept the night before the race. I was tossing and turning, sweating before I’d even started running, anxious at the thought of navigating the mountainous Marin headlands for 7 hours — or longer. I was afraid of that unknown.

My fears were rooted in my relationship with running. I’ve always been injury prone and issues like shin splints, and IT band and knee pain have been pretty constant side-effects of my attempts at the sport. I have pancake flat feet. My arches are so low that if you saw my footprint after I got out of a pool it would look like an oval. It’s one of the more visible symptoms of my body’s gummy connective tissues that are a consequence of a condition called ehlers-danlos syndrome. In my case it isn’t severe, but it means I’m really flexible and more prone to overuse injuries.

The first time I tried running was when I was in middle school and joined the track team. Within a few weeks, I had awful shin splints and my parents took me to a podiatrist to see if getting insoles would help. That doctor told me my body wasn’t built for running. He suggested I try the swim team. Unfortunately, I took what he said to heart and I gave up running for years after that. It wasn’t until I was in college that I tried it again. It still wasn’t easy, but thanks to a base of fitness I’d built through cycling I was able to get into it pretty successfully. I still struggled with injuries (who among us doesn’t?). But I ran. And my senior year of college, I completed my first marathon. It was one of my first big expeditions into the unknown, the first time I completed a race I wasn’t sure I was capable of finishing.

I didn’t take a straight line from that first marathon to my first ultra. That was in 2013 and between then and now, I took some years off of running, I raced my bike, I ran some more and did a couple more marathons. Last Fall, it had been a couple of years since I’d run consistently and I decided to train for a corporate 5k my company was participating in. I didn’t set any PRs at that race, but it got me back into running and thinking about the next big thing. I’d already done a few marathons. I wanted to see if I could go further.

As I lay in bed waiting for my alarm to go off, my biggest fear was that something would give out — my ankle, my knee, my hip — and I’d have to walk for miles. I knew I could probably limp my way into the finish, but that’s not how I wanted my race to go. I visualized myself running across the Golden Gate Bridge, the last mile of the race before it dropped down to the finish line on the San Francisco Bay. The truth was, I probably hadn’t done enough mileage leading into this race. I’d had a bad crash on my mountain bike that took away a couple weeks of training and my longest long run in the 12 weeks before the ultra was a trail half marathon. I hadn’t even run as many miles in a week as I’d be trying to do at this race. So, my fears weren’t unfounded. But I’d run consistently and I knew that so much of a race like this is mental. The mind tells the legs when to stop and all I had to do was keep moving.

By the time I was on the starting line for the race, my nerves had settled. In the days before the race I’d worried if I’d trained enough, what shoes I should wear or how much food I should carry. But as I waited for the clock to hit 7:00, there was nothing else I could do. For whatever reason, I’d been put in Wave 1 and the bike racer in me couldn’t resist starting at the very front of the pack. When in doubt, lead it out! I charged with the people who would eventually win the race and then after about 30 seconds settled into my ‘if it feels hard, you’re going too hard’ pacing strategy.

And then I hiked uphill. And I ran downhill and on the flats. I ate a gel every thirty minutes and drank my entire 500ml water bottle between every aid station. I executed my race plan. Around mile 11, I got nervous when I felt a dull ache in my right ankle. It had been bothering me since my last long run a week before. But the ache never became a sharp pain. It never gave out or even forced me to alter my stride. I just kept running and my body held together. Then, around mile 27 — after I’d run further than I ever had in my life — I crested the last big climb, saw the city of San Francisco out in the distance, and knew I was going to finish.

As I ran across the Golden Gate, there was a low lying fog that was level with the bridge’s deck. Above me was blue sky and at my feet a sea of white. I was running on clouds, unbroken except for the city skyline in the distance. Even though I’d run 31 miles, I felt as light as air. I was so proud of my body, of what it was capable of. All of the uncertainty I’d felt the night before was gone as I lived the moment I’d been dreaming of for weeks.

For that fleeting moment, I felt like I could run another 10 miles. But the race didn’t finish at the end of the bridge and after we descended down into the fog, I ran the hardest half mile of the entire race. The mind tells the body when to quit and now that the end was so near, the fatigue of what I’d done finally started to set in. Worse still, from inside the clouds I couldn’t see where the finish was, although I knew it was close. I hobble-jogged the last few hundred meters and into the finishing chute. When I stumbled through the arch at last, I started to cry. I had run 32 miles and climbed some freaking mountains while doing it! It was one of those rare and sweet moments in life when I got to achieve something I didn’t know I was capable of. And it makes me wonder: what else can I do?