Running the Dream

If you read my book Running the Dream: One Summer Living, Training, and Racing with a Team of World-Class Runners Half My Age and found yourself wondering what happened on the days not included in the journal-style narrative, here’s your answer! Sort of. What follows is a chapter I wrote for inclusion in the book but eliminated in a late effort to reduce the book’s heft. Enjoy!

***

Like many people, I eat lunch every day. Most days, it’s just lunch. Today, though, it was an experience. The food itself had almost nothing to do with the meal’s specialness, the company and setting almost everything.

My companions in bread breaking were four members of the Sonoran Distance Project, a team of sub-elite female runners who share a goal of qualifying for the U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon, and their coach, John Reich, himself a former sub-elite runner; the location a remote cabin in the woods where John hosts the team’s annual summer training camp (a three-day affair, as most of the roster works full-time in jobs completely unrelated to running). The invitation to drop in on the group’s midday repast came about when John, having read one or two of my books, learned I was coming to Flagstaff and got my contact info from Coach Ben (everyone knowing everyone in the local running community).

Warned by John not to bother with Google maps, I drove to the cabin with printed directions resting on my lap, a highly descriptive set of cues (“At about 6.5 miles into the forest the good gravel will turn right but you will continue straight”) I received from him via email. It was slow going, and rather unkind to the Fun Mobile in certain sections, but eventually I did reach Elk Park meadows, an off-the-grid settlement of rough-hewn houses and glorified huts strewn across a gash-shaped clearing enclosed by pristine forest little changed since white men first laid eyes on it. The very last line of John’s document instructed me to look for the “Reich” sign on Raccoon Drive. Seeing it, I veered left onto a narrow drive, passing a pair of catatonic horses, heads hanging over a slatted fence, before parking beside three or four cars lined up against a second fence marking the perimeter of the front yard of a squat cabin. John met me at the gate.

“Any trouble finding us?” he asked, eyeing the mud-spattered Mazda.

“Not really,” I said. “Just one wrong turn.”

John ushered me into the yard and introduced me to the runners. Natalie Cuomo, a medical student in Phoenix with a marathon PR of 2:48:08, established herself as the group’s extrovert, stepping forward with a winsome smile and an extended hand. Autumn Ray, an emergency medical physician in Phoenix who competed in the 2016 Olympic Trials, said something nice about my most recent book. Tanaya Gallagher, a bespectacled massage therapist and yoga instructor from Sedona who’s into meditation and recycling, fended me off with a wave, as though she had a cold she didn’t want to pass on to me. And, lastly, Amy Cole, who lives in Tucson and has a PhD in psychology, greeted me with a look of incipient hilarity that made me wonder if my fly was open.

Sonoran Distance Project

John handed me a bottle of water and invited me to sit on a camp chair facing the house. The others arranged themselves in a loose circle around me, Autumn and John in low chairs to my left, Natalie on the porch (where she massaged her legs with a medieval-looking device made by Roll Recovery), Amy in a beach chair on my right side, and to her left, prostrate on a yoga mat, Tanaya, whose husband, Josh Esquivel, knelt on the grass beside her.

I sat back in my seat and exhaled hugely, soaking in the primordial serenity of my surroundings. The air was warm and dry, stirred by a gentle breeze out of the northeast that carried on it a hint of the sweet fragrance of ponderosa pines. A broad-winged bird of prey glided far overheard, perhaps interested in the deer femur currently being gnawed at by one of five dogs lazing about the lawn. A vast silence surrounded us.

“Shall we go inside and watch TV?” I joked.

“There is no TV,” John said. “No electricity, either.”

I remembered suddenly a famous quote from the great American miler Marty Liquori:

“You’ve got to be a little bored to be doing really good training.”

The runners proceeded to grill me about my fake pro runner experience, their curiosity—like my friend Teresa’s—tinged with envy. August asked me, half-serious, if I’d gotten any good dirt on the team. I told her they’d been on their best behavior so far, wondering even as I spoke if this might actually be true—if things weren’t as perfect as they seemed within NAZ Elite. Amy followed up with a question about whether I felt accepted by my new teammates, and I told her I did.

“Take today’s workout,” I said. “I had sixteen miles with an eight-mile cutdown from 7:10 to 6:20. Ben Bruce, who’s coming back from an abdominal strain, paced me through most of the cutdown, and it was his idea; I didn’t even ask.”

