It’s important to own your crazy. So here I am. I’m owning it. I am, as my best friend recently put it, “a twisted little cruller.” Although the pastry analogy really just made me more hungry than introspective. Nonetheless, it’s true. Sunday morning, I’ll get up at 4 o’clock, scarf down as many carbohydrates as I can get my paws on at that ungodly hour, drive to an abandoned ghost town in the middle of the California desert and join two hundred other nut jobs who are all going to run 50 kilometers through the mountains. (That’s 31 miles for the metric-ly challenged.)

And I’m going to do it for FUN.

Ultramarathons are my new hobby, an ultra being any race longer than the 26.2-mile marathon, usually run on trail and usually characterized by one or more adverse conditions including but not limited to extreme heat or cold, drastic elevation changes, difficult footing, stream crossings, etc., etc.

I’ve been running marathon and shorter distances for a few years now, and it did occur to me last week when I came down the trail out of the Santa Monica Mountains after a punishing 25-mile training run that I was a little tired. I’ve been in training for one race or another every single day for four years* now, and it occurred to me as a whole herd of deer crossed my path (yep, deer in L.A.) that it might be nice to just sit down for a little while. Okay, maybe not sit but perhaps jog. I could just jog for awhile. For a few months I could not be beholden to a color-coded spreadsheet outlining every single run, every race, every cross-training workout, speed session and rest day. Maybe I could just get up in the morning and put on my running shoes and just jog as far as I wanted to, and then I could turn around and jog home.

And that sounded pretty good…until I read that the Shadow of the Giants 50K was taking entries for the 2008 race. And man! That sucker takes you through the giant sequoia forests on the southern edge of Yosemite National Park, which has to be one of the top five most beautiful places in the country. And who wouldn’t want to do that? So I signed up.

But after that, I’m resting…All summer…No training…Really…Fun runs only…No joke…I swear…It’s true…Stop laughing, I’m serious.


*Because I am a nerd of the highest order, I sat down and calculated the approximate number of miles I have run in these four years training. It came out to 6,240 or the equivalent of running from L.A. to New York, back again and then not quite all the way to Chicago. Now maybe I’ll get out my protractor and measure the hypotenuse of something.