I didn’t grow up playing sports and it wasn’t until a couple years ago that I would have even used the title athlete to describe myself. I started running when I was a teenager in my spare time, on a treadmill, by myself. I mostly did it to get in shape but along the way I fell in love with it. Fast forward about a decade and I had succumbed to two femoral fractures, one of which led to surgery and hardware in my leg. It was after my second injury that I decided to train for a trail marathon after never racing before in my life. I figured it was finally time to become part of the running community and hopefully following a training plan would allow me to properly recover and have purpose rather than just mindlessly running myself into the ground. It was also around this time that I found friends that pulled me into the climbing, mountain biking, hiking, and outdoor community. In 2019 I ran my first marathon and in 2020 I signed up for my first 50K in hopes of calling myself an ultra-runner. I was ecstatic to place 3rd in my first ultra-marathon and decided to keep pushing forward to see what I could do. I recently completed my first 50 miler a couple months ago and I feel like I’m just getting started.

For a training run for my 50 miler in Marquette I decided to try my hand at a timed loop course. This was a 2.5 mile loop at Addison Oaks and the goal was to complete as many loops in a 6 hour time limit. I thought I’d be able to easily complete 13 loops (about 33 miles) but I ended up one lap short of that. The 30.6 miles took me almost up to the last minute of the 6 hour time limit. The heat and humidity and the lack of long training runs before hand made this super tough.