Cuyamaca Carnage Carousel Round IV.

2016, 2017, and 2019. 

3 times I had completed this race. Round 4 would be my first ultra-trail race since February of 2020. 

Speedwork, long runs, mileage, and time on feet… For the most part, training had gone well. 

62 miles. I was eager to once again drop into the rabbit hole and see what might unfold. Little did I know, this race would be memorable and for all the reasons I had hoped it would not be. 

 The first 16-17 miles were great. I ran close to Thomas Reiss. We chatted on and off patiently waiting for the reality of the race to settle in. Shortly after this point, I started dropping off and he carried on. 

The pendulum swung in the other direction. As good as things had been clicking for the first 2.5 hours is about as brutal as they had shifted at this point. 

We were approaching our climb to Cuyamaca Peak (the highest point of the race around mile 22). My effort felt much more labored than I had anticipated, especially this early on. I had consumed enough food. My hydration was solid. Though I was running empty on of my water bottles, I was unconcerned because I had trained for it. 

I decided to walk. I got passed by a few folks. It’s a long day I thought. How one mitigates the low points in these races largely influences how one experiences them and the outcome they produce. 

Just make it to the aid station, get some food in you and reset. 

My walk slowed down to a couple steps and a break. I started wavering on the trail, drifting from side-to-side with each step. All that sounded good in the world was a nap. I even thought for a moment I might pass out. 

10 steps. Stop. Ten steps Stop. 5 Steps. Stop. Things weren’t getting better. I hiked up to the Peak at at a snail’s pace. People were flying by me. At that’s what it felt like. 

I could hear the music. Now I could see it. Finally. A volunteer about 50 yards in front of the aid station noticed I was not looking strong. He filled up my waters. I immediately took a seat in a chair at the aid station. 

Once I sat down, I started shivering. Mind you, the sun was out. Temperatures were in the upper-80s and this course runs through a primarily exposed and dry environment.  

Well, this is a first.

A volunteer nurse decided to take my blood pressure. All good there. Other volunteers fed me whatever caloric offerings they had. 

Still, I was shivering. There was a slight breeze, but everybody at the aid station was in either tank tops or tee shirts. 

One of the volunteers noticed and decided to put me into her vehicle with the door closed so that I could warm up. I didn’t move. 

More and more people were rolling through. It looked so easy for them. 

I kicked my shoes off. 90% sure I was going to DNF and for something completely unforeseen. 

Time passed. A lot of time passed. In fact, around an hour passed and I had yet to leave this spot. 

Everybody there encouraged me that I would rally. 

“All downhill from here. Just five more miles”, they said. 

Feeling much better, but still not great, I nodded. 

As my plan A, B, and C quickly disappeared, so too did my ego. 

Time to move on. Now, settle slowly and see if this improves. Just get this thing done. Whatever it takes. 

I pressed on and felt better, but still moving slowly.

Quite some time later, I arrived at 50K checkpoint at around 1:15 PM. Almost 7 hours later… A PR for me and not the kind of one I had wanted.

I had to constantly remind myself that his was no longer a race. It had become an entirely new experience. Forward movement was my only goal. It was useless to grasp on to whatever preconceived performance-related goals I had a few hours earlier. 

The next loop was comprised of 13 total miles with one aid station after nine miles. In previous years I had completed this section in roughly around 3 hours. It’s typically the hottest time of the day and precisely when the mileage starts to take its inevitable toll. 

I left the aid station after a volunteer helped me in switching my shoes. I was trying out Hokas, but I decided to switch back to my trail Altras. A new confidence had sprung. 

I’m coming back to life. Time to rally and rally harder than I ever have before. 

Still, I moved slowly, but did not care. Forward movement counts for something, right?

Then, nearing mile 37, I started to care about this slowing down even more. 

No matter the pace, moving – even at this snail-like pace – did not feel good. I was not unable to run downhill.

At this point, I was walking a downhill section where, in years past, I had pushed the pace. Minutes turned into hours. 

