How did I get here?

I was a typical Canadian child growing up with my sporting life focused solely on hockey.   Perhaps “atypical” is a more fitting word for me as us goaltenders sometimes exist on the periphery of the whole hockey team dynamic.  Nevertheless, hockey was all I did when I was young.   That is, except for one brief moment in the fall of Grade 6, when I decided to give cross-country running a try.

I was drawn into cross-country after watching my sister succeed in the sport.  I realize now that I consider my sister as one of my running hero’s, but at the time, I simply thought that if she could be successful at running, than so could I.  Call it arrogance, call it jealousy, call it whatever you like.

However, while she would be leading the training runs for the entire school, I would be screwing around with friends, chasing each other around trees and piles of dog-shite.   Reality slapped me good and hard on the day of my first, and last, race.  I remember little about that day, but what I do remember, I remember vividly.   The race started in a wide, open field and funneled everyone into a series of forest trails.  I started out too aggressively and was probably mid-pack by the time I reached the woods.  I began to panic as my heart started pounding through my chest; a feeling I was not familiar with and a feeling I DID NOT like at all (it’s funny how time changes one’s perspective on these things).   I was looking for a way out of the pain and I found it when a class-mate of mine, Mitchell, got tangled up with another runner and they both went down hard.   As I went by, I was only thinking about Mitchell and whether it’s proper racing etiquette to help a fellow runner up.  I didn’t.  The guilt of not stopping and lending him a hand overwhelmed me until he went blazing by.  That’s when I realized that I was doing little more than walking ... I had quit at that point.  I shuffled to the finish line, in 50^th place, four spots from last.

I figured then that I was not meant to be a runner.  My beliefs were reinforced by my absolute hatred of having to run (aka walk) 6 laps of the track in high-school gym class.   I never once thought about running after high-school, not even when people, including my future running coach, would comment that I must be a runner because of my slight physique.   My retort always being that “I can’t run 100m without doubling over”.  I had established a nice, comfortable, sedentary lifestyle, complete with a big, lumbering and equally non-running Bernese Mountain Dog.  I maintained this mindset until I was 35 or so. 

At the time, a few of my friends had been running to stay in shape.  I don’t recall what motivated me to join them, but I did and for roughly four weeks, we’d run on Saturdays and Sundays in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto.   During those weeks, I came to realize that I didn’t actually hate running.  I don’t think I truly enjoyed it yet, but it certainly didn’t feel like a chore. 

At the end of those four weeks, we were signed up to run a 10k on Toronto Island.  The race was organized by one of Ontario’s Triathlon Series, so it wasn’t a huge event and that suited me just fine.  I recall two things from this race.  First, I ran with my phone in my one hand and my keys in the other because I didn’t have pockets in my shorts.  Second, I remember getting to 8k and realizing that I wasn’t tired at all, unfortunately, I didn’t know how to run faster at that time.   I ended up with a 48:30 or so and for a brief moment, I actually liked running.  This was short-lived, however, and it couldn’t overcome the gravitational pull of my couch and TV.   I stopped running altogether.

The following spring I was in meeting at work and we needed a follow up.  When I suggested meeting again the next Monday, a co-worker commented that he couldn’t because he’d be in Boston.   He didn’t travel for work, so I asked why and he responded that he was running the Boston Marathon.  I was completely taken aback and intrigued at the same time.  I am fortunate enough to work for one of the sponsors of the race, but up to that point, I had paid little attention to the employee training program that allowed us to get into Boston without qualifying as long as we raised money for charity.  It took an off the cuff comment from a co-worker for me to comprehend the amazing opportunity that was available and to remind me that I may just enjoy running.

I could write pages describing what happened next ... and I may just do that in a future post, but for now I’ll just provide the Coles Notes version:

I signed up, through work, to run in the 2010 Boston Marathon.

I pulled a marathon training program off the internet.

I started my training for Boston running four times a week.

I dropped down to running three times a week by March because my body was sore all the time.

I finished the Boston Marathon.

I sat on a bench after the race, feeling a whole world of awful and I promised myself that I would qualify for the 2011 race.

I was once again blessed by the running gods who reconnected me with Albert Dell'Apa, my former co-worker and the best darn running coach in Toronto.

I got my Boston Qualifier at the 2010 Scotia Toronto Marathon, thanks to Albert’s coaching, guidance and encouragement.

I didn’t listen to my body and I over-trained for the 2011 Boston Marathon.

I paid dearly for that mistake during the race and have been paying for it ever since.

It hasn’t been all negative since 2011.  With Albert by my side, I have been able to post some pretty decent results in 5ks and 10ks and the dislike I once felt for running has been completely replaced by an undeniable love for it.  Unfortunately, my body falls apart in any race that is longer than 10k and it did so in a massive way in 2013. 

I had signed up for the Chicago Marathon and was being extremely cautious with my training.  I was looking for a good quality tempo run and, as such, signed up for the disaster that was the 15k Midsummer’s Night Race (I’ll refrain from elaborating as to why the race was a disaster ... if you were there, you know).   By the end of that race, my knee started to get flaky and I knew, once again, that a marathon was out of the question.  So I never made it to Chicago, but nonetheless, I kept running.   The knee pain eventually dissipated but I started getting pains in other places.  Thinking I was just dealing with shin splints, I kept running.  After six weeks, I finally got it into my head that perhaps it was more than just shin splints.  One bone scan later, it was confirmed ... stress fracture of my tibia.

