This post is about courage and failure, and how to think about success or failure when the objective is difficult. Aaron Steele’s 2014 Leadville 100 race report is one of the more honest and inspiring race reports I’ve read. Leadville is a brutal, high altitude 100 mile running race in Colorado. The race was Aaron’s first ultra-marathon DNF, or "Did Not Finish", out of dozens of ultras. You can tell from the post that the experience scared him: ...
It’s over! My first 100k is in the bag. I finished the 2015 Miwok 100k in 10 hrs and 12 minutes, good enough for 9th overall and 2nd place in my age group to a 23 year old crusher who took the overall win. The pace was much faster than the previous ultras I’ve done, all hundred milers. I spent this winter doing a bunch of ski mountaineering races, trudging up ski resorts and whipping my skinny skis down double black diamonds I had no business skiing on what’s basically my first season. All of those winter miles paid off with a huge boost in pace. Here’s the story. (And here’s the Strava if you want to skip the narrative.) ...
This is my race report from the 2015 Jackson Hole skimo race, the second of two ski mountaineering races I completed this weekend. (Here’s my report from yesterday’s race at Grand Targhee.) Jackson was going to be bigger and badder than Targhee, no question. I knew that I’d be hucking double black diamond chutes on Wade’s skinny race skis, but with no concept of how hard or dangerous that would be, I chose to shut down the usual mental preparation. I’d deal with the steeps soon enough. ...
Wow, I haven’t gotten crushed that hard in a race in a long time. Just fully WHIPPED! Jenna and I drove out to Jackson yesterday for the "Wyoming Rando Roundup", my first real weekend of racing since I signed up for all of these races a few weeks ago. I don’t have my own race setup yet, so Wade lent me his crazy carbon Alien 1.0 boots and SkiTrab skis, and some extremely short kicker skins (for flat stretches) that had showed up in the mail the day before I grabbed them. ...
This post is about some of the books related to endurance training and sports that have inspired me over the last couple of years. Training for endurance events changes you. At the beginning of a season, on my first long run, ten minutes in I feel anxiety creep in. How long have I been running? How many miles? How long until I get to turn around? Eventually these thoughts quiet down. The engagement of the activity is enough to keep me occupied for hours and hours. Dan Hammer thinks of engagement as cathexis - in the mountains, your thoughts focus in on the present and all distraction burns away cleanly. ...
Oh my god, I can’t believe that this race is over! I’m sitting in my desk chair with a little blanket over me, knees wrecked, feeling like FDR. 26 hours and 15 minutes of mountain running, and a Strava page to prove it! Here are some pictures and tweets from the crazy day. Pre-Race Unlike Leadville, Wasatch requires an application. It’s one of the big, bad, fucked up hard races, with 25k feet of elevation gain to Leadville’s measly 15k. It’s got a reputation of being second to Hardrock in difficulty. ...
(Jason Antin cranking up A Basin in our second Skimo race of the year. Photo by Camera Photography.) My running season ended in September with the Wasatch Front 100, and I resigned myself to a winter of weight lifting and sporadic winter trail running. It takes a LOT of motivation to run around in the cold in deep snow, so I tend to hibernate athletically until March. After a week implementing this, our herding dog Pretzel’s bottled up energy was red-lining - watching him yip, vibrate, whimper and drag his leash around in that sad and hopeful way, Jenna and I gave in and committed to a winter outdoors. ...
Last weekend, I raced the Leadville Trail 100 for the second time. Last year’s race was physically brutal; I sat curled up at the 50 mile point, 11 pounds light and unable to keep down fluids, for almost two hours before rallying and banging out a strong second half for a finish of 26:15 (strava report). That race earned me the silver belt buckle awarded to all finishers under 30 hours: ...
This past weekend I ticked off one of my athletic life goals; the Leadville Trail 100, a brutal 100 mile running race in Colorado. I signed up for Leadville this May after a team injury forced our boat out of the 2013 Texas Water Safari, a 262 mile canoe race down in Texas that is my usual ultra-length torture for the year. Less than three months is less training than recommended for a hundred miler, but what the hell. Rational thinking never led anyone to a successful hundred mile finish. ...