My right Achilles was not having any of it. I had neglected the warning signs the previous couple of weeks. Now, my form was overly compromised. My left knee was giving me fits because of this new stride I tried to utilize. In other words, this was not working. I knew things were not going well when my muscles (for the most part) felt fine, but my joints did not. 

Things were only going to get worse before they did better. Deep down, I knew this. I kept trudging along. 

Finally, I yielded to the reality I was now facing. My day was done. Rare is it that I use my cell phone in these races; however, I felt it was entirely appropriate to call a couple family members and friends. 

Prior to these phone calls, I knew my day was done. I was getting nowhere slowly. I told them I was going to DNF. That was that. 

I arrived at the Mile 40 Aid Station. Many of the same people who had helped me at the Mile 20 Aid Station were there. They encouraged me. They told me I needed to rally again. I told them it was game over. I had walked the previous 4-5 miles and things were not getting better.  

I sat there for about 10 minutes. 

I’m dropping out. 

They told me that this Aid Station was a “no drop zone”. To drop, I needed to walk the next 4 miles to make it to the next loop and turn in my bib. I was a bit perturbed by this considering the fact it’s called an “aid station”; however, I was fully capable of walking, albeit even more slowly at this point, so I marched on, but not before they handed me a cold beer.

I exited the mile 40 aid station with a cold beer in hand. 4 miles to go.

Ultimately, the time between mile 40 and 44 ended up being useful. The near-1.5-hour walk allowed me to process my decision and the events that had preceded it. Thus, there would be no qualms or emotional letdowns by the time I had decided to turn in my bib.

These miles took forever. The shadows were growing longer. Near the 11-hour mark, I finally saw the finish of my loop. 

The unique part of this race is that each loop starts and finishes at the same point.  

I have no excuse. As I was walking towards the finish, a small crowd stood in front of the finish line. There was a buzz in the air. Cheering from the spectators grew louder. They were all facing the opposite direction. I was walking towards the finish from one side (loop 2) and the first-place individual was coming towards it from the other side (loop 3). 

Phones were out. People were cheering. I saw the wall of people standing in front of me facing the other direction. I humbly (because there was no other way to go about this) took off my bib and handed it to one of the race volunteers. 

I’m calling it a day. 

She took the bib, said thanks and told me I was free to go. 

Though the first-place runner crossed the finish a mere few feet from me, we entered that area with two entirely different narratives. The crowd cheered voraciously for him. Not a soul, other than one race volunteer, had noticed me. I laughed and thought that this must be what a DNF feels like. How appropriate. 

I quietly stepped out towards a tree (where my ice chest and a change of clothes were waiting for me) and gathered my belongings. 

My day was over. 

That decision was my choice. 

Afterall, it was my choice to sign up for this race.

It was my decision to show up to the starting line. 

It was my decision to keep going. 

It was my decision to pull the plug.

I took pride for never having DNF’d (Did Not Finish) a race before. I never thought I would. Well, now I have. I used to believe it would be a blemish on my resume, albeit a resume that nobody, other than myself, cares about. I have yet to come around to the idea that it’s okay, but that doesn't matter because it’s over.

While humans have made endurance a more complex pursuit than need be, there are still clear ways in which to quantify failure and success. Though failure and success are not as clear-cut and binary as one might prefer, they still exist. While plenty can be learned from both, the lessons failure provides taste sharper and hit much harder. Though these lessons are easier to identity, often blatantly obvious, the space between identifying what precisely went wrong (and when and why) to implementing a more seasoned approach is not ideal; but that space is necessary. Only then, once one’s perspective has been refined (and refined in the truest sense of the word) can the lessons failure teaches be lived out.

If one should choose to commit to any one pursuit for long enough, then failure will be inevitable.

Success on the other hand… Not so much.

Onward and forward. 

Exertion. Equilibrium.

Yet the spell of solitude after exercise, as the remaining sweat receded with the speed of an ebb tide gave him a sense of vitality more satisfying than of any other time.

• Yukio Mishima

Clarity by way of conquering self..

