There are races where you chase a personal best, or meaning, or redemption. Sulphur Springs 2026 was firmly in the third category. Or so I thought anyway.

This race means a lot to me. I ran my first ultra there in 2019 and completed the 100 km distance in 2023. But Sulphur Springs has a way of keeping a person humble. In 2024, I arrived with a torn meniscus and tried limping through the course before eventually quitting and undergoing knee surgery two months later. In 2025, I returned ten months post-surgery, uncertain whether my knee or mind could handle the punishment. They couldn’t. Undertrained, underprepared, and short on confidence, I pulled the plug after 40 km. Two consecutive years of disappointment left a mark. Sulphur Springs had become a reminder that at this stage in my life, I’m often being held together by glue.

In 2026, I decided to run the 50 Mile (80 km) race and I arrived spectacularly unprepared as per normal protocol, although I had run the Toronto Marathon two weeks prior and somehow survived. I’d spent the week leading up to Sulphur Springs at another conference doing way too many conference things. To make matters worse, the weather forecast for race day deteriorated, and it was so grim that I seriously considered not showing up at all.

When race day arrived, the temperature was eight degrees, and torrential rains and strong winds were forecast for the entire day. So much for redemption, this was again going to be about survival. The morning started innocently enough. Despite the cold and wind, it wasn’t raining when the race started at 6 AM. But that changed quickly, and within an hour rain started to fall and shortly thereafter it was pouring.

Twenty kilometres in, I already looked like I’d escaped a nautical disaster. My shoes weighed an extra three pounds each from the ankle-deep mud on the flat sections. Every downhill was slick and treacherous, every uphill like climbing wax paper. There were moments I genuinely wished I had brought a helmet. I wiped out three separate times during the race, and I mean full cartoon-level crashes where you see things happening in slow motion and still can’t prevent them from happening.

The cold, though, was the real enemy. I was soaked for essentially the entire race. Not damp or uncomfortable either, like properly soaked. Every layer surrendered almost immediately. My hands stopped functioning sometime around mid-race and became decorative claws attached to my wrists. I went through three entire sets of clothing during the race and wore toques and gloves throughout. The only equipment that remained throughout were my shoes and socks, because I feared if I took them off and tried to change them, that I would see the condition of my feet and get discouraged. And my hands were barely working and changing shoes and socks seemed like a heavy task.

There were long stretches where I couldn’t get warm no matter how hard I worked. Eventually the race stripped away everything, and the goal became wonderfully simple: keep moving, try not to die, eat, drink. And there’s something oddly peaceful about that level of simplicity.

As the kilometres piled up, the field slowly disintegrated. Out of 122 starters, only 72 finished. Nearly half the field got taken out by the conditions, the terrain, or the quiet realization that sitting in a warm vehicle eating chicken nuggets was a happy alternative to this fucking crap. But I stayed in the fight.

And somewhere deep into the final stretch, exhausted and soaked to the bone, I realized this race had given me, once again, what I came for. Proof that after the setbacks and failures and accumulating mileage on my body and brain, I can still do hard things, especially when conditions become miserable and my resolve is challenged.

I crossed the line in 46th place after nearly 13 hours. Not fast enough to impress anyone but me. Maybe that’s what redemption looks like at this stage of life. There’s no glory, just the quiet satisfaction of returning to a place that once beat you, standing your ground, and once again proving to yourself that there’s still a little fight left in the old machine.