Can You Race When Life Falls Apart?

After skipping Javelina 100 last year, I registered months ahead for this year’s.

But when the calendar rolled around to October, a perfect storm of individual emergencies struck all three members of my immediate family at virtually the same time…in Arizona. While I live on the other side of the country in Tennessee.

Family living near the race is the reason I started running Javelina years ago, and I usually stay the week after for a the relaxed visit.

Except this year, when I went out the week ahead of the race to help.

I knew it would be challenging, but not how much.

Each day was like a stress-to-exhaustion test.

Practical things to accomplish, appointments to keep, a bazillion things to remember, shopping to be done, problems to figure out, tough decisions to make, conversations to have, cleaning to be done, physical moving to be done…

I zoomed through a full range of emotions and back, more than once every day.

Afternoons ended early as the emotional, mental, and physical drain ground me to a halt.

I’d forget to eat and was sometimes too tired for dinner. 

I went to bed early but didn’t sleep well, or long.

All of it, a shining example of race week worst-case scenario.

As I tell my clients, energy matters.

Running an ultra is far more than the running. It takes all the muscle and body energy you expect, plus your emotional and mental energy too.

And the longer the distance, the truer that is.

So I honestly had no idea how the race would go. To be this thoroughly exhausted before a 100-miler was new territory for me.

And if it was new territory for me, with 130 100-mile finishes, it was probably new for others too. So I decided to go into the race as an expedition into the unknown and share what I found, no matter how it went.

After all, we have a life. We run in it and live in it, so eventually, a chaotic race week (hopefully not this epic) is bound to happen.

My strategy was to run my best, enjoy the experience, and save something for Monday’s errands and housework. A finish would be great but I wouldn’t be shocked by a DNF.

Long story short, I ran it and finished…with the happy bonus of a much better time than I expected.

And from this expedition, here are my top three take-aways:

First, a race, even a 100-miler, can be a welcome mental and emotional break from dealing with the crisis. 

For 30 hours out of the week and a half-long visit, I got to play instead of adult. That was huge.

Remember the feeling of recess when you were a kid? Multiply it times a million.

Second, a race empowers you because it’s something big you can actually control.

Control, in that I was solely in charge of how I responded to race conditions, the decisions I made, and whether I believed finishing was possible.

I had control over my outcome.

And believe me, after being in response mode all week to a host of things outside my control that all involved other people, this was freedom.

Last, a worst case scenario race week doesn’t mean the best you can hope for is to survive the race. 

The race can actually recharge your battery.

Sure, I moved markedly slower than normal Monday morning but I also felt rested, peaceful, and ready to tackle the day’s tasks. A 180-degree change from before.

To sum it all up, if chaos hits the week before a big race, you don’t have to assume your race is doomed.

If you’re at all inclined to try it and you approach it with an open mind, you might be surprised.

And while I hope you never have your own perfect-storm crisis, the great thing about these lessons is that they apply to the smaller, everyday crises that are much more likely to affect your race.

If you want to do handle races more consistently in the ups and downs of life, I can help.

Email me and let’s talk how.