Trail Doula

Pacing a 100-mile run through a swamp in Texas

Having fallen in love with everything-ultra, when a friend asked if I would consider pacing her for the Rocky Raccoon 100-mile race in Texas this past weekend, I said, “Hell, yes!” Then I actually checked my meet schedule (as I’m a USA age-group swim coach) and realized it was the sole weekend that I was available to do this last-minute, hare-brained scheme of flying to and from Texas from New York in less than 3 days. Two days of that, mind you, would include the actual running of a 100-miles—the key element required for this plan to be successful.

I had listened toTrail Runner Nation’s podcast on pacing and what makes a good pacer, and as we drove to Newark Airport in her black Tesla that seemed to float rather than accelerate, I asked her a list of questions about what she wanted out of a pacer. How might I help her stay on track? What were the failure points in her last two-attempts, and how could I help her avoid them? I was so wrapped up in being the very best pacer I could be that I had even packed the night before, woken up early to get her coffee and was ready to go when she hummed into my driveway at 8am sharp.

As I took mental notes on everything she was telling me, I told a funny story about a remote first ultra that I entered: Behind the Rocks 50K, just outside of Moab, and how a heat wave rolled in just before the race, bringing temperatures from 45 degrees to 95 degrees on race day. 40-ounces of potable water was being required by the race directors as the aid stations were remote and often spaced up to 10-miles apart.

I didn’t have a hydration vest with me, only a used rucksack and two, somewhat moldy, 24oz water bottles that I had brought from home.

I explained that in my haste to get in and out of the aid-station (as all ultrarunning podcasters tell you to do,) somewhere near the half-way point and at the bottom of a very steep canyon I refilled my water bottles, grabbed a gel and asked a volunteer, whose t-shirt advertised that he was an ultrarunning coach, if it was okay that I was only really eating those liquid gels for a food source. He said, “Yes, as long as you’re drinking enough water to allow your body to absorb them.”

Indeed, I was, so I marched proudly back up the steep, craggy canyon wall, sipping on my water bottle the entire time.  Once I finished the first refill, I reached into my backpack to get my second bottle, only to realize that I had left it on the table at the aid station when I stopped to talk with the coach.

“What did you do?” she asked, horrified. This is not the type of thing that would ever happen to her as she has an important job and a clean car and really nice hair and all the right ultra-gear. She never looks flustered or behind or at her wits end. I look all of these things, most of the time and my car is a petri dish of tick borne diseases that I, or my dog, or my kids have dragged in from the woods.

Instead of saying that, I gave her a blow-by-blow of my mental pep talk from that hot day and a detailed description of the young woman in a matching camouflage patterned jog bra and shorts, who graciously offered me sips of her Gatorade. I was talking about some beautiful mesa and taking a salt pill as she pulled into the P4 parking area at Newark. She was horrified that I didn’t have a hydration pack and then it dawned on her to ask me if I had remembered to bring my ID?

“Yes, it’s in my phone,” I said, patting my jacket pockets, feeling for my phone that has a worn pink case that doubles as a wallet. My jacket pockets were empty. I felt around the seat and in my computer bag but without needing to look much farther, I could see myself waiting by the large window, with both of my bags strapped around my shoulders, my phone in my hand and then, as she pulled in, I set my phone down to grab the two coffees but neglected to pick up my phone.

Fuck…fuck…fuck and triple fuck. As my cheeks flamed red and my stomach sank somewhere into my pelvis, she managed to keep her calm and suggested that I just drive her Tesla home to get my ID and then get on a later flight.

Here’s the issue. There is no way, unless my children’s lives were at stake or there was a gun to my head, that I would attempt to drive a Tesla anywhere, even in my own driveway. It reminded me of a UFO and not really an actual car.

Plan B: She called her husband, who was home and gave him instructions to drive to my house, which I leave unlocked- a tidbit she found a bit shocking, and then he was going to drive the hour and a half to the airport to deliver it to me. (More embarrassment and self-flagellation here.) As we walked from the car to the shuttle and the shuttle to the terminal she was refreshing her United Airlines app and making changes to my reservation with such digital dexterity that it left my Luddite-self dizzy. She said she’d book me on the 3:30 flight but if her husband had not arrived by then, I could get on the 5pm flight. And if worse came to worst, I could get on the 7pm to Houston and aren’t we lucky to have so many flights?

