The Road to 50 - Week 2

The Race May Not Be the Point

It's 5:00 a.m.

The air is cold enough that your breath hangs in front of you. Nearly 300 runners stand shoulder to shoulder at the starting line, each carrying months of training, anticipation, excitement, and an enormous amount of uncertainty.

In just a few moments, we'll head into the San Juan Mountains to cover 50 miles of rugged alpine terrain. We'll spend most of the day above 10,000 feet, climb to over 13,000 feet, and navigate one of the most demanding ultramarathons in Colorado.

Some of us will reach the finish line. Some won't. That’s the reality of endurance events.  None of us know which story we'll be telling when the sun begins to set. That's part of what makes the starting line so captivating. Every person standing there has their own reason for showing up.

For some, it's redemption. For others, unfinished business. Some are chasing a dream they've carried for years. Others are simply trying to answer a question that's been quietly growing inside them.

Why do we willingly choose something this difficult? Why spend twelve or more hours climbing mountains, knowing there will be moments when every part of your body—and maybe even your mind—will beg you to stop?  And as is the case with most endurance events, we PAY FOR THIS!  Haha.

Standing there that morning, I realized something. We weren't really gathered because we loved running. We were there because somewhere deep inside, each of us believed that difficult things have a way of revealing something comfortable lives never will.

For me, this race had been on what I call my "Epic List" for years. Running another 50-mile ultramarathon during the year I turned 50 wasn't about checking off another accomplishment. It was about stepping into a challenge big enough that I couldn't hide from myself. I wanted to know if I was still willing to choose growth over comfort. Still willing to embrace uncertainty. Still willing to discover who I was becoming instead of settling for who I had been.

But here's what almost nobody says out loud at a starting line: the hardest part is already behind us.

Every person shivering in that 5:00 a.m. cold had already done the real work. The 4:30 alarms. The long runs no one cheered for. The training in the dark, in the cold and rainy mornings, on the day's motivation didn't show up and we laced up anyway.

For me, that work added up to something I didn't fully grasp until I looked back on it: over 900 training miles over the nine months leading up to the race, and 67,362 feet of climbing—more than twice the height of Everest, gained one unremarkable step at a time. Not on race day. In all the days nobody was watching. (I also torched somewhere north of 103,000 calories getting there, which I've decided retroactively justifies a few extra cookies!)

Here's the part that stopped me when I ran the numbers: I'd already climbed more in training than the mountain would ask of me on race day—several times over. Then it dawned on me. The starting line isn't the beginning of the effort. It's the finish line of months of it, a finish line disguised as a start.  The starting line is a celebration itself. Race day is a time to enjoy what the training has built!  Put it to work, and let’s see what happens.

What I didn't know standing on that starting line was this: the greatest challenge I would face that day wouldn't be the altitude. It wouldn't be the miles. It wouldn't even be the mountains.

It would be learning that the race itself was never the point.

The race was the celebration. Race day is where you find out what your training was made of—but it's not where the training happens. You can't cram for a mountain. You can't talk your way up 4,500 vertical feet on charisma and good intentions. Whatever work you did in the months no one was watching is the work that shows up when the air gets thin and the terrain gets steep. The mountain doesn't create your character that day. It reveals it.

And that's the part worth sitting with—because it cuts both ways.

Do the work, and the finish line takes care of itself; race day becomes a celebration of everything you already built. Skip it, cut the corners, tell yourself you'll find another gear when it counts—the mountain isn’t fooled, it never is.  Not out of cruelty. Mountains don't punish. They just tell the truth. The finish, or the lack of one, is rarely decided on race day. It's decided in all the quiet days that led up to it and whether or not you choose to put in the work.

That's the lesson I carried down off the mountain, and it has almost nothing to do with running.

We spend so much of life fixated on finish lines—the promotion, the title, the launch, the milestone. We celebrate the person crossing the stage and rarely ask what it cost them to get to the starting line. But the finish was never where the work lived. The work lived in the preparation nobody applauded. And whether we're leading a team, raising a family, or chasing something we've carried on our own "Epic List" for years, the same truth holds: how we finish is quietly determined long before we begin.

So maybe the real question isn't will I make it to the finish?

Maybe it's have I done the work the starting line deserves?