The 100km Path

I'm an ordinary man. I like reading, I like running, I like the mountains. I have an office job: I spend all day sitting in front of my PC, coding and analyzing data. I promised myself I had to do some sport to stay healthy. So I started running. I didn't want any constraints around time or facilities, so running seemed the obvious choice for me. I started watching videos on YouTube about it, how to do it properly, that kind of thing, and I started running. My goal was to run a marathon, with no time target. Simply to finish it. I was consistent: I'd run one day and rest the next, so I wouldn't hurt myself. But all of this was really just an exercise in willpower. I didn't actually care about running a marathon through a city; it felt so meaningless, so boring to do. I felt the same way about the workouts. All of them in the city, all of them on the road, with no real enjoyment of the place I was running through. The only thing that mattered was running. And I kept going. I kept running and following the scheduled workouts, without enjoying a single moment of it, but I needed all of it to stay healthy.

One day, after a few months of training, scrolling through YouTube, I found a video about the UTMB, the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc. It's a crazy race, roughly 160km, with an absurd amount of elevation gain, circling Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Europe. I watched a video of an ordinary person running this race, and I was genuinely struck by it. He ran through beautiful places, up and down. He chatted with other runners. He stopped to take pictures. He stopped to talk with the volunteers helping out during the race. He stopped at the aid stations where there was food and drink for the athletes. He enjoyed the run. He enjoyed the place. He enjoyed the trail. I saw everything I didn't have in my own workouts, and I imagined I wouldn't have it in a race either. I wanted that too.

I watched all his other videos, about training, about nutrition, about races. Each one increased my urge to try it myself, to try trail running.

So I tried. It was terrible at the beginning. I tried to run the whole time, running up, running down. I ran so slowly, putting in so much effort. In the videos, all the runners seemed to make it look so easy.

I was about to give up.

Until I started taking it easy. It's okay to go slow. It's okay to run short distances. It's okay to do both at once. It's not about performance, but about enjoying the place you're in: the trail through the mountains, or along a beach, inside a forest, or through the countryside. Running so slowly, I was able to look around, stop to take pictures, or simply enjoy the view. I started to enjoy the effort of climbing and to pick up my pace. I started to feel free on the descents and to increase the distance, still at a very slow pace. I fell in love with trail running.

Three years have passed since that day. I still run at a slow pace, and I've done a few races. The first was 20km with 900m of elevation gain. Since then I've increased the distance to 37km and more than 2000m of elevation gain. I enjoy every one of them at my own, very slow pace. But ever since that video, my goal has been to run a 100km race. I'm not ready for that yet. I've injured myself more than once because I wanted to reach that goal too fast. I hired a coach, but it didn't work out: I ended up injuring myself even worse. Now I'm physically fine. I can run 20km in the mountains without a setback, and I'm starting to be consistent with training again. In the next two years, I want to be able to run a 100km race.