“I just have to keep running. I can control that. That’s all I can do.” That’s the conclusion I came to at some point during the second day of the Backyard Squatch Ultra when I was beginning to lose hope and feared it was only a matter of time until I DNFed (Did Not Finish). That was my lowest point of the race, mentally at least, and thankfully it only lasted a couple hours until it passed and then we ran into a second night without sleep.
I am a Midwesterner (Quad Cities) who relocated to the East Coast (NJ) in 2006. I have been interested in trail running since before I realized I was a fan of running. Some of my most vivid and pleasant childhood memories are of sprinting on a dirt trail imagining I was Indiana Jones escaping from the Temple of Doom. Things have changed a bit since then, but not completely. I still do a good amount of imagining and daydreaming while trail running, but for the most part at a more sustainable pace.
I ran my first marathon in 2009. I began training for what I hoped to be my first ultramarathon in 2013. Unfortunately, as I began to increase my mileage I was hindered by an unrelenting pain in my hip every time I ran which lasted for several days following the run. After several visits with the doctor, x-rays, an MRI, and a visit with a surgeon I decided corrective surgery was the best option. The arthroscopic hip surgery repaired the anterior labral tear. According to the surgeon, my labrum was shredded due to a bone spur which caused a one way valve to form resulting in a painful cyst. Therefore, the shredded cartilage was cut out, the bone spur was shaved off, and the cyst removed. Two years later, I ran my first ultramarathon, the 2015 Blues Cruise in Leesport, PA.
Since then my passion for trail running and ultrarunning has only grown. I somewhat inadvertently ran my first 100 miler in 2016. The 2016 season was coming to an end and I realized I was the most physically capable of finishing a 100 miler than I had ever been. I decided to go for it and registered for a 100 mile race. It went far better than I had ever hoped it would. Up until that time, I had thought about writing race reports, but never did. I figured no one really wants to read about me running some race. Ironically, at the same time I was reading and enjoying other race reports regularly. Following finishing the 100 miler, I decided I would write a race report on it. Even if no one else wanted to read it, I wanted to have an accurate recollection of it. I found I enjoyed recalling the details of the event and reinterpreting them in a race report format. Since then, I have made the process of writing a race report a standard part of my ultrarunning habit.
