![]() Fast forward 12 years, and I had lost nearly all that fitness. My point is that things come easy when you have a strength and fitness momentum. In some respects, a medium-hard five-hour run is a lot easier than two-and-a-half hours at a 5:50-minute-mile pace. But I was also riding the wave of a level of fitness that I had built over a decade of consistent hard and fast training. So, I kept running more: a 50k, another 50 miler, and then my first 100 miler at the Western States 100. And I kept running - pretty fast - until I was finished. When I showed up to that first race, I just ran easy. I had also completed a 400-mile bike tour of Yellowstone National Park and the Beartooth Mountains of northern Wyoming. In the months preceding my first ultra, a flat 50-mile loop course on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, I had run my two fastest marathons, both in the low 2:30s. I came into trail ultrarunning in 2010, on the heels of peak fitness. Photo: iRunFar/Meghan Hicks A Fast Road Runner’s History The start of the 2022 Run Rabbit Run 100 Mile. I walk away from that DNF with five key lessons that took a long hiatus - and a stripping away of longstanding and taken-for-granted fitness - to learn. Looking back on my ultrarunning career, I believe that. It is said we only learn from failure we seldom learn from success. Thankfully not all did-not-finishes are lost causes. I quit at mile 80, during the worst of the rain and the cold. Significant gut dysfunction combined with not enough gear for inclement weather conditions - including freezing temperatures and repeated downpours of rain - made it impossible to move fast enough to avoid hypothermia. I prepared the best I could over about 10 weeks from early July to race day, September 16. But when my pain rapidly improved this summer, I decided to give the run a last-minute go. Years of pain and dysfunction have precluded most any trail running, let alone racing. In fact, it was my first run over 50 miles in just as long. Last month I attempted the 2022 Run Rabbit Run 100 Mile in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which was my first 100 miler in nearly five years. ![]()
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