A Disappointing Year So Far
2024 has been the most frustrating year in my running career so far. What started as a race season filled with hope and excitement has turned into one of disappointment and bitterness. In my first race of the year at Cocodona, I developed the same breathing problems that affected me last year and withdrew around mile 150. And then in Tahoe this past weekend, I was having a self-described "perfect race" until all of a sudden my knee swelled up and I could barely walk or put weight on it. Following an MRI, I found out that I thankfully just strained my hamstring, albeit rather severely, and I won't require surgery or any other intervention. The muscle will just heal itself over the next month or so.
The Tahoe 200 really was going as good as a race could possibly go. I went out fast and was maintaining second place while building a gap to those behind me. I managed to avoid chafing on my inner thighs, a huge win for me! Other factors like fueling, sleep, and aid station efficiency were as good as they have ever been. I said to my wife (who was also my only crew) several times at aid stations that everything was going as well as I could have ever hoped.
All of that changed around mile 145. I'd reached the turnaround point for the second out and back at Tahoe City and I was in good spirits. I didn't feel too tired, and although my lungs were suffering from the plentiful dust and pollen in the mountain air, I was full of energy and ready to push for the last 70 or so miles. But in the space of 20 to 30 minutes, my knee went from feeling kind of weird, to being really painful. I was struggling to bend it, any time my ankle articulated in either direction on an uneven surface it resulted in shooting pain up my inner thigh. My pace slowed to a crawl and I literally limped into the aid station at mile 153 and settled into several hours of attempting to get things to improve.
My wife and I have developed a protocol for making decisions which just involves eating and sleeping before any kind of race ending choice can be made. I slept for an hour, ate some food, tried rolling out the muscles around the knee, applied some KT tape, and walked in circles attempting to get anything to loosen up. I could move around okay when I was taking significant amounts of Ibuprofen and Tylenol but any time the pain meds started to wear off the swelling would come back and the pain levels would ratchet up to an 8 or 9/10. It was so disheartening.
The nature of a race made of out and backs meant that I could picture what the terrain looked like ahead of me and one section in particular made me really nervous to try to navigate successfully with only one fully functioning leg. The power line climb is well known to those who have raced the Tahoe 200. It's steep, gaining over 1,000 feet in a mile, somewhat overgrown, and the footing is slippery and sandy. It just seemed like such a precarious proposition to be making my way down the power line section while having to use poles and rely on my right leg for stability. Not only was there the distinct possibility of making things worse in my left leg, but favoring the right could easily result in something going seriously wrong on the other side.
As all of this played through my mind another narrative started weaving itself into thoughts right away. "Look at you! You're going to fail two races in a row. At the first real adversity you are going to crumble." I talked in a previous post about a voice in my head I call The Motivator and he was standing by to start punishing me right away. I turned in my spot tracker to the aid station and shuffled, leaning heavily on my wife, to our car further down the road.
I felt a strange sense of disbelief at this point. It doesn't even occur to me before races that quitting is an option. It's a mindset I've embraced with success in the past. But two races in a row, half of my races for the year, had now ended in a DNF. As I laid down to sleep in the passenger side of our car while we drove down to Carson City and our hotel, I knew there was going to be a torturous week ahead of me.
Anatomy of Negative Thought Cycles
In the days immediately following the race I found myself constantly thinking about how good my race could have been had this stupid injury not happened. I was picturing my view as I ran in the dark, my headlamp illuminating the trail in front of me, and my knee becoming more and more painful in short order. I thought through those hours after Tahoe City in as much detail as possible. Was there a moment where I took a serious stumble and caused the strain? Did I make some kind of mistake? Where, why, how did this go wrong? These thoughts flew through my head on repeat and I found myself totally incapable of ignoring them. I felt this intense sense of desire within me to return to the moment before my knee started hurting and somehow change the past.
This cycle of thought is so unhelpful and unhealthy. Getting trapped in a "what could have been" frame of mind is useless. There is nothing to be learned in thinking this way, there is just pain and suffering down that path.
I was lucky enough to get an MRI the day after getting home and got the results one day later. What looked like a meniscus tear or MCL damage was just a hamstring strain. Phew. And yet, the injury turning out to be less severe triggered another cycle of unhelpful thoughts. "Well clearly you made the wrong decision. You could have continued, it was just a strain after all." And some version of this statement just played in my brain over and over and over again for a few days. I'd be walking my dog and trying to distract myself with a podcast and find myself having to rewind whatever I was listening to because I couldn't pay attention to anything other than the voice screaming "well you can walk just fine today, you crumbled! You're a failure. You're the guy who fails."
