When Life and Your Race Collide

At the beginning of summer, my sweet Buddy dog turned 15 years old.

I took the summer off racing like I did last year to spend time with him.

It was just the two of us. He’d saved me and I consider myself the luckiest human to have him in my life. There was no question I was going to take the best care of him possible.

This summer would probably be his last and I wanted to slow down and appreciate the moments.

The only complication on the horizon was my 22nd Superior 100 coming up in September. I’d have the most finishes, so it was a milestone, and I love being in northern Minnesota at the first hint of fall.

I didn’t think too far ahead but the more days that passed, the more it looked like Buddy’s health and Superior would collide.

In early August, I got COVID for the first time and missed a week of running. In his way, Buddy took care of me.

As I recovered, he started to decline. Our walks got slower and shorter.

An uncomfortable decision loomed - stay home and take care of the one I loved or go to the race I’d waited decades to run.

I couldn’t do both.

Stay in this sport long enough and life will conflict with a big race. You can’t separate ultrarunning from the rest of your life. They don’t occupy separate little boxes.

At the same time, you want to plan and train for the best race possible and it’s natural to assume life respects your race schedule.

When a high stakes life-race conflict like this occurs, your first reactions are probably frustration and anger, because it shouldn’t happen and it’s not fair. You trained hard and this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.

But that’s arguing with reality - you lose every time.

And it doesn’t change anything. You still face the same agonizing decision you don’t know how to make. The consequences are excruciatingly high either way you make it, so you’d do anything not to make it wrong.

Which is why you’re tempted to avoid it by going with what everyone else thinks you should do, something you end up regretting.

The solution is to make ‘life v. race’ decisions easy by focusing on the few things that matter.

It gets you out of decision paralysis.

Use what you already know to create a simple process and decision criteria.

Here’s how that worked with Buddy and Superior.

Buddy was my priority and I accepted I might skip Superior. There was a next year with Superior. There wasn’t with Buddy.

I decided to keep my options open and proceed one micro-decision at a time. I’d use the following criterion for each decision: I will still be happy with it three years from now.

I still proceeded as if I was going to Superior. Reservation for kenneling Buddy at the vet, rental car, packing drop bags.

But his health took a turn and a week before I’d have to leave for Superior, I made the one of the hardest decisions of my life.

Even without a race in the picture, it was time.

I put Buddy to sleep the morning I left for Superior. It was the right day, even the right hour.

The decision felt so peaceful. I’d intentionally enjoyed even the small moments in our time together and done my best for him to the end.

One month on, I look back on the decision with peace. Three years from now, it’ll be the same.

We can do hard things and sometimes the hard thing is an important decision between a race and something else in life.

Make these decisions as easy as you can to make the best you can.