“Here’s something I’m curious about,” John said, and we all turned to him. “You intend to write about this experience, correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“What happens if you have a bad race in Chicago? That wouldn’t make a very good ending to your story.”

I reminded John that George Plimpton experienced a similar letdown in the process of creating Paper Lion. The climax of his story was supposed to have been the moment he came off the bench to play a full set of downs as quarterback of the Detroit Lions in a preseason matchup against the New York Giants, but at the last minute his coach decided against putting him in. Nevertheless, Plimpton’s book sold a million copies and became a hit movie, starring the author as himself.

“He couldn’t have known that at the time, though,” John countered. “He must have been shitting his pants when it happened.”

“And I will shit my pants if I run poorly in Chicago,” I conceded.

“Are you ready for some lunch?” Tanaya asked.

It was the custom of the runners of the Sonoran Distance Project to take turns preparing meals, and today’s chef was Tanaya. Having come to Elk Park Meadows with the expectation of feasting on something like grilled chicken breasts, a mixed greens salad, and couscous, I was instead given a choice between peanut butter and jelly and grilled cheese. I chose PB&J.

“Seriously, though,” I said while I chewed, “what the hell do you all do around here? Where’s the zip-line?”

“If you weren’t here we would be napping,” Natalie said frankly. “You should be napping too. You ran 16 miles this morning.”

“I don’t nap,” I said.

“What?” Tanaya said, incredulous. “Why not?”

“Whenever I nap, I feel sluggish the rest of the day. I never recover.”

“You told us you were going all-in on the professional running lifestyle,” Amy said. “Professional runners nap. You need to do it!”

Cowed by the vehemence of these objections, I promised I would nap. And then I turned the tables.

“What about you guys?” I asked. “You’re all busy professionals chasing the dream. It must be hard to give your running the attention and space you’d like to. Do you ever wish you could run full-time—to have this training camp lifestyle be your everyday lifestyle?”

“Yes, definitely,” Amy said. “The simple life of run, eat, sleep, repeat is very appealing to me. I’m not one who thrives on being busy.”

“I love my time at the cabin,” Autumn seconded. “When all there is to do is sleep and read, you actually get enough rest. Otherwise I find all sorts of useless chores to do. In my experience, both your brain and your body need the rest.”

Aware now that I was keeping the women from their hammocks, or whatever the hell they slept on in this odd Xanadu, I rose to leave. During the long drive back to Matt’s house I pictured my new friends packing up tomorrow to return to their normal lives. A quick bit of mental arithmetic revealed to me that in 78 days, I will do the same. From one perspective, this seems like a long time; from another, as brief as a pleasant dream in an afternoon nap.

In March 2017, I gave a talk at Run Flagstaff, a running specialty store located in the city whose name it carries. During the talk, I mentioned an occasion when I got to hang out with 2:19 marathoner Yoko Shibui and her teammates on the Mitsui-Sumitomo women’s professional running team in boulder, Colorado.

“Are there any men in the room who have run a faster marathon?” I asked rhetorically, a laugh-line I delivered every time I told this story. “If so, raise your hand.”

Too late, I remembered where I was—a true Mecca for American runners, where a lot of very fast men and women live and train. And the room was packed. And, sure enough, among those in the room, although I hadn’t noticed him yet, was Tommy Rivers Puzey, who had recently completed the Phoenix-Mesa in 2:18:25.

He did not raise his hand.

Interesting choice, no? I think it’s safe to say that most runners, male or female, who had just set a marathon PR of 2:18:25 would have been inclined to express their pride in the accomplishment, especially when invited to. But Rivers elected not to draw attention to himself in this way. I can’t say I was surprised. Rivers just doesn’t crave Strava kudos and the like as much as other people do.

Last weekend I participated in a very small and informal marathon in San Jose, California, that was organized by a friend of mine who heads a local running club. I was something of a guest of honor for the occasion. I’d brought signed copies of some of my books for the others and, right before we started, my friend made an announced my goal of beating my personal-best time of 2:39:30. I enjoyed the attention.

