Success is a Well Deepened by Failure

A Loser Builds His Foundation

Taping my nose shut during a senior-year wrestling match

A year ago I was finalizing my training for the Appalachian Trail. I had the new down jacket, bundles of dehydrated food, and a training regiment that would get my body accustomed to cruising through the mountains for five straight months. I would weight my pack and find any footpath in Pisgah where I could put up 30 miles. I did laps on John’s Rock, I descended the Blue Ridge Escarpment to Lake Jocassee and sped over heartbreak ridge almost like it was nothing. When the time came for me to leave Springer Mountain in February I had no doubt in my mind I could finish. But then came COVID and everyone remembers what happened then. ATC asked us to leave. National parks got shut down. Some hikers went home and some took refuge in hostels while others continued down the 2,000-mile footpath to Katahdin. I’m one of the ones who went home.

I felt defeated by training so hard and putting that training to no use, so while I was still healthy and strong I decided to marathon the Foothills Trail in one fell swoop. I didn’t nearly set any records, but it deepened my understanding of what I was capable of. I hiked 77-miles continuously? Me? The scrawny kid who always finished last in his track meets?

I’m not very athletic, and in fact I consistently ranked low on the totem pole in all athletic measures besides heart. Not once did I find a piece of hardware to hang around my neck after wrestling tournaments. I’ve been doing Jiu-Jitsu since 2018 and still don’t have my blue belt. When I was rock climbing three times a week in college I never earned any medals outside of the beginner’s division. When I look back on these experiences, however, I remember my coaches and training partners always commenting on my gas tank. “He can go forever.” “I don’t like submitting you because I know once I do you’ll just come back for more.” “You want to go again?” It seems that my truest talent always involved me showing up; I didn’t often win but I was always the man in the arena.

Once I finished the Foothills Trail I felt estranged from myself. I thought my limits existed somewhere far below that grade, and to be honest if I had packed a little more food to fuel myself onwards I really believe I could’ve surpassed 100-miles. There was this hidden reserve of output in my legs I had never experienced before, and I wanted to see where it extended.

Updating My Hardware

I’ve stood atop this mountain in hurricanes and in snow

It wasn’t a full week after the Foothills Trail marathon that I began setting my eyes on similar projects. “How fast can I do xx trail?” “What’s the greatest number of miles I can put up in a day?” “How many days can I keep moving without rest?” Wherever I thought a limit existed I wanted to see if I could push it. Aside from a pleasurable section hike on the AT and a brief stint playing on big mountains in Montana, the latter half of 2020 was mostly about running. I regularly made my way up Old Bald, the 1,000-foot rock that stands overtop the community I live in, at least five times a week. At first, my goal was to get my time under 47 minutes, then 45, and one time I finished the 4-mile run in 37 minutes! I didn’t just want one or two fast numbers though. I needed consistency. I needed to see completion times any day of the week, at any time, and in any weather that showcased progress as a trail runner.

By this point in time I feel confident that I have stood at the summit of Old Bald more times than anyone else in history. I can close my eyes and visualize every nook and cranny of that trail, and I have made it a point to help maintain my training ground by removing all but the biggest of debris so that the mountain’s occasional hikers can reach the top without having to go off trail or trip over any branches.

Finding a New Challenge

With my legs tuned up and operating at a higher capacity than they ever have before I knew it was time to look for a test. 2020 marked the beginning of my annual birthday challenges. For my 22nd I rode, ran, crawled, and scrambled my way to 22 different waterfalls in celebration of the day, but what should I do at 23? Since elevation gain was my new addiction I decided it would be fun (because my poor mental health means these things seem “fun”) to attempt 23,000 feet of vertical in one day. Old Bald was practically 1,000 feet anyways, so if I put up 23 laps on the mountain I’ll have reached my goal. Ah, to hell with it. I might as well do 24 laps just in case anyone wanted to question the validity of my feat.

I would start at midnight, February 5, and begin making my way up and down the mountain either until I hit 23,000 feet or until I hit 24 hours. It’s whichever comes first. My average run from the house up to the summit and back floated around 40-minutes, and since this run will be solely comprised of the mountain I thought the 40-minute mark sounded like a great average to work towards. With a five minute break every lap that puts me at 45 minutes a lap. Ok, so 45-minutes x 24 laps = 1,080 minutes and 1,080minutes / 60 minutes = 18 hours. That’s only six o’clock by the time I’d finish! Even if I missed that mark I had six extra hours before midnight to reach my goal. It all seemed so doable.

Execution

Hiding in my sleeping bag burrito. 24 degrees feels different soaking wet

At midnight the rains came in and the temps dropped to 24 degrees. I knew the key to staying warm was to keep moving so I wasted no time in scrambling up the mountain for the first time. I got back to my car in 38-minutes and wasn’t even breathing heavy. God, it’s amazing how hard that run seemed the first time I did it a year earlier.

Lap two started without my five-minute break so that I could build myself a safety buffer in case anything wonky slowed me down later that day. I passed two bunnies, and the rain stopped for the first half of this lap. Without the rain, however, there was nothing to keep the dense fog at the summit patted-down. It rose and swelled, consuming the entire mountaintop and me with it. My headlamp became nothing but a misty illuminated marshmallow that blocked my vision not five-feet ahead of me. I knew the trail well, but in knowing it well I also knew how slick some of those muddy switchbacks could get, and wiping out or sliding off the side of the mountain would not be the ideal start to this project. I moved back down to the car, had my Gatorade, rice milk, and beef jerky, and began my third lap.

