DNF Report: 2024

Welcome to my long overdue (and overwritten) Broken Arrow 2024 DNF Report. Actually, scratch that - my 2024 DNF Report. Because spoiler alert: I quit running.

Broken Arrow: Baby's First DNF

This was my third Broken Arrow. I was no novice, and came prepared. I had trained at distance and elevation. I had kept up the right running plan and strength training routine. I had kept the same nutrition plan as previous races. The weeks leading up to my race, I'd gotten plenty of rest.

The day of the race, nothing was thrown my way that I couldn't handle. I knew how to handle heat. I'd checked the boxes, keeping iced, keeping fed, keeping cool, keeping a slower pace. And yet by the end of the first of two 14-mile loops at a roughly 4,500 foot climb, I'd had no question in my mind; I was, for the first time in my running history, in my life, dropping out. I was quitting.

Now, I could sit here and tell you the factors that day which led to my drop, and you'd be none the wiser. "The heat was dangerous," or "it was a race I'd run before, and I wasn't going to PR," and "it didn't feel worth the risk." But saying this would hide the truth, which is that halfway through the first loop, precisely one half-loop before actually dropping, I'd quit that race. In fact, I had quit months before the start line.

I don't think we do enough in the trail running community of honoring the psychology that goes into these endurance challenges. So forget "heatstroke"; let's go back and unpack what really happened that led me to my decision to stop racing altogether.

Finishing 2023 Strong

Last year was one of my best, on and off the trails. From finishing my first 100k, to completing a 200-hour yoga teacher training (YTT) in Bali, to adventures throughout the Olympic Peninsula and Northern Cascades, I ended the year with a rolodex of Google photo albums most would envy. But my body felt it. Having trained in one form or another from December 2022 to December 2023, my body and mind were wrecked.

I felt tired. Constantly. I felt frustrated. I leveraged every recovery tactic in the book. No amount, no combination of eating, sleeping, and restricting exercise was helping. I was running on fumes. And that's when I realized that after 4 wonderful, challenging years of ultras, I had finally hit it.

My wall.

Yoga Teacher Training and Challenges

YTT at House of Om Amertham in Bali was magical. Waking up in the sticky sweet humidity of Mama Bali's belly deep in the jungles of Ubud was more than just an epic setting for diving into yogic philosophy and deepening my practice; it was the lubricant for allowing my true self to emerge. That November nested under banyon canopies and falling frangipani brought me home to myself. And oh, my friends, it wasn't pretty.

Bali, in a sense, broke me.

I learned so much during training. I forged connections that will last a lifetime, that have lasted lifetimes. I began to understand the true origins of yoga as asana, a physical practice which rouses deep connection with the divine. I experienced it as a practice between mantras, meditation, spiritual nourishment.

Look. I am not afraid of being humbled. Much in the way I welcome the challenge of steep scrambles up mountains, I relish opportunities to grow and learn through my own weakness. But I wasn't ready for this. I was not ready for this kind of humbling.

Sure, class was hard. I learned I'm not a great, or even a good, yogi. Ok, fine. Exciting, even, because it means this is a discipline in which I have room to grow. Learning human anatomy at a rapid pace was challenging, but again, stimulating. I enjoyed it. Practicing silence was hard, but worth it. I learned from it, too. Silence became slowing, and slowing became stillness.

And then stillness welcomed fear.

I witnessed this charismatic, boisterous version of myself reduce into a wallflower. I sought refuge in the back of each large room of thin, fit, young women who were en route to Influencerville. Each day, a new member of the group bravely took to the front of the class to volunteer their body for the teacher to demonstrate a new pose with, or to share a new skill they had mastered. Teachers threatened to call on those who hadn't yet volunteered, and for the first time in a very long time, I felt like I was going to puke.

And they did so. With every person in the class. Every person, but me.

