2024 Eastern States 100 Part 1 – DNS

The disappointment from a Did Not Start (DNS) lingers longer and is more painful than a Did Not Finish (DNF). Among successes as well, having experienced a DNS and a DNF in the same year, they both cause feelings of failure, dissatisfaction, and question your motives. For me, defeat from a DNF was more justifiable. I tried. I crossed the starting line. The only thing I didn’t do was cross the finish line. But I tried. On the other hand, failing to begin a race, packs a much larger punch. Especially after picking up a race packet, mentally unravelling 8 hours before the start, and heading home… and having the race canceled the next morning due to weather. That reality leaves you with complex emotions and thoughts. Anger, fraudulent, justified, lost. Was I right to turn tail because I knew subconsciously something bad was going to happen? If I didn’t ‘need’ the race for a qualifier, was it okay I didn’t start? Did I steal a wait-lister of the opportunity? Am I all bark, no bite? Am I living up to expectations? These questions flooded my mind in the days, weeks, and months following my DNS at Eastern States 100. It has taken five months to unpack most of it. To reflect. To justify or reject ideas about who I am and what I want to accomplish. Ultimately, everything stemmed from my own, countless misunderstandings. Misunderstanding of anxiety. Misunderstanding of my purpose. Misunderstanding of how to approach failure. This story doesn’t have a happy ending in terms of redemption… yet. But it does have a clearly defined path of how I currently see success. It has enabled me to see the larger picture. It has set me on a path of clarity, where completing the PA Triple Crown is not the final piece of a much larger puzzle. This is some of what I’ve learned and the scenarios contributing to it.

The detours, flooded roads, downpours, and last second race reroutes were just the beginning. I didn’t give these issues a second thought other than Hurricane Debby was making a mess of Pennsylvania. Through partially flooded roads, I arrived at Little Pine State Park. Crossing the bridge to the campground, I eyed the river rip a few feet beneath. From my campsite I could hear the dam roaring. Amidst the chaos of traveling 3+ hours, it then went silent. The kind of silence that is deafening, where you can hear the ringing in your ears. I tried to sleep but intrusive thoughts kept reappearing. What if something happened to me and I left my wife with three children? What if I didn’t even get to meet our third child due in December? What if I didn’t see my girls graduate high school or get married or see grandkids? I was already envisioning the conversation my wife would have with my daughters one day about how “Daddy thought it was a good idea to try to run 100 miles through the woods after a hurricane in a race he didn’t need for any particular reason other than to do it”. These thoughts are extreme, unhelpful, but somewhat valid in their own, twisted way. They still give me hesitation and pause.

I sat up, arms and fingers twitching, feeling my heart pulse. I tried to reason my way to sanity, reassuring myself the race directors are competent. People don’t die at these races. Despite the honest assessment, the question still lingered, what if? What if something did happen? Just because something usually doesn’t happen, doesn’t mean it won’t. There are first times for everything. A downward spiral accelerated each time I imagined never being able to experience Emma yelling “Daddy” with a big smile and arms spread wide for a hug when she sees me come home. Imagining this now, I can still feel the strong, complicated emotional reactions.

Alone, sweating, mind racing, with a 100-mile race in several hours, I walked back to packet pick up, handed my bib to the race director and shakily stated, “I’m not as prepared for this as I need to be.” I left Little Pine State Park and called Laura. Twenty minutes away, I was still experiencing worrying thoughts of death, confusion and massive disappointment, albeit relief. With tears, I yelled at Laura how I couldn’t reason my way through and felt like something was wrong with me. Laura’s attempts to calm me failed; I was an emotional freight train with a single mission of returning home. Even if I wasn’t home until midnight, I was determined not to be anywhere else. This was just the beginning of a painful and confusing few days but lingered for weeks and months.

The paralyzing reality of the questions I worried over are justifiable for anybody to make an argument one way or the other. “Of course, you should take precautions and heed those warnings. You have other responsibilities.” or “You’re being selfish by focusing on your goals when you could negatively impact more lives than yours.” Alternatively, people can argue the anxious emotions are natural and part of being human. They are extreme versions of what everybody tells you to avoid, the “what if” game. However, in my misunderstanding of anxiety, I compared it to the sensation of pain. Mental or physical pain is almost always something you can push through with either time and/or effort. Tolerance levels are different for everybody. I believed people experienced certain levels of anxiety because they weren’t tough enough to push through. My mistake.

Little did I know, what happened at Eastern States was the tipping point. I was a quitter, how was I going to explain I backed out and didn’t even try? It got worse. When I found out the next morning it had been canceled, I felt like a quitter and a fraud. Now I didn’t have to explain myself. I was grouped with everyone else who didn’t race… or was I? Maybe there was no explanation needed. Race was canceled. Maybe I could move on and try next time without acting like anything happened, right?

