I completed my first ultramarathon in December 2010 at the ancient age of 31. I only thought of myself as old because it was effectively the start of my running career. Most runners have histories in high school track or at least dabbled in local 5Ks in their 20s. If you’re not a runner by the time you’re 30, odds are you’ll never be (of course there are many stories about people who start late in life and go on to become phenoms. Obviously I was never going to be one of those, either.)
No, I was an old-but-actually-young endurance cyclist who wanted to spread my wings. This budding interest collided perfectly with a desire to impress my new love interest, who was an avid runner. Beat invited me to join him at the Rodeo Beach 50K, a trail race in the Marin Headlands just north of San Francisco. The 31-mile course included 4,905 feet of climbing. The weather was foggy, rainy, and cool. “Tough love from California,” I remarked. My sweetie pie tried to prevent me from making rookie mistakes, but I still did: I went out too hard. I didn’t take in enough electrolytes. I slipped and slid through the muddy downhills in a way that only a young body can absorb without consequence. I had terrible muscle cramps and a side stitch that constricted my breathing for much of the second half. But I finished. I was the 10th woman and 44th overall out of 57 runners. My time was 6:58:34.
What followed were my golden years of running, when I was setting big goals and smashing through 8-12 50Ks a year as training. I started to believe anything and everything was possible. I raced UTMB. I threw my name in the hat for the Hardrock 100. My hubris took me to a ridiculous endurance mountaineering expedition in France, the unforgivably mislabeled “Little Leon Trot” (Petite Trotte à Léon) in August 2013. Ten years later, I am still sorting through the trauma I incurred amid the stress, terror, and tortuous sleep deprivation this “race” demanded (my therapist tells me it’s normal to become permanently scarred by the things we do to ourselves.)
This was just the beginning of the end. I had a great year through most of 2014, but then I tore my lateral collateral ligament in a fall 200K into the 330K Tor des Geants. (I didn’t finish and still haven’t been back, even though finishing TDG would be the pinnacle of my running career. Pesky realism has overcome my youthful hubris, and it only grows farther out of reach every year.) In 2015, I caught a virus on the first day of the 2,800-mile Tour Divide mountain bike race. What started as a bad cold developed into bronchitis and then pneumonia before I finally quit 1,700 miles into the ride. This illness triggered autoimmune conditions — asthma and thyroid disease — that sent my health spiraling downward. Breathing difficulties would forevermore be the deciding factor in my fitness. I was never going to be the same. The running career I’d launched at 31 years old was looking fairly doomed by age 36.
I kept the dream alive, though. I turned my focus to the “Big Big Big” one, the Iditarod Trail Invitational 1,000-mile on foot. The ITI involves almost no running, it’s true, but I would need all kinds of high-end fitness to boost my body through this. I targeted the March 2020 race and trained with this in mind for more than two years. Living in Colorado hasn’t afforded many opportunities to run organized events, so in February 2019, Beat and I traveled back to California for another go at the same course we ran together in 2010, now called the Golden Gate 50K under the direction of Coastal Trail Runs.
It was wet and cold, the trails were a slip-n’-slide, and I was a big grump about how slow I was moving. My finishing time was 7:50, which honestly isn’t terrible given the conditions. I was the 14th woman and 37th overall out of 48 runners. It wasn’t my best day. It wasn’t even close to my worst. But I thought it meant my chances of becoming strong enough for the ITI were shot. I was done, washed up.
“Everyone gets slower as they get older,” a friend reassured me.
“But I’m still in the same age group!” I lamented. I was 39 years old.
Here’s where I want to try to explain why I decided it was time to take a big step back from racing. I kept fighting and gnawing and gnashing my teeth through the health issues that followed me through much of the last half of the 2010s. This battle was, frankly, emotionally and physically exhausting. More often than not I questioned why I still bothered. But as 2020 neared, I felt nearly back to normal. I put in months of focused training for the 2020 Iditarod, including weight training and dragging a loaded cart up and down hills near my house. I was ready. But then the event flattened me in ways I haven’t yet processed. I haven’t even begun to explore this particular trauma with my therapist. The most succinct way to describe it is that I pushed myself to a brink more precarious than any I’d tread before, in an environment where there was no room for error. I quit at mile 300. I felt humbled and penitent. The pandemic that immediately followed only punctuated my conclusion that “life is too precious and fragile to lose it to the demands of more, more, more.”
There’s a lot more to unpack, but at its core, this is an admission that I am a dopamine addict and racing was my way of getting my fix. I was never aiming to be the fastest or best. I only wanted to try new things, harder things, the hardest things. But there’s a price to pay for forever upping the settings on the hedonic treadmill of adventure. More than likely, we’ll eventually overshoot our abilities and find ourselves being flung backward from a great height. I feel lucky that I was still strong enough — just barely — to catch myself in 2020.
Because I am an addict, I have relapsed and I have raced since — both during the pandemic through virtual racing and after restrictions eased. I even went back to the ITI in 2022, racing the 300-mile event with my bike. I thought it would be fine to have the occasional race for fun, like a glass of wine for a special occasion. But if I’m being honest, the bigger events took a toll on my mental health. In 2021, I DNF’d a bikepacking race called the Utah Mixed Epic amid crushing grief following my father’s death just months earlier. I still have nightmares about elements of this race, similar to my nightmares about the 2013 PTL. And I wonder … why, why did I go back there? What am I even trying to accomplish?
By May 2023, I hadn’t participated in a race in 14 months. It had been more than three years since my last foot race (the 2020 ITI) and more than four since my last 50K (the 2019 Golden Gate 50K.) But Beat had to travel to the Bay Area for work and mentioned he was thinking about running the San Francisco Endurance Run to kick off his summer training. I am a sucker for nostalgia and the opportunity to run a good old-fashioned California trail race was too enticing to pass up. Beat was already in for the 50-miler, but I’ve never enjoyed that distance (too much running and not quite enough adventure for the pain.) 50K is just the right amount of running.
