Recovering From an Ultra: When Can I Run Again?

Today while running with a friend he asked, “what do you do, how do you recover from a big race, how do you know if you are ready to get back to training?” It seems like the natural progression of these last few posts would be to write about recovery and how to get back to training after a big A race when you left everything out on the course.

The short answer is there is no magic recipe for everyone, and its also ever changing as we change. In your twenties you may have been able to get right back into training after an event, maybe you figured out that if you ran a 50k you needed 3 days to recover and a 50 mile required 7 days, but as you age…or take on more life stress, have kids that doesn’t quite work out the same.

Lots of people call running their stress relief, but if we actually look at the science of running and how it affects you, running causes inflammation, releases cortisol; its technically “stress” to the body. On the one hand this is how we get in shape, that inflammation or damage or stress we incur, followed by rest, is how you gain fitness. It is actually IN THE RECOVERING that we get fitter, the stress is what induces break down where your body recovers better. It’s your body’s Build Back Better plan. In this sense this is how you look at recovery from a big event. It may take more recovery to gain more fitness because the load of stress is so high. Here’s an example, there is a bio marker that doctors look for when someone is having a heart attack, it produces massive amounts of inflammation in the body and it can be tested at a hospital to confirm if a heart attack is suspected. In studies that have looked at this marker they find that it can be even higher in runners post 100 mile than someone who was rushed to the ER having a heart attack. The difference is that its our whole body and hopefully more our muscles releasing this marker rather than just our heart releasing it and if we have trained in a smart manner this break down isn’t so foreign to our bodies: but this is to say big efforts can cause big inflammation/damage (even without injury)and require big recoveries.

There is no perfect time frame, but this is often what I ask of my athletes before we resume normal training:

1. Soreness- is there lingering soreness, stiffness, delayed onset muscle soreness, unhappy joints? When do your muscles all feel recovered and your strength starts to come back?
2. Sleep- when do you feel like your sleep patterns return? For 4 days after HiLo I felt like I needed to nap at 9am and 2pm. Fortunately we were driving home so it was conducive to me sleeping at random hours. I waited to do any easy runs until I no longer felt the urge to nap. Then I gauged how much sleep I was getting at night. Did I still want to sleep 13 hours a night if I didn’t set an alarm clock? Was some muscle soreness waking me up off and on at night? My sleep is mostly back to normal, its taken 17 days. Last week I was still sleeping very deeply for 13 hours so I kept my runs to walk/runs lasting from 30-40 min. This week as my sleep is more normal I will start 40-60 min very easy runs.
3. Mood- mood changes can be normal, if you are feeling some post race blues that is very common, but it probably means your hormones haven’t returned to their usual levels. Maybe you’re grumpy or have a shorter than normal temper, or you’re just so blah that you aren’t able to focus at regular life events- these are things to look for. If you are someone who deals with depression and know that post race is a time when the blues can hit hard, have a plan before they come on, maybe that’s talking to (or finding a therapist) maybe that’s letting your family know that you may feel more down than normal so they can look out for you. If any of these things are happening, its probably not time to resume regular training yet.
4. appetite- some people lose their appetites after a race, some people feel endlessly hungry. When does your appetite come back to its normal place. Getting “hangry” can be avoided during training by fueling appropriately, it should also be avoided post race by continuing to fuel. Your body just went through an epic event and it needs to repair bone, and muscle, lung tissue etc etc, its still working hard to repair all of your bodily systems.
5. Desire- you may not think this is important but it IS! If all of the above is relatively back to normal but you just don’t really feel like running—-don’t force yourself. Let it come back when it does, it will go a long way in keeping you from mentally stagnating. Just because you put in lots of work and are afraid to lose your fitness (you most likely won’t and its much easier to get back into shape than it was to get into shape in the first place.) If you force yourself to come back but are’t enjoying it, you’ll eventually burn out. It’s better to be excited to run again and lose a tiny bit of fitness than it is to run while you’re not ready yet.
6. For menstruating individuals that are NOT on birth control looking at your period and any changes. Did it skip right after your race, was it shorter or longer or any other irregularities(this is part of hormones but is a physical one rather than emotional) On the flip side for men, there isn’t something as straightforward but you can generally look to sexual changes. Loss in desire or ability to perform the way you usually do.

