What 60km Taught Me

In January I ran the S1 TransKarst, a 60km ultra on the Karst plateau above Trieste. Took me 10.5 hours.

The first 20km are a lie. You feel great. Your legs are fresh, your breathing is easy, and you genuinely wonder what all the fuss is about. You pass people, you smile at volunteers, you think about how you'll describe this to friends later. You're performing.

30km is where it gets honest. This is the elevation profile. 24.5km to go. The ups and downs get steeper from here.

Your quads start to ache in a way that doesn't go away. Your brain switches sides. It starts negotiating. "You could walk for a bit." "Nobody would know if you stopped." "You already proved you can do this." Every step becomes a conversation with yourself about whether to keep going.

47.5km is a different sport. By now you're managing, not racing. Blisters, chafing in places you don't want to think about, hydration, pace. Your body is filing complaints from every direction simultaneously. The romance of running is completely gone. It's just discomfort you've chosen to sit inside of.

This is where you start doing math. How many 5km runs is it to the end? If I just walked from here, what time would I finish? Can I make it to the next aid station? You stop thinking about the race and start breaking it into chunks. Tiny, manageable chunks. Just get out of this uphill. Just get to that tree. Just do one more kilometer. Then do that math again.

That's how you survive 47.5km. You stop being an athlete and start being an accountant.

What I held onto was simple. I'm a person who finishes what I start.

Tough, fast, well trained, all of that is up for debate at kilometer 47, and your brain will happily debate it. Who you are is not up for debate. Quitting would have made me a person who doesn't finish things, and I wasn't going to become that person on a hill above Trieste.

The last 10km were the stillest hours of my life. My body had stopped complaining. It accepted the situation. My brain had stopped negotiating. It accepted too. What was left was just motion. Foot, ground, foot, ground.

I didn't know I was capable of that kind of silence. I live in my head. I think constantly. I narrate my own life while I'm living it. But somewhere around kilometer 52, all of that turned off. And what was underneath was calm.

The finish line wasn't euphoric. I didn't cry. I didn't pump my fist. I stopped running, stood still for a moment, and exhaled. A deep, full exhale that felt like it had been held in for ten hours.

The voice telling you to stop is not you. It's something running in a separate process, and if you keep moving through it long enough, it eventually shuts up.

I think about that silence a lot. Not the running part. The silence part. The part where everything unnecessary fell away and I was just a body moving forward.

I want more of that.