A few days after Harricana, I started thinking about all those promises I'd made to myself in the forest. I love ultramarathons, and I don't want to stop doing them, but I do need to stop doing them like this.
There was, however, one remaining complication that I failed to mention previously. The Harricana people weren’t going to let me wander around the mountains indefinitely.
For the first twenty kilometres, everything was suspiciously fine. I was moving well and keeping an honest pace. The morning was beautiful and the scenery in the Parc National des Hautes-Gorges was stunning.
Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. I say this all the time, yet seemingly every post I’ve written in recent months revolves around me repeating the same stupid shit.
One of the advantages of spending years auditing organizations is that you develop a fairly good sense of how things are going to unfold.
As I laboured through the opening kilometres of the Course des Pompiers, I found myself again contemplating one of life's great unanswered questions: where exactly is the line between stubborn and stupid?
There are races where you chase a personal best, or meaning, or redemption. Sulphur Springs 2026 was firmly in the third category.
Back by popular demand, here's another list of lessons I would convey to my 20 year-old self.
Most runners spend months training and obsessing over fitness so they can successfully complete an endurance race. I’ve got a completely different system these days: I run endurance races to get back into shape.
The older I get, the more I realize how much stuff I got wrong over the years. If I could sit down with my 20-year old self, here is a brief list of lessons I would convey.