Less than half a mile into the race, my left foot exploded in pain. I tried my best to run through the discomfort, motivated by the fact that I was running in honor of Rivers, who at that moment lay in an ICU bed in a coma battling a rare and aggressive form of lung cancer, and also by a desire to spare myself a walk of shame back to the start (it was an out-and-back course, so the bathos of my swift failure would be noted by all of my fellow runners, one by one). I kept telling myself to do what Rivers would do in my situation, which was to keep fighting. But then, suddenly, I remembered that moment at Run Flagstaff when Rivers did not raise his hand, and I realized that, in my situation, he himself would not fear the walk of shame that followed quitting. So I quit, knowing it was the smart move, and thinking, Who gives a shit if people lose a bit of respect for me, or even have a private laugh at my expense? I know who I am, and that’s all that matters.

Everyone cares what other people think of them. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar. Even Rivers cares. One time an online troll called Rivers “a washed-up subelite with a disdain for clothing.” I know this because Rivers told me about it, and he told me about it because he hadn’t forgotten it, and he hadn’t forgotten it because it stung.

Caring what other people think of you is an ineluctable part of being a member of a social animal species. What people actually mean when they offer the trite and shallow advice not to care what other people think is that there are good and bad ways of caring what other people think of you, and you should concern yourself only with the good ways. Rivers is on a mission to inspire other people through his example. You cannot possibly pursue such a mission without thinking a lot about how others are perceiving you. Yet this is an undeniably healthy and altruistic way of caring what others think.

We seldom reflect on this side of the equation, though. That’s only to be expected, as most of us routinely fall into the trap of caring what others think in bad ways. Is my PR impressive enough? Is my car better than yours? Am I skinny enough? Did my last Facebook post get enough likes? It’s only human to worry about such things to a certain extent, but if they represent the full extent of your concern for what others think of you, you’re in for a rather empty life.

I myself have always craved the praise of others to an inordinate degree. As I describe in my book Running the Dream, I believe this is because I grew up sharing my father’s passions for writing and running, and he took such evident delight in my successes in these endeavors that I began to seek similar reactions from everyone. I will never outgrow this psychological conditioning, nor do I even want to, but I do believe it is in the interest of my personal maturation process to become more balanced. Having friends like Tommy Rivers Puzey, who are farther along in their spiritual journey, is helpful in this regard. Had it happened ten years earlier, that walk of shame I did after aborting my recent marathon probably would have caused me to feel no small amount of shame, but in fact it didn’t.

And guess what: Afterward my friend who organized the event applauded me for setting a good example for his club members by making a prudent decision under pressure and not acting all prideful and embarrassed about my failure. Ironic, no? By finding the wherewithal to care less about what others think of me, I just might have gotten them to think of me in a way that actually benefits them while also making me feel good about myself in a way that impressing people doesn’t. Thank you, Rivers!

Following is an unpublished chapter of my book Running the Dream: One Summer Living, Training, and Racing with a Team of World-Class Runners Half My Age. It features my friend Tommy Rivers Puzey, who a couple of weeks ago sent me a series of alarming voice messages from a hospital ICU in Flagstaff, where he lives with his family. Even scarier, Tommy remains there today, on a ventilator, suffering from a COVID-like but undiagnosed respiratory illness that has severely damaged his powerful lungs. It hurt me to cut this chapter in an effort to shrink my book down to a readable size, but I’m pleased to have this opportunity to share it now in Rivers’ honor. I’m confident you’ll come away from reading it with an understanding of why this guy is so special and why everyone who knows him personally is reeling right now. As you can imagine, his medical bills are piling up. A Go Fund Me page has been set up to assist him with these. I’ve donated to it and I urge you to do the same.

80 Days to Chicago

Two miles (give or take) into this morning’s Bagel Run I heard footsteps approaching from behind. Seconds later a bearded runner wearing a hydration pack on his bare back pulled up on my left side, breathing heavily from his pursuit.

“Hi, Matt,” he said casually.

I gave the runner a second look and realized he was none other than Tommy Rivers Puzey, one of the famous Coconino Cowboys, a group that has been described by its marquee member, Jim Walmsley, as “a bunch of reckless runners and best friends from Coconino County . . . united by the desire to push each other in training and learn to embrace the suffering.” Though Walmsley is by far the most celebrated Cowboy, for my money Rivers is the most interesting. Name any country at random and Rivers can probably tell you a story about having run there. I first met him two years ago in Provo, while participating in James “Iron Cowboy” Lawrence’s mind-blowing 50th Ironman triathlon in 50 days (in 50 states!).

