To my surprise, convincing Amie wasn’t that hard.
I sent her the UltraSignup page while we were both working, and we texted back and forth about it during the day. We didn’t register immediately. I made it clear that I wanted to do the race, then mostly left it alone.
There was also the small problem that I had no idea how to train for an ultramarathon.
So I did what I usually do when I become interested in something: I went completely overboard.
I spent most days in my office with YouTube videos about ultrarunning playing on my iMac while I worked my actual job. I’m a bit of a tech nerd and possess a set of secret Excel ninja skills, so naturally I built a spreadsheet. Weekly mileage. Monthly mileage. Average pace. Average heart rate. Anything I could track went into it.
I had also just bought a COROS Pace 3, which gave me access to the COROS training library. Sitting there waiting for me was a 50K training plan.
We hadn’t actually registered for a 50K.
We started the plan anyway.
I think it was around 16 weeks long, with the first eight weeks focused heavily on Zone 2 work. It was spring in Cincinnati, the temperatures were cool, and it was easy to want to spend every possible day on the trails.
Amie and I became very familiar with the trails around us. For me, a few hours in the woods after a stressful day at work could reset everything.
I also had no idea what I was doing and managed to build some bad habits.
Because the plan called for so much Zone 2 work, I became obsessed with my heart rate. I watched my watch constantly. The second my heart rate crept out of Zone 2, I backed off until it dropped again.
I carried that habit for a long time.
It drove Amie insane.
She’d want to push the pace and I’d be staring at my watch like exceeding Zone 2 for thirty seconds was going to invalidate the entire run.
Still, we were running regularly through the spring of 2024, building miles and having a lot of fun doing it.
And we kept checking UltraSignup.
A couple of weeks into June, the registration indicator for the race changed from green to yellow. Spots were starting to fill.
That was enough for me.
By then I had my heart set on this particular race. I hadn’t found another ultra nearby that interested me as much, and I genuinely worried that if this one filled before we registered, the whole running experiment might lose momentum.
On June 24, 2024, we finally did it.
Amie and I registered for the East Fork 50K put on by Empower Ultras.
Our first ultramarathon.
Actually, our first race of any distance.
I still remember the excitement of registering for something I genuinely did not know if I could finish.
We also quickly discovered that signing up for an ultra apparently meant buying a bunch of stuff.
Until then, we each had a pair of relatively inexpensive trail shoes and whatever running clothes we happened to own. We started going through the required gear list. We bought Salomon running vests and soft flasks. Amie pointed out that we probably needed shoes we could comfortably wear for more than 30 miles, which started the hunt for our first real race shoes.
We also learned an important lesson about ultramarathons.
A 50K is 31.1 miles.
The GPX file for East Fork showed 33.7.
Race directors like to call those extra miles “bonus miles.”
I have since learned that race directors find bonus miles much funnier than runners do.
One reason we chose East Fork was that the race was only about 25 or 30 minutes from our house. We could actually train on the course.
We did.
Not nearly as much as we should have.
By late June, Cincinnati summer arrived.
If you’ve never spent a summer here, temperatures in the 90s combined with ridiculous humidity can make stepping outside feel like opening a dishwasher halfway through the drying cycle.
Suddenly it became much harder to convince ourselves to go run for hours.
So, having just registered for our first ultramarathon, we responded in the most intelligent way possible.
We basically stopped training.
We’d get out once or twice a week, run a short trail and call it good.
Amie repeatedly told me, “We are not ready for this race.”
I didn’t want to hear it.
Training or not, I was doing the race.
As August got closer, Amie finally put her foot down.
“If we don’t start getting in some real training, I’m not doing this race.”
That got my attention.
We started forcing ourselves back onto the trails. It was hot. It was humid. It sucked. But at least we were running again.
On August 23, the night before the race, we drove to East Fork State Park for packet pickup.
That was when the whole thing became real.
We got our bibs and race bags and took the obligatory picture holding our numbers. We stood around with the other runners but didn’t really talk to anyone. We didn’t know anybody.
I felt completely out of place.
These people looked like ultrarunners.