She couldn’t have been more accommodating or accepting of the situation and her lack of anger or frustration made me spin faster into a full-fledged shame spiral. She became Reese Witherspoon at the end of Legally Blonde, moving through shuttles and terminals and texting me screenshots of new reservations and pointing out landmarks in the airport so that I wouldn’t get lost without her later.

She told me that once I got back to the car that I shouldn’t leave it because without a phone on me, that would be the only way her husband could track me. Apparently, Teslas talk to one another in their native alien speak. She told me that I could watch Netflix or listen to music or turn the heat up and then handed me “the key” to the car, which was NOT a key but, in fact, looked like an Amazon gift card or a hotel key card.

“This is the key?” I asked.

“You just have to tap it over the sensor,” and then she said something about hovering the card. But then she had to go to her TSA pre-check and I was sent back out into the -5 degree weather to find the Tesla, which, by the way, looks exactly the same as all the other Teslas. I did locate it, but I could not open it, despite tapping the card and hovering the card and doing weird circles with it and sliding it across the windshield. My hands were getting so numb that I was running around the parking lot to warm up, when I passed a security vehicle and flagged them down.

I told the security officer that I could not get into my Tesla. 

She asked if I had the key. I said, “Yes.” Then she asked why I couldn’t open it if I had the key. To which I responded, “Well, it’s not my Tesla. It’s my friend’s Tesla.” To which she responded, with a confused and somewhat suspect face, “Can’t you just call your friend?” To which I responded, “No, because I don’t have my phone.” She looked at me for a moment trying to ascertain, I’m assuming, whether I was being sincere, was off-my-rocker or, more likely, whether or not I was trying to break into someone’s car.

My fingers were now blue, and I backed away, telling her it was fine, that I would just go try it again. When I got back, I realized that the car had been open the entire time, I just didn’t know how to use the damn door handles because they blended right into the car side panel.

Once inside, I did not move for fear of being locked out, missing her husband, or finding myself arrested. 

Her husband pulled up two hours later and said, “Forget something?”, holding up my phone as if he just happened to be in the neighborhood and saw that I left my wallet behind. 

She married well, really well, I thought to myself. This guy is a keeper.

So much to do in Huntsville

I arrived in Houston at 8pm. She picked me up in a rental car filled with items and snacks we’d need for basecamp at the race (two bag chairs and snacks,) and drove from Houston to Huntsville to the Holiday Inn Express.

We were told by the young woman at the desk that there was a party on the 2^nd floor. When my friend asked to change rooms, the woman indicated that it would not be possible because the hotel was filled to capacity with military personnel on leave. As we moved closer to her room, the raucous sounds of bodies banging into one another, music blaring, and the smell of alcohol hit us hard. Sizing up the situation, I realized her room was right next to the party. I was a pacer. My room was on the bottom floor. She had to begin running in less than 7 hours. It was time to make my first decision: “You take my room downstairs. Go!”

4:30am came early, really early. But there was no time to spare as I was a pacer and needed to stay on top of things, particularly after my phone debacle. We headed to the Huntsville State Park, following a stream of cars and runners with headlamps to tent-city, where people with serious crews and sponsors had their pup tents all pimped out with massage tables and firepits and buffet-styled breakfasts. 

We inched our way towards the inflatable Hoka start/finish line where the music was blasting and set up our two chairs and her drop-bags filled with all of the food and clothing and lighting she might need as this was a 5×20-mile loop race that brought runners back to the Start/Finish line 5 times if they were lucky or unlucky, depending on their vantage point. I stood on line with her as she got her bib and chip bracelet which she had to put around her ankle, making her look a bit like a convict on house arrest.

There were last minute gear changes—a handheld flashlight vs a headlamp, a tank-top vs a short-sleeve, less potable water as there were aid stations every 5-6 miles. 