“You’re looking fit,” Rivers said. “I was checking out your legs while I was chasing you down.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve lost a bit of weight.”

Thirteen days ago, when I left California, I weighed 150.6 pounds. Today I am five pounds lighter, and the change is noticeable. The man I saw in the bathroom mirror this morning was all veins and striations—much more so than the guy I’m used to seeing. I attribute the sudden drop mainly to my efforts to eat like Matt Llano (less beer, bread, and cheese, more variety in my starches and veggies), though Faubs tells me everyone loses weight at 7,000 feet because the resting metabolic rate is higher up here.

“So, what have you been up to lately?” I asked.

Rivers and I last crossed paths in March, at a book signing I did at Run Flagstaff, the local running specialty store. That was only four months ago, but four months is an eternity in a life such as his.

“I’m tired, man,” Rivers said tiredly. “When I saw you in the spring I’d just gotten back from Salamanca, where I did a mountain race.”

I remembered this, but the rest of the story was news. A few days after our book-signing encounter, Rivers jetted off to Italy, accompanied by Caleb Schiff, a big name in the local cycling community and owner of Pizzicletta, a bike-themed pizza joint. The pair spent a week touring the mountains of Tuscany and the trails of Cinque Terre, fueled by focaccia, kinder, cannoli, fried calamari, and other street foods. The following week, Rivers (who has an enviable set of abs) modeled for the clothing retailer H&M in the quarries near Carrera, where Michelangelo got his stone and where Caleb got the marble for the countertops in his restaurant. Home just long enough to catch up on sleep, Rivers then flew to Boston to participate in a certain marathon. On arriving there, he began a 48-hour fast, dropping 12 of the 18 pounds he gained in Italy, and finished 16th in the world’s most hallowed footrace with a personal-best time of 2:18:20. Two weeks later, Rivers finished third in the Calgary Marathon. Four weeks after that, he found himself in Auburn, California, having been enlisted to pace Jim Walmsley through the last segment of the Western States 100, beginning from the American River crossing at mile 78. Favored to win the race, Jim overheated and dropped out—at mile 78. This was a month ago. Last week, Rivers completed his doctorate in physical therapy. He has three kids.

“I don’t know how you do it,” I said.

We’d covered four miles at this point and it was time for me to turn around. Apprised of this, Rivers elected to turn with me.

“What about you?” he asked. “How has the pro running experience been for you so far?”

“It’s been great,” I said. “I’ve run 74 miles in the past week—more than I’ve done in eight years—and I feel terrific. There’s a long way to go still, but right now my legs are handling the work easily.”

“Interesting,” Rivers said. “Why do you think that is?”

“At the risk of sounding like some wide-eyed mystic,” I said, “I honestly think the environment has a lot to do with it. For whatever reason, running 74 miles in seven days in a beautiful place surrounded by teammates is less stressful to my body than doing the same thing alone back home.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Rivers said. “Did I ever tell you about my Costa Rica experience?”

“No,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”

In 2009, shortly after Rivers and his college sweetheart, Steph, were married, Steph was accepted into a master’s degree program in conflict studies in La Paz, Costa Rica. Never one to miss an opportunity for adventure, Rivers (who had previously done missionary work in Brazil) took a leave of absence from his undergraduate studies in Hawaii to accompany his bride to Central America, where he immersed himself in the country’s thriving mountain running scene, which revolves around a celebrated 20-mile race to the top of a 12,500-foot mountain. Confident he could contend for the win, Rivers spent six months training for the event only to have his ass handed to him, finishing 45 minutes behind the winner in 24th place.

Humbled, but also curious, Rivers (who speaks fluent Spanish) quizzed one of the top finishers about his training.

“I don’t train,” the runner told him.

“What do you mean?” Rivers asked.

“I don’t have time to train. I have too much work to do.”

“What kind of work?”

“I’m a porter.”

“What’s a porter?”

“We climb the mountain every night. We carry the gear for the tourists who are going to climb it the next day so it’s waiting for them when they make it to the top. Then we run back down.”

“We?” Rivers asked.

“All of us,” the porter said, gesturing toward some of the other top finishers.