I was a guy who had started running a few months earlier and had spent a decent portion of July avoiding training because it was hot outside.
We went home and tried to get to bed early. I barely slept. It seemed like I had just closed my eyes when the alarm went off.
At least we had packed everything the night before. We loaded the car and headed back to East Fork before sunrise.
It was August 24, 2024.
I remember that drive.
I was terrified.
I wasn’t going to tell Amie that.
She asked if I was ready.
“Yeah. This is going to be awesome!”
That was a lie.
Amie was considerably less enthusiastic. She knew exactly how undertrained we were and exactly how ridiculous the thing we were about to attempt was.
We parked and walked to the start with maybe 10 or 15 minutes to spare.
I tried to settle myself.
Mostly I did that by actively trying not to look as terrified as I felt.
I wanted to go home.
Then the countdown started.
A couple hundred runners crowded around the small start/finish area. The horn sounded, everybody started moving, and suddenly there was no more time to be scared about starting an ultramarathon.
I was running one.
Amie and I settled somewhere in the middle of the pack. We knew we were slow and had absolutely no intention of trying to hang with the runners at the front.
The first mile or so was park road. By the time we turned onto the trail, my nerves had started to settle.
All I had to do was keep moving.
Then we hit singletrack.
Roots. Rocks. Woods.
This I knew.
We cruised through those first few miles feeling good. Other runners passed us and almost everyone had something encouraging to say. I noticed quickly how friendly everyone was. That continued for the rest of the day.
And then I stepped on a rock.
My left foot came down, the rock rolled, my ankle went with it and I hit the ground.
I’d had ankle problems before. Rolling one a couple miles into my first ultramarathon was pretty close to the nightmare scenario I had imagined before the race.
Amie looked down at me.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“We paid a lot of money to be here. Get up.”
Written down, that sounds much harsher than it was. You have to know Amie.
I got up.
I took a few steps. It hurt.
“Let’s try to run a little.”
So we ran.
Every stride hurt, but adrenaline was doing enough work that I could ignore it.
The runners were still fairly bunched together through that first section. There hadn’t been much room for the field to spread out yet.
Then we climbed out of the trees and saw the powerline.
It went straight up.
At that point in my very short trail-running career, it was the biggest climb I had ever seen.
That spread us out.
Amie and I made it to the top and eventually settled toward the back of the field. We found ourselves among a small collection of runners moving at roughly our pace. We’d pass them, they’d pass us, then we’d see one another again at an aid station.
Now it felt like an adventure.
We were slowly covering miles through thick woods that made it seem like civilization was much farther away than it actually was.
It was awesome.
Around mile seven we reached our first aid station, grabbed some watermelon, used the pit toilets—which are horrible—and headed back out.
The race had aid stations roughly every seven miles. For two people doing their first ultra, those became landmarks. We weren’t thinking about 33.7 miles anymore.
Just get to the next aid station.
The next section rolled up and down before opening into a field that reminded me of running around my grandparents’ farm when I was a kid.
Around mile 14 we reached the Twin Bridges aid station.
For the first time, we sat down.
Those camp chairs felt incredible.
We ate fruit and salty snacks and refilled our water. One of the runners we had been leapfrogging all day came into the aid station after us. She grabbed what she needed and was gone.
That was our cue.
We weren’t worried about beating her. Watching her get in and out simply made us realize how much time we were spending sitting there.
So we got up.
The next section was probably the hardest part of the race for me.
It felt like constant climbing. I knew the Nature Center aid station was somewhere around mile 20, and I started watching my watch obsessively.
Eventually a steep climb dumped us onto the park road.
I was hot. My ankle hurt. The adrenaline that had covered up the pain earlier was gone.
For the first time all day, I seriously wondered whether I could finish.
Maybe jumping directly into an ultramarathon as my first race hadn’t been the smartest idea I’d ever had.
We reached the Nature Center and I was visibly struggling.
A volunteer met us near the walkway and took our bottles to refill them while I sat down at a picnic table.
She came over.
“Did you get a menu?”
I laughed.
I thought she was messing with me.
Then she handed me an actual restaurant-style menu.
