At this point it has been about eight weeks since UTMB but it really feels more like eight months for me. Where I was two months prior to the race to where I am now two months after feels so dramatically different. I haven’t had any will to talk about or put out anything about the race and where it left me, frankly because it all just felt very meaningless and I felt a complete disconnect from the sport and the people in it. More things mattered to me and I couldn’t care less about seeing another headline or reading another race report. The only thing that mattered to me were the people in my life close to me, the people who really understood me and wanted to spend undivided time with me. For this reason, I decided to remove all social media apps from my phone and take a break from mindless virtual engagement. So with that, I’m sorry if I didn’t like your post, give your uphill treadmill workout kudos, or watch your film. I’m sure they were all top tier pieces of content that will be talked about for years.
But to be honest, I’m not sorry. I feel like I’ve regained my presence and am reminded just how important that is. Not just in being an athlete, but in just being a human walking through the world. Wow these apps really have taken all of that away. And they’ve taken away much more too. Despite being in a very low place after having lost my best friend, dropping out of biggest race in the world and the race I dedicated the last 10 months of work towards, and being forced to shut down running due to the injury, I actually did not feel the level of sadness and hopelessness I thought I would. August brought some of the worst news of my life and one of the worst injuries in my career, but oddly it was ok. It just was what it was, which was my life that I was swimming through.
It really is fascinating how your reality, no matter how seemingly and objectively hard in the moment, can feel fine when you are not comparing it to others. It is much easier to accept it as it is when you have no reference to how it could be better, or wish you were living someone else’s. Life is about the very low points and accepting those as moments of growth, just as much as it is defined by the high moments of achievement that people seem to remember you by. Without one, there is not the other. It is much easier to accept that for what it is when you’re not comparing yourself to someone you barely even know.
There is always a silver lining through any tough time, and I think for me limiting my phone usage has been the most important one. Obviously, staying connected and having some sort of social media presence is part of the public professional athlete job, so I know staying totally offline is out of the question, but I think it’s good to remember having these moments of silence and limited exposure can be extremely valuable for me during tough times. In general, I plan to keep the apps off my phone and limit the usage to when I am alone on my laptop. I think anyone you are close with in your life deserves that level of presence with you anyway. It’s insane how much unimportant bullshit we share to people we don’t know through modes like Stories, but how sometimes it can feel hard to share important real thoughts and updates to those close with you in person.
And in the spirit of that thought, I am going to share some updates on myself to a bunch of people who barely know me (probably you reading this):
Honestly, I’m doing alright. I’ll start with the injury. The ‘distal quad tendinopathy’ immediately diagnosed after UTMB was further confirmed as quad tendinitis, which is more or less the same thing. I’m on a heavy PT regimen and 4 weeks ago received a PRP injection into the tendon, which might have been the most acutely painful 10 seconds of my life. The progress has been slow, but I am on my 3rd week of 30-60min run/walks and seeing some improvement from how it felt running over the summer. I am holding out until around Thanksgiving to truly evaluate if the PRP did anything or not to eliminate the inflammation. For now, I’m happy to be running at all, which has been accompanied by about 250-300 miles of cycling per week.
Tendinopathies don’t just pop up out of nowhere… they are long-term mechanical wear-and-tear on the tendon from overuse. Uncovering what caused this has been fascinating. For some context, I first started feeling knee pain in March of this year. It always felt manageable, and always felt like it would go away after warming up. Overtime through the season, the pain intensified and would take longer to go away. What started as 20min of running before relief, went to an hour, to two hours, three, four, and then finally no relief by August. I made it through some extremely demanding races in Madiera and Andorra, and figured it would make it through UTMB as well, but by that point the tissue was beyond any sort of tolerable limit. Along with the higher intensity and faster pace of the first 40k of UTMB, it could not take any more load to get me around the loop.
