About a year and a half ago (February 2024), I reached the end of a long and difficult personal journey. I had lost 25kg after a lifetime of being overweight, following this I was on a bit of a high, feeling good about myself and what I could achieve. So I made a questionable decision, I told my mum that I would compete in a race of her choosing with her for her birthday (I really struggled to find ideas that year). My mum frequently hikes and does trail running, occasionally participates in races and most recently participated in two RACINGTHEPLANET ultra marathons with my father, but I didn't anticipate that she would suggest that we do one of these ultra marathons together.

Fast forward a year (to February of 2025), and I find myself at the start of my journey to train for an ultra marathon in 6 months. It was daunting, I had just quit my job in order to better focus on my studies and start my training, and I had never run before apart from the mandatory cross country runs we did when I was in secondary school.

I very quickly learned a lot about how my motivation works, I realized I would need to have a smaller intermediate goal or I would never be able to properly start. So I signed up for the Lausanne 20km race, the whole process of training for this race gave me a massive confidence boost. I was running distances I had never run before, and doing times which were quite reasonable for me. I competed and ran 20km in just over 2 hours, a satisfying result for myself.

Following the race, I began to include more hiking and trail running into my training. Things were looking good. As I got to the summer I started to think more about the logistics of the ultra, ordering and trying different freeze dried food, training with a 10kg backpack, creating an excel sheet with my nutrition for the week of my race. As we got to the month of August, my motivation reached a peak. I created a detailed training plan in order to really boost the intensity of the training, I felt invincible and I was ready to not just complete the race but also do well.

Of course, as I reached this peak I was quickly knocked back down. On day 3 of my new and improved training program, before I had even had the time to raise the intensity, I ran into problems. After a short and easy run, my knee started to hurt. I ran again the next day, and now the pain was worse, I was limping for the rest of the day. Lastly I tried a hike, I thought that I was ok for the entire uphill, however, the second I started going downhill I realized something was really wrong ... I limped the whole way home. 2 days later, I saw a physiotherapist who confirmed that I had an IT band problem, not disastrous but still I needed to rest and adjust expectations for the race.

What followed was the most difficult period for my motivation. Even when I was cleared to go back to training, I found it difficult to get going again. My studies suffered as my head was clouded by the race that I wasn't training for. I was in a rut, but I was able to dig myself out. I adjusted my expectations, set more realistic goals for myself, and punished myself less for the failures of the past month.

I'm just a few days away from my race, I'm finishing up projects at school a bit more slowly than I originally planned, but it's ok I'm still making good progress. I'm a bit under-trained for my race, but it's ok I believe I'll still finish well, have a good race, and an amazing experience.