Hi all!
I will be moving all of my writing to Substack. You can find me there from now on: https://substack.com/@abbyheffern
Substack has a more active running community which I’ve been enjoying as a reader and will now be participating in as a writer.
Hope to see you there!
Dunes 50K – 6 hours & 25 minutes – 3rd Overall Female, 13th Overall
“This is what I’m good at” I keep repeating to myself as I push to the finish, imagining I’m a freight train, legs unstoppable at the end of a race. While most people are starting to walk and wish for the day to be done, I’m coming alive.
“I’m not the fastest, but I might be the strongest” so I know that if I stay focused, my legs will have no problem with a big effort in the last 6 miles of the race despite the fatigue from hours of running sand dunes in the south Florida heat.
“This is why I train the way I do. To back down now would be a waste of all of those hours I spent hiking on the treadmill and under a heavy barbell.” By the last few miles of the race, I’m sure I’ve created enough of a gap between myself and the 4th place female that I’ve secured a podium finish, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is finishing knowing I gave my honest best. I don’t want to finish on cruise control, just because I’ve guaranteed myself a spot on the podium. I want to finish right on the edge of what I’m capable of, because that’s why I’m out there. To find out how deep I can dig when it seems impossible that there could be anything left.
I think about Jasmin Paris who was the first woman to finish the notorious Barkley Marathons. I think about how race director Gary Cantrell aka Lazarus Lake described what she achieved as a “mathematical impossibility.” On paper, she was not capable of doing what she did. She tapped into a reserve that couldn’t be measured and did the impossible.
I round the final corner of the trail and sprint the last stretch to the finish. “What’s possible for me if I continue to explore?”
It’s 2023 and I’m on the edge of my couch, with my face in my hands, watching my alma mater Florida Atlantic University lose and get knocked out of the championship in their first ever trip to the Final Four. I’ve never been a basketball fan. But the hype of watching FAU beat the odds all season long got me hooked. The let-down of their loss starts to sink in as I spoon the last of a pint of ice cream into my mouth and watch the camera pan across the players’ faces of despair and disbelief. I’m depressed – but at the same time – another familiar feeling starts to rise to the surface.
That night, I type into Google “basketball coaches near me.” I’m 27 years old and I’ve decided I’m going to take a basketball lesson. When I tell my friends and family, they laugh and ask me “why?” The best reason I can come up with is because I watched March Madness, which doesn’t make it any more logical, and probably makes it less logical. But the truth is, I can’t tell them why because there is no reason why. It’s not logical. It’s curiosity.
While the basketball lesson did not, shockingly, lead to a WNBA career – it did lead me to think about how often my actions are driven by curiosity without reason, without needing to know where something will lead or why I’m doing it, and how my life has unfolded with possibility in ways I never could have predicted as a result.
In 2018, I ran a 7 mile trail race and saw other runners at the same race completing 50 miles and 100 miles. I thought that looked like a pretty cool accomplishment and adventure – so despite 13 miles being the longest I had ever run at that time, I came back and ran the 50 mile distance the next year. I’ve been traveling the country running ultramarathons ever since.
In 2021, I was watching Katie Ledecky dominate swimming at the Tokyo Olympics. I thought the swimmers looked so beautiful and free in the water, and suddenly felt drawn to being in the water myself. I had no swimming experience and had felt no interest in swimming up until that exact moment. I signed up for a local masters swim team that week to learn, and have been swimming ever since – competing at Masters Nationals, in local triathlons, and in long distance open water swims.
When I made the decision to try both ultrarunning and swimming on somewhat of a whim, I was predictably asked “why?” by my friends and family. And early on, I didn’t have an answer for them or even for myself. All I had was that little spark of curiosity and interest, and an unrestrained instinct to act on that spark – no matter how seemingly small or illogical. In fact, if I look back on my life, the most meaningful and transformative pursuits started without a clear “why.” The why was something I slowly pieced together over time once I was actually out there doing the thing. In a culture that constantly preaches the importance of “knowing your why,” it turns out knowing your why, at least initially, is not all that important and life changing.
What’s important and life changing is honoring your curiosities and interests by taking action. Giving yourself permission to not know why in order to try, to not need to make your actions logical to other people or even to yourself. If you wait for an obvious and logical reason to act, I think you’ll be waiting your whole life. Some people do wait their whole lives and will always wonder what could have been. Some people wait until their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and wish they would have started sooner. As a strength and endurance coach, I hear that story all the time.
Take the basketball lesson. Tune in and act on that spark of curiosity you’ve been dismissing just because you can’t come up with a clear why. It might lead to very little, like my basketball lesson did, and that’s okay. But it also might lead to adding surprising new chapters to your story that you never could have written while sitting on your couch waiting and wondering. In my experience, you’ll find that when you act, the why you’ve been waiting for has actually been waiting for you.
Ready to act on your curiosities? Wild Dog Athletics provides online coaching and programming to help you reach your goals and embark on new adventures. Go to: https://www.wilddogathletics.com/ to learn more.
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