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Day 1, What’s Going on in 2025 | RSS.com

Salutations!

It’s been a spicy minute. For a variety of reasons stemming from the pandemic, I was far away from my life and the things I love doing for what felt like an eternity. That’s a post I’ve tried typing out multiple times getting into the sweet tea of everything but I can’t really type it without an endless swath of bitterness that I don’t really feel like engaging with anymore. It rhymes with “I was a shmedic in the shmilitary”. Weird life decisions aside, I’m finally back home and outside of my ‘professional life’ I kept some ties with my long distance hiking roots alive by getting into running, and later ultrarunning.

As I made my way through Northern California on the PCT in 2018 I became pretty aware of the fact that – while I absolutely adore long distance hiking – I wanted to branch out and try new things. The moment I broke out of my amorphous blob of a daily routine to decide to hike that trail first in 2016 was the best decision I have ever made in my life, hands down. It’s easy to fall into it and think you just need to keep doing that one thing, but the truth is it’s a big world full of all kinds of dirtbag activities to engage with, and I really liked what I found with ultrarunning. Be it the people, delicious aid station food, or the immense build up, I can’t pick one particular thing.

At the end of my last ultra, a race I had failed the year prior in an absolutely spectacular trashfire way (being the last one out on the Pinhoti nearly an hour behind the last group of finishers and getting DQ’d at the last aid station before the finish line)… I had a lot of options and wondered if I should just continue to do 100 milers, do a longer race, do another long distance hike… So many options. I’ve been juggling this around in my brain since, and after visiting the PCT last year to go out for little section hikes and sleeping in my car at various trail heads just trying to collect little bits of my prior life I wondered if I should just do that? But there’s also the Arizona Trail! There’s the Appalachian Trail that I came to genuinely start to like after living in the Southeast the last four-ish years of my life.

Why Not Both?

Enter the super duper ultra, or ‘journey race’! I was scrolling around Ultrasignup the other night, completely unable to sleep, mulling over my options, looking at ways to get to the Arizona Trail on a shoestring budget… I found it. I got that hallmark pause followed by the incessant heart thumping and shaky-hand scrolling. A 420 mile race from Salt Lake City, UT to Yellowstone National Park. A similar chain of thoughts entered my head like “Am I really ready for this?”, “What if…”, and “But there’s grizzly bears!”. I know this process, I know how it goes. When something enters your life that makes you start doubting yourself in spite of your excitement, you have to just send it. It’s honestly that simple. So I filled out the application for entry, and here we are. I don’t even know if I’m actually in the race yet, but I’m operating as if they’ve given me the green light. I took yesterday as my last easy ‘live like a slug’ day, and today was the first of many grueling days of training until August.

I kicked it off with a half marathon up a local mountain.

That one, right there.

Running along roads and listening to cars roar by is my least favorite thing probably, but as I no longer have a car of my own I don’t really have a choice. It’s better this way honestly. The last time I departed from ‘car life’ I had to bike commute and it absolutely supercharged my training for my 2018 hike.

UP UP UP we go!

I got to the junction that heads up the long extending spine and found the snow was slick and dusty, providing basically no traction. I had a totally different route in mind until I last minute decided I’d head up the mountain so didn’t have my spikes with me. I took it slow and slid my way up acutely aware of the fact that going back down was going to be a funny sight to say the least.

Making sure to get a good look at the Oquirrh range on my right.

And ogling a the Wasatch mountains on my left. The mountains that – with any luck – I’ll be running along this August as I make my way to the super scary murderous grizzly bear territory, the land of a thousand terrors and horrors.

Ok cool… so what?

I made it four years without word vomiting all over the internet and doing the vlog thing – a pastime that has since given me “the ick”. What’s the point of any of this?

I want to keep a log going. People ask me questions about things like this all the time and they tend to let a variety of things get in the way of them actually doing them. It makes me sad. I think if something calls to you, you should just do it. Every single one of us has a number of days above our heads to live on this planet and to boggle yourself down with technicalities and nitty gritties so much that you never actually try anything is heartbreaking to me. The internet provides us with this endless stream of people to “Live vicariously through <3” that we just sit and fantasize and the buck kinda stops there. For those that find joy in their routines, I think that’s totally fine. But often I think everyone has that ‘one thing’ they really want to do but don’t initiate on.

There are approximately 937 million guides out there on the internet (trust me, I counted) about “how to run an ultra”, “how to do a long distance hike”. I have a very plain view and trajectory I take when I do these things it’s not like I’m the most successful ‘endeavor-er’ in the world, but I try to stray from over-inflating what it takes to do these things. The truth is at the end of the day, I more or less see myself as kinda fragile and weak for a lack of better descriptors. Not in some self-loathing “I’m not turbo-masculine and strong, oh nooooo!” kind of way, but I know my faults and I think it’s okay to see them and name them so long as you don’t allow them to define you and what you do in life. These faults have created drag on the things I’ve tried doing in the past and every year is a new opportunity to address them in relation to the things I love doing, and they’ve diminished significantly.

Ultrarunning and long distance hiking are amazing things, don’t get me wrong. But in order to get engagement, people absolutely have to dress them up and make them way more dramatic affairs than they actually are. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching inspirational internet slop as much as anyone else, but I became aware of this mental barrier it built in my head along the lines of “man I could never do that, these people are just built different!”. Paired with that, guides are just absolutely mired with product placement, paywalls, the whole shebang. I think it’s amazing these people made a career out of the things they love doing, but they do it at the expense of the people they’re trying to encourage. Let me just say, you do not need to buy your way into these things. There isn’t a nugget of knowledge that is ever worth any amount of money from the people you’re trying to speak to.

All this to say, I want to share this in earnest and hopefully help people along the way. For freeeeeeeeeee and without too much spectacle. I like to think I’ve nailed out a good ‘training plan’ and ‘way to live’ as I train for these things, and more than anything a mindset to reach whatever goal I have any given year at this point. So week by week I’ll throw up what I did, thoughts on what worked and what didn’t, and nuggets I’ve found success with as I make my way through this arduous process of getting back on the endeavor wagon.

If you made it this far, pretend a ton of kazoos and confetti went off. Throw in some balloons too I guess. Wear a ceremonial hat if you have one. Future posts will be a bit more structured, I had a lot to go over this time around.

It’s good to be back! See y’all in the next one.