A quick photo and she was off. “Third time is a charm!” I yelled out. “You’ve got this. I’ll be here when you need me to jump in!”

I watched the stampede of bare legs and bouncing lights weave their way through tent city, along the lake, and into the woods and when the coast was clear, jumped back into the car to find myself a big cup of coffee.

Here’s the thing about Texas. Everything is big and wide and oversized. As the light came up, I saw things that I hadn’t seen before like the most massive statue of Sam Houston, some sort of Confederate General, I assumed, looming over the road like patriarchy itself. Then there was a sign that advertised the Texas Prison Museum, just a few miles up the road and a large gun shop next to a beauty salon and Starbucks in the strip mall across from the hotel. I took a picture of both to show to my friend in case she thought of dropping out and going to see some sights instead. “There’s nothing to do here except gun-ranges and prison tours,” I would say in those dark hours.

I texted her loved ones pics and updates and nervously sipped on my coffee checking the live results, and getting excited when I saw her hit mile nine. Every 20 miles a racer would return to the starting line and results would be updated. Then another 9 miles past that they would hit an aid station and their location and time would be registered again. In between it was anyone’s guess and I kept thinking it was better to be there early than late. I proudly attached my “Pacer” bib onto my shirt and grabbed my own running “kit” as the ultra-folks call it and headed back towards the park.

Now that the light was coming up, I could get a slight handle on where we were. There was a large lake, campgrounds with both tents and RV’s, there were Hoka inflatables several places along the road inside the park where runners would cross, and there were signs warning of alligators. Although I did a deep dive into race reports on the Rocky Raccoon I had missed the part about alligators.

As I leaned on a cement railing overlooking the lake with a bunch of other spectators anxiously awaiting their runner to come through for loop 1 or 2, a woman pointed out a bald eagle. We all exchanged stories on who we were waiting on and why they came to this race and how their training has been going and when they last were able to track them on the live results. We were doing math together and after a while we all became one big fan group, looking for our runners together and cheering them on as they came through. In between we just continued to cheer everyone on because this was 100 miles and the runners would need all the love-banking that they could get during lap 1, 2 or 3 and certainly beyond.

I made a note to self that a cowbell is an absolute necessity for any type of crew or support person or just random people taking a walk through the park when there’s an ultramarathon going on. Nothing can get a pep in your step like the sound of a cowbell.

The longest mile…

When my friend came in after the second lap, she was doing okay. As well as anyone can be doing after 40 miles of running in a swampy park in Texas. Her feet hurt from hitting so many routes and there were some blisters to deal with and quick, on-site change as we were moving towards the dark hours at this point. She had a lot of equipment. Lights and backup headlamps and some sort of massage gun that she was using on her quads as I took off her shoes. She had those cool sleeves and started stuffing her hydration pack with more snacks and ginger chews and things that would stave off the nausea a bit more.

Without much to-do, she got up and bravely began the run through tent-city, I moved alongside her and said that I’d go get her coffee and that she was killing it and to keep it moving and I’d be back well before mile 60.

Mile 60. Think about that for a second. 60 miles. On foot. She was already 11 hours in at 40 so how many more hours out there until she got to 60? If she got to 60. I felt like a mom leading my baby lamb off to slaughter. I went to the hotel and tried to nap, but couldn’t because I kept refreshing the live-results waiting for her to get to mile 49 where they’d post her chip-time. 

When it came through, I screamed, “Yeah, girl!” and got our coffee, some extra snacks, double checked my outfit and my bag and headed past the scary statue of Sam Houston and pulled on into the Huntsville State Park where it was dark and a bit eerie looking as all one could see were people roaming around carrying various things to their car and the occasional headlamp crossing the road towards a Hoka inflatable directional sign and then they’d disappear.

I knew she was having stomach problems as she texted me this at mile 49. She said it was a suffer fest and she probably wouldn’t be getting to mile 60 until midnight. Another text came through and she said that she was 4 miles out and would be there within the hour. A lot can happen out there in the dark, gator-swamp, with a full moon above us so I started jumping up and down to get myself awake as I had a job to do. I was a damn pacer, and I needed to pace!