Perspective via perspiration.

Triumph as a result of trying again and again.

And again…

All of which can only be earned by way of effort because effort, the only ticket worth accruing, is the ticket to entry.

Upon entry, there is no energy for pretending. When every fiber of your being is fully engrossed in the task in front of you, that is all that matters. All of these distractions that come with a 21st century existence quickly become background noise. As they should.

In that place, you conquer yourself, and, in doing so. you lose. In this case, loss is what you leave behind: the parts of you that yearned for something less than your best or, in other words, your worst. There is no greater gain than to lose a sliver of that which holds you back.

For any of this to be possible, you must first listen. The path ahead begins with a murmur; soon enough, you will realize it is less of a want and more of a need. If time passes without it having been satiated, the gnawing pulsates. The static grows louder.

Do you have to answer that call? 

No.

Must you?

Vulnerable ≠ Venerable

Thank you for not being vulnerable.

These days everybody else wants to be

Technically, all humans are. I’m not entirely sure how proclaiming your vulnerability makes you or those around you better.

Nature doesn’t favor the vulnerable. Out there - in the world of predator versus prey - conveying vulnerability only expedites one’s expiration date. Kill or be killed. If you desire the latter, do everything in your power to make your vulnerabilities known to all. Let me know how that works out.

In the world of endurance, there is no stronger signal of vulnerability than when follow passing somebody else during a race with a quick scan backwards. That turning-of-the-head is a dead giveaway. I learned that lesson once and have seen many others capitalize on it since. Vulnerability is interpreted as weakness; weakness is not strength.

“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that.

Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.”

Cormac McCarthy

As far as I can tell, there’s no correlation between vulnerability and “mental toughness” (or whichever other performance-related metric you’d like to substitute).

Yet still, folks continue to blabber on about how vulnerable they are. This is especially true in the endurance community and sport performance / sport psych. community.

It’s not sincere. Reminding everybody of your vulnerability is a narcissistic, look-at-me attention grab guised as soft rhetoric trying to win over the approval of others, accrue more “likes”, or worst of all, pity.

Your inability to cope or susceptibility to suffer more than everybody else is not - and should not be - worthy of anybody’s celebration, admiration, or praise.

It’s exhausting.

Reminding everybody how vulnerable you are after-the-fact is disingenuous. It’s a cop-out for not having been honest on the front-end of things. Technically, vulnerability is inherent to the effort if the effort is or was honest from the onset.

If you go long enough or hard enough and vulnerability will reveal itself. That doesn’t mean it need be the focal point.

When you’re striving towards a meaningful and challenging goal, you will be exposed at various points. Many of your vulnerabilities and your flaws will going be put on display. That’s actually okay. As an effort wanes, those defects become more evident with the passing of time; however, striving honestly supersedes the appearance of struggle. If the effort is honest, it will speak for itself. Moreover, you need not concern yourself to gain the approval of anybody else. If that’s the case, you will be too consumed by the effort to even think about telling people about it anyways.

How about, instead of vulnerability, we shift the focus towards honesty?

The truth stands above any of our idiosyncrasies.

Instead of cowering to the challenge or interpreting something as “harmful” (to your ego), how about we fortify ourselves and shoulder the eagle as a way to contend with the challenge?

After all, those are the rules that nature has set..

“Queen of the Rodeo” - Alice In Chains

Intuition Over Prescription

Tools – watches, data, gear - are effective (and necessary), but they’re still a means to an end, not the end itself. If the information these tools provide dictate your every decision and move correlated with performing, then you’re screwed. Eventually, whatever natural movements you once exhibited become supplanted by mechanical movements. Flexible thinking turns rigid. Over time, prescription gains more value than your own intuition. This is not optimal.

Any deviation from expectation (or weather, terrain, pace, fatigue) morphs into an excuse. There are no excuses though. You have the gear right? Even then, the feedback it delivers you while trying to do consumes your conscious while doing.

