When I was in eleventh grade, I trained to run 10 miles. A 10-mile team run in late October was an annual junior varsity cross country tradition. Every Saturday leading up to the attempt, the distance that our coach assigned us got longer by a mile until we had run 9 miles in a single continuous effort. Once we had run 9 miles, the step up to 10 miles was supposed to feel doable.
In training, we always ran out and back on a perfectly flat trail surfaced with manicured crushed limestone. Every half mile was marked with a wooden sign post noting in yellow paint the distance from the start of the trail. As I trained throughout the fall, I learned exactly where each mile marker was located – which marker was hidden behind buckthorn overgrowth, which marker was situated a tenth of a mile too far, which marker was actually just a post missing its digits because some cheeky person had nicked the painted numbers. Knowing where the markers were made it easier to reel them in.
But still, even after a fall of memorizing mile markers – and a few seasons of high school endurance sports before that – I was nervous the morning of the 10-mile attempt. 10 miles: double-digit distance! The feat seemed superhuman. After all, I did not consider myself “a runner.” I was just a mediocre participant on the Wayzata High School cross country team, only one of more than 120 girls learning to lace up and endure. At the time, I ran because being on a sports team was familiar, and I wanted friends, and cross country was social, and I wasn’t allowed to come home and sit idly on the couch after school. I ran because I might as well run.
Looking back more than a decade later, nothing in my memory distinguishes the actual 10-mile attempt from the many other miles I ran on that rail trail in high school. In the end, I managed to complete the distance. I do remember eating watermelon at the end of the run with an uneasy mix of pride and the familiar discomfort that comes with not quite fitting in during high school. Still, 10 miles – I was a double-digit runner.
I continued to run on a team in college. I attended a Division III school where anyone was welcome to compete on the cross country team as long as she was willing to commit to complete attendance and the corresponding training load. Once again, I ran because it was familiar and I wanted friends. But something about collegiate running – fitting in better with my teammates, starting to know who I was and what I wanted, being just a little bit older – planted competitive seeds in me. I wanted to race. I looked forward to Tuesdays when I could rip quarters on the track and squeeze every last drop of oxygen out of my quads. I relished every opportunity to take off my road shoes and lace up my spikes. I wanted to know what I was capable of, even if that was a mid-pack time.
But I hadn’t learned moderation. I was impatient. I ran myself into injury almost every season. And as a result, after four years of collegiate running, I was still an incredibly mediocre runner. In fact, I might have been faster at 16 than I was at 21.
Learning to suffer well.
Now, at this point, I want to make clear that there is nothing wrong with mediocrity in a joyful pursuit. There is nothing wrong with casual running purely because you love it, just as there is nothing wrong in choosing another way to experience your body because running doesn’t fill you up. But when I graduated from college, I wasn’t finished with competition. I needed time to recover from the devastating impossibility of the perpetual injury comeback, but I was not done with my sport.
I quit running after graduation and instead learned to live on my own, work a job, and build structure into my new adult life. But after a year away from the sport of my adolescence, I was ill-at-ease in my own body, unhappy, and unsettled. It was time to lace up again.
I started by running 2 miles, three days a week. 2 miles! It was as though I were back in middle school running for the first time, a decade of competitive running erased. Those initial 2-mile runs were frustrating, euphoric, exhausting, impatient – the 17 short minutes that each run lasted contained a full range of emotional experience. Gradually, I built from 2 miles to 3, and then 3 miles to 4.
Eventually, I set my sights on a half marathon. Most of my half marathon training consisted of quarters on Kezar Track because left turns evoked hungry memories of a time when I had faster turnover in me. After a few months, I ran a respectable road half marathon on fewer than 30 miles per week, and my competitive energy began to unfurl once again. A friend noticed my budding fitness and invited me to sign up for a road marathon with her. Runners be warned: in retrospect, making rash racing decisions following the high of a successful race is not something I recommend.
