A Long Blog About a Longer Race, Or: All About My First Ultra

As has been well-documented, I like to run. I like to run so much that in 2019 I signed up for my first-ever ultramarathon.

For the uninitiated: An ultramarathon is any distance longer than a marathon (which is 26.2 miles). Common ultra distances are 50k (31 miles), 50 miles, 100k, and 100 miles. While ultras can take place on the road or the track, they’re most commonly held on trails, which means they take even longer to complete since the terrain is hilly and highly technical (that’s a fancy way of saying there’s roots and rocks and shit).

Lots of people have asked me why I would ever want to run an ultramarathon. I like to say that it’s all down to my willingness to do nearly anything to foster a misplaced sense smug superiority.

But if I’m being real, there’s a little more to it than that. I haven’t PRed in the half-marathon since 2016. After a grueling 2019 Good Life Halfsy where I missed a PR by about 30 seconds, I was ready to stop thinking about speed and start looking for another challenge.

After reading a slew of running books in 2018 and 2019, most of them about athletes like Scott Jurek and Rich Roll and Dean Karnazes, I started dreaming about joining the ranks of the ultrarunners. So I did a little research, and one ultra that was “close” to home and ranked on several “good first ultra” lists was the Dirty 30 in Colorado’s Golden Gate Canyon State Park—32 miles and more than 7,600 feet of climbing.

I signed up for the race in December 2019 and promptly began training. But like everyone else, I had no idea what 2020 would hold.

The one nice thing about the “unprecedented times” of March 2020 was that my primary hobby—running alone in the woods for literal hours—was unaffected. I ran my highest-ever mileage week (52 miles) in May 2020, and I was feeling good, doing 20-plus-mile long runs out on mountain bike trails.

Not that it mattered, in the end. The 2020 Dirty 30 was among the many causalities of the pandemic.

So I spent a summer licking my wounds, and when registration for the 2021 race came around, I took advantage of my cancellation discount and signed up again.

I got off to a decent start with my second round of training, even managing a very slow, 11-mile run on iced over trails in the first four weeks. But the night prior, my husband had come home from teaching not feeling well. It could have been anything—he could have just been tired—so we didn’t think too much of it. At least not at first.

Three days later, he realized he couldn’t taste the Impossible burgers we made for dinner, and I was starting to feel a little off myself, something I tried to attribute from the chill of running through three feet of fresh snow earlier that morning. But in the middle of the night, I woke up sweating and feverish. In the next two days, we both tested positive for Covid.

We had mild cases, which meant we both felt like shit for a solid two weeks. (This is your reminder to get the damn vaccine if you haven’t.) I took another week off running, per all the no doubt highly-scientific advice I found on Runner’s World, then got back to it.

My first post-’rona run was three miles, usually an easy distance I could run in 25–27 minutes without pushing too hard. But this time, it took me a solid 30 minutes, and that didn’t include the times I had to stop and wait for my heart rate to go down. It was pumping so hard it was like I’d been running a much longer distance at a much faster pace.

In total, it took five weeks before I even approached pre-Covid mileage, to say nothing of pre-Covid pace. I got vaxxed on Fridays at the end of March and April, and a side effect was a day or so of muscle soreness that didn’t do anything to help my training the next day. In the end, my longest run prior to the race was only 16 miles—half of the total distance.

At this point, I’d adjusted my goal from “finish in under 10 hours” to just “finish, period” because despite my many setbacks and my lackluster training, I was still determined to do the race or die trying, though, as usual, I was less afraid of dying and more afraid of shitting my pants in the attempt.

Come race day, I had never been so nervous and anxious, which is saying a lot for someone with unmedicated generalized anxiety disorder. My strategy was to take it aid station by aid station and focus on making the cut-off times. (The overall race cut off time was 11 hours and 30 minutes.) I knew if I thought about the whole distance, I would completely fall apart.

My husband drove for an hour through windy mountain roads in the dark to get me to the starting line. I spent about an hour trying to gauge if I could poop any more and shivering in the cool morning air, then I lined up with the other first-wave runners.

We got off to a rough start when some of our group—anywhere from 20 to 50 people—took a wrong turn and ran about a quarter mile in the wrong direction before getting back on track. It was unfortunate, but I was just glad I wasn’t lost out on the trail alone, something I had spent a significant amount of time worry about.

As I ran a nice downhill single track path somewhere around the third mile, I got hit with what would the be first of many waves of emotion throughout the day. Even though I still had many miles to go (29, to be exact), even though I was currently being passed by a runner much more fit, I was just feeling the weight of the anxiety lifting. No matter what happened, after today, it would all be over.

