All the feels.
The Ridgeway National Trail is 87 miles long with minimal elevation in the grand scheme of things (roughly 6,500 feet up and same down), so considering all I’ve done with my running to date, you’d think I’d have long ago cracked it. If there’s a reason I need to keep going back it’s because I should have finished the first time I tried, and if you know me, I don’t give up easily. If you know me, you also know that I dwell on everything so there is no other answer than to slay this particular dragon or I will never really be at peace with it. When I stop and think back at the first crack I had at running the R86, there were only 16 miles to go when I decided to stop. I was still within the cutoff, but I was in uncharted territory and I was in pain and I was lost in my head with worry about something I had no control over, nor could I do anything about at that particular moment in time. But pain is a passenger on any ultra, this is nothing new. Needless to say there’s no limit to the...