This obsession with what the tool conveys negates any likelihood of considering other behaviors. Thus, you go deeper down the hole - narrowing your scope of focus - instead working towards being whole. Blind spots grow bigger. No degree of excess nor debauchery matters if you get in your 10,000 steps.

Strava might tell you “good enough”. Is it?

Why would you what the tool tells you to determine your effort? Aren’t you the one who is supposed to be determining that?

What percentage of time, energy, and effort are you actually willing to expend on the task itself, not the things that tell you about it.

Why would you let it hold you back?  

A spectator doesn’t need a clock to determine whether or not an effort is honest. It speaks for itself. The individual exerting wears it and tastes it, just as the spectator sees it and feels it.

Ignore, then, whether you are tall and thin or short and stocky, whether they laughed at you at home (where they are often unkind) or at school (where they are mostly blind anyway). Indeed, to hell with the lot of them if you feel you can do it.

Percy Cerutty

Pay attention to the physical condition and let the numbers remain a byproduct as opposed to the other way around.

More elements than tools are needed to thrive in sport (and life, for that matter). You already have everything you need, but once you allow the tool wedge itself between your spirit and your sinew, your thoughts and your actions you turn into the tool and become increasingly devoid of the ability to completely saturate yourself into the hear and now. In doing so, you’ve let the number dictate the entirety of the experience, making it easier for you to quantity it as either in the binary of 100% ‘good’ or ‘bad’, absolving yourself the responsibility of looking for any nuance(s) that might help towards future endeavors.

The tool is not the answer; it’s merely a reflection of what you’ve done. Therefore, you should only concern yourself with having done after having done and not while doing.  The irony here is that the result is a reflection of the doing; so if you focus on the result while doing you automatically separate yourself from it. At that point, the only doing you’ll experience is more of a reaction - and less responsive - which will inevitably do you in. 

There are a number of high-profile coaches who have proven that we can not only do without these modern machinations, but we can actually do better than everybody else.

One of my all-time favorite coaches is the legendary Australian running coach, Percy Cerutty. Cerutty is not as popular as his contemporaries because his genius was outmatched by his unrelenting quest and eccentric approach towards challenging the status-quo. He coached a sub four-minute miler named Herb Elliot, who also won Olympic gold at the 1960 Summer Olympics.

Cerutty’s philosophy could best be coined as “Stotan” which was his attempt at merging the tenets of Stoicisim with the Spartan ethos. His athletes lived and trained with him at Cerutty’s beach compound in Portsea, Australia. His coaching style eccentric in that he never had his athletes run around a track. Never. That included Elliott who proved to be the best in the world. Always barefoot, Cerutty’s style was avant-garde. He and his athletes ran up and down sand dunes daily and lifted weights frequently. Variation was mandatory and best conducted in the elements.

In a sport obsessed with data and structure (and during a time when the norm was staunchly opposed to strength training), Cerutty went against the norms by not letting his athletes follow some fixated schedule. He believed how other athletes were training was not only wrong, but lacked style and spirit, two ingredients absolutely necessary for a total effort. For that reason (and more), nature became the grindstone upon which his athletes whetted their spirits. Via repeated exposure, the minds of those who trained at Portsea became more malleable, their bodies more solid, and spirits more rugged.

 When an athlete goes out to train, his body should dictate his needs and he runs according to its capacities and demands.

Percy Cerutty

Fast forward 60 years and the performance-related gadgets permeating the athletic world would make would wonder how we ever thrived, much less survived, without these tools? The last six months have underscored this reality as many people have learned that a gym isn’t necessary in order to build fitness. Instead of chasing the next “thing”, cultivate your relationship to your effort during training and not some device. A result of that is a more clearly defined intuition making you less reliant on these externalities.

The ability to go internal, when necessary, will directly determine your capability in handling whatever external variables come at you. If you can’t trust yourself, nobody will. Through building that trust, you’ll be more equipped to harness that intuition when your senses are heightened or when unforeseen variables appear (because they inevitably will). When you’re able to really tune in, everything that is irrelevant – or, in other words, doesn’t matter - fades into background noise. Then, not only will how experience what you’re doing be more enriching and satisfying, but your performance will be 100% better.