And this spiral, this pity party, continued for several days following the race. As an experience it is kind of interesting how my mind can be bad at adapting to situations like this. The final cycle of negativity I found myself in was this strange kind of meta-observation of my experience. It went something like this. "Look at you feeling sorry for yourself and depressed and sad. What a drama queen, you don't have real problems. You have never had real problems! All your issues are self imposed and you can't even handle those." The irony of the conclusion that I've never had to face serious adversity or hardship in my life, is that its accuracy would result in further embarrassment and shame which would only make the conclusion apply more and that would result in yet more embarrassment and shame and so on and so forth. This thought cycle can accurately be called a spiral and I woke up a few mornings in a row and got sucked into its gravity.
Writing this now, I am struck again that it sounds pretty melodramatic. I'm not writing this in the spirit of feeling sorry for myself, but in the hope that expressing my thoughts will make me feel better and perhaps help someone else who might go through something similar. Writing does seem to have a cathartic effect and I'm really happy to have an outlet in which I can express some feelings.
Moving Forward
My goals at the beginning of 2024 are obviously completely off the table. For that reason, I've decided to roll my entries for the Bigfoot 200 and Moab 240 to 2025 and enter the lottery for the Tahoe 200 for next year as well. Hopefully I will get into Tahoe and I can attempt the Triple Crown of 200s with a clean slate in 2025. Not only do I want to do all three races and get the full Triple Crown experience, but my timeline to be fully recovered from the hamstring strain for Bigfoot was optimistic and I feel like entering a race feeling less than 100% confident in my body was a recipe for disaster. And so there will be no more 200 milers for me in 2024.
Instead, I've decided to shift my focus to some other goals that excite me. I haven't run a 100 miler for a while and a race that interests me (while also giving me an extra month to feel confident in the hamstring) is the Mogollon Monster. Aravaipa puts on great races, it's normally pretty competitive, and it takes place in some unique terrain that I am eager to explore. Dropping back down to 100 miles after focusing on 200s for a few years will be interesting and presents a different kind of challenge that I'm going to be excited for come September.
I'm also going to run the DC Peaks 50 in October. Not only is the course awesome and fun, but the community around DC Peaks is really fun. Though 50s are definitely not my strength, it will be a fun day out in the Wasatch. If you want to run a fall 50 miler, I cannot recommend it more. The last 20 miles of the race are potentially the best section of trail I've ever had the pleasure of running.
So 2024 hasn't gone to plan. It sucks. I pour so much of myself into training and racing and everything that surrounds ultrarunning. It's obvious to me that too much of my identity is wrapped up in this unforgiving sport. That's something I can address moving forward to help myself deal with disappointment in a healthier, less self-destructive way. But in the past few days I've realized I made the right decision in Tahoe, the risks outweighed the possible rewards of continuing in the race. I could have easily damaged something much more seriously while trying to go on in my compromised state. So for my long term career, it was clearly the right decision. I wish coming to that conclusion did not involve making my way through a swamp of mental anguish, but it is what it is.
Recovery is going well so far and most of my day is spent without feeling any pain in the hamstring. I'm starting physical therapy next week and my PT is optimistic that I will be back to a solid training volume fairly quickly. I do have some questions about my unique hamstring injury. I strained it near where the muscle attaches to the tibia, the semi-membranous tendon. I also tore this part of my hamstring in my other leg in 2022. Distal hamstring injuries are relatively rare, and so I would like to figure out if I've got some kind of unique situation where I am putting stress on that particular area. Though my goals have shifted, the two races that I've got on my 2024 calendar at this point are going to be exciting, fun, and interesting. There's no reason to feel anything other than optimistic.
Before I conclude I want to share something that's helped me this week. In soccer, there's a statistical concept called expected goals (xG for short). xG is a formula that takes into account the quality of chances a team creates and the likelihood of scoring goals. Teams will go through patches where their xG is actually really high but for whatever reason they aren't scoring those chances and they lose games. Most of the time, as statistical averages come into play, teams with a high xG will emerge from their slump and once again start scoring goals and winning games. I feel like I am currently in a similar situation to a team in a slump with a high xG. I'm setting myself up for success, and whatever the ratio I want to apply, whether I feel I've got a 90 or 95% chance of success in a given race, I have been unlucky to end up in the 5 or 10% that results in a DNF. Statistically speaking it's obviously possible to get a 1/10 result multiple times in a row, but it's unlikely to continue. If I keep on progressing and making improvements, it seems nearly impossible that I will continue to fall in the negative side of that distribution.
This doesn't mean I'll never have another DNF, of course, but it makes me feel confident that despite these recent failures I am on the right path. I wasn't over-trained coming into Tahoe and the 150 miles I did complete were easily the most successful in regards to many small factors that make up these long efforts. I will be excited to (hopefully, fingers crossed for the lottery) return to Tahoe next year and seek redemption. Maybe the course will even return to the full loop and I can be one of the lucky people who gets to run all the way around the lake. I'm still young as an ultra-runner and I've got a lot of time and years ahead of me to get things right.
Comments