Once these things are back to normal you can get back to your regular training plan. This doesn’t mean no running while you wait to recover, easy movement: foam rolling, walking, yoga, swimming, easy cycling and short very easy runs that stop before you get tired are ok and good to get a little blood flow to stiff muscles.

Once the initial muscle tenderness has subsided and I have loosened up a bit, but often before I am ready to run; I like to do any old PT exercises I have been given to reinforce good movement patterns that old injuries can alter. Easy activation things like 5-8 well executed squats, or even squats with a chair assist (like you are going to sit down but don’t put all your weight onto the chair)to get some joint ROM and load your glutes a bit, banded walks, bird dogs, easy on my knees planks, 3 way banded leg swings that challenge different activation of your glutes and ankles to help any proprioception come back along. I have also done things like walk 10 min, run 5 then some dynamic running warm up drills like side skipping and Carioca and cool down with a walk for easy 20 min of movement.

If you take care of yourself and don’t rush back too soon you are less likely to run into overuse injury and mental burn out. We ask a lot of our bodies, sometimes its nice to slow down and listen to them and let them tell us when the time is right to run again.

HighLonesome 100

I am going to start the race report 3 weeks before the event. No longer having the constraint of either traveling with, or finding care for an old dog, we decided we would drive out to Salida 3 weeks before the race. In the past I have always felt sick at altitude, I once got altitude sickness at 5,000 ft at Bighorn….so we took the opportunity to travel to 7,000ft and work remotely. As per usual the first week I felt pretty terrible over 9,000 ft, I felt really tired the second week, but by the third I felt like I could go over 10,000 ft with out the usual headache and upset stomach. The other change I often feel, even when I am not at altitude is the humidity transition from the very humid east coast. Whenever I travel for a race where its dry, I never feel like I get my hydration right, like I need to adapt to being drier. I know that altitude requires more hydration, but I really paid attention to drinking and felt like by the end of the second week I wasn’t constantly parched

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The first week in CO I felt quite overwhelmed and had to temper my excitement to hit all the 14ers around with also tapering. I did hit two 14ers, and post race I do wonder if all the hiking and running I did up high to scout the course and anything to do with how my legs, hips and lower back cramped up so early in the race.

If you are looking to run HiLo in the future and have the chance to get out on the course I do recommend you go run the section up to Antero and down the other side, Laws pass, and out by Purgatory and Monarch. I ran all of those sections, except Law’s pass, I sort of wish I had seen Law’s pass, but getting a feel for the other sections of the course was very helpful. The overview is that it’s gorgeous, sandy in many sections, very rocky in lots of places….no roots like on the EC, but I was feeling some serious hatred for rocks by the end. Small rocks, loose rocks, large rocks piled on top of rocks that shifted when you stepped on them and threatened to snap your pole in half every other step. I believe that I saw Devon Yanko on an out and back with only one pole, because her other one did, infact, snap in half.

After I was able to run on several sections my race anxiety subsided. I saw it was beautiful, hard, high and as I mentioned in the previous post, I was only going to be able to finish, not compete in the race. It gave me a bit of a feeling of freedom to have a mindset of, just get to the finish, take care of yourself and settle in for a long day, and night, and another day of hiking.

The race boasts 23,000 ft of climbing, the high point is just over 13,000 ft, there are 5 sections at 12,000 ft and the low point is somewhere around 9,000ft. It begins just at dawn and we assembled in a large field that overlooked Buena Vista, the sunrise that morning was spectacular, a reminder to take in the beauty and be thankful for the day.

As we all set off through the field and onto a road, down the hill and into the trees I thought about how I would have to reverse this direction and that I WOULD see it going the opposite direction. It goes downhill for about 2 miles, then flat for 2 miles and finally into the woods and climbs for the next 15 miles up to the high point of 13,000 ft. After the race I watched the Strava Fly-bys, I felt fantastic up this first climb and was in the top 1/3 up the side of Antero. I wasn’t pushing the pace, was eating and drinking and hiking comfortably. Once you crest the first climb you get onto a jeep road…a VERY rocky Jeep road. It was here that I smacked the outside of my left ankle…once, twice. It never really got swollen, but it certainly felt like I sprained it. I was no longer able to push off of my big toe, which then really started to hurt my hip. I continued on down, down, down the rocky road and fell in with two women from Colorado Springs. We chatted a while, walked and jogged a bit together, and then they left me at the bottom of Laws Pass. This was probably where I got pretty low, it was hot, then it hailed, then I started feeling kind of sick and my hip and ankle pain turned into lower back cramping. This was also like mile 20.