Now thoroughly intrigued, Rivers returned to La Paz determined to become a porter himself. He befriended a few of the local runner-porters and spent the following summer trekking with them by moonlight to the top of the mountain and running back down, abandoning his normal training routine. A few weeks before he and Steph flew home, Rivers ran a solo time-trial up the mountain, retracing the racecourse that had humbled him several months before, reaching the top 30 minutes faster.

“That’s really cool,” I said as Rivers and I cruised the last few blocks to Biff’s Bagels. “But what does any of it have to do with me and Flagstaff?”

“Those porters were training,” Rivers said. “They just didn’t think of it as training. Going up and down the mountain was part of their life, something they accepted without questioning or resistance. Even though it was physically demanding, it wasn’t emotionally draining. They were at home on the mountain and with each other. They raced well because everything was in synch: their work, their group, their environment, and their lives.”

“I get it now,” I said.

 

Read other post here: 

Here, for your free reading enjoyment, is the first chapter of Matt Fitzgerald’s book Running the Dream: One Summer Living, Training, and Racing with a Team of World-Class Runners Half My Age. If you decide you’d like to read the rest of it, please consider purchasing a copy from your local bookstore. Explore other options here.

93 Days to Chicago

Nine sets of (mostly nonmatching) running shorts and tops. A rainbow assortment of running socks. Running tights in two thicknesses and an old pair of half-tights worn down to gossamer in the seat area by unnumbered washings. Running gloves, running arm warmers, and a thermal running hat for cold days and a performance rain jacket for wet ones. A couple of warm-up suits. Three pairs of size 11.5 running shoes. Eight or nine running-themed T-shirts, some of them mementos of past races, others bearing the Hoka One One Northern Arizona Elite professional running team logo. Seven pairs of Runderwear brand athletic boxer briefs.

I stuffed these items into the larger of two well-traveled Samsonite suit- cases when I packed last night, having waited until my afternoon run was out of the way to do laundry. Into the smaller suitcase went an assortment of other essentials: energy gel packets, gel flasks, a canister of powdered sports drink mix, effervescent electrolyte tablets, a handheld drink flask, energy chews, energy bars, a hydration belt, an iPhone armband, wireless sport headphones, sport sunglasses, a roll of kinesiology tape, and a GPS running watch with charging cord.

Lacking both space and need for much else in the Fun Mobile (my wife Nataki’s name for our Mazda crossover), I crammed the gaps around our bags this morning with a few more items I wouldn’t dream of leaving behind, including compression boots for post-run recovery and a vibrating foam roller for the same use. Oh, and our dog, Queenie.

We hit the road at eight o’clock, right on schedule, traveling precisely one block before I realized I’d forgotten my driving shades. Annoyed beyond measure (time waste is a trigger for me), I pulled a violent one-eighty and sped back to the house, stopping hard at the curb instead of pulling into the driveway. I’d just succeeded in fumbling the house key into the front door lock when, hearing my name, I turned around to see Nataki gesturing casually in the direction of the garage, which was blocked from my view by a corner of the house.

“Garage is open,” she said.

Moments later I was back in the driver seat, buckling up with the forgotten eyewear perched on the crown of my head.

“We dodged a bullet there,” I said.

Indeed we had. Nataki and I were leaving home for thirteen weeks, an entire summer, to fulfill a dream—my dream—of living the life of a professional runner. That’s an awful long time to leave your garage door open.

Driving off again, I pressed the Fun Mobile’s voice command button and recited the home address of Matt Llano, a member of NAZ Elite and my teammate for the next three months. A vaguely feminine humanoid voice informed me that the drive from Oakdale, California, to Flagstaff, Arizona, would take ten hours, thirty-one minutes. Matt rents out rooms in his house to athletes visiting Flagstaff for high-altitude training. Most if not all these folks are not middle-age amateurs like me but real pros like Sally Kipyego, an Olympic silver medalist from Kenya, who recently slept in the same bed Nataki and I will share during our stay. It is unlikely that a slower runner than me has ever lain on that particular mattress.

Obeying our android guide, I headed south on Geer Road—a two-lane country highway choked with trucks driven by agricultural workers on their way to an honest day’s labor—to Turlock, where we picked up Route 99 and continued south through the Central California eyesores of Fresno and Visalia and Bakersfield before bending east. The dashboard temperature reading rose steadily as we pressed inland, peaking at an astonishing 122 degrees in the town of Needles on the Arizona border. We then began to climb, reaching 3,000 feet on the approach to Kingman, 4,000 feet near the Yavapai County line, and 5,000 feet as we skirted Seligman, the mercury falling in proportion to the Fun Mobile’s ascension. Between Ash Fork (5,160 feet) and Williams (6,766 feet), our rocky brown surroundings gave way to the lush verdure of the Coconino National Forest, in which Flagstaff nestles like a jewel on a bed of green velvet.

