Musings From A Big Backyard

Freedom Race Colombia

Talk is cheap—I feel like I could write a thousand pages on these three words alone, but I’ll try to restrain myself to just a few here.

After seeing that the race format I’d been eyeing for over a year was going to happen a mile from my front door in Medellin, I knew I had to participate. Freedom Race Colombia is a Big Backyard-style race, meaning that runners complete a 4.16 mile/6.7 km course every hour. You can’t start the next loop until the top of each hour, and your race only ends when you quit or fail to finish a loop within the 60-minute time limit. This continues until there is only one runner left, the last man standing and only finisher.

The 3pm start time worried me. I’m an early riser, and the idea of losing the hours between 6am and 3pm, not running and not sleeping either, had me thinking that I’d be extra tired trying to make it through the second day in pursuit of surpassing 24 hours (100 miles). How confident I was. A different story was told, a better one than setting and reaching a predetermined time, distance, or whatever goal. In this style of race, the idea is to go one more, no matter what, until you simply can’t anymore. The spirit of the race is to find out what you’re really made of. You don’t have to be fast at all. 13-minute miles, and you’d cross the finish line with a few seconds to fill your water, grab some calories, and head back out. You just have to be tough and resilient and consistent. Ready to return to the starting line every hour on the hour. As Lazarus Lake, the inventor of the Big Backyard Ultra, says, in order to stay in and keep going, “You cannot have a bad hour. Only good and great ones.”

Friends and family heard my assurances that I would reach the 24-hour mark (100 miles/160 km) and keep going. That’s when all the distance goals (marathon, 50k, 100k, 100 miles) have been surpassed and only those looking to make it to the undetermined end remain.

In the days before the race, it had rained much more than usual. Usual is an hour a day. We’d been getting storms that seemed to last from sunset to sunrise, with additional downpours scattered throughout the day. I was ready to be wet, and we did get rained on, but luckily it was of the usual variety and lasted for just one loop. We got soaked, but it was very temporary. A change of clothes was all it took to erase the effects of the rain. However, with the rain came the quitting mind and excuses. It was loop 5, I think, that we got soaked, and that was the first time the idea of calling it quits entered my mind. No matter that I had assured myself and others that 24 hours would be achieved. Talk is cheap. Talk is less than cheap; it is meaningless at best and often ends up being an embarrassment. Cheap talk and confidence did nothing at all to help control my mind when things got uncomfortable.

“Well, if it keeps raining, this is going to get a lot more brutal a lot faster. Maybe it would be a good thing if it rained more, with thunder and lightning too.”

This way I could allow the harsh conditions to be my escape. A good enough excuse. My reason for quitting. Unfortunately, I wasn’t struck by lightning nor drowned in a puddle, and thus had to keep going without a sufficient quitting story.

Then.

“Maybe making it until midnight will be enough for this effort. 9 hours of running. No one will judge me for quitting then.”

But I didn’t come to run for 9 hours. I came to run until I couldn’t run anymore.

At this point it became obvious that my physical preparation was not going to be the problem, but instead my lack of mental training would be at the forefront throughout the race.

Big mistake.

No meditation.

Workouts designed to make athletic gains rather than developing mental resistance.

Without intentionally targeting your mind with exercise, it will atrophy.

Ultra-running is a balance between the mind and body; it relies on both heavily.

Personally, I’ll take a hard mind over a well-conditioned body any day. One is susceptible to rain and injury and fatigue, and the other can make all those obstacles become totally insignificant in the blink of an eye.

Due to lack of mental training the quitting mind wouldn’t leave me alone.

“Okay, 3am, 12 hours of running, and that’s the perfect time to quit. What’s wrong with a 12-hour run? Nothing.”

And after that.

“Alright, coming in from the 4 am loop is a reasonable time to throw in the towel. This way I can make it home before sunrise and get some rest without losing another whole day.”

As you know, these were just more lies that the mind tells itself when quitting seems easier than continuing. That’s the difference—what you do when your mind starts looking for a way out.

These thoughts continued loop after loop. Excuses and rationalizations that have to be fought against and defeated.

Again.

“Okay. For real this time. Once we hit 100k, it will be 15 hours, 6am, and going another 9 hours to reach a full day is excessive. So let’s just end it now with your head hung low, but at least it will be over.”

None of those things happened. Thank God. But that is the fight, the psychological battle that you must undertake to arrive at your limit.

My limit came shortly after the start of hour 18. The sun was shining. I was feeling good. I think there were 7 of us left. I took off on loop 18 without a doubt that I would finish it. Maybe I came out too fast, maybe I tweaked something stretching between loops, I’m not sure, but a few hundred meters into the loop, my knee seized up and forced me to hobble along with a straight leg. I sat down, I moved it all around, I got up and tried to walk again, but it did not go very well. Maybe jogging would feel better than walking? Not at all. I sat down again and pulled my leg this way and that way for maybe a minute and stood up again to try moving forward at a decent pace. Not happening. That’s when I quit. In the moment I wasn’t defeated or angry with myself. I was totally satisfied because I felt that I had given it all I had. The goal was reached: go until you can’t go anymore.

For that day, for that version of me in the past that no longer exists, the limit had been found. In hindsight, I should have hobbled forward until the time expired. Maybe as I moved, the knee would have improved, and I could have made it back before the end of the hour. Next time. With the experience gained and lessons learned, with a hardened mind, the next time I will find another new limit and again walk away as a new and improved person, with another new unknown that demands discovery. That is what I’ll do. I learned. I grew. I’m better and stronger and more resilient for having participated. My cheap talk did nothing. My actions transformed me into a new and better person. Now repeat the process until death tells us that time is up.