There’s that initial rush of seeing a human being, particularly one that you know and one that’s there to support you. She came in a little before midnight and talked about this magical man out on the trail that saw her stumbling and stopping and putting her head between her knees. He handed her Alka-Seltzer and told her to put it in her water and take it and because she was hurting so bad, she did as he said and within 15 minutes felt like a new woman. “Who knew about Alka Seltzer?” she said. “Can you Google that and find out why it helps? I have to take a nap. Wake me up in 5 minutes because I can’t stay here long.”

I put my big puffer coat over her and set a timer on my watch and then just stood there, not sure what to do. Pacing is a lot about waiting. You have no idea when your runner will be coming in, what state they’ll be in and, as I was about to find out, how quickly and often brutally that state can change.

We were off into the night. She warned me, and I had read in any and all race-reports I could find, that the Rocky Raccoon should be called the “Rooty Raccoon” because there were no rocks to speak of but a continual onslaught of gnarly roots. I had to tell myself to pick my damn feet up and keep looking at the trail so I didn’t fall and become a liability rather than a support.

She told me some of the tales she had from the trail. Her stomach, the villain of her last attempt to try a 100-miler at the Javelina 100 in Arizona, was flaring up again and she had to pee every five minutes. That was no exaggeration as she was stepping to the side of the trail constantly, and I kept thinking how much that had to hurt her legs just to squat down at this point. 

A few miles in and we were still rolling, with continuous pee breaks and me reminding her to sip her water and get some calories in. She was singing the Gilligan’s Island theme song over and over again, so I just joined in. A low point crept in and she began to walk and repeat the phrase “Everything hurts and I am dying,” and then she would sing it. “Everything hurts and I am dying!” 

After she ate some instant mashed potatoes at an aid station, and I refilled her water bottles we went back into the woods. The full moon did filter some light on the rooted trail, and I was so happy to have my waist light and my headlamp and felt like I was in Guam or something when we would run over these long, winding footbridges through the wetlands.

What a 100-miler really looks like

Then the bottom fell out. Somewhere near mile 67.  She told me that she needed to rest, that she had to take a nap. I would give her a few minutes nap and try and get her moving again. It was anti-forward motion. It was like sliding down a mud-hill and I was trying to get her to grab onto a branch to stop the fall. 

Here’s the thing about pacing someone in the middle of the night in the middle of a 100-mile run. You enter an alternate reality. It’s dark. Cold. They haven’t slept. You haven’t slept. There are people walking around like lost zombies. And then there are fairies sprinkled throughout the woods, offering you chicken broth and peanut butter and jelly sandwich squares. People are vomiting, weaving, crying, but no matter their state, they’ll say, “good work,” or “keep it up,” as you pass by them on the trail.

This uber-competent mother, lawyer, athlete, human somehow morphed into a toddler, throwing fits, attempting to bargain and then, hiding from me whenever she saw a bench, peeling away to go lay down.

It was wild. I was checking my watch and trying to give a little bit of comfort and rest. I realized that we were in a bad place, but then I’d get her moving again because I knew that she wanted to finish this damn thing and we had 30 miles to go and a cut off of 32 hours. There were miles in there that took everything I had to keep her moving forward. I was firing on all emotional cylinders trying to get her back in the game.

She told me that she wanted to quit, and that failure wasn’t a bad thing and that the people who loved you would still love you. I told her that was all very true, but she didn’t fly all the way to Texas in February and get 71 miles into a race to not finish. Then she started condemning our way more accomplished ultrarunning friends at home who had suggested she come to this race. “Don’t listen to Phil and Jay because Phil and Jay are stupid!” she said, “Phil and Jay say 100 milers are fun. They aren’t fun. They’re stupid.” 

This vein went on for about 3 miles and then it dissolved into laying down on the side of the trail to sleep. I would give her a minute, sometimes two minutes but then pull her back up and turn into a drill sergeant and let her know that we had to get moving. “Just to the next aid station. You’ll get something to eat. We’ll get you some Coke with caffeine and you’ll feel better.” I looked at my watch and was starting to get worried. We had 10 miles to go until the beginning of Lap 5. We needed to move.