I noticed over the last couple years, my hips have gotten noticeably tighter and I would experience lower back pain over the course of multi-hour runs, which would result in a forward lean in my stride and limited knee drive, especially over the course of long races. I was frustrated as it seemed like performance was declining in long ultra despite training more and feeling good doing it, but it does all make sense now. PT has uncovered that I have barely been using my glutes and hamstrings these last couple years running due to the tightness in my hips. Instead, I’ve been compensating onto the muscle that has been activating well - duh, my quads. The tendon overuse injury has been from years of massive training overloading it. My focus now has been making my hips mobile again so I can stay upright and actually activate my glutes and hamstrings while I run. I’m hopeful through all of this, I recapture access to my entire biomechanical chain and actually run to my potential again.
If anything, all of this has launched an investigation into my body I’ve needed to do for a while now. If I’m being honest with myself, I knew something wasn’t right and I wasn’t realizing the gains I was making in training when it came to race day. I felt fitter, I was investing more into it all, and training better than I ever have, but when it came down to it my body wasn’t responding late stage in a race. I was forcing it all and most likely would have continued to because stopping training never felt like an option I wanted to choose. My hope is that is the much-needed reset my body has been screaming at me for, and ultimately I will add years to my career once I’m on the other side of it.
Although there is not much to report, I feel like I should talk a bit about UTMB and how the race went down for me. At this point, I feel so moved on and uninterested in telling the story but there are tiny moments in there that I will remember forever and remind me why I love this sport and the people in it. I will do my best to shout those people out as they made a terrible day one I would normally want to forget worth holding on to.
The unfortunate thing about it all is that my body felt really ready to rip a good loop. Was I in shape to run under 19 hours? I don’t think so necessarily, but then again you never know. I did feel phenomenal to St. Gervais and felt like we had a really great group to work with. I know nothing really matters early on and there were many of us within a minute of each other, but for me, that group at the front felt like Ben, Baptiste, Vincent, Zach, and myself. A few sentences and jokes were shared along the way and we all took turns pushing at the front. Having shared the first half of this course with Vincent on a training run a month prior, I felt very confident we were moving at a solid yet sustainable pace. Having a later start to avoid the torrential rain really changed the energy up Col de Voza and through St. Gervais as well. Going through those early stretches and climb in the dark brought all the crazy fans out. What I realized is how much everyone loves Baptiste. I still get chills remembering the passion in everyone’s cheers for the local Frenchman. This race is just so different for them in such a beautiful way.
From St. Gervais to Les Contamines I continued to feel good, but I did feel like the pace and inability to take the pressure off down the climb to St. Gervais was really getting to my knee. I remained hopeful the pain would go away as it would sometimes on training runs, but I could also tell my form was starting to falter a bit and my stride was closing up. There was a point on one of the road climbs in this stretch that I began to drop back from our group of 5. Zach began to notice, looked back at me and smacked his hip, signaling me to wake up and glue myself to him. A few days prior, Zach and I met up for a shakeout run and shared similar sentiments around how we want to approach the race this year. Basically, we both wanted to go for a win and nothing else and that we would love to work together for as long as we can. It meant the world to me in that moment that Zach wasn’t going to let me fade and it truly felt like we were in this together. I thought back to a few years prior when Zach was my mentor on TNF and how awesome it was we were now racing side by side on the biggest stage. Zach was one of the first people to believe in me and really give me the confidence to believe in myself. For a moment, everything felt super safe and I was really feeling like we were going to do some damage together.
With the help of Meredith, I was in and out of Les Contamines quick and did my best to show no discomfort. Zach caught back up shortly after and we were running well together again, but things started to really unravel for me on the flat section to NDG. I began to limp and by the time we reached the crowd-lined climb, I had lost any ability to put power out on my left leg. At this point I was unable to keep up with the front. Caleb had caught up to me and I feel lucky we were able to experience one of the highlights of the race together on the NDG climb. We chatted a little but I could not keep up climbing on Col du Bonhomme. At this point I was essentially putting all my weight on my left pole and none on my leg. Needless to say, it was slow and I was passed by what feels like at least 20 people. The descent to Les Chapieux, needing to limp down with my poles, was expectedly even worse and I was passed by another 10. By now, I was fairly certain I wasn’t making around Mont Blanc, but I remembered Hayden had to wait until 8am to leave the Chapieux aid station the prior year so I wasn’t going to drop there.