A pale late-afternoon sun was dipping languorously behind us when we hit the city limit. Canceling the navigation, I skipped Matt’s exit, took the next one, and cruised along South Milton Road, Flagstaff’s main drag, until I spied a Chili’s restaurant on the right. Minutes later we were enjoying an early dinner of burgers and fries (and beer, for me)—a sort of last hurrah. For the next ninety-three days, until the Chicago Marathon on October 8, I will do everything the real pros do and make every sacrifice they make in pursuit of the absolute limit of their God-given abilities, dietary sacrifices not excepted. From what I’ve heard, Matt Llano himself eats like a saint and has never tasted alcohol in his entire life. I don’t know if I can match his standard, but I’m going to try.

At six o’clock, our promised arrival time, I rang the doorbell of a newish home in the upscale Ponderosa Trails neighborhood, sucking on a breath mint. The door swung open and Matt appeared at the threshold. If I hadn’t known he was a world-class runner, I would have guessed it just by looking at him. His twenty-eight-year-old body has an avian economy, a built-for-flight appearance that is only hinted at by the tale of the tape: five-foot-nine, 125 pounds, 6 percent body fat.

“You made it!” he said, exposing a set of almost luminously white chompers. “Come on in.”

“We brought pluots!” I blurted in reply, handing Matt two large cloth bags filled with the ripe fruit Nataki and I had pulled off a tree in our backyard yesterday. Taken aback by the near-industrial volume of produce being foisted on him, Matt stared at the bags for an awkward second before accepting them.

“I love pluots!” he said, recovering. “I’ll do some baking with these.”

Matt led us upstairs and showed us our room, which we discovered to be about half again the size of our own master suite. I hauled our stuff in from the car while Nataki went to work unpacking and arranging. When this was done, I went downstairs to be sociable. I found Matt sitting at his kitchen breakfast bar eating a salad of kale, broccoli, shaved Brussels sprouts, cabbage, radicchio, avocado, cranberries, roasted pumpkin seeds, and apple cider vinaigrette topped with roasted chicken breast—a fairly typical dinner, he explained. Also present were his full-time housemate, Jason Blair, a local policeman with whom Matt went to high school in Maryland, and Jen Spieldenner, a professional triathlete from Ohio currently occupying a smaller guest bedroom on the first floor.

“What does Ben have you doing the next few days?” Matt asked.

Ben Rosario is the coach of NAZ Elite and a big reason I’m here, having responded with a surprisingly unhesitating “yes” when I emailed him eight months ago to ask if I could spend a summer as an unofficial member of his team and write about the experience.

“Not much,” I grumbled. “No run today, four miles tomorrow, six miles Sunday, and then I start running with the team.”

“That’s good, though,” Jen said. “Seven thousand feet is no joke. You have to ease into training at this elevation. Even if you feel good, it’s important to hold back. I made the mistake of doing too much too soon the first time I came here, and I dug a hole for myself that I never got out of.”

“It’s not just your running that’s affected,” Matt added. “When I moved here in 2011, my appetite went crazy. I would lie awake at night in the fetal position, miserable, too hungry to sleep and too exhausted to go upstairs to the kitchen for food.”

“And if you have any kind of open wound, it will never heal,” Jen piled on. “Last year when I came here, I had a sore on my lip. When I went home after three weeks, I still had it.”

Suddenly sleepy, I said goodnight to my new friends and shuffled off to bed, wondering what the hell I’ve gotten myself into.

There’s a moment in the film It Might Get Loud, a 2008 documentary centered on guitar heroes Jimmy Page, the Edge, and Jack White, that has stuck with me over the years. It’s the part where Jack is discussing the rationale behind his minimalist musical style, and in so many words he explains that making things harder for himself artistically forces him to become more resourceful in the creative process, thereby enabling him to come up with stuff he would never have come up with otherwise.

