I don’t have any tattoos. I thought about getting one after my first 100 miler, but I didn’t know what to get. That was the Run Rabbit Run 100, and I envisioned going in to get a rabbit tattoo that turned out to look like a Playboy bunny. That fear was enough to make me not follow through with it.  Recently, I’ve considered getting a tattoo of Everest, but not because I have any interest in climbing the actual mountain. I’ll come back to that in a bit.

Leadville 100 is three weeks away, and I’m almost through my peak training weeks. It has been an adventure packed few weeks. We rolled straight from a three-day Leadville Training Camp into Josh’s six-day bikepacking gravel race across the state from north to south via the most ridiculous and circuitous route with as much climbing possible. There was a lot of driving all over the state to see him and cheer, and I pushed my brain to its limit (and then beyond). I drove myself up I-70 to Winter Park for the first time in seven years, and that was a huge accomplishment! I should have patted myself on the back and stopped there, but no, I drove all the way home that afternoon, and then drove to Central City the next day. Three days later, I drove halfway to Trinidad to pick up our husbands before I gave in to Kristi repeatedly asking “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive?”  As soon as the race was over, Josh spent one night at home and left at 3am for the airport for a work trip.

One of the reasons I have not done Leadville prior to this year was all the needed high-altitude training, and wanting to be able to drive myself to train. I didn’t want to rely on other people, and for the most part, I have succeeded with that. In the last couple of weeks, I was feeling pretty damn invincible and so proud of myself for being able to do all of the driving I was doing…and then I drove myself right off a cliff, figuratively. The day after Josh left town, I drove myself to Allenspark to run up to Thunder Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. I felt horrible. I was exhausted, and the effects of the last two crazy weeks were catching up with me. I could hardly run, feeling disoriented and having trouble processing the rocky terrain. I got in my 18 miles, but I was walking and crying the last two miles back to the car. If there had been cell reception, I would have called someone to come get me. But there wasn’t, so I sucked it up and started driving. I’ve never been so happy to have road construction because the road was down to one lane in several spots, which meant driving for five minutes, and then stopping and closing my eyes for five minutes, then repeating, sobbing the entire way home.

Kristi met me at the house an hour later, and I was still sobbing. I sat on the floor of the living room sobbing, drinking apple juice to give my brain a little energy. Kristi was trying to find some way to help me, and I kept saying, “I just need to go to bed”. FULL TODDLER MODE. It was ugly, folks. If only the apple juice was in a box, and I had a handful of goldfish crackers to throw on the floor, the scene would have been complete.

Since then, I’ve been trying to go to bed by 8pm, get more sleep and drive less. After you “drive off a cliff,” it is a lot of work to climb back out of that hole, but I am feeling better. Training for Leadville has been an interesting experience. I wasn’t working when I trained for my last three 100 milers. My full-time job was brain injury recovery, with all sorts of therapies (vision therapy, cognitive therapy, vestibular therapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy), and training (aka recreation therapy). It is a much different experience while working, and how anyone does it while working full time and raising kids, I have no clue.

Last week, while out on a run, feeling exhausted and sorry for myself, I was listening to a Hidden Brain podcast about mindsets and reframing your reality. There was a part of the podcast where a researcher talked about her experience as a Ph.D. student working late one night, exhausted and stressed. A man she knew walked into the lab, saw the look on her face and said, “Ah, looks like a cold, dark night on the side of Everest”, and walked out.  She thought it was weird, but didn’t think much of it until a couple of weeks later, then it hit her — what did she think her experience would be as a graduate student? When you are climbing Everest, it is going to be one cold, dark night after another; that is the experience you signed up for. You didn’t sign up for it to be easy. At this point, I just started laughing. Here I was in my peak weeks of training, exhausted. I signed up to run another 100-mile ultramarathon. I paid a coach to tell me how to push myself and train harder than ever before, so I could be stronger and faster than ever before. Shockingly, the training is harder than ever before, but what did I think it would be? That realization made my run feel so much easier. The fatigue I was feeling was exactly what I was supposed to be feeling.

So now that is my mantra. When I’m in my third set of 400-meter threshold intervals, and my legs are screaming at me — it’s a cold dark night on the side of Everest. In three weeks, at mile 85, when my feet are throbbing and everything in my body is telling me to — it will just be another cold dark night on the side of Everest. Training for this race was never going to be easy because the race isn’t going to be easy. Apparently, I like cold, dark nights, or I wouldn’t keep signing up for these races. I’m going to work hard during Leadville to remember that. It is a choice to be out there. Every mile I keep running is a choice.

If down the road you see me with a little Everest tattoo, you’ll understand…although even as I write this Josh is laughing, saying, “I would love to see that.”  Okay, so maybe I’ll get a temporary tattoo.

Three weeks until the next TBI to 100.