I looked at it.
“Can I get a grilled cheese and a cup of chicken noodle soup?”
“You want bacon on that grilled cheese?”
Who doesn’t want bacon on a grilled cheese?
A few minutes later I was eating hot soup and a bacon grilled cheese sandwich in the middle of an ultramarathon.
I inhaled it.
I still tell that story all the time. It remains one of my favorite memories from any race I’ve done.
The following year I came through the same aid station and the same volunteer was there. I got to tell her that she had basically saved my first ultra.
That day, I finished eating, topped off my water and stood up.
I wasn’t 100 percent.
I was a hell of a lot better than when I arrived.
We left the Nature Center and had about a mile of park road before turning back onto trail.
The woods changed.
We entered a section of pine forest that would become one of my favorite parts of the course. Eventually the trail started dropping toward the Little Miami River.
Somewhere in those pines, my watch reached 26.2 miles.
Then 26.3.
First time going beyond 26.2
We stopped.
I took a picture of my watch showing 26.3 miles. We took another picture of the two of us standing there smiling.
We had gone farther than a marathon.
For the first time in our lives, Amie and I had covered an ultramarathon distance.
I’ve always done this during races. I’ll stop for a picture. I’ll look at a view. I’ll take a few seconds to notice where I am. Those seconds have never mattered enough to me to give them up.
So we stood there for a moment.
Then we kept going.
As we descended toward the Little Miami, Amie started having trouble with her quad.
Downhills became especially painful. She had to turn sideways and slowly work her way down anything steep.
Eventually we reached the river.
The water was around waist deep that day, so keeping our feet dry was no longer an option. At that point the cold water actually felt pretty damn good.
The race photographer was standing in the river and caught a great picture of Amie beginning the crossing.
On the other side was the final manned aid station.
We stopped long enough to grab a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and headed out.
About five miles remained.
They were the longest five miles of the race.
We were tired. We were sore. The sun was dropping and we were moving slowly.
But we were moving.
There was one runner we’d been around for most of the day. She was part of that little collection of back-of-the-pack runners we kept seeing over and over. Nobody had formally decided we were together. We just kept ending up together.
By then those people felt like our people.
Earlier in the race, one guy had been bombing down a hill when he stepped completely out of his shoe. He lost his balance and I managed to grab him before he went into the ground or a tree.
We hugged.
Then we went back to running.
That was basically our relationship.
About a mile and a half after the river, we had just gotten back onto trail when we saw the woman walking toward us.
The wrong direction.
Something about her face immediately looked wrong.
We stopped.
“What’s up?”
“I’m dropping. I can’t go any farther.”
We tried to talk her out of it.
“Stay with us. We’ll get through this last section together.”
She was done.
She had already called her crew. They were coming to get her.
It crushed us.
She had been out there around us all day. She had helped pull us along without ever really knowing she was doing it.
Now, with only a few miles left, she was gone.
So we kept moving.
Amie’s quad was hurting. My ankle was hurting. We had stopped caring about pace, heart rate, splits or any of the other numbers I had spent months putting into spreadsheets.
Forward was the pace.
Several times we became convinced we had missed a turn.
We could hear music and voices and think, That has to be the finish.
Then we’d realize it was somebody on a boat out on the lake.
Keep moving.
Eventually the sound changed.
This time it really was the finish.
We could see lights through the trees.
Then we saw the inflatable start/finish arch.
We came out of the woods and suddenly it was only a few yards away.
I pulled out my phone and started recording.
Amie and I crossed the finish line together.
I yelled as we crossed, and my voice cracked because I was trying not to cry.
The race director came over to congratulate us.
I had just completed the hardest thing I had ever done.
33.7 miles.
It was slow. It wasn’t pretty. I had rolled my ankle a few miles into the race. Amie could barely walk downhill by the end.
We had finished.
The drive home gave our bodies enough time to cool down and stiffen up.
When we pulled into the driveway, our kids came outside and had to help us get into the house.
Our legs hurt.
Our feet were blistered.
We made our way into the bedroom.
And then we opened our laptops.
We started looking for another race.
I was an ultrarunner.