I hobbled into the first aid station, Cottonwood mile 31, where I first got to see my crew. My crew tried their best to calm my cramping hips and get my femur to glide in the socket so I could push off with my big toe instead of roll to the outside of my foot, continuing to hurt my ankle. I would say from mile 20 to the finish every step hurt that ankle. It felt like it was just crushing the heel cup of my shoe suddenly. I did my best to ignore it and shift my gait around to the inside of my foot instead. I headed back out feeling a little better and went up and down the other side of Laws Pass back to the looped part of the course.

I ran/walked as best as I could as the course climbed another 2,000 ft to the next aid station. This section is at 10,000-12,000 ft and it was a little frustrating that at sea level it would have been the easiest run. In the moment, up high it was not. My quads were already dead. Not in that they were sore or stiff or anything….this was a completely new to me feeling, like if I normally can make all 100% of my leg muscle fibers fire, suddenly I could only make 40% fire. It was very weird and very frustrating and was only mile 40. This was where I hit my lowest point of the race, cramping hip and back, bruised shoulders from a pack that felt great on my very short training runs, but now 10 hours in felt restrictive and like both shoulders were going to have a nice bruise on them.

When I rolled into my next crew stop, mile 50, I had it in mind to drop. Death marching with legs that dont work didnt seem like the most fun.

I got to the aid station, had my crew check my oxygen saturation level to make sure that it was my pack bothering me and not actually a lung problem. It was fine. I mentioned my hip and ankle and they did some more massaging and mobility, I asked where my husband was…….if anyone will let me drop its him. “Hey Drew, If I drop now we can go home and you can get to bed by your usual bed time.” It worked the one other time I dropped from Run Rabbit Run on my first attempt at 100 miles up high. I couldn’t find him. “Where’s drew?” I enquired with my plan in mind. “He went to bed, you’ll see him tomorrow morning at mile 70.” Foiled! My other two crew members and my pacer, who was eagerly awaiting his pacing duties, were not about to let me drop out. Eat some food, change into your night gear, get your headlamp on and get out of here. We did, however, have a plan for my back. If I continued to move in the weird pattern my pacer would run back and they would let me drop. They would wait an hour to make sure I was ok. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately my hip straightened out and I was able to hike without pain. I did still end up compressing my sciatic nerve and still have a little bit of weird tingling on the bottom of my left foot, but its getting better each day.

DJ and I have known each other for years, but we have never actually paced each other. I discovered that this was his first pacing/crewing ever and he was quite excited for it. He listened to me whine, he commiserated with me by telling me about some of his past 100 mile failures, triumphs and funny stories. He took my mind off of the constant ankle pain by laughing at my rain pants.

So you have required gear that you must carry during the race, there are several check points. On the one hand it was heavy and annoying, on the other they would absolutely save your life if you got caught and needed to be rescued. This year the weather was perfect, sunny and warm, a few passing showers, the stars were incredible and it never really got cold up high overnight like I expected (and totally could have if we had a storm or some other typical freak weather.) I had to carry 1.5 L of water, a seam sealed jacket or poncho, headlamps, a bivy, a whistle, and at night we added to it a long sleeve shirt, pants and a hat. In trying to offload my back I put on my hat, jacket and rain pants. 1 mile into the night section and the hat and jacket came off and the pants got rolled up to my knees. Now these pants were totally water proof, wind proof and light weight….but seriously funny looking. Kind of like hammer pants. Very practical, very lightweight, but made me giggle and my husband give me the, “you look like a goof” look when I tried them on in the store. They also brought endless amounts of laughter to DJ as he hiked behind me and I threatened to buy his wife some so he could see them more often…ha!

Most of the night was spent tip toeing as best as I could over what seemed to be endless fields of talus. Finally the sun rose and it was another unbelievably beautiful sight, but I was more tired than I had ever been during a race. I think being up high for so long did two things: it made me really tired and it depleted my muscles in a peculiar way. I had my very first race nap at mile 70. I got in to the aid station and said, before everyone starts asking me questions and getting me food I need 5 min of quiet, I am going to take a nap. I have never felt sleepy before, that was also something new, but the 5 min of laying down and closing my eyes rejuvenated me. I ate and drank, dropped my hammer pants and hat and long sleeve, changed my shirt, got arm sleeves and a had and an ice buff in preparation for the final 20 miles which are always hot, dry and exposed and left mile 70, Monarch pass, feeling like a new human The first pic is me in need of a nap, the second is the most rejuvenating 5 minute nap ever!

