Endurance sports are having a moment. Run clubs, marathons, and ultramarathons have never been more popular. In North America, ultramarathon finishes have roughly tripled since 2010, exceeding 150,000 runners last year, according to UltraRunning magazine.
I understand the appeal. I spent years competing in some of the world’s most difficult endurance races, finding satisfaction and eventually a professional career in seeing how far I could push myself. But as more runners test their limits, I hope they’ll also ask themselves what they need those achievements to prove. For me, winning became a way to feel worthy of love. Every finish line offered reassurance that lasted only until I started worrying about the next race.
It took losing my professional running career to understand why I needed that reassurance so badly. The story began long before I laced up a pair of shoes and entered a race.
Divorce and my parents’ own troubled upbringings made my childhood difficult. As an adult, I can now see that my parents were unable to provide the safe, nurturing, and stable environment a kid deserves.
My young mind came to a conclusion that many children do: I must not be good enough the way that I am. Love, attention, and care, I believed, were all things that you had to earn.
As a teenager, I was desperate for the attention I rarely received at home. My grades were good, but not scholarship level; I was on the cross-country team and acted in school plays, but was never the standout star in either.
Despite my best efforts, nothing worked. That is, until I found success in ultrarunning.
At 15 years old, I watched my mother train and complete her first marathon. I was mesmerized. Maybe I could win her affection by doing what I’d seen her do.
Later that year, I crossed the finish line of the San Diego Rock n’ Roll Marathon. I loved the challenge, but I wanted more. Within a few years, I was running my first 50-mile ultramarathon. As part of my senior project, I pledged to run 100 miles around my high school track while fundraising money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society in honor of a friend who was battling cancer.
The ensuing media coverage was much more than I expected. To be honest, I loved the attention. Suddenly I felt seen by my mom. Again, I wanted more.
At 19, I finished Badwater, a 135-mile race across Death Valley in July. A year later, I flew out to Minnesota and completed the Arrowhead 135, in which I pulled a sled across the frozen landscape for nearly 54 hours. By age 20, I had attempted the Barkley Marathons for the first time, a race so difficult that in its 40-year history, only 20 people had ever officially finished. It would take me two more attempts navigating heinous trails through the hillsides of Tennessee to ultimately finish the race in 2013, becoming finisher 13.
Soon I was flying across the world, competing in 200-mile races, and living the life of a professional trail runner. It was everything I could have hoped for: the attention, the praise, the pre-race interviews, and the post-race adulation. And yet a part of me knew that if I didn’t win every race I entered, the worthlessness that I’d kept at bay for so long would drown me.
In 2018, that tidal wave finally came crashing over me. I had been diagnosed with a congenital bicuspid valve in my heart, and the resulting aortic aneurysm meant open-heart surgery.
Just like that, my professional running career was over, and with it went my path to validation. I had lived my whole life up to that point working for my worth; it was never inherent. If I couldn’t achieve results, who was I? Did I even exist? How could I be loved without having earned anything?
I spent the next five years dismantling my own self-worth from sport through therapy. The first and most pressing thing I had to face was the threat of suicide and self-harm. Running, it turns out, was protective of the deep-seated worthlessness I had developed from childhood.
Through intensive dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), medication, and an inpatient program, I curbed the more life-threatening aspects. DBT taught me awareness and the skills of emotional regulation. Later, lifespan integration and internal family systems therapy helped bring the roots of my childhood trauma to light and ultimately helped me place the hurt and shame back to their origin with my parents.
Slowly, I began to develop the understanding that I could be enough without having to achieve.
This lesson was never screamed at me. I was never explicitly told that I wasn’t enough. Instead, this anxiety whispered, quietly and convincingly, within me. It was the shaking hands of my 15-year-old self racing his heart out for the love of an absent parent. It was my 19-year-old self, slapping himself to keep going and push harder up the climb because some nebulous time or position would merit the love I never felt.
Through therapy, I came to realize I’d been fighting the wrong fight all along, and my relationship with running changed. After a full recovery from my heart surgery, I was able to begin running again, though not at the same level as I’d done before. In spite of the slower times, I was still able to get out into nature and, more importantly, spend time with my wife, whose running career was taking off.
I could hear my internal voices more clearly than ever and separate myself from it all a bit more. Eventually, I hired a running coach who, in addition to my wife, helped support me entering into shorter distance events that I’d eschewed early in my career. Not being a short-distance specialist, I’d been afraid to enter races I probably couldn’t win. Now I tried them anyway, and I had fun.
I realized I didn’t have to win a race to enjoy it or find value in it. I was finally enjoying running without needing it to be directly tied to my success.
Looking back on my career and with the perspective of both age and a tremendous amount of work, I’ve asked myself if I could have reached the same heights without that feeling that I need to win to be worthy of love.
Perhaps, and perhaps not; I’m less interested in that answer.
What I’d like to do is go back to my younger self and be there for every track meet, every race, no matter how well I performed. I’d tell myself, “I love you no matter what happens here today. There is nothing to prove. This is just a race.”
If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental-health crisis or contemplating suicide, call or text 988.