There’s a deep human truth embedded in this mindset, which is that with constraints come opportunities. When something is taken away from you—like, say, your ability to train and compete in groups because of a viral pandemic—it is natural to regret the loss. But the most resilient among us quickly pivot from focusing on what we can’t do to what we can do, and that’s exactly what many athletes are doing in response to the current crisis. If you’re open to turning the lemon of coronavirus into lemonade, here are four potential ways to do so.

Augment Your Home Gym

The day I learned that the health club I’m a member of would be shutting down, I went online and bought a 45-pound kettlebell. It was the one piece of equipment I felt I needed to perform at-home strength workouts that were just as effective as the ones I normally do at In-Shape. (I already had a Swiss ball, a pair of 35-pound dumbbells, TRX straps, resistance bands, and slide disks.) It doesn’t take a lot of dough to create a home strength-training set-up that is in no way limiting compared to what can be done in the gym. If you don’t already have all you need to do challenging and well-rounded strength workouts at home, take this opportunity to fill the gaps.

Expand Your Healthy Cooking Repertoire

By coincidence, my sister-in-law Jennifer gifted my wife and me with a delivery of Hello Fresh! meals three weeks into the shelter-in-place period here in California. In case you’re not familiar with the service, Hello Fresh! home-delivers fresh ingredients and original recipes for meals that customers then cook in the comfort of their own kitchen. The timing couldn’t have been better for us. With more time to cook and with restaurants closed and trips to the supermarket being risky, we recognized Jennifer’s thoughtful gesture as a great way to not only survive the pandemic but turn it into an opportunity. I’m not trying to sell you on Hello Fresh! specifically, but I am trying to sell you on the idea of using this challenging time to expand your repertoire of healthy homecooked meals.

Bone Up on Your Sport

If you enjoy reading, the natural thing to do when you’re stuck at home more than usual is to accelerate your reading rate. And if you’re an endurance athlete who likes to read, a great way to make productive use of extra time at home is to educate yourself about your sport. I’m mainly a fiction guy myself, but I recently enjoyed and learned a lot from Tait Hearps’s and Matt Inglis Fox’s charming little book Eliud Kipchoge, which describes the authors’ experiences inside an elite Kenyan running camp in the summer of 2017, and next up for me is The Athlete’s Gut by Patrick Wilson.

If I may make a somewhat self-serving book recommendation (and I may, because this is my damn blog), consider preordering a copy of Running the Dream: One Summer Living, Training, and Racing with a Team of World-Class Runners Half My Age. I wrote it in the hope of entertaining, inspiring, and edifying my fellow runners all at the same time, but I’ll let you judge whether I pulled it off.

Build Better Sleep Habits

For as long as I can remember, I have utterly refused to compromise on my sleep. I get eight-plus hours a night year-round. But most adults in the U.S. and a lot of other places are chronically underslept, and endurance athletes, being busier during the day than most adults, are even likelier to sleep too little. This isn’t good, because endurance training increases sleep needs and exacerbates the costs of under-sleeping. 

Chances are the current health crisis affords you more time to sleep than your normal lifestyle facilitates. If you’re among the majority of athletes who don’t sleep enough, take advantage of this opportunity, not just by sleeping more now but by doing so with a view toward establishing a new routine that you can carry forward after this nightmare has passed. And, for that matter, be sure also to carry forward the Jack White mindset that with ever constraint comes the potential to discover new ways forward.

During my flight from Oakland to Phoenix last Friday, a mantra for the following day’s Black Canyon 100K trail run came to me: Stay positive. I realized instantly that it was the perfect choice for the occasion because it made me feel more relaxed about the looming challenge. 

I don’t really get anxious before big races anymore. In the two weeks leading up to both the 2017 Chicago Marathon, where I broke a nine-year-old PR, and last year’s Ironman Santa Rosa, where I blew away my one previous Ironman performance, I felt only excitement and eagerness to get out there and get after it. But this one was different somehow. At the time, I attributed my unwonted anxiety to the fact that Black Canyon played into a number of my weaknesses—namely, running extreme distances, downhill running, and running on technical terrain. Only later would I discover that I was apprehensive not because the race was different from others but because I was different.