I slowly made my way up Col de la Seigne, seeing many friends fly by me along the way. Jon Albon had a quick chat with me and offered me a UK-exclusive painkiller, which I blindly took but it didn’t do anything except get me really high (just kidding). There were a few moments on the climb where I felt like I would get into a rhythm again and figure out a system while hiking to take pain off the knee, but all the flatter, runnable sections interrupting it were a quick reminder that I was totally unable to run at this point. I remember looking up at the beautiful full moon a few times, trying to find any form of strength. I would look up and think about Jake with the hope that his memory would propel me forward, but the exact opposite would happen. I would start to whimper a bit and have to completely stop and catch my breath. At one point I sat on the ground, feeling totally defeated with no will to continue at all. It all felt so hopeless and the race felt meaningless. It was all just way too soon.
I finally made it to Lac Combal and dropped. I’ve DNF’d a couple times now but that was by far the easiest call I’ve had to make. Turns out Lac Combal is actually a pretty convenient place to drop and I feel really grateful of all the support I had in the decision, and to the Terranova’s for picking me up so quickly. Courtney joined my in the car at one point after her day didn’t go as planned either, and we sat there together, both feeling a combination of disappointment and a bit of relief. As her ride arrived and she got out of the car, she looked at me and told me she was proud of me. She could have very easily not and just said goodbye or to keep my head up or something else like that. But for some words, those four words had an affect on how I saw myself post-race and how I will carry myself to the next.
_____________________________________
The main reason UTMB intrigues me is because I don’t think I’ve even scratched the surface of my potential there. Aside from this year, I have only ever raced it after racing Western States 9 weeks prior, and this year was even worse considering how injured I was lining up. Curiosity is my biggest motivator and after 4 attempts, I am so so so curious what I can do there when I am 100%. Maybe it is nothing special. In fact, that's probably the case. But I really don’t care. I just want that proof and then I can move on.
Right now, my focus is on getting healthy. Not just pain-free, but truly foundationally healthy. I want to use my whole body when I run again and I don’t want to be compensating. I won’t start training at full capacity until that is the case. As much as I thought I would try to return to Western States next year, I think I need at least another year focusing on UTMB and getting to the start line in with an uncompromised body and focused mind. There wasn’t much in my favor to have a good go this year, but I don’t regret trying and like the beginning of this post described, I’ve learned so much about myself through it.
Ultimately, I’m taking steps in the right direction to becoming a more complete version of the athlete I want to be. At the beginning of this year, I feel like I had no idea how to approach nutrition at mountain races but the plan is getting better and better. My needs in the Sierra vs needs in the Alps is becoming more clear, and I need a whole lot more in the Alps. Nutrition at Andorra was the first success, and was mostly due to a drop in consistent hourly sodium and the inclusion of some real food. My hydration needs fluctuate a lot, and therefore so does my sodium, so trying to stick to a blanket sodium number all day, similar to how you would for carbs, doesn’t make the most sense. It becomes a lot to think about especially as the needs change based on weather and the course, which is why practice makes perfect. As far as real food goes, I’ve found the things I like that work for me, but there is a lot of room for improvement in the delivery system and optimizing for weight and space, but there is time and a clear action plan to develop that.
I’ve also identified what I see as distractions and things that subtract from my overall presence and happiness in my process and want to make an effort to eliminate these things. As much fun as I have on Strava, I don’t think it is productive toward effective training, at least for me, and is also a total waste of time. I found myself really focused on my numbers last season, mostly because others would compliment me on them. A lot of these numbers were achieved through pain that was hard to admit to. For now, my training will stay on TrainingPeaks, with the exception of the fun adventures or races worth sharing.
That’s it for now. I do like to write but I go back and forth on sharing it all. I never want it to feel like an obligation or a mode to receive external validation or remain relevant. It’s a therapeutic activity for me and I want it to remain that way so I will post when it feels right to, which may not be after every race, or may come at random times as navigate times through this sport. Thanks for reading!
