We runners tend to obsess about numbers. We drill down our splits, we dwell on PRs, our BQs, and CR’s. We painstakingly dissect race results to determine how we stack up compared to others in the same gender or age group. The mere existence of the age-graded calculator is a testament to our boundless enthusiasm for quantitative self-assessment.
But if you ask me, the best measures of true grit are registered way before anyone gets to the finish line. Heck, I’m amazed at what I see people go through to get to the start.
Just last weekend, when snowmageddon threatened to derail long runs around the nation, RW Challengers talked of gutting out 12 and 16-milers on a treadmill. Two weeks ago, Challenger Shannon Price Running Was His Life. Then Came Putin’s War run-must-go-on mindset. “I hope it helps others who see me realize they can still run during the snowy weather, just like I am,” he says.
How Des Linden Keeps Showing Up most blown away by the runners who finished hours after the leaders. I was at the HURT 100, a gorgeous but grizzly 100-miler. (See some photos here). The course, five laps of a 20-mile loop with 25,000 feet of elevation gain and loss, is a brutal labyrinth of slick rocks, gnarly roots, streams, and embankments. Just one-third of the runners who start the race finish it. The conditions are usually hot, wet, and sloppy, making the experience more like an audition for a science-fiction film. “It feels like the roots are grabbing your feet and pulling you down,” says Jeff Sanders, a two-time HURT finisher and former pro triathlete.
Sanders was having a stellar day at this year’s HURT until mile 27, when he slammed his foot into a rock and broke his left toe. He got up, kept running and falling, sprained his left ankle, and endured pure agony as his big toenail went through his foot. Nevertheless, he pushed on, and ended up finishing in eighth place in 27 hours and 50 minutes.
“You go into these races with grand thoughts about how you’re going to do, and in an instant, you’re reduced,” he says. “You get what you get, and you can find a way to keep going or you can quit. When you think about what other runners before you have gone through and accomplished, you just find a way through.”
Then there was Jennifer-Anne Meneray, who was on track for the 100-mile finishing goal until mile 23, when her foot caught a root. “I went, in an instant, from running at full velocity to landing full weight on my left elbow and knee,” she says. Though one arm was too broken and swollen to use, she lifted up her muddy, bloody, body up and kept running for 43 more miles. The biggest struggle, she said, was mustering up the emotional strength to shift her attitude, and view what she’d accomplished as a success, not a failure. She plowed ahead to mile 67, and would have kept going had a friend not convinced her to get an X-ray.
“It’s hard not to strive for your best when you’re surrounded by such a supportive group,” says Meneray. “From the leaders to the last in the pack, runners were constantly cheering for each other, pausing to make sure other runners are okay, keeping them on the marked trail, even physically pulling them back onto the course or just sharing what they might have in their pack that someone might have forgot.”
Now these runners, obviously had to contend with more extreme conditions than most people do while aiming for a marathon or half-marathon goal. (And for the record, we here at RW don’t advise you to run through broken bones and sprained ankles.) Nevertheless, the perseverance that they demonstrated says a lot about where the mind can take the body. They didn't let their fears, excruciating pain, or even the reality that they weren’t going to reach their goals, stop them. They didn't get all worked up about their bad luck or sulky about the years of training that had gone down in flames. They were moved by the feats of the runners around them, and the ones who'd persevered before them. And when faced with the option of quitting, they reached inside and found a sense of strength that would have been impossible to measure in any split or race result or age-graded calculator.
We all have those harrowing moments in training and racing, when we’re just not sure that we can or want to go on, or even start. There are days when it's icy out, or we're tired, and we feel overwhelmed by the distance or our own expectations about what our finishing times should be. It only takes a quick look around - and in the runner’s world you never have to look far for inspiration - to see others who have overcome more harrowing things than we could ever imagine. I think that's the power of joining a broader running community, like this one on the RW Challenge. We can commisserate with one another and cheer one another on, find inspiration from one another when we run into our own limits. And when we find a way to push through them, we have a chance to move the others in the pack. Guess there's some strength in numbers after all.
