x*The tense of some of this may be inaccurate when I post this. I have added and subtracted to it since I started, so there is a good chance the Divide 200 is over at the time I publish it.
I should be running a 200 miler right now. But I am not.
An ultra is never a sure thing. I always tell athletes that you haven’t truly arrived in the “sport” until you collect your first DNF. In such a complex and demanding set of endeavors, you can’t ever show up to a start line and be assured a finish, the universe has too much of a say. It is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting and beautiful facets of this type of exploration: you can have done every bit of training, every bit of planning and still fail, dramatically. Show up to test yourself enough, hard enough, and you will fail…as you should.
But in these failures, you grow. You gain perspectives around exertion and effort and life. You download data to use for your next outing, you callous your body to handle more and you expose yourself to the ruthless examination that a long day out brings. Showing up at the start line for an ultra, for 99.9% of athletes, is not about winning, it is about growing. And growth does not only happen when things go as planned.
If a DNF is a right of passage, a DNS (did not start) is an examination of self.
I currently am experiencing my first of these in many, many years, so this piece is to both navigate my own experience and also reflect on the experiences I have seen countless athletes go through on their journey through ultra. I think hearing others go through an experience that you have or inevitably will can be a helpful voice to have in the back of your own mind when shit hits the fan.
This past winter, the 200 bug finally struck. I knew it would and had waited until that fire got lit before I hit “register” on The Divide 200, a monster of an outing up here in the Canadian Rockies. Stoke was high.
Winter here is not a friendly place and I ambitiously jumped into a fairly big mileage build in the depths of sub 0 temperatures and constant snow storms. “Survive this and spring and summer will be a cakewalk” I told myself as I crawled through 60, then 70, then 80 mile weeks in some of the nastiest winter conditions I had experienced in years. Fitness was built, spring arrived, now the fun begins. Right?
Turns out that was a fuckin lie!
Spring came and motivation went. I had burned out, hard and lost the spark. Running 3 months of high mileage, on the only plowed road in town, in the dark, apparently will do that to you. 6 months laid ahead with a 200 mile monster waiting at the end that I was on track to be ready for physically but mentally, nowhere close. I’d wake up groggy, heavy, no motivation for a 10k shake out let alone a back to back long run. I live in one of the most beautiful places on earth to run, and I wanted none of it.
For a while I told myself I had easy outs: the area flooded during the timeframe I should have been doing my biggest days, wildfire smoke blew in for weeks after the flooding went away, it was impossible to get the miles in that I needed, work was busy blah blah blah. All lies I told myself to feel a little better.
But none of it was impossible, because others made it work. Those who kept their fire lit, did the work and are on the race course right now, doing something epic.
I took a week down, then two, then three. I made the decision to DNS long before I officially pulled the plug. “Maybe I can get ready in a month”, hell I even wrote about it here. But I knew all along where this was headed once that flame dimmed.
At the end of the day, my mind was not ready to do the demanding thing I signed on to do.
And that, is ok.
Because when you are connected to being human, you don’t tie your identity to one “thing”. I am not a race, I am not a summit, I am not a set or reps or an amount of miles. Those are all things I get to do, I get to partake in. Things that I make a decision to do, and at times, not do. And none of that changes who I am as a human for the worse…If anything, I feel I grow from making objective decisions about things like not starting a race. I treated myself with grace and love instead of showing up because I wrote I would on instagram.
And if you click “register” enough for anything in your own life, be it a race, a job, a relationship or anything else, you’re going to at some point, be confronted with the DNS decision. How you handle it each time matters, because growth happens in those moments.
I have coached athletes for 20 years. I have seen the struggles of success, failure and the mental gymnastics people play with themselves to get to a start line they probably shouldn’t be at. It is interesting to me seeing how different people navigate the moment they are confronted with the reality that something is not going to happen.
Races and objectives can not happen for a variety of reasons, primarily in two categories: By force and by choice.
By force is the easy way out, in my opinion.
You signed up for a 100 miler, trained, are ready and you get the dreaded “race cancelled due to wild fire smoke” email. Disappointment floods in. You did the work, paid for the hotels and travel, you had pacers and crew lined up, now what? In these scenarios, I typically see an initial moment of panic that can usually be calmed with a simple conversation. “Life has happened and being angry won’t fix it, let’s outline our options” is my copy and paste first line to athletes in this situation. Can we find a new race to pivot this fitness into in the next 30 days? No, ok. Can we find a self supported outing that speaks to you? No, ok. Can we find a race in 60, 90 days, that we can roll this fitness into? Etc etc are the steps we work through until we find a solution, recalibrate and shift focus. This sounds simple and obvious, but it is my hope that an outsider reading this, knowing that I've had this conversation with athletes dozens, if not hundreds of times over my career, and it ALWAYS worked out, will bring you some calm in your own navigation of life happening.
By choice is the trickier of the two, but in my opinion, the more valuable experience as it pertains to life.
You make a lot of decisions and commitments in life. Shocker, some are not going to work out, and giving yourself the space to say “actually, I changed my mind” is never wrong, when circumstances are right. This is not a free pass to avoid the hard things, you need to confront those. But when the path to something and the act of doing something, begins to clearly be harmful, you need to take a breath, a step back and ask yourself “is this right?”.
My race is a great example. I picked “a thing”, I spent a lot of money to sign up, I invested a lot of time and physical effort into it. I told people I was doing it, I built a schedule around it. I had dedicated resources of my life to it. And I woke up one day when I was supposed to start a 95 mile week, and all I want to do was spend the week in the mountains with my wife.
So I did. Because why the fuck would I not? The Divide 200 is and was just a random ass race (and they all are). When I lay on my death bed and I think back to life, am I going to be happier saying “got that 200 buckle!” or “I spent more time doing what I love with the person I love”? Obvious answer.
And that exact thought, is the process I use in all my life circumstances that confront me with the option to DNS. “How would I view this in my final moments?”. Because in my final moments, when I reflect on a life event, I will see if following through made me a better version of myself. Conversely, I will see if allowing ego to prevent a change of course caused me harm and to miss parts of life I should have attended to.
It sounds dramatic, but it is simple when put into practice. And it can be applied to almost any decision you make in life.
This was all a pretty wordy way to say: you GET to do this stuff. A race, a self built adventure, a summit bid, an FKT attempt, they are all things that you-get-to-do and you can change your mind at any point. Nobody cares, nobody will care, nobody will remember. Tell every single person you know that you are going to run a 100 miler in 8 months, then drop from it 2 months out and watch how little people care. So why do you care? Why do you lose sleep over it and beat yourself up over a decision that at the end of the day ONLY affects you?
Because ego is strong. But your heart is stronger if you know how to flex it.
Go live life. Don’t avoid the hard stuff, but when your gut tells you to change course, do it. Quit the job, leave the partner, move towns, drop from the race. You have a finite period of time on this earth, don’t waste it doing shit you don’t want to.
Onward, Always.