Six months ago, give or take, my wife Jennie sent an invite out to our tribal chat group. She wanted to form a team of eight to run the Ragnar Trail Race at Soldier Hollow in Midway, Utah. Strangely, I was one of the first to respond. Yes. I'll do it. I don't even remember typing it.
That's unusual in our marriage, by the way. I'm normally the guy who says "Hey, I have an idea, let's get everyone together and do this insane thing," and Jennie is the extraordinarily competent human who turns my ridiculous ideas into reality. This one was hers, start to finish. She asked the tribe who wanted in, and the first person to say yes was, apparently, me. She still can't quite believe it.
Eventually we had eight runners: Eli, Jennie, me, Aubrey, Riley, Amethyst, Jade, Porter. Then, four days before the race, Jade tweaked his knee hard on a downhill training run. Out. His brother Caleb got the call — "Can you run Ragnar in four days?" — looked at his calendar, and said yes. And we had eight again.
There was one slight problem. I couldn't really run. Ten years ago I could do the one-mile hill loop by my house in about eight minutes. Now it's sixteen. My lungs complain, my hips hurt, and uphill running absolutely murders me. I'd "trained" through most of the summer in the loosest sense of the word — life kept interrupting — and I didn't get serious until about four weeks out.
And somewhere in that final stretch, something else showed up that neither of us expected. About a week before the race, Jennie and I both went quietly, unexplainably low. Not anxious about the race itself — there was no logical thread connecting the dread to anything specific. Just a flatness, a heaviness, the kind of low you can't argue your way out of because it isn't attached to a reason. We'd later name it what it was: some kind of pre-race depression, chemical and strange, that lifted the moment the race actually began. But in the week leading in, it was real, and it was confusing, and we just had to sit in it.
Which is how I found myself, four weeks before Ragnar, halfway up the infamous Red Loop on a test run, climbing nearly a thousand feet in about two miles, thinking: there is no way. So I turned around. Not dramatically. My body simply said you cannot do this, and it was right — at least that day.
Instead of treating that failure as proof I shouldn't do Ragnar, I treated it as information. I'd been training with a man named Jesse Elder around this exact idea — that failure isn't a verdict, it's data — and for the first time, I actually rewrote the program running in my head. I started training differently. More hills, more dirt, more time outside instead of my treadmill.
A couple of weeks later, six of us went back. This time we finished Red. It took Jennie and me four hours to cover about seven miles, partly because the final stretch of trail hadn't actually been built yet — we were bushwhacking through scrub oak, following GPS coordinates for a trail that didn't exist. But I finished. Then Ragnar's new ownership finally cut the real trail and shortened Red to about five miles, and suddenly I knew something I hadn't known before: I can do Red.
That became my entire strategy. Not "I'm going to crush this." Not "I'm finishing all three loops." Just — I know I can do Red. If that's all I've got, fine. We'd find out the rest afterward.
Thursday afternoon we built camp beneath a huge pine tree in an aspen grove. Friday morning our team ate breakfast together. At seven, Eli took off and absolutely smoked Green — for about seventeen glorious seconds, Team Trail Wubs may have been in first place. Then Jennie went out on Yellow. She'd broken in brand-new, wildly expensive racing shoes just days earlier — after a nineteen-mile training run the previous Sunday, five days before the race, in the same shoes. Not the wisest sequencing, and her calves let her know it; her Yellow loop turned into a real fight with pain she hadn't planned for.
Then they called me. I stepped into the transition tent wearing a ridiculous tie-dye shirt I'd made myself, my whole team screaming behind the fence. I bolted around the first corner and almost immediately my hips seized up and I couldn't breathe. Five miles of mountain ahead of me — including the exact climb that had already beaten me once.
Well. Here we fucking go.