Quick update: I was officially accepted into the 420 mile race today, awww yeeuuuhh! I have a work thing that popped up with a bit of an unceremonious surprise. I may be able to work around it and still do the race, time will tell. Does no good to feel deterred before it’s time.

Audio version of this article.

Unless there’s additional posts or points to be made, it doesn’t make sense to write an update about every day and every run, it becomes a little superfluous.

Though I’ve been running to maintain for a bit with some breaks here and there, this is week one of ‘legit’ training. It kicked off with a half marathon up a mountain which left my knee feeling a little less than stellar, so I backed off, did some knee yoga, and hit the stationary bike transitioning through various virtual rides in familiar mountain ranges which had my knee back to 100%. I hurt it on a bit of an awkwardly procured injury trail running in California, tumbling down the trail and catching myself with my knee straight into a rock. Spicy!

I alternated between running and the bike to make sure I wasn’t agitating things too much, staying away from doing too much elevation work. For whatever price I paid with that first run, it paid off in the end because my baseline improved. The runs are starting to feel a bit more solid throughout the duration without too many ‘taper off’ periods where I’m just not feeling all that great. Saturday I could only manage 4 miles due to time constraints, and Sunday was a 7 miler again due to time constraints.

Overall it was a good week! I’ll continue to kinda keep it at these mileages and this weekend I’ll likely do a dramatically larger endurance event (be it running, hiking, or biking depending on how my body is feeling) if it’s feasible. I often use high-endurance days to give myself a little boost and reset my baselines. With that, this is as good a time as any to talk about…

How Much is Too Much?

This is something I’ve wanted to touch on and have drafted over and over and over again. I think the only thing I can say at the end of the day is: you’ll know. If you don’t know yet, you will eventually. This is not a fun, interesting, spicy, etc. answer I could print on some sick merch, but it’s the only honest one as far as I’m concerned. It’s not my place to say, everyone is different and as you progress you’ll find new lines and barriers. I think you’ll find you can surprise yourself over time and do more than you think you can, but the nature of these things is you likely will get injured at some point no matter what you do. As unfortunate as these times can be, they help you learn.

And you know I actually think it’s best this way, it goes on to a whole other topic I want to touch on down the road. At the end of the day, I’m some random dude with a blog. At the end of the day, all the subject authorities on the internet are no different from the hundreds of other people doing the exact same race people report on and share their personal story about. In these races are a wide variety of people who have trained all kinds of different ways, some of them followed a ‘hack your body’ scientific formula and have a shrine built for their Garmin watches, and others defined their own training by finding their own little truths as they trained. At the end of the day, they’re still all doing the same thing.

The best way to describe this is to use the Pacific Crest Trail as an example. The trail is solidly its own thing, right? It’s a path that goes from Mexico to Canada, it goes across the desert, the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades. The McDonalds near Cajon Junction is an oasis (I preferred Del Taco, but I digress). In spite of that, it’s characterized by the fact that for every person out there it tells a wildly different story. Everyone got there in a different way, everyone hiked in a different way, experienced different things, or experienced the same things differently. McDonalds vs Del Taco, yo.

What I Will Say: I’m a Strong Advocate for Two Things

Become familiar with your body. We never know it as much as we think we do and it’s full of surprises. Some good, some bad. The more you learn about it through experiences, the better equipped you are to determine how far you can push it. As you start from square one, that might just be a mile walk, and that’s totally fine. Do that walk and be proud of it because now you have a sense of scale for what it would take to walk two. That’s iterative progress which over time becomes exponential. The most I ever ran before I ran 100 miles (er… 97 miles, that was the failed attempt year) was 50, literally only half. Before the 50 was 30, going all the way back to the first day I decided to run and barely made it a mile before I got shin splints.

Develop your own method. Set your own goals. This is a personal endeavor, make it yours and own it as yours. In my opinion, there’s more benefit to making it your own personal journey and form of discovery than mirroring. With running in particular I had to take this approach because there’s almost no consistency with what people advocate for and there’s a reeeealllllyyyyy good reason for that: Everyone’s different. I have a lot of little ‘tricks’ I do to bolster my training because I figured them out as I went, it’s a learning experience. I’m sure if I named them some people would call me out on them, but that’s the nature of the beast. What works for me sounds asinine to others. There’s more of this for later and I do have specific helpful things, but honestly nothing special because it’s really not as complex as it can seem at the end of the day.

But I Mean – Yeah – There is Too Much

I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring it up. You absolutely can push it way too much, and as much as I want to say it’s a line that’s really hard to cross… I’ve seen otherwise. I’ve lived a life of doing all kinds of weird things, working awful jobs in awful heat all day long without even a hint of anyone around me being impacted by it, and yet I’ve also seen people go borderline with heatstroke after exerting in the heat for less than an hour in recent years. It’s incredibly alien to me, but it accentuates that we have our own lines and only we can speak to our individual lines.

Heat injuries are serious. Rhabdomyolysis exists. This is why I’m stressing individuality or self determination here. A lot of injuries like this come with advanced warning, you’ll feel things start to go downhill. When in doubt, back off. Rest, cool off, and reevaluate for the day. Take care of yourself because the goal is to understand your body and develop it, not destroy it.