When we got to the aid station she collapsed into a chair and I brought her instant mashed potatoes with bacon bits in them. These people were trail angels and full of knowledge and suggestions and one aid station manager asked me if I needed help to “get her back out on the trail.”

“The sun will come up and you will feel better,” I told her as she slowly lifted the spoon to her mouth,“You want to finish this.”

I grabbed some snacks for her and myself and when I turned around, she was up and fastening her vest. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

And then something miraculous happened. I still don’t know what it was. She said it was seeing a guy DNF (did not finish) at the aid station and she thought, “I don’t want that to be me again.”

Boom. We started flying. She began running like we were in the freaking state championship of the steeple chase. She was nimbly bounding over roots and muddy sections of trails and up and down hills, over wooden platforms, around runners and their pacers and we began to pick off one after another after another and in my head I was screaming “Hell yeah! Let’s get this party started.” Selfishly, it felt so good to run and to have her mood lightened and not be the one pushing the pace. I felt like she was in this elusive flow that people talk about, and she just kept sailing through miles until we got back to base camp. Now she was fixed on her watch and knew what she had to do to make the cut-off. “I want that belt buckle,” she said. “Don’t let me stay her long.” We had to care for a few blisters, pop them, bandage them and strip down some of the nighttime layers and readjust the headlamp, get her earbuds ready to go so that she could listen to her playlist that she had been banking on for that last 20-miles.

I was texting her husband that she was running out of her mind and he was pumped. I kept disseminating updates as she did a quick massage gun of her feet, put on new sleeves, drank water, ate a cold, dry pancake. Then we were back up and running.

I was so glad that I had listened to the Train Runner Nation podcast about what it means to be a pacer and how you have to give yourself over to your runner- how it’s all about them and not to take anything personally because there will likely be a time when they get ornery and angry and frustrated and tired and might not be their best self- and that’s all to be expected.

That time came. She had her music in and we were walking/running/jogging on and off, switching paces and I tried to stay next to her but not in front of her and even slightly behind her because I felt like she needed to be in control at this point and determine her own pace and feel strong. She apologized for not talking to me but said that it was going to require all of her energy to finish this thing. I told her to put in her earbuds, listen to her music and not worry about me at all. “I run alone a lot so I’m totally fine running in silence.” 

As it got hotter and longer, the miles stretched out and time seemed to stand still and at one point I could just feel the hurt and anguish coming of her like emotional sweat. “When I see you I can’t run because it makes me anxious so could you run behind me where I don’t see you?”

“No problem,” I said. I held back even more. I felt like I was a husband or a loved one in a delivery room trying to encourage her to ‘push.’ Only there was no baby, there was just a belt buckle. But the effort felt the same. I remembered a point giving birth to my middle son where I hated everyone in that delivery room: my husband, my doctor, the nurses, the entire hospital was just one big conspiracy to make me suffer and at that point, I had lost complete sight that a baby was at the end of this pain train. All I wanted was to get off the damn train even if I had to jump.

She wanted off too, but there was only one way to go and that was forward. She didn’t want to know how many miles we’d done, no inspirational talk, no pointing out pretty scenery (of which there was little) and no chitty-chat. She was inward, the pain was palpable. But here’s the thing about pain: You can’t share it with anyone. It’s such an isolating feeling because when it leaves the body there is no language to communicate it and so it just falls back into the body.

I knew I had to be there. Part of her was hating me, because me being there meant she had to finish and having to finish meant more suffering and after 28 hours of running she was done. Just done. Everything annoyed her- the sun (which she usually loves) other people on the trail (though she faked it well and still said ‘good job,’), the roots, the planks, the swamps, the old oil tanks, the big concrete houses bordering the park, the brush and bramble, the light shining off the lake, the slight-inclines that felt to her like ski-slopes at mile 92, and then the absolute warping of time and space, where forward was backward and time collapsed in on itself and the dials wouldn’t move.

