I just finished my final long run of training for the *now cancelled* Jack Bristol Lake Waramaug 50 Mile Ultra, so I think it’s officially time to announce the new race I’ll be running on April 25th – the inaugural Mianus River Park 50 Miler. The course is a 4.5 mile loop that will take me around the park roughly eleven times before the end. After today’s 32 mile run (seven-ish loops and then some road for the last three miles), I am intimately familiar with the route, and dreading the prospect of running it that many times by myself. At least I won’t be running Mike Wardian’s Quarantine Backyard Ultra (63 repetitive laps for 262.5 miles in two and a half days). Compared to that anything seems doable.
I’m mostly nervous because I will be running alone. I think my past two ultras have felt relatively easy because I’ve spent large chunks of them running with other runners I met out on the course. During the North Face 50 miler last April, my trail companion helped me bite off about fifteen miles of the race, right at the point where it started to get challenging. This time around I won’t have that veteran presence to keep me motivated, and will have to rely entirely on myself for motivation. A daunting task, but I guess running the race on my own makes for a tougher challenge.
I realized most of this mid-run this morning, out on the trail. I was coming up on the end of my sixth lap and thought: “I’m kind of sick of this.” Just like that. There’s one particularly short and steep hill that I really don’t like, and I couldn’t remember whether I had already done it that time around or was about to face it. I was probably at mile 27 when the thought hit me that I wouldn’t be able to finish 50 miles of this monotonous, hilly course.
Any distance runner can tell you that creeping doubts are their worst nightmare. I would rather fall ten times during a run than start to question my ability to finish, and here I was, focused not on the present but on a longer run, two weeks from now, that I was feeling very sure I would struggle to complete. Not where you want to be at the culmination of training.
Luckily, the other thing distance running is good for is a short memory. No sooner had I finished my run, eaten a few cheeseburgers and taken a shower, than I was back to envisioning success on the 25th. The mind really is a powerful tool, and I saw both sides to its power today: baseless worry and baseless confidence. I’ve probably learned a “lesson” here – that I need to take things one day at a time – but with running the lessons are a dime a dozen, and it’s actually disciplining your mind that is the hard part.
I will leave this with a particularly inspiring (and relevant) verse from a hymn that I stumbled across the other day:
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see
Lead, Kindly Light
The distant scene; one step enough for me.