If there was a next time? I considered everything else happening in my life. I didn’t know if running was a hobby worth pursuing. To spend time training and dreaming only to possibly fail again at the few opportunities I might have in the future seemed like a waste of time and effort.

I’ve been married for 8+ years to my wife, Laura, and that commitment was made years prior to being a runner. That will never change. Not to mention, a dad of two girls ages 2 and 4. Expecting another baby in December and training with three kids seemed like a nightmare. Nobody I knew of was training with three kids under 5. It didn’t seem feasible. Between family and work, it appeared more like an impossible mountain to climb. I’m fortunate enough to have a full-time job I enjoy. I see value in my coworkers and what we do. Why not dedicate more time to work?

I continued running because it allows me to think clearly. I had more to contemplate. At one point during an uphill treadmill work out, anger got the best of me. Surprisingly, I confessed to Laura, “I just get depressed realizing I can’t travel or do any races or anything I want to do until like 8 to 10 years from now when I’m closer to 40 years old. It’s just difficult”. I may not be the most talented runner, but I am talented at keeping my emotions in check. Typically, I push them farther away and ignore them. However, my anger worsened as I ran steeper and faster.  I messaged again, “I’m just frustrated because I feel like I work my f***ing ass off and have nothing to show for it, it just feels self-defeating”.

All these factors make for a convincing argument and still do. From this perspective, I’m happily married with three young children and a job I enjoy. I couldn’t ask for anything more and have everything I need. Why pursue a crazy hobby? Why dedicate time towards an apparently self-serving interest, constantly battling inevitable physical decline? Ultimately, I’ll get older, slower and more injury prone. I could turn my back on running altogether and probably be fine. It’s always easier to turn your back on something when you’re facing everything else you love, or so I thought.

Determined to learn more about what happened before I left Eastern States, I bought Rewiring Your Anxious Brain by Catherine M. Pittman PhD. & Elizabeth M. Karle MLIS. I learned anxiety originates from 1 of 2 pathways: the Cortex Pathway or the Amygdala Pathway. The cortex can be a source of anxiety because humans have the ability to predict future events and imagine their consequences. Alternatively, the amygdala is a built-in alarm system, identifying any threat you see, hear, smell, or feel and then send a danger signal. It receives information before the cortex does because it is the more direct route from our senses, preventing some information from being processed by our highly developed frontal lobes. Pounding heart, trembling, stomach distress, and hyperventilation are the amygdala’s attempts to prepare the body for action. Causing people to think they might be having a stroke or heart attack or are “going crazy”, the amygdala can also alter brain chemistry by triggering the release of certain neurotransmitters. Therefore, the amygdala has the neurological capability to override other brain processes, such as the cortex. It is true you can’t think when the amygdala takes control. The brain is hardwired to allow the amygdala to seize control in times of danger. Because of this wiring, using reason-based thought processes from higher levels in the cortex to control amygdala-based anxiety proves to be extremely difficult and your cortex can’t reason it away.

I found relief in finally understanding anxiety is a biological response which could impact anyone, at any time, for any reason. You could be the smartest, toughest, person in the room but experience anxiety if your amygdala senses a threat and the fight, flight or freeze response is initiated. Toughness has nothing to do with anxiety or one’s ability to cope with it. I lacked experience dealing with anxiety and was completely unprepared. I had no understanding of people currently dealing with anxiety. The anxiety experienced at Eastern States caused me to reevaluate how people deal with it and this book was an amazing resource.

Ultimately, the arguments which were pushing me towards leaving the sport altogether were the ones that led me to finding my “why”. As a parent, you are supposed to set the standard for your children. Not the standard in terms of what success and achievement look like, but set the standard for how to discover passions and dream big dreams. Set the standard for the process of hard work and dedication to accomplish whatever success looks like in their eyes. My passion is running and my big dreams are pushing my limits. Success is a moving target. Sometimes it’s for speed, sometimes it’s to finish, and sometimes it might be to show up again and take the first step after previously bailing.

More importantly, I don’t want to just set the process standard in terms of chasing a big dream. I want to set the standard in terms of how to respond to failure. As a parent, it feels natural to withhold weaknesses and disappointments from my children. However, I would argue it’s those events and the following responses which are the most important for dream chasing. Even if they might be too young to comprehend what’s happening now, it’s all good practice for the future. J.K. Rowling profoundly stated, “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”  Failure will happen more often than success. With success, you can dream bigger. Be content without being complacent. Somebody should always have a goal they are working towards as a contribution to their identity. One’s identity will be formed by default if they don’t have dreams big enough that could result in failure. I want my children to grow up chasing something as passionately as I run. I want them to see me succeed and respond to failure. I want them to know I am always behind them, hoping they can enthusiastically take control of their own lives and never stop dreaming big.