So... I Won a Race

What: Lake Fairfax 10 Mile

When: October 29, 2023

Where: Reston, Va

Stats: Trail Race, ~10 miles, ~1000ft ascent

Result: 1st Overall, 1:13:09 (Results, Strava)

I won a race!

It wasn’t a big race. But it was, without question, the biggest race of my life.

Because it was a day I used to legitimately believe would never come. I didn’t run for over a year and a half, and frankly spent most of that time far more concerned with ever again living a fully functional life - With making it out the other side, with moving and sleeping and thinking like a normal healthy person. When I couldn’t stand up out of bed or walk in straight line, racing was often the furthest thing from my mind. And even if I made it back to some kind of normalcy, for some two years I never really believed I’d seriously compete at the front of another race.

But…. here we are. More than four full years after crossing the finish at Kona I finally, finally, finally found myself back on a start line. A much smaller, more low-key start line – a local race with about a hundred people. But a perfect first race back, and one I’d been counting the days to for quite some time.

Chamonix

How’d I get here, from a summer update that was still less than optimal?

Things have honestly gone extremely well lately. I’ve been delicate and disciplined and careful with every aspect of my health. For a good eight weeks anyway I’d been training daily with virtually no neurological symptoms at all. That even included a trip to Europe (running and hiking in Chamonix, France, it turns out, is basically unbeatable) during which I managed to avoid dietary or lifestyle “mistakes” of any kind. Without a doubt, this was the best stretch so far.

The week of the race wasn’t exactly perfect, however, and I wasn’t even fully certain I’d race on Sunday if things didn’t come around a bit. Nothing was terribly bad by any stretch, but I felt limited/impaired enough (by intermittent headaches, cervical numbness, peripheral fatigue and tingling) after work on Thursday and Friday that the race was in at least some degree of doubt. But, Sunday came as the neurological symptoms went, and before I knew it I was racing again.

 I don’t really know what to write about the actual race. It was a cool little event! A 10(ish?) mile trail race put on by a fantastic local race company. Mostly single track through the woods, but not particularly technical or hilly as far as single track through the woods goes. There was like 1000m of easy grass and dirt before the trail part, and a friendly guy named Scott pulled me out way too fast for my current fitness. I finally let him go and assumed he was gone for good, but I kept catching glimpses of him through the trees and finally pulled all the way back almost eight miles in.  

My legs had been rebelling since the early miles, in a crampy/seizey kind of way. Found this very frustrating, since I had run the first half of the course at roughly race effort the week before with no such problems. The nerve pain/tingling from the previous days was gone but it felt like I was having a lot of trouble producing the force I wanted (it doesn’t help at all that I’ve barely run hard in years). This actually felt more pronounced on the super smooth, runnable sections where Scott kept putting additional meters into me.

Catching up on the more twisty/technical section seemed like the only chance to press an advantage - Hammered it down a tight, somewhat rocky downhill to open a gap and just tried to hold on the rest of the way. Kept the legs in one piece the last ten minutes and ended up about 30 seconds clear by the end after what turned into about as painful a last mile or two as I remember. A relative lack of race fitness, a total lack of any hard training, and some minor lingering neuro problems combined to create a frankly strange end of race experience, where I felt my body fighting to keep everything together rather than being strictly limited by flat-out aerobic output. 

Finishing didn’t feel like I expected it to. When I had played it through in my mind over and over in the weeks leading in to the race, I imagined I’d be highly emotional at the finish. The thought of winning a race three weeks out had been making me emotional, after all. But in the moment, it was basically the opposite - It was probably the least emotionally present I’d ever been winning a race. Part of it was everything I just wrote about not being in great shape to race – trying to pull it all back together laying in the finishing chute leaves little room for emotion. Part of it was that the gravity of the moment just wasn’t hitting me like I thought it might.

 

I was incredibly excited to be sure– basically bubbling over really. But in that sense it was just like any other race, any other good result. I just felt so much joy and relief to finally be home. Not until my wife finished a bit later did I feel any of the “emotional” bits I expected. And not until I started writing this has it really sunk in that I’m really racing again, and doing it without any apparent consequence to my health.

But I am racing again! And for a second time in short order. I’m writing this the Thursday after Lake Fairfax, with plans for race number two already this Sunday, a fairly low-key 25k trail race in western Maryland. It took a day or so longer to feel recovered than it might have a few years ago, but the legs are ready to go and I feel better from a basic health perspective than I did a week ago. Let’s see if we can make it two in a row! Onward and upward!

Chamonix Ibex