From Non-Runner to Ultra Marathons - A 38 Year Journey

Frequently as a child, I would wake up and my dad would be gone. Not because he was a deadbeat drunk in a bar or a businessman married to his job on the road. He was running. He would wake up early in the morning before I woke up and come home sweaty with a smile on his face.

I never understood that smile as a child and I wouldn’t understand it until I was 38 years old. My dad has ran over 25 marathons and I was at the finish line of at least 15 of them watching countless numbers of runners run, limp and even crawl across the finish line. (Pictured below is the crew heading to the 2010 St. George Marathon to cheer on my dad.)

In the early years, when my dad was running paces in an attempt to qualify for the Boston Marathon we would arrive in time to see the winners come across the line. The first runners always seemed to breeze through effortlessly. As time went on, however, the more you’d see blood soaked shirts, cramped legs and the occasional self covered vomit. There was nothing appealing about running a marathon, but I did love to cheer on my dad.

It was always emotional to see my dad cross the finish line. Some years he was strong and confident and other years he was just glad to make it to the end. He typically wore a bright colored hat so we could find him easily in the crowd, but there’s also a connection when you view someone as your hero. You can spot them a mile away.

After he crossed the finish line, we would walk around waiting for him to get his medal and pick up his gear. That’s where you would see endless numbers of people aching, limping, and searching for the massage table. Toe nails would be lost, stairs would not be taken and still people were smiling. Why were people happy about almost dying?

During High School, my interest in running worsened. I found a place in the gym, lifting weights and being as scrappy as I could as a 5’7”, 165 lbs outside linebacker who doubled as an offensive lineman due to my quickness and low center of gravity. I’ve always needed to hustle more than my opponents and teammates. What I lacked in physical capabilities, I made up with grit and hard work. However, I hated running!

Conditioning was the bane of my existence! I would rather take hit after hit than run laps. When I tore my ACL my Junior year, I started to think a bit differently about my body. The closest I got to enjoying running was when I joined the soccer team my Senior year and I realized I had to run so I could build up my endurance to compete. I was a defender, which meant at most I was running half of the field during a match.

Over the years I would try from time to time to get into running, but it usually was put to a quick halt due to shin splints, foot pain, or sheer laziness. I could never find the joy in running that my dad therapeutically required almost on a daily basis.

In my early 30’s, I navigated back to soccer while living in Hong Kong. The company I was working for regularly played on Friday mornings and despite being one of two Americans allowed on the pitch with the other European and Asian footballers I really felt a connection. Naturally I gravitated towards defense for less running, but over time, the more I played the more I loved running the full length of the field as a midfielder.

That was until February 2019 when I jumped up to win a ball and came down extremely awkward on my leg. I instantly knew I had torn my ACL. It was the same feeling I had felt 18 years previously on my other leg, but worse! I was devastated. I had progressed to playing both Monday night and Friday morning and I was flying around. Rarely did I get tired and I was hanging in there with the younger guys, better than I expected.

Too often in life the weight of setbacks slow us down or stop us completely. We feel that hope is gone and all of our work was for nothing. It’s during those times that focusing on improving by the smallest of measurements each day is still progressing you towards your ultimate goal. If you don’t know what your ultimate goal is, then it can be harder to pull yourself up from the depths.

Thankfully I had a friend who worked in the Hong Kong health system and was able to get me in quicker than usual to get reconstruction on my ACL. Physical therapy was a different story. Because my rehabilitation was not essential to my daily functions, I would be put on a long list that placed me two years out from getting any type of help from the healthcare system. I had two choices, pay a crazy amount for private rehab, or do it myself. Since I’d already rehabbed an ACL before, I decided to go it alone. (Video below of my working on my gait in 2019.)

Progress was slow and milestones were few and far between. It didn’t help that COVID would hit Hong Kong quicker than most countries and by January of 2020, we already had restrictions around the city limiting our physical activities such as soccer. I like millions of others around the world decided to take my newly found time freedom to start a new hobby. Our home in Hong Kong could be found on the Eastern coast in the rolling mountains of the New Territories. These mountains were nothing like the ones I knew growing up in Utah, but they were good enough to work out legs that were weak from atrophy. I started hiking.

I started out slow, just going up and down the hill closest to our house. Going up was fine, but coming down was hard on my knees. I quickly learned that the trail I was regularly hiking was a section of one of Hong Kong’s most famous trails, the 100-kilometer (62 mile) MacLehose Trail. I started going on longer distances and more and more hikes and really came to love hiking.

I loved taking pictures, listening to audio books and even started to enjoy the workout of hiking. As the world of 2020 crept along, I was blazing trails. I would log over 200 miles of hikes from March to November. The crowning event was completing the Hong Kong Trail the week before I would move my family of 7 back to the U.S.

The Hong Kong Trail is just shy of 50-kilometers at 29 miles. The trail starts at the famous Peak on Hong Kong Island and winds through the whole island from one point to the other. My friend had convinced me that it was a must do before I left and so at 5:00am on Thanksgiving day, (not a big deal in Hong Kong) we started on my first Ultra Marathon. The closest I had come to high milage was an 18 mile trip I had made earlier in the year. I had never ran a marathon of 26.2 miles and now I was going to do 29 miles with 4,400 feet of elevation gain?

It would take me 9 hours and 10 minutes to finish the trail, but I finished it and I felt great! (Relatively). I could barely walk, but I had that smile on my face that I had seen on my dad’s so many years earlier.

I would love to say that the next three years would be the launch pad into a passion for trail running, hiking and maybe even a street race marathon, but it wasn’t. It was almost the opposite and I would once again need a major life event to get me to reach a new level. But as they say…that’s a story for another time.