Inspiration comes in many forms

I may have thought my endless suffering would put people off ultra running, but not one bit

The joy of running in a group.

I often get messages from people saying they were inspired to take up ultra running after reading The Rise of the Ultra Runners. While partly I’m happy to hear that, to think that my words have managed to effect a change in someone that will lead them off on a life-affirming adventure, sometimes I’m also a little conflicted. I wonder whether, 50 miles deep and dragging themselves through the depths of the pain cave, they won’t be cursing my name. “That stupid damn book. Why, why!?”

I’m also a little confused. I honestly thought my book would put people off running ultra marathons. After all, in the book I suffer through virtually every one of them, spending a lot of my time wallowing in despair and self-pity. Who would want to emulate that? Of course, I do get it. The intensity, the challenge, the eventual overcoming of that adversity, the self-transcendence that takes place - those are the attraction. But part of me was half expecting a backlash from the ultra running world - “Hey, it’s not that bad, for goodness sake - stop putting people off.”

It turns out I was inspiring people again this past weekend, and, again, I was a little conflicted.

After my recent struggle to set my first ever FKT, on the John Musgrave Trail in Devon, and to finally see my name up in lights on the famous FKT website, a regular reader of the Monday Musings went out and ran it - over an hour quicker! To rub salt in the wounds, he did it completely unsupported, and he wasn’t even planning to run the entire thing, but said he got halfway around and “was having so much fun he decided to carry on”.

So well done, Charlie, that’s an impressive run. He also beat the overall, supported FKT on the route by about 20 minutes. (And he did it all while completing a series of videos on his prep and record attempt “on the John” - as he put it.)

Repeat: it’s not a race

As for me, I was back doing parkrun this weekend, and again trying not to race it. I had run a tough five-mile time trial with my running club on the Tuesday night - where I had run pretty fast, in strong winds - and I was still tired and not sure I could face the parkrun. But I told myself, “just take it steady”. I decided I’d run there and back, and not even stop and re-start my watch for the parkrun bit - so it was effectively just a faster section of a steady run. That was how I was billing it. To myself.