She kept asking people how far it was to the finish line and she kept getting different answers, each one being longer than the last. “I hate them,” she said. I laughed. “No, I really hate them.” She faked it well and especially at an aid station where she’d greet old friends that she made on Lap 1 or Lap 2 and thank the volunteers and crack a joke or talk about her Alka Seltzer angel and off we’d go again to the long death march in silence.

There was only the sound of our feet falling and jagged breaths. We were just existing. I thought of other times when I’d taken on this role. Not in an ultramarathon but in life when someone I loved was suffering. Sometimes you just have to walk beside someone as they struggle. That’s all you can do. In this case, I felt like I was helping her give birth to a 100-mile belt buckle without any drugs. I was a trail doula and things were getting intense.

When we were a mile and a half out there was a photographer perched at the edge of a bridge and she stopped, wrapped her arm around me and said, “I want you in this!” and then asked him how far it was to the finish. She didn’t like his answer either.

“This is the longest mile of my life,” she said and kept running. Now, you can talk about ‘long miles’ and try to convey that to people who are thinking about doing an ultra or their version of an ultra-challenge which could be a lap around the block or a 5K or a 100K, but in the moment that mile has walls and ceilings and no escape routes and it’s claustrophobic, with little oxygen and no sense that it will ever end. But it does end, and the finish line does begin to appear, like a mirage in a desert.

Each step of that last mile was a lifetime for her, and yes, she chose this, but what she really chose is to try again, to not have a fear of failure, to be vulnerable, to push herself beyond what she’s ever done before and to share that journey with her husband and children and loved ones and a sliver of it with me. I’m a swim coach and a lifelong athlete and have seen people dig deep before, but this was another level of deep. This was scraping-the- marrow-out-of-the-bones type of deep and she was somehow able to summon up courage and fortitude to keep going and cross that finish line and receive that belt buckle and “cry that ugly cry,” as she said, with our sweaty arms wrapped around each and the knowledge, that her body, which birthed 3 children had just carried her a hundred miles at 49 years of age. 

It was an honor to pace, a privilege to be on the course. For all the shade I was throwing on Texas- the Rocky Raccoon’s roots are deep and its volunteers and race directors, golden.

Pacer Duties: Complete!

—Erin Quinn

That 100-mile finish line smile

Rest Day Demons

Should I consider taking up smoking and quit running?

I love the way it sounds: rest day. It sounds like a National holiday. It gives off a sense of comfort and ease. Like you should be laying poolside or on the beach with nothing but a towel, and a book that you’re completely engrossed in. Legs up and resting. Maybe even an exotic smoothie packed with all kinds of antioxidants and immune-boosting ingredients like turmeric, ginger, elderberry and echinacea. Your body is being pampered, rejuvenated just by the sheer fact that it’s resting. No runs, no cross-training, no things that require great physical effort or lots of sweat and some form of too-tight fitting clothing made of wicking material although I’m never quite sure how the sweat gets “wicked,” and where it gets “wicked” off to. But that’s an entirely different subject.

Today was my rest-day and instead of it looking anything remotely like what I had fantasized about on mile 17 of my last long run when I thought my legs would detach from my body, it left me feeling restless, anxious, eating bags of pretzels, drinking way too much coffee and engaging with my inner-critic, who apparently has not been brought up to speed on the necessity of rest days. This voice was berating me for not starting a strength routine (as I’ve been pledging to do for the past 5 years.) Asking why I couldn’t be more like those other runners on Instagram that do dead lifts and glute exercises and chin-ups and Bulgarian split squats? “You’re planning on running a 100-miles with those chicken legs? Really?” It asked. “Are you trying to get injured?” I would talk back, but in the end, all I would hear is the constant refrain of “you’re so lazy.”

When the internal-volume got too intense I tried to shut it out by dropping to the floor and eking out 10 pushups (all with less than stellar form,) but no sooner had I finished when the demon voices started up again.

Ten pushups? Wow! Aren’t you something special. Why don’t you use your rest day to get ahead on your deadlines, do your meet entries, clean the house, go food-shopping, or just put on some yak-tracks and hit the trail for a light hike? Why are you so lame.”

