Guest post by Drew Roberts
“Conquering the mind” sounds like some motivational poster on the wall of a corporate boardroom. A mantra that speaks to being smarter than you already are, or perhaps the ability to see enlightenment happen in real time. A dogmatic concept that blends the existential and spiritual realms of time and history.
Have I lost you yet? No? Good. My brain is weird, and it often conjures up really weird ideas and thoughts. A lot of that comes from spending inordinate amounts of time running, so perhaps it’s all random side effects of brain trauma. Who knows.
Seriously though, the thoughts we have are endless and for some of us, mental illness is a very real and debilitating issue. For some, thoughts can be like wicked monsters that seek to tear us apart. This is how it feels for a lot of people who suffer like this, attempting to make sense of voices, thoughts, and feelings that result in depression, anxiety, restlessness, anger, and so many other things.
I bring these things up because I struggle with low levels of PTSD from trauma in my childhood, along with many years spent drinking to numb those feelings. It wasn’t until after I got sober and started working through my past, that I came to terms with what I could control and what I could not. Fate seemed to intervene in my life, and around the time I quit drinking, I picked up running. Soon, running became my therapy.
You might be reading this and feeling a sense of connection, like you’re not alone, like you can relate to what I’ve written. Or maybe you know what it means to conquer those mental monsters, and you battle them every day. Regardless, if you’re a runner you know the value of lacing up those shoes, creating endorphins, and doing your best to manage your thoughts.
Confucius said, “your life is what your thoughts make it”. And as someone who desperately craves dirty therapy (aka trail running), I am often thinking of hitting the trails in order to attempt to make sense of the noise in my head.
What’s funny is how I perceive myself to be as I write this, thinking it makes me sound like a lunatic. But I know I’m not completely nuts because I am constantly meeting more and more runners who feel the exact same way. And in this way, running becomes an escape, of sorts. And races become a masterful collection of weird people who run to deal with thoughts that often don’t make sense.
And this is where the virtual events are not so terrible after all. Don’t get me wrong, I love racing and seeing people, but I also love running alone, and virtual events allow me to race while doing so solo.
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Recently, I signed up for an event called the MTU™ Showdown. MTU™ stands for Mountain Training Units, and refers to the combination of both horizontal and vertical elevation gain. The event is geared to last as long as 6 months, based on the 1,600 MTU™ Great Divide Trail (GDT) in Canada (the trail is 1,124 km long and covers 47,600 vertical metres, the combination of which equals 1600 MTU™s. Learn more here). There happens to be 3 different routes one can take, which are the Scenic, the Prairie, and the GDT, and speak to rolling, flat, or hilly terrain, respectively. The goal is simple: be the first to 1,600 MTU™s.
The challenge started on January 1st, and it represented a great way for me to really kick off the year right, as I set my sights on a 100 miler at the end of March. Typically, I run a lot of trail miles with a lot of vertical gain, which placed me on the GDT route. As I began to rack up the mileage, I get regular emails showing me different images and videos of waypoints along the route, which have been super cool so far.
The best part has been the couple of connections I have made through Strava and Facebook, of other runners who are tackling this same challenge. And this is what draws me to this sport, knowing there are lots of crazies out there like me, who are just trying to manage the grind of daily life, of random weird thoughts, and of connections that mean something.
Drew Roberts
Ultra Trail Runner, writer, coffee snob
Drew Roberts is an ultra runner who discovered ultras at the tender age of 48, much to the chagrin of his lovely bride, who hates running…
Drew is a contributing writer for Run Oregon Blog, and can quite often be found on a trail near his home, in Central Oregon.
To learn more about Drew, check out his writing here or his Strava here