My training was not ideal. A trail-running crash in November 2022 left me with a bruised sternum and bruised ribs, and I was unable to do much through the end of the year. In January and February, I was struggling with anxiety which manifested as agoraphobia, and most of my exercise was on an indoor bike trainer. In March and April, I started to emerge from this mental health valley. The relative high propelled me into a whirlwind of adventures in Alaska, Scotland, and Utah. These were fun and satisfying but not exactly running. Knowing I hadn’t trained adequate turnover into my legs, and knowing I’m still overly timid about descending thanks to the November trauma, I wouldn’t allow myself to go into this race with any expectations. “Keep my ego in check and not fall on my face,” was the extent of my goals.
The route for the San Francisco Endurance Run 50K was markedly similar to my first 50K. The start was also at Rodeo Beach, although it had to be moved back a half mile along a narrow strip of the road due to a surfing event that day. The weather was ideal for running, with morning temperatures near 50 degrees and a strong breeze carrying a stream of coastal fog across the grassy hills. The course was 31 miles with 6,500 feet of climbing, which I knew would have to be gained on punchy and steep (but short compared to Colorado) coastal headlands. Beat’s event started at the unconscionable time of 5:30 a.m., which meant we had to wake up at 3 a.m. to get ready and drive out from the South Bay.
My race didn’t start until 7 a.m. In order to cope with the early wake-up, I’d consumed a large mug of coffee on the way to the starting line and chased it with an 80 mg caffeine-infused energy bar after I saw Beat off on his race. This is notable because, since the New Year, I have significantly cut back on my caffeine intake as a way to manage my anxiety and insomnia. So consuming something close to 200 mg of caffeine is a whole lot for me now. I expected to be bouncing in my seat as I awaited my race start.
Instead, I slumped into the passenger’s seat of our rental car and passed out. And I did not rise until the race director’s bullhorn startled me awake at 6:55 a.m. Panicked, I jumped out of the car and ran a couple of laps opening all the doors as I tried to remember the dozen things I still needed to accomplish. Peeing was at the top of the list, so I darted over to the porta-potty. At that point, I only had two minutes, so I filled my Camelback with water, threw on a jacket, threw on my hat, grabbed a tube of sunscreen and sun gloves, and raced to the start. I did not lube my feet — a crucial step I’d never before missed. I didn’t even tie my shoes. I managed to start with the pack (I was dragging up the rear maybe 10 steps back from the next runner.) But I did have to stop within the first 100 yards to tie my shoes, put on my gloves, make sure I had a snack, and smear sunscreen on my face and legs.
This was not a most auspicious start, but I didn’t let it faze me. I jogged until I caught up to Chuck, a longtime Bay Area friend. Chuck is a legend, really. He’s run at least 262 ultras since his first in 1983 — that’s just his Ultrasignup list; there are likely a lot more. He was the person who inspired Beat to take up ultrarunning back in the mid-aughts. He’s now 74 years old and still going strong, crushing his age group in numerous races every year. As we started up the first hill, I walked with Chuck for a while and caught up on life. By then, the two of us were near the back of the pack and I thought, “Well, this is how it’s going to be.”
It wasn’t long before my Colorado legs got their California supply of oxygen and took off marching up the hill. I may not be much of a runner right now, but uphill hiking is still one thing I can do well. I passed a few people and then the climb was over all too soon, as climbs that stop 1,000 feet above sea level are prone to be. Still, the descent wasn’t too bad. It was even fun — smooth and flowing, if as hard as concrete (I had forgotten that aspect of well-trodden Marin clay.)
I blazed through Tennessee Valley, and after another over-all-too-soon climb, I was in Muir Beach. There was a short out-and-back spur where I could see there were at least 15 women ahead of me, and probably more who were long gone. But I was feeling good, and the air was crisp and full of oxygen. There were two good climbs after Muir Beach, the second on what can be a soul-sucking fire road called the Marincello Trail. But I love the Marincello Trail. It reminds me of so many wonderful nights riding across the Golden Gate Bridge with my friend Leah. We’d climb well into the evening hours and relish the silence and darkness free of light pollution mere miles from San Fransisco. Leah liked to poach no-bikes singletrack. I was always scared of getting caught but I loved the swooping descents. I miss a lot about the Bay Area. But I’ve come to accept that I miss a lot about the past, period.
Lost in my nostalgia, I cleaned the climb and started down the foot-only SCA Trail that was always so much fun on my bike. I kept passing people but I wasn’t keeping track. I had no pain, no cramps, no angst about my lost athletic years. I was just running and enjoying the day.
I rolled into the finish in a time eerily close to my first 50K here — 6:58:00. I had no strong feelings about it … could be better, could be worse. I had a great day, and If I’d raced my heart out, it would have just as likely turned out worse (as in, I may have broken my goal of not falling on my face.) The race director handed me an age group award — third! I later learned I was the fifth woman in a field of 22. And 19th overall in a field of 50. Top half! Not half bad!
I had been excited to age up to the 40-49 group, but I also learned that if I had still been in my 30s, I would have finished first in my age group. All of these Bay Area ladies are aging up and getting faster. Do I still have that shot?
I won’t commit to anything, but I will admit, I enjoy racing. Low-stakes 50Ks are where it’s at. All of the fun and less chance for life-altering traumatic experiences. I hope another one is in my near future. Next time, I will properly train.
So glad you enjoyed the race and found a mileage that seems to be just right for you. How were your feet afterwards as you didn't lube them?
Sounds like not having expectations and just going with the flow may be the key to enjoying a race like this. Had to laugh when you said you forgot to tie your shoes!