Day 4,272—End of the Year Break—

 

        Everyone has been getting perpetually sick at my house. First, it was me, and I thankfully have been feeling better, but now everyone else is coughing, and I just want my leg to stop hurting. I did almost nothing today, just a 15-minute mile run. I visited the spot where I tripped yesterday. I don’t understand how almost falling hurt my leg so much, but this was bound to happen, and I need to slow down before I get injured enough to where I have to stop running every day, and that just scares me, so while I am writing this, I am trying to acknowledge how safe I need to be if my leg doesn’t feel better, but I am just optimistic that it will. It also feels more like a strain than it does a serious injury.

        I would like, as a long-term goal, to plan for 4 new states to run in every year. If I do that for 10 years, I will be at 45 states when I turn 50, and then I could either try to run the additional 5 in the year I am already 50 or squeeze in the 5 states somewhere else. This is an incredibly ambitious goal now that I am writing this down, especially because I have only run 5 states in the first five years that I have been doing this, but I often forget that I haven’t been running ultras that long. I did my first race in 2021, even though in 2020 I ran a few training ultra runs it wasn’t until 2021 when I did my first race, so one state a year isn’t that bad. In five years, I have run in at least 34 ultra-races. I didn’t complete two officially, and unofficially I didn’t complete 3 more but in all those races I completed over 100K, and in one the race was cancelled, so four DNFs still seem like a lot, but in one of those I still ran over 100 miles. In my most recent DNF, it was in pretty cold conditions. The other two, I got sick, but I think I could have completed them had I taken a 20-minute or hour-long nap and then started again. Live and learn. Still, 34 ultra races in 5 years are more than an ultra every other month, so I should be happy about that. I have accomplished a lot in the first five-years doing this. Who knows what I can do in the next ten years? I want to, at the very least, plan for 4 states for next year and go from there. I like the idea of trying to do 5 new states the year I turn 50. I got two new states picked out already. I just need to decide the two to travel to over the summer.