Battle-wounds

The good days can never fully be appreciated without the bad days. And the bad days are necessary for learning.

This has been the summer of the trail. It's been a series of calculated misadventures and mishaps. When you're off in uncharted territory, you're bound to make mistakes along the way.

Over the last month, I've experimented with some longer-than-usual runs, some epic-mountain passes, and some total busts. A two-hour run used to be a "long day." Though, I've now successfully changed the definition for myself. Two hours of running is just another day. And it no longer prompts an intense nap of similar time.

In these experiments, I've bonked nearly every time save one long run — a 28 miler in and around Gunnison that spanned a dry and hot morning. In an attempt to try new things and find what works, I even took a brief pit-stop and chugged a Pepsi. Ironically enough, it went down like water. But what I've learned (through trial-and-error), is that when you're running for hours (and hours), anything will burn, and everything tastes good.

Along with nearly doubling the length of my long runs, I tested my ascent/descent skills last weekend in Crested Butte at the 31st annual Grin and Bear It trail race. It's a mostly single-track course that leaves town at 8,900 feet and climbs nearly 1,700 vertical feet to Green Lake at 10,600 feet over the span of 4.3 miles before turning around and scorching back down to Crested Butte.

The insane views of course are entirely lost upon the competitor, as you're too focused on forward-momentum than the treeless mountain-tops that still hide snowy crevasses. Despite the extreme lack of oxygen, I made sure to take a few glimpses of my surroundings, which undoubtedly caused my good day to turn bad. 

(This is where the whole "bad days" things comes into play.)

The day was going rather well — at first. I was sitting in second on the initial climb up the steep sides of Mount Axtel, just seconds behind the leader. Feeling good and patiently biding my time until the ascent — which I figure to be my strength — I fell into a rhythmic stride of low-gear running; survival running.

But as it would be, my lack of technical-running skills and desire to occasionally lift my eyes from the sketchy trails and catch a brief glimpse of the mountains around me caused not one, not two, but three awkward spills. The first two were more "roll-overs" that didn't kill momentum much, but they did cause my glasses (Trail rule #1: Don't wear glasses - I'm out of contacts!) to leap from my face, prompting a half-blind search along the rocks and roots before finding them and popping up in a impatient sprint. The third fall was much more of a "bust." Over rocks and down nearly 10-feet, I rolled, slid, and eventually came to a stop on my back somehow. With blood gushing from my knee, bruised down my legs and back, and all momentum lost, I actually considered throwing in the towel this time.

But I couldn't.

I'll admit — it took several minutes of walking and hobbling before my knee felt okay enough to run on, and my useless goals had melted away. Expectations always create definitive results, and sometimes — most times — you really just need to throw any of those away and just run.

With the win clearly out of my scope now, I realized that I was still in second place. The three falls forced an insane amount of caution over the sketchy trail sections over the remaining three miles, but on the softer, more-suitable-for-running sections, I was able to open up and run.

Knowing that the pain would come rushing back once I finished, and probably last for days, I resolved to the "screw it" mind-set, and just hammered.

Like some of my experimental long runs in previous months — the ones where I'd bonk hard after two hours and finish starving and with enough salt on my arms chest to add flavor a spicy flavor to rice — I learned something.

In life, as in races, when the going gets tough, oh well. There's no cop-out. You just endure. You can't run away from a loss, you can't run away from a bad day. You simply have to get back up and keep plugging away, at however slow and enduring a pace.

Granted, just about everything that could've gone wrong almost did, I still managed a second-place finish, and experienced what it was like to attempt to race up a mountain at high altitudes  along single-track and sprint back down. The lesson here (among the many): Don't look around, and LIFT YOUR KNEES!