The Wild Dog Blog

Tag: trail running

  • Honor Your Curiosities

    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.

  • Life is Like an Ultramarathon

    When I show up at the start line of an ultramarathon, I expect to be challenged and tested. I expect obstacles. I expect to get tossed around a bit and I don’t expect everything to go my way.

    Life is like an ultramarathon – some days we get handed triumph, and some days we get handed tribulation – and which one we’re handed on any given day is completely out of our control. Most people know this, but still don’t expect it, so when things get tough they’re surprised and unprepared.

    To approach life like an ultramarathon means expecting and preparing to face challenges so that when they arrive we’re able to endure them and make use of them. I’ve run enough ultras to now know that struggle is either a price I have to pay or something that can pay me. I can fear it and resist it, or I can accept it and be curious about who it’s asking me to become.

  • Focus on Your Own Lane

    When I first started swimming on a local masters team I learned very quickly that focusing on what someone else was doing in their lane – how fast they were swimming or how many laps they were doing – distracted me from my own pursuit of getting better. In an effort to try to keep up with the person next to me I would swim frantically and lose control of my technique which obviously didn’t help me swim any faster and only reinforced bad habits. It took a lot of discipline to learn how to focus on my own lane and trust that with patience and intentional effort the rest would follow. 

    How often do you get distracted by what someone else is doing in their lane? It’s easy to get caught up in what other people are doing and where you feel like you’re falling short. But this type of comparison only leads to rushing the process and frantic decision making which will slow your progress in the long term. To stay focused on your own lane is to do the hard thing of accepting the part of the process you’re in and seeking satisfaction in the work itself.

  • Prepare to the Best of Your Ability

    Prepare to the best of your ability so that when you win, you can take pride in knowing you’ve earned it. 

    Prepare to the best of your ability so that when you lose, you can take comfort in knowing you did everything within your knowledge and power to give yourself a shot. 

    I’ve been on both sides of the table. Backed by months and months of relentless preparation and work, I’ve won and felt the satisfaction of the outcome matching the input. Conversely, after allowing some gaps in my game to go unaddressed, I’ve lost and felt the disappointment in reflecting on all of the ways I could have prepared better.

    What does preparing to the best of your ability mean to you? To me it means not cutting corners or leaving any stone unturned – in my sport, in the gym, in my lifestyle choices, and in how I’m training my mind. I try to pass this along to my athletes because winning and losing will always be outside of their control. But how they prepare will determine how they feel about themselves when they stand on top of the podium or walk away empty handed. And isn’t that what matters most?

    Wild Dog Athletics has 1 new athlete spot open for March. Go to https://www.wilddogathletics.com/ to learn how I go beyond the program to help you prepare for your big goals and wild adventures.

  • Suffering is Optional

    “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”

    Is it the ultramarathon that creates suffering or the mind?

    In the ultramarathon community, it’s a common preaching that athletes need to learn how to “love” or “embrace” the suffering. And while this isn’t completely off-base, the more ultramarathons I run the more I realize that what’s most important is choosing whether or not I’m going to label what I’m experiencing as “suffering” in the first place. 

    I can teach my mind to not suffer needlessly by being aware of the stories I’m creating around my experience. When I’m throwing up on the side of the trail I can choose to perceive that experience as neutral, something that just is, rather than labeling it as good or bad or writing a story about what it means for the rest of the day. When labels and stories are removed or carefully chosen, you’d be surprised at how quickly the “suffering” dissipates.  

    Ultramarathons themselves don’t create suffering. How I perceive what I experience during an ultramarathon is what creates suffering. 

    The question then changes from “What can I endure?” to “How will I choose to endure it?”

  • Are You Being Derailed or Redirected?

    It’s 2018 and I’m in the middle of the build-up to my first marathon. I’m putting in more miles than ever before and hoping to run a Boston Marathon qualifying time. But being new to marathon running, I don’t know how to ease into big miles properly and end up getting injured. A few weeks before the race I’m forced to pull my entry, feeling devastated that the injury completely derailed me from my goal. I spend the 3 weeks of healing time thinking (or stewing) about what would come next. 

    I eventually manage to get back to short runs pain free, but at that point I no longer have the fitness or time left in the season to chase a Boston qualifier. Feeling unmotivated and discouraged, I start scouring the Internet for something different that could get me excited to train again. I stumble across a 7 mile trail race in my area and think it sounds interesting and that it will give me a mental break from the monotony of road running. I sign up, not knowing what to expect, but excited to train for a race purely for fun and for an adventure. 

    The trail race is a blast and not only do I get hooked on trail running, but at the race I see other runners completing distances I hadn’t known were possible – ultra distances – 50K, 50 miles, and 100 miles. I think about what an amazing accomplishment it would be to finish an ultramarathon. One year later, I’m back at the same race to run the 50 mile distance – crossing the finish line in 15 hours and change. I’ve been running ultramarathons around the country ever since. 

    What I initially thought was derailing me back in 2018 when I came up injured a few weeks before my road marathon was actually redirecting me. Because of the injury, I discovered that fateful 7 mile trail race where I was introduced to ultrarunning and as a result led to a life full of travel and adventure. 

    What we think is derailing us is often redirecting us. When we remember how often a perceived “derailer” became a “redirector” in hindsight, we can face obstacles and challenges with faith in all that we do not know and maybe even with excitement about what we can discover if we have the courage to keep moving forward.

  • Cowboy Yeti 100K – Make the Effort the Objective

    It’s the middle of the night and I’m trying to get my eyes to focus as the light of my headlamp bounces off of the fog in front of me. I’m two miles from the finish line of a 62 mile trail race in Texas, and I’m feeling strong as I start to close in on the end of the day. I hadn’t been feeling that way for most of the day – I spent miles 25-40 dry heaving and throwing up, but caught a second wind in the last 21 miles of the race and managed to rally back to a decent pace. For the majority of that time I had been alone, so as I squint through the glare of my headlamp, I’m surprised when another light starts to come into view ahead of me. 

    “Is that another runner?” I think to myself. Long distance trail running sometimes has a funny way of making you feel like you’re the only one out there – there usually aren’t many runners on course and over such big miles it’s easy to get separated from each other. Due to how much I had to slow down in the middle of the race and not seeing anyone for most of the day, I had assumed that anyone who was ahead of me at that point was far ahead of me and was out of reach competitively. 

    Despite that, I had been pushing myself hard physically and mentally in the last third of the race. Not because I thought I could catch anyone, but because I knew holding myself accountable to giving my absolute best under the tough circumstances I’d faced throughout the day would leave me feeling really proud at the finish. 

    As I approach the light ahead of me I realize that it’s coming from two other runners. I slow my pace to say hello and give a few words of encouragement before passing them and picking it back up to head to the finish. I feel a fresh bolt of excitement realizing I had unexpectedly caught two competitors who had been ahead of me for the entirety of the day. I think about how that opportunity presented itself because I didn’t allow myself to make excuses or let my foot off the gas pedal, even though it would have been easy to do so. 

    In other sports, athletes can motivate themselves to push through adversity and discomfort by seeing how close they are to catching their competitors or how close their competitors are to catching them. This dynamic rarely exists in trail running because your competitors are often out of sight. When the going gets tough, it comes down to how accountable you are to giving your honest best and how willing you are to not let up no matter the circumstance or outcome. 

    Trail running teaches me this over and over again – to make the effort the objective and to keep hammering even when the possibilities have not yet come into view. They’re beautiful lessons I’m happy to be reminded of that have both changed the way I race and changed the way I live.