I caution in advance that this story might ultra distance run on sentences and the journey to my why might turn into a death march but here goes…
I started running 19 years ago and have been in the ultra space for almost 5 years. The first 15 years of that journey had little to no community aspect when it came to me and running. Its not because I didn’t want it. Hell, everytime i came across a runner sitting at my bar or out in the wild I would strike up a conversation. Every one of them went something like this,
” I just did XYZ 10k”
“hey, me too!”
“My time was 45:49”
“mine was 53:52.”
An awkward silence would follow because we both knew that because of our different 10k times, we couldn’t run together. I can’t count the number of times this happened to me or how many times people have told me that the same thing happened to them when I told the story. It’s sad really.
Now, as I approach my 40th birthday I had thought that I really wanted to do at least one marathon in my lifetime. I thought that I had better get it done before forty because if I don’t it’s just going to get more and more impossible as the years go on. My 46 year old self is sitting here laughing at my 39 year old self but he just didn’t know any better.
I had two back to back failed attempts training for a marathon. One in 2018 and one in 2019. The first failed attempt was from burnout and the second was from an injury that I developed and that I didn’t know how to rehab. It wasn’t until 2020 that I was able to complete the goal of the out of reach distance. The covid shut down gave me the time as well as the mental reset to get the job done. I figured that being healthy was my best shot at making it through the pandemic and I had the extra time to train properly. I Trained for 5 months and got it done with a solo run on a course of my own making. My friends surprised me with homemade signs along the course and my wife rode a bike with a cooler on the back serving as my mobile aidstation. To this day its still one of my favorite runs.
When I started this third attempt, I decided I needed a more informed approach to figure out what I had missed the first couple of times around. I started looking for training and fueling videos on youtube and that’s where I was introduced to trail runners. Runners by nature are oversharers but trail and ultra folk take it to a whole other level. Their basic approach of run a little bit, eat a snack, run some more, have a burrito, run more had me at the get go. They just looked like they had more fun and gave less of a fuck about being so serious. Running is hard enough as it is. There is no need to make it harder by being so tightly wound. As soon as that marathon was over I had already made up my mind that I was going to run a 50k.
(The why part starts here.) My first ultra was in May of 2021 and it was a beautiful disaster. From a community standpoint, it wasn’t really the showcase of what I had been told the trail community was. Everyone was standoffish and nobody really was engaging and or supportive. I was let down to say the least but I decided I would give one more race a try. I had been eyeing the yeti snakebite in ATL but when I went to sign up, it was sold out. I was bummed to say the least but the very next day I was shown a little yeti magic for the first time. Creature comforts had set up a meeting at our bar in Charleston because they were coming into the market. I saw the reps shoes and struck up a conversation with him about running. He mentioned trail and ultra stuff in ATL and Athens and I told him that I had tried to sign up for a race called snakebite the night before but it was sold out. He asked the other guy with him if they still had spots open that had been given to the company and he said yes. We exchanged emails and just like that I was in. I met one of my best friends at mile 10 of that race and I truly believe that my wife became inspired to run her first ultra after she saw the Yetis doing their thing that day. There was no doubt that this is where I wanted to be and this is what I wanted to do.
Two years later and many miles down the trail I got my yeti tattoo. It is a celebration of everything that has happened from running my first mile in 2006 to every mile that I will run from here until the end. It is a celebration of all the friends I have met on the trails that have supported each other to do things our younger selves never thought were possible. Every person who we picked up or picked us up so that we could succeed in what we set out to do. We leave no one behind as we walk each other home.
We become better people when we are together. We take our better selves back out into the world when we go home. If the world could use more of any one thing right now it’s humanity and the yetis’ produce humanity by the truck load.
