Embrace the Suck

Had a rough time at Leadville this year.  Finished in 27:52, over three hours slower than last year despite having trained harder and having been more prepared.  A finish was in doubt many times, but thanks to some huge help from my pacers and digging deeper than I’ve ever had to do – I got it done.

I repeated the phrase ’embrace the suck’ over and over to myself through the day and night.  Get it done no matter what.  The problems aren’t going to magically disappear.  Get comfortable with the fact that things aren’t going well and keep moving forward.

Full report to come later, but for now a peek into what it’s like to be at the absolute end of your rope and knowing that you still have twenty miles to cover.  The lucid voice behind the camera is my friend Kirk who paced babysat me for the last 40 miles of the race.  Kirk has not run a 100 mile race, yet.  Any bets on how soon he will be signing up for one??

Posted on August 23, 2010, in race, run. Bookmark the permalink. 14 Comments.

  1. Wow, sorry man….that does suck when you train for something and it just doesn’t go well…
    Come join us at the Bear! You’re fit and ready to go…just need a little recovery!

    Steve

  2. That vid needs to be required viewing for all possible entrants. Damn.

  3. Great meeting you this season and even better competing with you. Didn’t have the race I hoped for either but I admire that you returned to Leadville this year to push harder.

  4. leila degrave

    Chris,

    SUPER impressed by your resolve and determination.

    Your reports from 08 and 09 were so inspiring as I set out on my own LT100 journey a while back. And then, in person, I’ve come to know that you have a presence and character about you that reminds me there is MUCH more to all of this than a certain finish time. Thanks for being a role model – and hope to run and race with you again someday!

    • Leila,
      Thanks for those kind words! Congratulations on your journey – you’ve reached a major milestone but I have the feeling you are just getting warmed up…

  5. You finished what you started, that’s awesome man. Sorry that it wasn’t what you had hoped, but it sounds like it turned out to be a “good” experience. No motivation needed, I’m impressed man. Sorry I didn’t get a chance to say hi out there. Go crush the next one, this is the journey that never ends 😉

  6. Ahhhh. Embrace the Suck! It’s good to see you “workin hard”, usually when you’re with me you’re “hardly workin” Great job Bro! Not only did you embrace it you grabbed by the horn and other parts and held on tight. Way to go.

  7. I second the comment about this needing to be required viewing for entrants!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: