Part of fitting ultra running into your life, as opposed to fitting your life into ultra running, is that occasionally things don’t turn out like you had planned. Last year I had gotten onto the wait list for Yamacraw along with my running partner Brent and brother-in-law, Joe Dan. Brent was towards the front of the list and easily got into the race, but he was worried we wouldn’t get in and decided to decline his entry. As fate would have it, both I and Joe Dan would eventually get into the race, but with Brent having already declined entry it didn’t seem right for us to go, so we both decided to forego our entries as well. Hopefully this was the closest thing to a Shakespearean tragedy I’ll ever have to experience. I can live with that.
This year we were aware of Yamacraw’s popularity so we all signed up early. Brent and I easily got in and Joe Dan got a decent position on the wait list. Yamacraw is the only ultra I had planned before heading into HOTS this summer, and I was really looking forward to getting a solid trail run in during early April so that I could spend the rest of Spring running up and down busy highways getting some HOTS gas-station-life training done in May with some rest in June. But that all changed this Saturday.
My wife and I had long ago decided that we wanted our daughter to attend Japanese supplementary school on Saturdays starting in the first grade. I more or less forgot that the supplementary school follows the Japanese school year fairly closely, so unlike in the U.S. the new year begins in April not August. This past Saturday we went to an open house at the school she’ll attend, a solid 80 miles from our home in Bowling Green, KY. It’s also in the Eastern time zone, one hour ahead of us, so classes start even earlier. During the open house it was announced that the semester’s opening ceremony would be held on April 4th, the same day as Yamacraw. When I heard this I started to do the mental math of time and distance before almost immediately realizing that it simply would not be possible to be in two places at the same time. I admit, my initial reaction was mild frustration, but that’s just the way it is when you try to be an ultra runner with a family. You have to know when to walk away from something no matter how much you wanted to do it, because as anyone with kids knows, they won’t be little forever and they are watching us as parents and learning lessons from us that we don’t even realize we’re teaching. I’m asking my daughter to give up every Saturday for years to come and I feel put out about missing a race? That shouldn’t seem reasonable to even the most obsessed runner.
Like I’ve said before, this Blog is called Every Ultra Day, and there’s a few ways you may interpret that, but for me, one thing that it means is that normal people like me can’t hire coaches and running will never be the most important thing in my life. It’s something we commit to as much as we can because we love it, and while we may not be able to put the work in that professionals do, we put as much as we can into it even if that means we run on average only about every other day. There’s been plenty of stretches over the past few years where I ran virtually every day, but then there’s been stretches where work or life just wouldn’t allow it.
This shouldn’t be interpreted as not giving it our all, or only haphazardly stumbling into ultras that we aren’t prepared for. I want to be a better runner than I currently am and I want you to become a better runner than you currently are, and if you aren’t running at all yet, I think it would be great if you started, if that’s what you want, but that doesn’t mean we abandon our responsibilities. Every decision we make is on the margin, and so in life it doesn’t really even make sense to talk about giving your all to something. I’ll hopefully never be asked to choose between my daughter’s opening ceremony or every single race from now until eternity. If that were the case I very well may choose to take the races, so give me the water please. But I’m just being asked to choose between one single opening ceremony and one single race. In this case, clearly the opening ceremony is the winner, so yeah, I’ll take the diamonds please. If we were to play another few rounds of this game, though, eventually my subjective preference for running Yamacraw would exceed my desire to attend an opening ceremony and so in that particular iteration I would go run. There will be other Yamacraw 50k races in the future, but my daughter will only enter Japanese school once, and I would like to be there to see it.
Am I disappointed that I have to miss Yamacraw? Absolutely. It’s OK to be disappointed. I’ve heard so much about this event and I’ve never been able to run it. But there’s more to life than running and so we all have to choose what is best in our own lives and find that balance that lets us do the things we enjoy at a cost that we can bear. I can’t tell you what that balance is in your life; you’re going to have to decide that for yourself. But for most of us running will always be a negotiation; a negotiation with our employers, a negotiation with our friends or family, a negotiation with our Netflix account, a negotiation with reading more books or traveling more or learning to play the clarinet. I promise you, it is possible to successfully negotiate all of these decisions and become an ultra runner if that is what you want to do. But I also promise you that you’ll sometimes find yourself in situations where you just need to take the advice of Dr. Henry Jones.
So good luck to everyone running Yamacraw this year. I wish you the best. As for me, it looks like when one door closes another really does open, and I can’t wait to spend a lot of time in E-town, going up to Bernheim forest and Otter Creek for some trail runs while my daughter is in Japanese school. If you you ever want to you join me, just hit me up on Facebook or Twitter because I would love the company and I’ll be there every Saturday.
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