Things went smoothly until mile nine, at which point I wiped out. Though the course had many treacherous downhills filled with loose, chunky rocks, I was running on a gravel flat when I tried to move aside for a runner coming up behind me and fell in the process. Embarrassment alone motivated me to get up and stumble on, but seconds later I became lightheaded. My vision blurred. Stupidly, I kept running anyway, and through dumb luck I stopped feeling like I could pass out at any moment.

A few minutes later, when I was crossing a bridge, I looked down and saw just how much my knee had bled. Suddenly the dizziness made sense. I stopped in my tracks, slightly horrified. Another passing runner—an older but very fit man—stopped to make sure I was okay. He gave me a little pep talk before he took off again, and I pushed on to next aid station at mile 12.

At the aid station, a volunteer helped me wipe off the wounds with a wet paper towel before applying Neosporin. An attempt was made at wearing some Bandaids, but they didn’t last long before the combination of ointment and sweat had them sliding off.

That was hardly the worst of it, though. I was quite literally climbing over rocks on my way to the next aid station, and I’d gone to a dark place mentally. I was already exhausted, and at this point the race was becoming more of an ultrahike than an ultrarun.

A race photographer appeared, and he asked me how it was going. I mumbled something to the effect of “oh, it’s going,” but he heard me say, “not so good,” which was far more accurate.

After he took some pictures of my bloody knee and palm, he told me it was all downhill to the next aid station, and he said he hoped I felt better soon. Heartened, I continued on my way.

It did not feel downhill to the next aid station, but I made it all the same. It was mile 17.something, and a lot of people were trying to quit at this point. But the volunteers at this station were determined not to let anyone drop for anything less than a life-threatening injury. As I sat trying to choke down as many boiled potatoes as I could stomach, I heard one woman tell a runner, “if it’s just your stomach that’s bothering you, you can keep going. Have some ginger ale.”

Before I left the aid station, another volunteer doused my wounds with hydrogen peroxide and applied a moleskin bandage to my knee. That, too, was short lived, and by mile 20, I’d accepted it: There would be blood.

I was many hours in at this point, and time started passing strangely. I had the surreal experience of looking at my watch, seeing I was eight hours in, and wondering where the time had gone.

During the last third of the race, I leapfrogged with a girl named Alison from Boulder—I’d get a burst of energy and jog past her, and then I’d slow to walk and minutes later she’d pass me, until eventually it turned into us walking together until one of us wanted to stop and pant for breath. It was her first ultra too, and she asked if there was lots of “vert” (read: elevation gain) in Nebraska. I said no, and she said, “Well, I’m sure there are other ways to train.”

Given my performance up to this point, I was thinking that was clearly not the case.

I wasn’t familiar with the course, but I knew the biggest climb of the race was Windy Peak. At mile 25-ish, I thought we’d already finished it, but Alison said it was still to come. I didn’t entirely believe her until we’d been going uphill for awhile, and we started seeing runners pass us coming back down the way we came.

On her way down, one woman saw our green first-timer bibs, and she said, “Way to you you two. I’m so proud of you for doing this.”

Alison looked at me and said, “Wow, I’m about to cry.”

And honestly, so was I. At this point, even the race signs with lame motivational quotes like, “if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you” were making me tear up.

I made it to the top of Windy Peak alone, and then there were just a few miles left. I even managed to run the last quarter mile—quite an accomplishment, because I’d almost certainly done more walking than running. I crossed the finish line 11 hours and nine minutes after I’d started.

As a volunteer put a finisher’s medal around my neck, I was flooded with the same sense of gratitude. Gratitude for all my friends and family who’d been understanding when I couldn’t stay out late on Fridays because I had my long run the next morning, who’d texted me well-wishes the night before and the morning of. Gratitude for my husband, who gave up three days to stay with me in Colorado while I acclimated, and spent two hours just getting me to the race and back. Gratitude for the volunteers, who made sure I ate and got speedy water refills and medical attention. Gratitude for the other racers, who all went out of their way to offer commiseration and encouragement.

And I was also proud. Not necessarily of my performance—I finished 346 out of 366, after all—but of everything that led up to it.

Every day I got up to run in the ice and the snow, in the heat and humidity, every minute I kept going during the actual race, I made a decision. I made a decision to show up for myself.

Throughout my training, I realize it’s true what the philosophers say: Some things are just intrinsically valuable. A faster mile, more muscled legs, finisher medals—all amazing things, but all less important than the work you do on yourself in the process of getting them.

And the best part?

I didn’t even shit my pants.