To train for the road marathon, I naively escaped to the trails. I needed to get myself away from San Francisco concrete, and I had no way to do that but to run for hours. Most weekends, I ran from North Beach across the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marin Headlands with a backpack of water and cheap calories. I had no idea what I was doing. I walked up hills, got lost in the fog, fell often, and frequently photobombed tourists taking selfies. But I had fun because I was free from the pressure of past performance. My 12-minute mile pace meant nothing to me when I was grinding up Marincello eating pretzels.
To cut to the chase, after training on trails, the road marathon was a disaster. It was unbelievably humid and flat. I walked the last 5 miles, and I vowed never to race a road marathon again. But I still appreciated my Headlands training, and once enough amnesia had taken hold after the marathon, I signed up for a 50-kilometer trail race at Rodeo Beach. It would be my first trail run. Could I cover 31 miles over steep terrain? There was only one way to find out.
Clueless and happy.
The morning of the 50-kilometer race, an atmospheric river hit California. When I parked at the starting area, all I could do was laugh. With the wind blowing sideways and torrents of water cascading down the trails, there was no way I could take this ludicrous sport seriously. For a first race, the conditions were actually perfect – I held no anxiety about time or pace because simply finishing would be a victory.
Two memories of this inaugural trail race stand out. First, I slid halfway down to Pirates Cove on my butt because the rain had turned the trail into a saturated clay slide. Second, at mile 27, I cursed into the wind at the top of my lungs, wondering angrily why I was running, why anyone loved me, what the point of being alive was. 1 mile later, I ate some gummy bears and boiled potatoes at an aid station, and life seemed worth living again. Therein lies the beauty of ultrarunning.
All told, in my first trail race, only 44 of 73 registrants finished. And somehow, I took first.
If only the story were straightforward from here. It’s not. I still hadn’t learned patience and moderation. I began training enthusiastically again after the 50k without allowing my body to heal from the effort, and I promptly shredded the plantar fascia in one of my feet. Soft tissue injuries are finicky, and I could not run for 6 months.
Those 6 months were among the most difficult I’ve endured. I had found my compass again in running, only to have the fallibility of my body rip it away from me. I committed to cycling to maintain a connection to my heart rate, and I set myself the goal of cycling to the top of Hawk Hill once a week during 2017. I took a photo each time I summitted the climb, and I now have the memories of an entire year recorded at the Hawk Hill view point. I remember summitting the day I turned 25. I remember cycling up the hill in the smoke of Northern California fires, unaware of what I was breathing because the sun hadn’t risen yet to bleed orange through the smoke. And I remember the euphoria of a ride after getting clearance from my physical therapist to begin running again.
To return to ultrarunning and forestall injury, I decided to work with a coach. I found David Roche, and our partnership has taught me to be patient and lighthearted. We’ve been working together for almost two years, and the progress I’ve made in that time has been remarkable. I’m winning races, and I’m now dreaming big dreams. I’d like to be one of the better ultrarunners on the West Coast. I hope someday to race – not just run – 100 miles. And most importantly, I imagine lifelong running joy, a joy that is unattached to results and open to a changing relationship with endurance.
I am reflecting now on the story of my running because this week, I did something I’ve never done: I ran 70 miles in singles with a day of complete rest. That’s almost 12 miles a day each day that I ran. 10 years ago, I struggled to imagine running 10 miles at once, let alone as a daily practice over uncompromising terrain. What was once impossible can become possible, concretely, not just metaphorically. So much can happen with time, gradually and then all at once. As my geology education reminds me, change occurs through the interplay of gradualism and catastrophe.
I am healthy, I am strong, I am faster than I have ever been. I have worked for this by lacing up daily, holding faith, and playing the long game. Running has proven to me that motivation follows action, that sustained effort opens doors, that I am capable of so much more than I ever thought I was growing up. These lessons translate into my science: the opportunity of a six-year PhD program excites me because running taught me how to marshal my energy over months and years toward radical self-transformation. In this phase of life, my science is intricately intertwined with my sport; they are not separate, because the energy and lessons of each endeavor feed the other. I will continue to dream big dreams; show up for each pursuit, one day after the next; and remove, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprises the bottoms of my training shoes.
Grind on.