The Skipped Intro

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash.

Hello. This is why.

Read before You Ultra began as a notebook. I was training for my first 50k race (the “gateway drug” of ultrarunning) and devouring everything I could find about the sport: books, articles, race reports, studies, training advice, gear reviews. Words so well put together. A world so rich and seductive and weird. To be truly a part of it, it seemed to me, it was imperative that I revere its words.

And it had many, a lot of them wise. There were giants in ultrarunning (with bigger calves than regular giants’ and clad in performance apparel) on whose shoulders to stand. So whenever I thought I’d found one, I’d grab two fistfuls of polyester and start climbing. I knew next to nothing, so I read everything: from training philosophy to specific workouts, from basic physiology to morassy psychology, from meaningful failures to meaningless triumphs. And I wrote down bits and pieces of what I read, an eager student of a sport so generous with its secrets.

I quickly learned that not all of those words were created equal. Some were pretty but in the most useless of ways. Others had been bought and were not easy to trust. Others still, though well-meaning, were just plain wrong.

The real value of the words of the ultrarunning world lay not in trusting them blindly but in challenging them—or rather, in being challenged by them. The words were almost never the lesson. Instead, they defied me to go out there and question, and seek, and try things, and learn. Running, in turn, provided the means, as well as the space.

I was thus not a hoarder of words but a harvester. Each highlighted passage became an experience waiting for me outside, today, tomorrow. And through experiencing, I understood, and memorized, and knew better. Running and reading met and bled into one another, and each of them deepened the other.

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A year or so after that first ultra, I’d finished a couple more, and my dog-eared notebook had blossomed into a digitized, color-coded, extremely searchable library. All my highlights had tags, such as “nutrition” or “race day,” and even sub-tags, such as “gear/cold weather” or “injuries/gross.” I enjoyed curating and organizing my ever-expanding collection. I’d often go to it for inspiration, direction, or to unearth some piece of research that would win me an argument about the usefulness of poles/salt tablets/cross-training. The most traffic it saw was by far during taper weeks—my favorite time to sit back, relax, and question everything.

But my digital notebook wasn’t merely an accumulation of knowledge, for encoded within it was the evolution of me as a runner. If I were to read it in chronological order, hundreds of authors would narrate a story of how I came to recognize my strengths and weaknesses, and what was right for me, and what was possible.

Hundreds of voices, except mine. A library of everything I knew from which yet my own words were missing. Because I wasn’t a writer.

Because I was shy, I wasn’t a writer.

I started doing this sport in part to have an excuse for spending excessive amounts of time alone with my thoughts (I’m fun at parties). But thoughts are wild and erratic things. I’d say they slip away if I were sure they are at all possessable.

But words I could own. So in my other, smaller notebook, where I logged things such as miles and effort and sleep, in the margins, I talked to myself. In slantwise strips of run-on soliloquies that bowed not to grammar or punctuation, I traced logic and framed notions of running and being a runner. And after races, I wrote race reports on torn-out pieces of paper. They’re still here, all around me, in the margins of my room: one is bloating that book over there, two more are buried under some socks in that drawer. I wrote those carefully, as if I were talking to you. And at the same time, I was you—how is it that in writing a story, you’re both telling it and having it told to you?

Because I was vain, I wasn’t a writer.

I remember how I used to avoid hilly routes when running with other people. And if I did find myself running uphill next to somebody, I’d try to keep my mouth closed and quiet my breathing. I wouldn’t even say “hello,” for my hollowed-out voice would betray my ineptitude. By myself, in the margins, I was free to pant and sputter and wheeze, but I cared too much about how I looked in your eyes to allow myself the same weakness in public. My ego couldn’t handle my being seen as a waster of air.

Nor of words. Yet this—my words—is what you are now reading. I will show you my crumpled race reports, too. I will stop stuffing them between pages of books and burying them under piles of hosiery, just like I stopped pretending I was too cool for oxygen.

On the day I decided to stop suffocating myself on the uphills, I wrote this note in my journal: “Breathe as if nobody’s listening.” Not in the margins, either, but across the entire page. So this is me writing as if nobody’s reading. And if somebody is, hello a thousand breathless times.

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I was training for my first hundred-mile race and devouring everything I could find about extreme fatigue and night running and dirt naps. Words so intoxicating and daring. A world even weirder, and so unexperienced. To be truly a part of it, it seemed to me, it was imperative that I put it in my own words.

I started adding a new tag to my highlights: “100 lessons.” As in “lessons in running a hundred-miler.” And but also the other meaning, as there were at least that many things to learn; at least that many about which to write.

And that’s what’s with the title of this newsletter.

If you decide to stick around, it won’t be for my consistency. I’ll acquiesce to the whims of that which, in my view, merits writing about it. But ultrarunning is as endless a source of experiences as it is of laundry—some of them will occasionally find their way here. So subscribe to these writings, why not. Your inbox and I would be equally surprised by them.

I’m still not a writer. Herding thoughts onto a page just happens to be a way to make sense of them. To fill gaps not in memory but in comprehension. No other form of thinking is quite as surprising to my brain as having it record its own creations. Nothing reveals a void in the same breath as it fills it the way writing does.

Not every experience is a lesson, but if I get the words right, they matter in other ways. Perhaps they’ll mean something to you, too. Or to somebody. And if words should fail me, or I them, please remember that thing I said about pretending nobody’s reading.

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And finally, today’s Reading Recommendation in a Single Quotation with No Further Explanation:

❝I belonged, I realised. That was it; that was all. I was finally at peace in the hills that, physically and emotionally, had troubled me most.

—Jonny Muir, The Mountains Are Calling

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