[Nick M]

This is a long-ish story, but I wanted to share just how important the resources on this site and the knowledge Scott and his colleagues share was in helping me reach my goal.

I live in Philadelphia. We have no mountains that you can get to easily. We have a lot of flat streets, a lot of concrete, and our ‘hills’ top out around 200 feet. What we do have is the Wissahickon Valley, a 1000+acre park in the northwest corner of the city that basically follows the gullies and cliffs around a creek that flows about 7 miles before it dumps into the Schuylkill River. It is an improbably wild, immersive, and beautiful place, and its more than 50 miles of trails get heavily used by hikers, mountain bikers, horseback riders. Its also rugged as all hell, and the first time I ran there after my in-laws moved to an adjacent neighborhood I thought my legs had been beaten up with a baseball bat.

Around that same time I started thinking about whether, or how, it would be possible to run or hike every mile in the Wiss in one day. I got the idea about two years ago hiking through Houston Meadow with my family and in-laws, and at the time we all agreed that it sounded impossible in a beyond-our-comprehension kind of way. Fast-forward to this spring, I had two ultras and a few miles in my legs that it no longer seems impossible. It would just be by far the hardest, longest, toughest run I had ever done, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The problem was that neither of those ultras had gone particularly well. The first had been a 42-mile FKT attempt on the AT through Michaux State forest that ended with my pulling the plug at mile 36 after such severe cramping that I shuffled into the parking lot with what were effectively two peg legs at 30 min/mile pace. The second was the Highlands Trail Fest 50K that, while it was a very challenging course and I finished respectably, had blown me up so badly I couldn’t really walk for a week. My training for these had been so random and unstructured that it probably wouldn’t be considered ‘training’ at all. I needed a better approach, and I found Training for the Uphill Athlete. I devoured it in two days, rebuilt my whole approach around it, started a 14-week clock, and off I went.

I’ll spare the details of the training approach itself. I basically followed as many of the recommendations as I could for someone with decent fitness, but probably who was probably aerobically deficient and who had little actual base. When the day came, I felt fit but nervous. 60 miles, 8000′ of gain, and lots of scrambling, and steep, sharp uphills. We started at midnight in the dying throes of a tropical rainstorm that had swung up from the Carolinas. How would this go? Would I even make it to morning? Didn’t matter, I said to myself. I hit start on my watch and left from Valley Green Inn out with a few friends along for the ride.

Long story short, I never felt better. It was the best day I’ve ever had on the trails, period. I felt fit, fast, and like I could have kept going for ages. I had often felt in my previous ultras that I was constantly scraping the bottom of my barrel just to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Now, that barrel felt endlessly, comfortably deep. I positively floated over sections that during training had been a grinding slog. I hit a low point at mile 50ish when one hip flexor tightened up, which required me to spend 4ish miles gingerly getting some movement back into it. But that was my only real setback. Everyone I met to pace, or my wife and buddy crewing me, kept saying how fresh I looked. I finished the day sprinting into my finish line in Houston meadow to cowbells, not far away from where two years earlier I had thought this was such a crazy idea that no one would ever try it.

So this stuff works. You don’t have to be fast to do it, you don’t have to be young to do it, you don’t have to have some demonic genetic engine to do it. You just need time, patience, and knowledge.

Much love,

Nick

[Shashi Shanbhag]

What an amazing story, Nick. Thank you for sharing your journey.

[Scott Johnston]

Hey Nick:

Thanks so much for writing this wonderful story.  It warms all the hearts here at Evoke to hear this.  We know that opur approach works. Thousands of people have proven it. You don’t need to be a mutant, or a 20 year old. You just need these three things: Consistency, Gradualness and Modulation to make what, at first, appears to be a totally conunterintuitive approach work.

Congratulations. I think you have just scratched the surface of what you are capable of.

Scott

[Author]

Posts