This is the section I actually ran, its a nice, flattish dirt road that finally gets below 10,000 ft for a bit. You start at 11,300 and drop down to the low point of just around 9,000 ft. Each aid station checks you in and out, so when I arrived at the next aid station they were shocked at my pace. I was solidly moving close to a 20:00 min pace all night up high, and suddenly I dropped to closer to a 10 min pace. (Cut me some slack here, This was like hour 26 by now)

The final 23 miles go back up to 10,000 ft again and are hot, dusty and exposed. I took my WSER and my living in a hot climate knowledge and dunked into each stream crossing and put ice in my bandana at every opportunity now. I think this was the thing that held my nausea off long enough for me to chase the cut offs and finish. At mile 80 I had been trading places with a handful of other runners, by mile 85 I kept wondering what had happened to them. I do remember they were hot and weren’t stopping as often in the creeks like I was. It turned out they all dropped from the heat and nausea.

Back at mile 70 it was 24 hours and I had 36 hours to finish. Trying to do mental math I had joked with DJ that if we were at home 30 miles would take maybe 4.5 hours and probably only yield 2,000 ft of elevation, I laughed that it would most likely take ever minute of those 36 hours for me to finish…so close, yet so far. By mid morning Drew tagged in to finish the final 18 miles with me. This would only be his second time ever pacing me, I think the last time he paced was at Grindstone in 2014. I let him know that I could no longer do any math and that I basically had to keep my pace below a 20 min/mile pace, I asked him to help me keep as much cushion as possible because I would inevitably be stopping for pee breaks and other slow downs. He did a great job at keeping me motivated and moving and keeping his eye on the clock. This was also a first, I have never, ever chased cut offs not even close…it was kind of a nice thing to latch my brain onto. Seeing the race from the back was a totally different experience, often find myself running completely alone for 50 or more miles in a typical race, the end of this race was spent yo-yo-ing with all the other runner who were trying to move just ahead of cut off times…running together, passing each other with encouraging words and stoping to offer any help. There is different feel of camaraderie at the back of the race that is just as wonderful as the feeling at the front. Having now run at the front and back, I can honestly say everyone is working equally as hard, and is suffering the same…its the people at the back that know how to endure the suffering longer. We are all there doing our best, competing against the clock and the elements. “The cut off to the final aid station is 4:40, we will get there at 4…” that was something to feel excited about. It was also really nice to have a race where I could have different expectations, it was actually really enjoyable.

As we hit the final 4 miles, back on that dirt road that I had started on, it began to downpour. At the pre-race meeting Caleb had mentioned that at mile 99 (this race was 101.8 miles total) there was a flood area that would fill immediately in heavy rains and if it did fill NOT to try to cross it, to wait it out….as the small, light rain drops fell Drew remembered the warning. “We gotta run, the rain is going to pickup and we don’t want to get stuck near the wash.” This was one of the few times that I felt any sense of urgency the entire race. Just as the sky opened we crossed past the wash and were safely on the opposite side. The climb back up that last mile to the finish was pretty stupid, but the finish, holding Drew’s hand across the finish was pretty amazing!

In a nutshell this race was hard, beautiful, lacking in oxygen, and full of technical terrain, however, its so enjoyable because the co-RDs and volunteers are so fantastic! I can’t say enough about the family feeling of the race; both new comers and people who had been there before were welcomed like old friends. If you’re looking for a challenge: both of your physical and race-trouble-shooting ability this one is for you!

High Lonesome 100 (backstory)

If you are looking for my race report, that will be a separate post coming later. I feel like so much has happened between my last 100 in 2019 and now. This post discusses where my mind and body were going into HiLo 100 and what got them there, and things I have been doing between 2019 and 2022 with links to the different therapists and practitioners that helped me through a lot of body/hip pain. Why am I sharing this? Well I think there is a perception that in order to do something big, you need everything to go perfectly, everything must align. I wanted to show that is not the case, but you do need to consistently be doing things that will get you to your goal in the best way you can with where you are in life.