From my current perspective, I see clearly that all of the ingredients necessary for a successful race were in place—except for one. From the first few steps I felt terrific physically—light, speedy, and indefatigable. When my friend Bob Tusso (who stepped in heroically at the last minute to crew for me) refilled my hand flask with Roctane at the Bumble Bee Ranch aid station at 19.4 miles, my legs felt the same as they had in those first few strides—not a hint of soreness or fatigue in them. On the long climb that came immediately after the checkpoint I passed a half dozen runners, all of them breathing audibly; I wasn’t.

I had a good race plan and was executing it to a T. Ninety percent of runners start too fast in any given ultra, but at Black Canyon this almost universal error is exacerbated by the relative friendliness of the early miles, which are mostly downhill. Determined not to make this mistake, I started conservatively and let the clowns gallop ahead, knowing I would see most of them again in due time. I moved up from 65th place at Bumble Bee to 41st at Soap Creek (31.2 miles) to 34th place at 37 miles. My fueling plan was also working perfectly. I was taking in 24 ounces of Roctane and one Hammer Gel per hour like clockwork and suffering no GI discomfort beyond the occasional belch.

So, what went wrong? In mile 24, I simultaneously turned my left ankle and jammed my right big toe against a rock, pitched forward, and drove my right kneecap straight into another rock. Some injuries you can run on, others you can’t. I could run on these, so I did, albeit in a good deal of pain. Then, approaching the Black Canyon City checkpoint, at 37 miles, I fell again, spectacularly. This time I didn’t—couldn’t—get up right away. When I did, I noticed that something was wrong with my left shoulder. I felt a stabbing sensation deep inside the joint each time I swung the arm back. I must have hit the same knee again, too, because it hurt even more, and I couldn’t put any pressure on my right big toe.

Fortunately, the checkpoint was only a quarter mile away. When I got there, I told Bob I was done for the day. “Really?” he said. “You look okay to me.” (God bless Bob Tusso. You can read more about him, and our friendship, in Running the Dream.) In reality, I looked like I’d been dragged behind a horse. When I showered at the hotel later, I discovered caked-in dirt on the back of my neck.

I would love to tell you that I quit the Black Canyon 100K because I had no choice, but I would be lying to you if I did. As I write these words 48 hours later, I’m still really sore, but I can tell that none of the injuries I sustained was serious. Even before my second fall, I was losing the battle to stay positive. While power hiking up an absolute killer of a hill around 35 miles, I did some mental math and realized I had more than four and a half hours of suffering ahead of me still, and I realized something else: My heart wasn’t fully into this race the way it had ben with Chicago and Santa Rosa. When I fell again soon afterward, I felt more relief than frustration or disappointment.

In a 1998 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, renowned psychologist Roy Baumeister looked at the effects of emotional exertion on physical stamina. Sixty college students were required to watch a movie featuring disturbing content. A third of the subjects were asked to suppress their natural emotional response to the material, another third was asked to do the opposite, and the remaining third was asked to express their natural response. All of the students completed a test of muscular endurance both before and after watching the movie. Remarkably, the two groups asked to manipulate their natural emotional response to the film showed a drastic decline in physical stamina, whereas the control group did not. The conclusion? Emotional exertion negatively affects endurance performance capacity.

Twenty-five days before the Black Canyon 100K, my mom, who has Alzheimer’s disease, moved into my home so that my wife and I can care for her. As you might imagine, it has been an all-consuming and emotionally intense experience. The last thing I did before leaving the house to catch my flight to Phoenix was spend 20 minutes on the phone arguing with a local elder care manager about the Kafkaesque struggle I’ve had cutting through red tape with insurance companies and caregivers and doctors and whatnot. I was angry, stressed out, overwhelmed, and not thinking about my race.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no regrets about the choice I’ve made. My mother is more important than my hobby. The point I’m trying to make is that attaining peak performance in endurance events requires more than just peak fitness, good pacing, and a dialed-in fueling plan. It also requires that you start the race with full emotional batteries. And if that’s simply not possible, it’s helpful to at least understand that you are compromised no less than you would be if your training had gone poorly. I’m pretty sure I would have stood a better chance of salvaging my race if I’d had this level of awareness about my situation. 

In any case, I’m grateful that, as and endurance coach and writer who enjoys a platform for sharing the lessons I learn in my athletic journey, I am able to pass on the specific lesson I learned this weekend. Make no mistake: I’m going to carry a monkey on my back from this failure that only the next successful race performance can remove. But even if I never have another successful race, I will not look back on what I went through on the Black Canyon Trail as a waste.

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