I was getting worn down and I wasn’t even running. The voices were coming fast and furious. I started to believe them. Why did I even take a rest day if I was going to waste it? Why couldn’t I be more motivated? What was the point? (more snacking and refills of coffee here.)

There was a mantra in my head that I had picked up from one of my many books on ultrarunning about recovery being a key part of any type of endurance training. An essential part. One of the most performance enhancing things one can do outside of the training itself. And while I believed that from a swim coaches point of view, from a practitioner’s point of view, my wily inner-demons began to whisper, “but you’re not an ultrarunner. You’re not even a real runner. You barely get to 50 miles a week. What do you have to rest from? Rest days are for those mountain goats that log in 100-200 miles a week, hell, some of them in one day! You think you deserve to rest from running a 6-mile loop on a smooth carriage road. (Lots of internal snickering and sneering here.)

As I walked around attempting to do laundry or dishes or return emails, finish a story on a local land conservation effort, these voices reached a crescendo and all of a sudden they were telling me that not only was I lazy but overweight as well. The jury of inner-trolls had decided that I was at least 10 pounds too heavy. As I folded the laundry, I looked painfully at the mirror and saw what they saw. A spare tire around my middle that should be trimmed down if I was going to be one of those ultrarunners that somewhere around mile 62 hit a “flow state,” where they were light and airborne and experiencing some transcendental moment. I would never get that moment with the muffin top. I thought about doing crunches, or planks or something to help the situation which apparently had gotten so far out of hand that it took a “rest day” for me to realize just how much I’d let myself go.

“You know what?” I thought to myself. “Maybe you should take up smoking ? Maybe that’s more your style. Why not? You’ll get thinner, (along with emphysema,) but it probably makes more sense to start a habit that you can really commit to rather than chasing this dream of being an ultrarunner. Plus, you’ve never liked crowds and since smoking is so far from cool anymore, it would give you a lot of alone time to spend in dark alleyways where you could meet people more like yourself.

I think I actually screamed “stop it,” in my head but it came out like someone trying to communicate when they’re intoxicated and here I was on my rest day feeling sad, dejected, and downright worthless.

What’s crazy is that this is not how I talk to friends, or athletes I coach and it’s not at all what I truly believe or think about anyone. It’s not even how I talk to myself, most of the time. But when everything becomes quiet and the movement slows, those voices can launch a surprise attack.

“Can’t hit a moving target,” my mom would always say. But I move, and I move a lot and rest days are supposed to be fun days and good days and not get down on the floor and wrestle with your demon days, but here I was.

I can see why there are people that do these running “streaks,” or other kind of physical streaks because then they never have to crawl the walls and turn on themselves and second guess their entire value as a human being. Well, maybe they do, but I wanted to at least imagine someone out there, who can escape these mental assaults just by committing to never having a day off.

For better or for worse, I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t be one of those people because my body is just not built that way. It needs rest or else bad things start to happen. Overuse injuries flare up, back gets wonky, legs protest and tired ankles start to roll if they even sense a loose rock up ahead.

So, here’s my challenge for future rest days. I’m going to try and be kinder. Put that inner-critic on mute. Turn up my playlist beyond the recommended volume level so that my three different versions of Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” will drown out any other thoughts other than ones that include me feeling good, relaxed and in the middle of a major rest-day groove while my body, which has carried me 100’s of 1000s of miles along with creating and birthing 3 little humans, rests, relaxes and regenerates some cells that allow it to continue to carry my less-than-perfect soul around.

I will repeat mantras about recovery being the “secret weapon” to performance (or really any area of life.) Stare out the window. Look in the mirror and tell myself I’m beautiful, even when I don’t feel it. Proudly eat stale pretzels and pizza crusts and sugared cereals and maybe even an entire row of Girl Scout Cookies that I ordered way too many boxes of. Rest days are great days to indulge in Girl Scout cookies because those girl scouts are just trying to earn a badge and so am I. A rest badge. A silky sloth patch. We all deserve one. I got mine today.

–Erin Quinn