2020 was a wash in terms of racing, I ran a small local 20 miler and attempted a 100k but often felt like my heart just wasn’t in it. In 2021 I was looking for some inspiration. Something big to look forward to as I was in a bit of a funk and wasn’t feeling particularly excited to do much of anything, including but not limited to running. I recognized that it was more than just the blues and was introduced to athlete therapist Danielle Snyder of Inner Drive Wellness and started working with her. I also signed up for High Lonesome 100 for a change of pace. With Covid continuing it was really hard to mentally invest in anything; to put myself fully into any training, or nearly anything else. What if I spent all the requisite hours training, driving 8 hour days to get to some actual mountain running, put in hours of strength training to be able to carry the required gear, only to get Covid and have to bow out of the race the week before?! Realistically to recover from Covid in a healthy manner most individuals need a solid month to get back to their pre-covid state. I had seen it in several athletes I coach, as well as in most of the literature that the journal of sports medicine put out. I wasn’t sure I could handle another let down, and I sure as heck didn’t want a surprise lung issue up at 13,000 ft in the wilderness.

Ultimately I chose for HiLo for two main reasons. First I wanted a change of scenery and to spend an extended amount of time in CO-this would be my excuse, to get used to higher altitude. Second I had been searching for races that supported equity and encouraged a large field of women. The lottery has 150 spots and half are slotted for women/half for men, this year we actually had more female starters than men: 74 women started, 69 men started! Not that I have much of a voice, but the small voice I have I like to use to support races and RDs that I believe are truly trying to make a safe, enjoyable and more diverse race experience. I knew it was hard and it topped out over 13,000 ft but I didn’t really think about the implications of that for several months later; I pushed that down. If you’re looking for this in an east coast race, Hellbender 100 has a similar lottery system.

Winter training went ok, but I kept having frustrating hip pain that started in 2019. I dropped out of a marathon in March at mile 20; I pushed that disappointment and frustration down. I have had this weird pain for almost 3 years, sometimes its a run stopper, sometimes I don’t notice it at all. After going to a myriad of doctors, I finally found someone who was both an internal medicine doc and a sports med doc. She diagnosed me with very early arthritis in my hip, no ligament tears, no labrum impingement and sent me to a Pelvic floor PT and told me that if the hip continued to bother me she had several methods to help it that were within the rules that WADA allowed for. Wow, that was a huge relief, I didn’t realize how much chronic hip pain could weigh on me. Also I didn’tknow that the weird UTI like symptoms that I started back in 2012 were all related. (SIDE NOTE: pelvic floor health and issues are everywhere, but should not be normalized and not to be ignored. If you have any sort of pelvic floor things, not limited to pain with sex or bladder things you CAN and SHOULD get that sh*t fixed, its a game changer—-it also led me to take some additional classes to add to my coaching resume that were super interesting and that I have used to help some of my athletes already.) Not only had it affected my running, walking, sitting, but going to the bathroom and also my sex life were involved. It took about 5 months to get things feeling better, they aren’t perfect, I can’t undo the arthritis, but I could figure out my pelvic floor issues and relieve most of my hip pain, and I can feel the rest of my body unwinding too. I can see the light at the end of this PF tunnel, pun intended!

Meanwhile, as I was muddling my way through pelvic floor pt (not to mention peri-menopause which I haven’t even been able to address; theres a theme here of pushing things out of mind.) and trying to stay on top of the depression and anxiety it was causing, our dog was slipping away from us. This spring my best furry friend and running partner, Emmitt was diagnosed with cancer and we suddenly found ourself having to put him down at age 15 in a short 4-5 days from diagnosis. Prior to this he had really never had any injury or sickness; no arthritis, no surgeries, I think the worst he had was he once had a tooth pulled and 3 years ago he injured a tendon in his paw and had to take it easy for a few weeks. He was 15 but was still running 1-5 miles a day with me on the trails

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It was such a shock, it felt like it came out of the blue. As I was digging myself out of physical pain and injury, here was our happy and healthy dog who still waited patiently every morning for his run, sliding very quickly towards his end without us knowing. I kept thinking we should have had at least a year of him getting older, stiffer, not wanting to run…instead it was 5 days and was so incredibly hard. Instead of ramping up my training at this point, I found myself numb and awash in grief, not sleeping not eating, trying to figure out who I was and how to function without the usual dog-goal posts of every day: wake up, feed Emmitt, run, run Emmitt, walk Emmitt at noon, feed him, walk him again, snuggle on the couch at the end of the day. Even just the day to day things where he would sit on his lazyboy chair and watch me while I work-was gone.