Give or take, a stress fracture equals about ten weeks of no running.  However, when your Osteopath provides an assessment that your running issues are due to you being unbelievably weak (paraphrasing here ... a bit, not much), that ten weeks actually turns into about five to six months as you focus on building up your general fitness level before hitting the roads again.

As my body was healing, my mental state spiraled out of control.  I became irritable and erratic.  I closed myself off from the world as much as I possibly could and faked interest whenever I was forced to be part of it.  When I was by myself, I did things that I still find bewildering.  When I was with others, I was unbelievably and embarrassingly belligerent.  I was in a state of mania for days on end and utter depression for even longer.  This cycle kept repeating itself ... over and over and over.  I had fallen apart completely.

I have always struggled with being me.  I do not like myself much.  When I’m in a room with people I don’t know and even with people I do know, I tend to feel completely inadequate.  In my mind, there will always be someone more interesting, someone funnier, someone better looking ... whatever ... in short, I’m often overwhelmed by my sense of feeling lesser than everyone else.

The thing is, when I’m running, I feel that I’m equal.  I don’t care if I pass other runners or if they pass me, whether it be on the street or at the end of a race.  The times speak for themselves and I stop judging and comparing myself to others.  In the back of my head, I know I’m a fairly good runner and that makes me feel amazing.  If only I hadn’t rejected running earlier in my life ...

When I lost my ability to run, I lost the tool that kept my mental state balanced.  In the past, before I ran, my family and my close friends kept me stable during my uneven periods.  But with my self-imposed isolation, I didn’t have them.  It’s really no wonder that I collapsed.

Fortunately, all things pass.  I returned to running in March/April this year and sought out help to understand my thoughts, feelings and behaviors.  I got myself into a much more positive place and similar to what I did at the end of the 2010 Boston Marathon, I made a commitment to myself.  This time, it was to figure out, by the end of 2014, what I needed to do in life and then to work towards that goal in 2015.

For the longest time, I couldn’t figure it out what I truly needed.  I was missing my a-ha moment.  Then something happened.  

It was two days before I was to leave to Portland to run in the Hood to Coast relay race with one of my oldest friends, Daryl F.  My mind should have been focused and obsessing over the relay; Hood to Coast after-all, is an iconic race complete with its own movie and cult following.  Instead, I was kind of dreading it.  My training had been all over the place, I was having more knee and shin issues and I was really concerned about letting down a bunch of people I didn’t know. 

I had been watching an embarrassing amount of TV at the time, with a primary focus on the show Boundless, as well as, the Long Way Round and Long Way Down series.

For those not familiar with Boundless, it follows two Canadians, Simon Donato and Paul Trebilcock, as they travel the world competing in endurance races.  I find the show both entertaining and compelling because it isn’t solely focused on telling an endless story of their successes.  Rather, it highlights the pain, suffering and mental anguish that Simon and Paul encounter with every event they sign up for.  The show humanizes them and, for me, I feel a connection to them.  I have yet to complete anything that compares to what they’ve done, but I have slogged through 25k training runs in -25 C temperatures and have crashed through the wall more than once, so I feel like a kindred spirit.  I’ve been there and I’ve pushed through and when people ask me why I do it, there’s really no good answer other than “just because”.

The Long Way Round and Long Way Down series are better known and follow Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman as they ride their motorbikes first around the globe and then from the top to bottom of the earth.  Similar to Boundless, LWR and LWD focus a great deal of time on the suffering and internal struggles that Ewan and Charley face throughout their journeys.  That’s what resonates so powerfully with me.  It shows real people struggling with real challenges.

For one episode in the second season of Boundless, Simon and Paul undertook the “Ramsay Round”.  The race, which is against the clock not other racers, takes Simon and Paul on a 56 mile course over 24 Munros (mountains over 3,000ft) in Scotland.  The goal is to complete the course in less than 24 hours.  This episode solidified a few things in my mind.  First, that Scottish Highlands can be a hostile and unforgiving place, especially when undertaking a challenge like the Round.  Second, that regardless of the brutality, those same Highlands are remarkably beautiful.

The route in the Long Way Down series runs from the top of Scotland to the bottom of South Africa.  Every episode starts with a recap of the route and always mentions “John O’Groats”, located in the far, north-eastern corner of Scotland, as the jumping off point.  The continuous repeating of the name resulted in an almost Pavlovian response with me.  No, I didn’t yearn for dog food, but I did think about Scotland continuously throughout each episode regardless of where they were riding.

And there it was.  Two days before heading to Oregon, I figured out what I need to do in 2015.  I need my own adventure and I know that it has to involve Scotland and that it has to include John O’Groats and that it has to involve running.  It will be my adventure, not someone else’s.  It will be by myself, for myself.  It will break me down and show me what I am capable of.  It will allow me challenge my core beliefs of inadequacy and, hopefully, it will be the trigger that enables me to finally like myself.

A lot has happened since August.  For the longest time, I kept this idea mostly secret because I wasn’t completely convinced that it was even feasible.  I’m being more open about it now because [a] physically speaking, I am stronger than I have ever been and [b] I have mapped out a route that is just shy of 1,000km which I believe to be manageable in 30-45 days.  I’m currently targeting the July/August time-frame, midges be damned.  This blog will be updated as my training progresses and my planning kicks into high gear.  I’ll write about the challenges; the good weeks and the bad.  I’ll write about the people who are helping me and perhaps even the products I’m using.  And then as my adventure gets going, I’ll write from the roads and the trails.  I hope it’ll be somewhat of a good read and an even better adventure.  I can’t say for certain that I will complete it, but one thing I do know is that I won’t quit on myself.

Craig