On becoming an athlete
On becoming an athlete
Learning from John Bingham + Katharine Graham's 'Personal History'
Late last week, I had the chance to talk by phone with
, a writer whose fantastic newsletter covers her love for long-distance trail running, which she’s done for more than 25 years as both a coach and a runner herself — to give you an idea of how accomplished Sarah is, a few years ago she won the race known as the Grand to Grand Ultra, which unfolds over 171 miles through the Utah and Arizona desert.During our conversation, I told her about a friend of mine who’d become an ultra runner over the past few years, and about how my jaw drops in amazement when he tells me the mileage he runs: 60, 70, sometimes 80 miles or more, over a single weekend. “I just don’t know how anyone does that,” I said to Sarah. “How can you get your body to do that?”
I’ve run 26.2 miles before — three times, actually — but pushing myself to run beyond that distance has always struck me as something only a very special, rare group of people can do. In her coaching, Sarah said, that’s exactly the leap she helped runners learn how to make: to transition from “being a hobby jogger into an athlete,” expanding their sense of possibility about what they could achieve.
Inside, I still wondered: how? How do you get to the mental place where it’s within the realm of possibility to run two (or more) marathons in a single day? How do you wrestle with the side of yourself, the voice in the back of your mind, that says you can’t do it?