Why a 50k?

As I mentioned last week in my winter’s lament, I have recently started training for a 50k, which is part of my goals for this year. I’m about three weeks in, just starting the fourth week, which is thankfully a down week, and I’m so incredibly full of energy.

But why a 50k? Why can’t I just run a 10k, a half-marathon, or even a marathon like any normal person? Well, why not? Okay, so that is a terrible response, and while it may be the flippant, quick answer I give people in person, it’s not the whole truth, which, like many stories behind our choices and goals, runs (haha) much deeper.

Long ago, in a city far away from where I live now, I first heard about ultramarathons—those select races longer than a marathon for, what many might think, a special breed of people who like suffering. At the time, I was deep into running—5ks, 10ks, half-marathons. I think I was even training for my first marathon around that time. One evening before a Pilates class that I had recently started attending, I overheard one of the regular members talking with the instructor about training for the JFK 50 miler. “A 50 miler,” I thought. “Wow.” I looked it up immediately on returning home and slid into an internet hole of trail running and ultrarunning, something I had never really heard of. I mean sure, I knew people ran on trails because I ran cross-country for a long time, but I didn’t know that adults out of high school and college ran and competed on trails

I was intrigued. Yet I also felt such a feat would be near impossible for me. A feeling that further deepened after dragging myself through my first marathon, a subsequent “trail” marathon that was really just on a wide, crushed stone fire roads, and a final third marathon, where I just decided that marathoning was not for me. I thought maybe I could try shorter trail races, but anytime I tried to train on trails at all, my heart rate launched itself into the red zone from a combination of not being able to modulate my pace on the variable terrain and my intense fear of stepping on a copperhead snake. We also have timber rattlesnakes in the mountains outside of Washington DC, and I couldn’t even bring myself to try and run in those places. It seemed pretty obvious to me that trail running, like marathons, would not my thing.

For a time, I focused on shorter distances but soon burnt out in my pursuit of faster paces and my own competitive pressure to place better and better each time. So I gave up racing entirely. Around this time, craving some other kind of activity, I discovered the fabulous Wanderbirds, one of the local DC-area hiking clubs, who hiked every Sunday. At first, I kept with my usual 10 mile run on Saturday and then hiked 10 to 12 miles on Sunday. Then, I just hiked, running sparsely during the week or sometimes not at all. Luckily, being in a group of people helped me cope with the acute snake anxiety, at least for walking. I have seen a number of rattlesnakes on the trails of the Shenandoah Valley and Southern Pennsylvania and had one extremely memorable encounter in Saguaro National Park. Looking back on each encounter still brings waves of nausea, though.

With a little time, hiking on the trails in the face of potential face of fanged danger became somewhat tolerable, so I started to run on trails again, choosing, what I hoped was, the poisonous snake-free park in the center of DC—Rock Creek Park. (P.S. If you have ever seen a copperhead in Rock Creek Park, please do not tell me.) However, it still felt so much harder, plus I had to drive to the trails, so I never really ran there often. Soon, though, I moved so close to the park that deer and raccoons loitered in the trees just outside my first-floor apartment.

Eventually, hiking led me to mountaineering, both on glaciers and in the winter. For training during the week, I ran more often on the park’s trails than I had before, but it wasn’t until the year before we moved to Spain that I really directed my attention to trail running. I had decided to take the year off from mountaineering to free up my time to prepare, pack, and purge for the move. Unlike my other attempts at trail running, where I just tried to transfer my usual run to the trails, I started as if I was completely new to running—using the effective run/walk method. And because I cannot be athletically goalless ever, I set a goal to run the loop of Rock Creek Park in DC, about 13 miles. I even did a training run in a park further in the suburbs, where I know there must be copperheads. Take that snakes!

After moving to Madrid, I continued to run trails, as we live quite close to Madrid’s version of Rock Creek Park—Casa de Campo. I also continued to hike and go to the mountains, primarily those just outside Madrid and the Pyrenees. Suddenly, living so much closer to high, enormous mountain ranges, our trips became more frequent as well as longer, at least in time. When living in the US, sure, sometimes we would have super long days from time-to-time, especially on specific trips like Mount Rainier or Patagonia. However, in Spain, it seems that every hike we go on is 8+ hours. In addition, since I’m apparently much less scared of vipers because I have never seen one alive, I have taken on running more technical trails, including the Cuerda Larga, which was last year’s running goal, and some shorter trails in the Pyrenees.

And…there it is. After all these years, knowing I can handle long hours on foot and more or less comfortably run rocky, mountainous trails makes me think I could also manage an ultramarathon. Of course, during the long hours hiking the trails, I’m not putting in the same amount of mileage, so there are still a lot of unknowns, which can be as equally evocative as it is nerve-wracking. While I can finally wrap my head around the thought of me, in the abstract, being able to run something so long, I can’t really conceptualize actually doing it—most likely because I haven’t, right? How easy is it to properly envision something you have never experienced? But I try not to think about it too much and take my life one run, one workout at a time. Wish me luck!