Many want the having done without the doing, but that misses the entire point. The latter just is, while former is a result of. What also remains true is the probability of your desired outcome is more likely once you let go of concerning yourself with it.

Tools only provide are a modicum of information. Yet still, people allow these so-called “wearables” to encapsulate the entirety of the experience. Numbers can’t quantify spirit. Data - though it does to a large extent - cannot fully explain effort, unless, of course, that is the only means by which you determine effort (or let it determine you). Therefore, your adherence to any one prescription is best served when it ranks secondary to your intuition. Always.

A tool might help you climb the mountain, but it need not became one. No tool, no matter how advanced or sophisticated, can offer the depth of learning that nature - or reality - can provide.

Onward!

EMULATE

Date: August 6, 2017.

Time: 6:00 AM-ish

Location: Skyline trailhead, Three Rivers, CA.

Purpose: Final Long Run of a summer spent training for the upcoming Kodiak 100 Mile Ultramarathon in Big Bear.

I picked up Matt while it was still dark out. Summers in the Central Valley – and Augusts in particular – are notorious for searing heat. Although because of more frequent late-season fires, summers in California have become notorious for horrendous air quality.

The previous day, I was in a wedding for my old roommate and good friend, Brett Karraker. It was a blast. I arrived home late that night and slept very little, which was 100% intentional considering I wouldn’t be sleeping at all during the upcoming race. Intentional or not, there are no excuses considering the many times I’ve picked up Matt at 6 AM a few minutes after he arrived at his home from a 16 hour, through-the-night shift.  During those runs, he would literally be sleeping in the car until we arrived at our starting point. He would only get his sleep after having completed our 16-20 early Sunday morning runs. I was as in awe watching him do it then as I am writing about it now. For Matt, everything was – and still is – training. This idea – that there are countless opportunities to train and sharpen one’s mental toughness, no matter the means – stuck with me. Everything you do has the potential to influence your training just as much as your training has the capacity to permeate into every part of your life.

We arrived at the Skyline Trail head, set to embark upon something that we’d never done before: a double. Our standard loop was the 7.5-mile jeep road climb up to the Cinnamon Gap sign. From there, it was (and still is) 7.5-miles back down for high-quality 15 miles. Our objective on this day was to stop at the car, fuel up, rehydrate, and head back for a second loop.

The purpose of this double loop was to emulate what we’d be experience in a race. We wanted to familiarize ourselves with fatigue and see how our minds respond to near dehydration, caloric depletion, and contending with the unrelenting desire to stop running. In a 100-mile race, all of that and more will happen at various points. The deeper you get into these races, the less you can BS yourself. Eventually, you’ll be exposed to what you neglected in training. Whether that happens at mile 20, 65, or 88, there is no way around it.

Sure enough, we ran out of water with a few miles to go. The morning sun lifted offering us little to no shade. Then the temperatures revved up to 100 degrees. Our only food remaining was down in the car. We started to unravel quickly, but we had no out. The only way to finish the run was to make it back to the car. Eventually, we did. In doing so, we knew with full certainty that we were ready for the big dance.

To date, that was the most difficult training run I’ve ever finished. I’ve completed longer training runs that were physically more challenging; but we wanted to test ourselves at a deeper level. First, on a hot summer day, two loops on a jeep trail is mundane. Second, by having the vehicle – our ticket home – as the turnaround point, it provided the opportunity for doubt and the desire to seek comfort to creep in. This was the point. Just like a race, when volunteers help, encourage or even offer pity, the desire to quit becomes increasingly more enticing. Nobody is forcing you to keep going. What’s the point anyways? You’ve gone far enough. Irrational thoughts creep in and you have to deal with them. Loop two gave us exactly what we were looking and more. Three weeks later, when we stood on the starting line, we had no clue how things were going to unfold, but we knew we were 100% ready.

Emulate the variables in which you’ll be exposed to.