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Are You Too Comfortable With Comfort?
It was a warm June morning when I laced up my running shoes. One of my good friends signed up for a 50-mile back-country race and asked me to pace for him the last 26 miles.
The race course changes every year and the race organizers were not careful with measuring the distances to each aid station so my 26 mile leg turned into 31 miles.
31 miles!
It was a hard run through mostly back country on rocky trails. Honestly, I don’t understand the appeal at all to run that far, but that friend had been there for me during a pretty difficult time in my life so I was returning the favor.
We joked before the event that ultramarathons are really eating contests with some running in between. The way ultramarathons work is that you have to reach certain aid stations by a specified time or you’re not allowed to continue the race. We were okay on time until we hit the bottom of Bosun’s Hill which was a grueling climb almost 1,000 vertical feet essentially straight up the mountainside. If we were moving a quarter mile per hour I would be surprised.
Following the intense training of that summer and the event itself, I didn’t slow down much. I set a personal running milestone in 2023, ending the year with more than 1,400 miles under my soles.
In many respects, those were pretty uncomfortable years. I ran 200 miles in December 2023 when it’s typically below 30 degrees in the early morning hours. I had to work through multiple injuries sustained from running too far and too hard on worn out muscles.
Since then, however, I’ve basically given up running. Stress and anxiety have been my go to excuses for not exercising. It’s interesting that running used to be my primary stress relief until the stress got so bad that I couldn’t deal with it by running anymore. So naturally, stopping running was the correct choice, right?
Wrong!
Before I go any further, I don’t want to minimize the impact of mental health on everyday things like exercise. There have been days in the last year when I’ve slept very few hours a night for sometimes weeks on end and have been in survival mode. Exercising and self-care were fleeting thoughts and perceived luxuries I didn’t have time for amidst everything…