Nutrition Counseling

At some point in every race, either during a hard training run or during the race itself, I found a wall to scale. A wall of doubt, a wall of insecurity. Whatever the wall, I've always overcome it. Until Bali, I had never realized that the hardest walls I had been scaling spawned from deep resentment towards my own body. In hindsight, my angriest tears came not from sprained ankles and shin splits, but from skewed images of myself:

"Why can't you just get lighter?"

"What is wrong with this body, why are you running 50-mile weeks and gaining weight?"

"You're eating what you should, so why do you feel so fatigued you're about to roll an ankle?"

"Your body just isn't right for this sport. You don't belong here."

"Nothing is working. You should quit doing this."

The anger would peak from the same frustration every time. "No matter what I do, I don't get lighter or thinner, and so I won't run faster." It wasn't until Bali that I realized how susceptible I am to my own inner hatred. So this year, I pivoted focus and started nutrition counseling.

It's f*cking overwhelming.

On one hand, it's enlightening. I'm realizing how much inconsistency can disregulate your glucose levels. We think this explains a lot of my fatigue and hunger, possibly leptin levels. So we're doing it all: running blood tests, scribbling in work books, studying blood sugar and body cues, etc.

On the other hand, it's disheartening, because contrary to popular belief, nutrition counseling doesn't exactly help you lose weight. In my case, it's causing me to gain weight. Our focus right now is regulating my intake, meanwhile recalibrating my approach to my own health and body. Despite being so focused on my physical ability for years, this is hard and overwhelming.

Alas, it's also exactly where I know I need to be.

Body Image And Sports

Being confront by poor body image in Bali was by no means a purely internal experience. In environments like this where thin privilege goes unchecked, the body discrimination is real. One moment of personal breakthrough in Bali was disrupted by a students vanity, with the support of the instructor; while achieving a challenging headstand pose, I was asked by another student and a teacher to move out of the way because I was blocking her camera. (Seriously, I couldn't make this up if I tried!)

And genuinely, there is no use in challenging someone who exercises their thin privilege in this way because social media will ultimately reward the behavior. Women who look like ads, make money. We're often told that obesity is linked to lower income under the guise that less resources lead to obesity, but more and more, research suggests that it's likely the opposite. Competency might not outweigh "cultural fit" if-you-know-what-I-mean.

There's a reason absolute titans like US Rugby player Ilona Maher still leverage their platform to advocate body positivity. No level of fame, notoriety, or accomplishment renders one immune to the abhorred beauty standards we're held to in the Western world. Experts in the wellness industry are urging us to abandon archaic plans that drive women towards smaller bodies. Exercise physiologist Alyssa Olenick espouses this loudly and clearly, busting an endless list of myths that athletic women should treat their nutrition planning differently than athletic men, encouraging us to focus on things like energy deficits. She even states that by avoiding historically supplements like creotine, which are historically marketed as "good for men, bad for women", we're even risking impacts to cognitive decline.

Then again, who needs brain power when you've got a tiny waist, #amIright? (Sarcasm, people.

What's Next?

This morning, I chatted with my nutritionist about how essential it is to have a healthy relationship with movement. We lamented on the lack of discourse around how often people unwittingly displace addictive aspects of their personalities from harmful addictions to "less harmful" addictions, like fitness, never noticing that the pattern of dependency remains intact.

Mental health is often mentioned as a footnote in articles about coping through recovery, but we rarely see athletes encouraged to pivot and find coping strategies beyond exercise. But doesn't health means whole health? It's not just your vitals and BMI. It's your mental, emotional, physical, social, spiritual well being, which means diversifying your tool belt for coping with stress, anxiety, depression, or just the natural challenges life has to offer should be considered essential for health security.

So for now, I'm focused less on pace and more on base. I'm engaged in movement that feels good, but am leaned out of the ultra world. I've started investing more time and energy into creative skills like music (i.e. joining Jaws of Brooklyn) and writing, and spiritual practices (i.e. teaching yoga & meditation). We'll see where this lands me in a few months before reexamining my race schedule.

Until then - ॐ शान्तिः (om shanti).