Wait, WTF are you talking about?

Is it not a beautiful thing? Does it count? Does anyone care? It may be hard to determine that answer for some.

We are so often (myself included) caught up in the tracked stats, or socially acknowledged accolades of achievement. Maybe hopeful for some acknowledgement from others in the same bracket, friends, or family that we forget why we are actually doing what it is we set out to do.

Running. My current devil, is all too familiar with this. Endlessly perseverating on Strava goals, hitting consecutive monthly standards, working towards big ticket runs to chip off a shiny badge for myself. Familiar?

Is there something wrong with me? What is it all for? Medals? (PS most of them don’t serve any actual purpose as anything else). This is not meant to be a Debbie downer post, but more of an eye opener.

I believe that it is more a case of “it’s about the journey, not the destination” than “Am I stark raving mad” or at least a mix of both.

I recently took on a challenge with some friends over a few weekends ago to run the Baden Powell 50k run, a lesser, non sanctioned version of the V100, an Annual non supported, non acknowledged, “non existent” ultra run each year in Vancouver’s North Shore mountains by Club Fatass.

The sign up for these events are not $400 dollars, or license plates from your home state, they are little more than signing up on a Google doc, and being a good person to acknowledge that you have completed the race to stave off NSR from looking for you. Grass roots. No support, no bananas. Free high fives though.

So is it worth it? If no one knows. If no one cares, if no one is #ing it? If it goes unrecognized? I think yes. Perhaps it matters more. Maybe the most. It is a time where you are doing it for yourself, without the distraction, that’s not to say that the bigger races aren’t being done for personal reasons, but there is a wave, a cloud of social experience that is happening, that I think sometimes can blur the focus of what or why your doing it in the first place. Does that make sense?

I am intrigued by the realm of ultra running, and ultra marathons. The human endurance, the mental fortitude it takes. I’m in. I love it. I am working myself up to a level where the reality of taking on something of this level could even be realistic. And thus some of these undocumented/ unrecognized races are an amazing experience to take part in. They are an opportunity to “practice” being ridiculous without flying to the western states and such.

So what’s up Next?

Well inspired from our partaking in half of the V100, we have reached out and joined the next local Club Fatass event coming up in late June, a 28k trail race in the mountains between Squamish and Whistler BC, the week after that if all goes well, we will be running the Howe Sound Crest Trail as one of our final big runs prior to our major objective of the summer, running the Timberline Trail. Keep posted.

Cheers.