I have been a dog walker/trainer for more than 10 years now, and most of it was due to adopting Emmitt. It turns out he was a mix of breeds that are especially hard to rehabilitate if they haven’t been properly socialized as a puppy: namely border collie and german shephard. By throwing myself into learning how to train and re socialize a neglected older dog I found that I had both a knack for it and a passion, which became a career. Honestly, we had also adopted him shortly after my father in law passed away and so he was both a distraction, a way to give love to someone who had been neglected and abused a safe and loving home. So when he passed lots of those old emotions resurfaced, things that had been pushed down.

Now it was mid May, it was my 42nd birthday and I had put my dog down, and I hadn’t really thought about training for a very hard race. This isn’t to say I didn’t run a step, I certainly ran, but running where I live you have to work really hard to get about 1,000 ft of vert in 9 miles, so to train for miles-long-climbs that gain several thousands of feet of vert takes focus and effort and lots of driving to far away areas.

The week after we said goodby I started training because I finally had the mental capacity to do so,

May 16-22 I ran 70 miles with 6,600ft of elevation (these next few weeks the elevation was all hiking on a treadmill in my garage)

May 23-29: 70 miles with 4,000 ft of elevation—that’s like no elevation

May 30-June 5: 67 miles with 7,175 ft of elevation

June 6-12: 80 miles with 8,000 ft of elevation

June 13-19: 84 miles with 7,000 ft of elevation

June 20-26 was my big cram week of 90 miles which would be similar to like a Western States training camp. You can have a super compensation weekend in a training cycle provided you have adequate recovery after. I drove out to Asheville and did a big 3 day weekend of hiking on technical trails. The week looked something like this: monday off, tuesday 8 miles, wed 6 miles (drive to Asheville) Thursday 26 miles with 5,000 ft of climbing, Friday 21 miles with 4, 000 ft of climb, Sunday 25 miles with 4,500 ft of climb, and it was followed by a big recovery week of very little running while we took 3 days to drive to CO.

That was most of my training. I was a momentarily stressed that I was not fully prepared, who crams for the hardest 100 miler they have done? Apparently, I do. Then I remembered I do this because I love it, and my mindset switched to: What can I do on less than “perfect” training, and how the beauty of life is that its all less than perfect but often results are surprisingly wonderful despite our earlier perception of what “perfect” is.

I will add a caveat: this would be my 7th 100 miler, my 12th year of trail running, 20+ years of running/sports, I am a coach, I have a coach,I have figured how and practice eating before, getting 200-300 cal/hour during, and food after, I did do strength work between PT and getting strong enough to carry all the required gear—upper body and lots of back strength and I have a team of very knowledgeable friends who are in the PT and strength and conditioning world, plus they are amazing crew…so this was not a couch to 100 miler by any means. I do think in ultras experience, past miles, good nutrition and hydration strategies that you have practiced well, strength and knowledge of how to trouble shoot will get you far in completing ultras. Consistency in your sport can make up for a lot.

At some point I looked back at my Run Rabbit Run 2017 finish I estimated that I wanted to finish in 28-30 hours, then I paused and remembered that the last 6 or so months of my race prep were less than ideal for that type of external goal. I reassessed and decided that my goal would be to finish in one piece. My A, B and C goals would be to hold onto expectations lightly, to breathe and put aside any of my competitive nature and enjoy the views, gut out the thin air, DNF if there was any indication that my hip was feeling worse, eat, drink, be smart and trust my crew.

Also contributing to my mindset, we lost two very important women in our lives, not just our dog and that was an additional weight on both me and Drew. I had been thinking a lot about what it means to age, and decided this would be a good way to practice not being so focused on external competitive goals that usually motivate me and focus more on the journey and the friends that would be with me. I want to continue to run- long after I can be competitive and HiLo was a way to just be in the moment and not worry if people would look at me and wonder why I was satisfied with a nearly DFL. In my mind I would have to tell myself that yes, people would look at a 16th place finish at WSER a few years ago and then look at this almost last place finish and wonder what the heck happened and that I would just not have to care. I was doing the best I could with where I am in this moment of life and be happy.

If you have read to the finish, thank you for bearing with me and reading this far. Race report to come later.