My path to ultrarunning was weird.
I didn’t run track or cross country at any level when I was young. I played baseball from around five years old through high school, and in my teenage years I probably spent more time on a skateboard than doing anything else.
I was a shy, awkward kid. I didn’t have a ton of friends and mostly kept to myself. But I loved being outside, especially in the woods. My dad took me fishing and hunting quite a bit when I was young, and there was always something different about being in the woods or sitting near a lake, river, or stream. It was quiet in a way that mattered to me.
My head has always been noisy. That mental chaos has been there my entire life and probably always will be. It’s just part of who I am. But being outside could turn the volume down.
Somewhere along the way, I got away from that.
Music took over during my teenage years and followed me into adulthood. Then came a professional career, marriage, kids, and all the normal things that start consuming the hours in a day. I played guitar in a niche but reasonably well-known punk band. My career grew. Amie and I, who had been together since we were 13, got married and started a family.
Amie always had an active streak. She liked running and lifting. When she started training to compete in the National Physique Committee, I started lifting with her. Initially I was doing it to support her, but I grew to really enjoy it.
Running was different.
I hated running.
I would happily spend an hour on a stationary bike rather than run for five minutes. By then, years of neglecting my body had taken a toll. Running hurt. My legs hurt, I got winded quickly, and I wasn’t good at it.
That last part probably bothered me more than I realized.
I’d been good at baseball. I’d gotten good on a skateboard. I never thought about all the hours I’d spent becoming good at those things. I only knew that running was hard and I sucked at it, so I didn’t want to do it.
Then, in 2016, everything changed.
On March 2, 2016, I woke up in a hospital and was told I’d had a stroke in my sleep. A vertebral artery dissection was determined to be the cause, although we never found out what caused the dissection itself.
During my recovery, Amie, the kids, and I started hiking.
Almost every day we’d load up the car and head for a local trail. I wasn’t running. I wasn’t thinking about running. I was just walking through the woods with my family.
And I remembered what I’d forgotten.
My brain got quiet out there.
We’d hike, and I could feel my thoughts settle down. I could relax. The woods were doing the same thing for me that they’d done when I was a kid.
Eventually I was able to return to the gym with Amie. She was training for another competition, so we spent a lot of time there. She also wanted to run, even if it was something simple like a loop through the neighborhood or a few miles on the treadmill.
Nope.
Still hated it.
The stationary bike was right over there.
That attitude didn’t change for years.
It wasn’t until the beginning of 2024 that I finally gave running a real chance.
Around that time, Amie got the Audible version of David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me, and we listened to it whenever we were in the car. I’m not going to start yelling “Stay Hard” and tell you that I learned to push through unimaginable pain and became an ultrarunner. That’s not what happened.
What caught my attention was the running.
More specifically, ultrarunning.
The idea of someone running 100 miles blew my mind. I don’t think I’d ever seriously considered that people did that. A marathon was the absurdly long running distance. Apparently there were people who reached 26.2 miles and thought, What if we just keep going?
That got my attention.
Amie noticed.
“Let’s start running. Maybe just a 5K or something.”
A warning here: “just a 5K” is apparently a gateway drug.
I didn’t start running because I had decided I was going to become an ultrarunner. I didn’t have a training plan. I barely knew anything about running. I was simply interested enough to finally try.
So Amie and I started running around our neighborhood.
It sucked.
My shins hurt. My calves hurt. Everything seemed harder than it should have been. It probably didn’t help that I was trying to run in an old pair of Vans.
But I’d told Amie I was going to give it a real chance, so I bought actual running shoes. I think my first pair was an On Cloudsurfer.
At the beginning of February 2024, we took those shoes to a paved trail around a small airport near our house and attempted our longest run yet.
Five miles.
We didn’t move fast. I’m hesitant to even call what we were doing running. But we covered five miles.
Five miles wrecked us.
I was also ridiculously proud of myself.
At that point, five miles seemed enormous. I had done it. More importantly, something had happened during those five miles that I hadn’t expected.
I wanted to do it again.
A couple of weeks later, we went on our first trail run.
First trail run. It was February and the leaves hadn't come back yet.
Living around Cincinnati, we’re lucky to have a surprising number of trails. We’re not talking huge mountain trails. These are Appalachian-style singletrack trails cutting through dense woods, sometimes only minutes from neighborhoods and city streets.
We picked a trail close to home that we’d never visited before and went for a run.
I already knew hiking trails could quiet my brain.
I wasn’t prepared for what happened when I ran them.
There’s a term runners use: flow. It’s that point where everything seems to click and you’re just moving. I didn’t know much about running yet and probably couldn’t have explained any of that at the time.
I just knew my head was quiet.
There was singletrack in front of me, woods everywhere, and my wife was out there having a blast with me.
I loved it.
The strange thing about those trails was how far away everything felt. We could be less than five minutes from the city, but once we got onto the singletrack, it disappeared. I heard our footsteps, birds, leaves, water. I watched the trail coming toward me and figured out where my next foot needed to land.
Running was still hard. My legs still hurt. I was still slow.
I didn’t care.
I knew almost immediately that I was a trail runner.
That first trail run was only three or four miles, but I was hooked.
We kept running through the neighborhood during the week because we needed to build endurance, but weekends became trail days. Then evenings became trail days whenever we could manage it. Eventually almost every run that could happen on a trail happened on a trail. The neighborhood became the backup plan for when we were short on time or the trails were too muddy.
We still hadn’t entered a race.
We barely knew what we were doing.
A nine-minute mile meant almost nothing to me. I didn’t really understand pace yet. We were learning about heart-rate zones, VO2 max, weekly mileage, shoes, fueling, and all the other things runners somehow find themselves obsessing over.
We consumed everything we could find.
Every weekend we went looking for another trail.
And somewhere in there, trail running became more than something I enjoyed doing on weekends.
I work in a high-stress, fast-paced field, and at the time my career was beating me down mentally. I would sit at my desk thinking about singletrack. I’d watch YouTube videos of people running trails while I waited for the workday to end so I could go do it myself.
The woods were still quieting my brain.
Running just let me go deeper into them.
As my love for trail running grew, so did my curiosity about distance. Ultrarunning kept pulling at me.
Amie and I started paying more attention to our training. We tracked our mileage and deliberately tried to build endurance. Amie wanted to run the Flying Pig Marathon here in Cincinnati.
For some reason, I wasn’t particularly interested in the marathon.
Maybe it was because it was a road race and, by then, my head was firmly in the woods.
The sensible thing would have been to find a local 5K and make that our first race.
I’m not always particularly sensible.
I started searching for ultramarathons near us.
I found one at a park close to home. It offered a 50K, 100K, and 100-mile race. We knew the park. We’d been on some of those trails.
I looked at the 50K.
33.7 miles, 50 Kilometers is actually 31 miles but we've learned race distances are not fully accurate. Race Directors like to call these small inaccuracies "bonus miles".
We had never even run a race before.
I had to do it.
Then I just had to convince Amie.
To be continued.