By now the lack of rain meant instead of fighting my way uphill through slick mud I instead had to learn to ice skate up the mountain. My footprints from the previous two laps created bumps and slick shoots through the mud that were now frozen solid in their form. It was kind of like hopping over ankle-high ice sculptures for 1-and-a-half miles, and then came the intimidating ice-skating slalom course back to the bottom. With my mind so deeply engaged in keeping myself upright, I didn’t even realize I had just run over ten miles, half of them uphill, and wasn’t even tiring.

Laps four and five I ran on autopilot with a Joe Rogan podcast helping me up the mountain one lap and Joyner Lucas’ “Evolution” album the next. My wet clothes and shivering body made my legs feel heavy on lap five, and I recorded a short video for a friend who was all too excited to watch me suffer on this course. I told him how I was hurting but moving forward, and when the rains came back on lap six that became my new normal; cold, heavy, and hurting.

My angel of a mother intercepted me on lap seven with a thermos full of hot tea and a note of encouragement rubber-banded to the side of it. I built myself up a buffer over the past laps and decided to take an extended break in my car. I cocooned myself in my sleeping bag, set a timer for ten minutes, and inhaled the hot fumes spiraling out of the thermos. If I fell asleep during this break I certainly didn’t realize it, but the timer came quick and I had to jump out of that warm car and begin making my way up again.

Laps eight and nine came with increased but manageable difficulty. My body was definitely upset to be removed from the warmth of my car, and in retrospect, I’m not sure if it really benefitted me in any way to take that break for warmth other than the improvement it made to my mental state. But then came lap ten.

Heading uphill for lap ten meant running my 23rd mile and ascending over my 10,000th foot of elevation gain. It was 8:00 am, and while I thought daybreak would do wonders to set me into my second gear for this project, what it really did was remove me from the trance I had put myself. All night I had navigated a frozen obstacle course through dense fog with nothing but my bobbing headlamp to guide me, and as the sun rose my vision widened to the world around me. I could see the lake and the birds. I could see people in cars leaving for work. I could the track in its entirety now, and the fog was still thick but shattered by the daylight. I wasn’t engaged as much as I was in previous laps, and what’s more, my knee injury came back to haunt me.

You see, sometime along the Foothills Trail marathon, around hour 24 or 25, I sleepily walked off the side of the mountain and fell about seven-feet down onto a boulder. I did some damage to my knee in this fall and had to work on it for almost a month to get it feeling right again. The fall banged something in my knee and prevented it from bending properly. It would lock up in a stiff, fixed position, and only with great effort and a lot of pain was I able to bend it… But I hadn’t felt that injury in almost six-months by this point.

Whether it was temperature or exertion or the 10 odd-thousand feet of downhill running I had placed on my knees that morning, I was in big trouble. How could I keep moving on a technical course like this if I couldn’t bend my knee?? I wasn’t even quite halfway through my goal, and even though I had a lot of gas left in the tank I became incredibly concerned. I jogged every agonizing step down that mountain making it over 25-miles of steep running by that point and refueled at my car. I laid on the wet ground and stretched. I filled my body with electrolytes and solid fuel to keep all my systems running. I gave myself another moment in the heat to see if I could ease the pain out of my knee while I massaged it.

I took off toward lap eleven in what I consider one of the world’s fastest limps. I scaled over 200-feet in switchbacks right out of the gate and forced myself to get to the top of them before stopping even once. When I got to the straightaway at the top of the switchbacks I was essentially hopping on my left foot while using my stiff right leg as a fulcrum to simply ride over in order to maintain some kind of a gait. It felt useless, however. I summitted the mountain around minute 45, only halfway through the lap in the total elapsed time I gave myself to do a full one. Where I felt stiff on the uphill I was in pain again on the down. I couldn’t exactly ride over my right leg as I came down or else I would plummet onto my left leg until I managed to damage it as well. My slowest time down the mountain until this point was about 15 minutes, and this time it took me over 30. With my pace rapidly declining and the risk of further damaging my knee at play, I was defeated. The project was over.

Deepening the Well

While I didn’t reach my goal I did push my limits. The total elevation gain of the Foothills Trail is just shy of 11,000 feet, and during this project, I had completed that same amount of gain in under eleven hours. I still had half the day left, and while my knee was damaged, what consumed my mind was just how far I could have gone had I continued with my physical therapy. My failure was a direct result of me not properly and fully addressing my weaknesses. Did I have the energy to keep going? Well, yeah, but it was never energy that I was concerned with. I have tons of energy. It’s literally what most of my friends know me for. I found myself failing because I placed too much faith in my greatest strength and not enough time addressing my weaknesses. I can see this now with absolute clarity.

I am currently back to strengthening my knee, only this time I’ll do it right. Where I find success later will be due to the fact I’ve failed. If me not finishing the AT is what enabled me to marathon the Foothills Trail, then me not finishing my 23K attempt will be the reason I succeed next time.

My reserves of strength are deeper. My sense of grit has hardened. My well has deepened, and it only happened because of failure.