This past weekend, for the second year in a row, I failed to finish the Leadville Trail 100. After winning the race in my first two attempts in 2006 and 2007 and taking 2008 off due to injury, the last two years have been a symmetrical—if somewhat disheartening—counterpoint to my initial success at this event.
While it is one of the most tired clichés to state that we often “learn more” from failure than success, there is a sizeable amount of interesting truth beneath this cliché’s hackneyed surface that overuse can’t dilute. Failure provokes us to question, a practice that is all too easy to dismiss when one has recently experienced success and fulfillment of expectations. If one reason to engage in an irrational activity like racing 100 miles is to catalyze personal growth, then hardship, failure and the subsequent questioning become invaluable opportunities. This past weekend was certainly one of those opportunities for me.
The lessons I learned at the Leadville Trail 100 this year all have to do with three basic concepts: patience, respect and humility.
It should go without saying that running, even racing, 100 miles is an act of patience—biding one’s time, occupying the mind with an attention to mundane detail, whiling away the miles until the musculoskeletal damage accumulates enough to demand one’s focus, making sure you’re constantly covering the banal basics: sugar, salt, water. However, it is a race, too, and on Saturday, August 21, I let the don’t-waste-a-second mentality of racing override the take-the-time-to-solve-problems nature that is required for running 100 miles.
Quite simply, instead of stepping back for a second or two earlier on in the race and explicitly addressing the fact that I wasn’t getting enough calories, I soldiered on in easy denial. In, say, a 50-mile race, it is completely possible to incur a mild fuel deficit and still make it to the finish line without a significant bonk. However, in a 100-mile race, the distance is simply too long, and such depletion will almost certainly catch up to you before the race is over.
As early as 40 or 50 miles—when I had already built a 40+ minute lead—I should’ve significantly slowed the pace until I could stomach a few hundred calories and was back on top of my fuel intake. If I had even done this at the mile 76 Fish Hatchery aid station, I might’ve prevented the meltdown that occurred shortly thereafter. Being stuck in a racing mentality with a lack of patience doesn’t just apply to eating habits—it can easily bleed over into poor decision-making in other areas (pacing, gear choices, etc.) that can eventually end your race before the finish line. The ability to solve problems on-the-fly is something that I’ve always believed to be at the core of a successful 100-mile performance. However, what I forgot that Saturday is that some problems can’t necessarily be solved “on-the-fly” and sometimes you have to slow down to address the issue
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