Highs and Lows: The Importance of HiLo

(Hint: it's what it took to get here)

As I rolled through Raspberry 2 aid station, my pacer Cortney asked if it was starting to feel real. I checked my watch, which read 93 miles. “Nah,” I responded, “still too much can go wrong.”

When we popped out on the gravel road with 3.5 miles to go, I left myself start to believe. But I didn’t exhale until I ran those last hundred years weaving through the rutted out field and crossing the finish line, incredulous.

I didn’t think I’d be here. Hell, I didn’t think I’d be at the start line, let alone the finish line. And the finish line in one piece? Unheard of.

Two years ago to the day, I crossed the finish line of Cascade Crest, in 2nd place and running my fastest 100 miler ever, but with a femoral neck stress fracture that fully exploded on me with 3 miles to go. The following months on crutches and the ensuing complete meltdown of my life gave me a lot of time to think. I don’t think I appreciated at the time how much that experience destabilized and rattled me.

I spent a big chunk of 2024 away from running, and away from my community while I tried to figure things out: figuring out my relationship to running now that I was no longer a sponsored athlete and “past my prime,”, figuring out a body that I had subjected to far too many years of caloric restriction and weight suppression and compulsive movement and comparison to other women on the start line, and figuring out how I want to exist in the world as a childless/childfree¹ woman in her 40s.

(Spoiler alert: I still don’t have any of that figured out)

But when I toed the line at HiLo two weeks ago, I had at least taken a chance on doing a few things differently to break some ingrained patterning, and to face down the demons that had haunted me since that Cascade Crest finish line.

(CW: discussion of weight and eating disorders. Take care of yourself)

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(1) I never hit 60 miles a week in training

Given my injury history, I’ve always been a comparatively lower mileage ultra runner. But in all my other builds, I’d spend several weeks above 60mpw, maybe peaking at 70, perhaps a few more. And like clockwork, I’d start to break down in the weeks leading up to the 100 miler, showing up the start line with, say, the beginnings of a femoral neck stress reaction that then turned into a Grade 4 over those next 100 miles.

This training block, I maxed out at 59mpw, and often sat between 45-50. How did that translate to HiLo, a mountain 100 with 23,000+ feet of climbing?

Happy to say that my quads were never blown, I was barely sore in the days after the race, and my fitness wasn’t the thing slowing me down: my fear of and complete weakness at technical descending did that for me instead. Maybe one day I will embrace the fact that I prefer California carpet and should really just lean into that, but until then, my poor knees will pay the price.

Even with that, I managed to eke out 8th woman and beat my goal time of 27 hours by 35 seconds. (I’m absurdly proud of myself for picking a reasonable number out of thin air and nailing it so well). So, I would say that the training plan worked pretty well.

With that, however, I’ve had to sit with the reality that I’m really not training to win races anymore - I’m training to stay healthy, to participate in the races and push myself, but my days of riding that razor edge to maximize performance are behind me. While I feared how humbling that might be, in practice I’m actually finding it to be rather freeing. Being out there, whether it takes me 23 hours or 37 hours, has overtaken “winning” as the most important motivator in my running.

More importantly than reducing mileage, however, I did an even harder thing.

(2) I gained weight.²

I’ve tip-toed around this subject in my writing over the years because it’s fucking impossible to talk about weight when it relates to eating disorders without pissing off a small but vocal army. Further, it’s extremely sticky, for good reason, to talk about weight when you are objectively in a smaller³ body. Well, let’s rip the Band-Aid off.

Going into Cascade Crest in 2023, I was riding a line with my weight and my fueling I shouldn’t have been riding: not intentionally⁴, but I wasn’t paying enough attention to ensure I was in a good place. I played a bit too fast and loose, which is how backslides start. And when my femur broke, I went to the bad place for a bit. It came on insidiously, beckoning to me while I crutched around my house alone, while I tended to a freshly broken heart, while I tried to make sense of what had happened and where I was going. As my muscles withered from lack of use, I let them. As the eating disorder voices went from whispers to shouts, I lost my will to fight back. By the time I was off of crutches, I knew I had dug myself into a hole.⁵

I spent most of 2024 crawling out of that hole, determined to not let a minor slip turn into a major derailment. It was harder than I wanted it to be, it took longer than I thought it should take, and there is a not insignificant level of shame that accompanies the struggle when you’ve been so public about your recovery for many years. There was a reason I was pretty quiet on social media - when a large part of your presence has revolved around eating disorder recovery, it’s tough to show up when you are struggling.

The brain does a funny thing when you dip a toe back into relapse - your shit that wasn’t fucked up gets all fucked up again and you have to unfuck it all over again, slowly, if you want to right the ship.⁶ And so I did over these past two years with a lot of intentional work. Very slowly, and imperceptibly at times, the recovery mindset started coming back. At some point, my fear of being sidelined (again) from the sport I loved to do outweighed my fear of that second bowl of ice cream. My fear of what low energy availability was doing to my brain and risk of dementia outweighed my fear of that extra slice of pizza. My desire to move through the world in a body that I wasn’t afraid of breaking on a steep descent outweighed my desire to be the smallest person in the room.

And with that shifting mindset, I got back into a healthier body, which is really just a nice euphemism for “I gained 10-15lbs back and my body is much happier to have.” I can’t say my brain shares the same enthusiasm, but after dealing with this stuff for 25 years I’m finally accepting that the weight at which my body is healthy and functions at its best is not necessarily going to be the weight that my brain is comfortable with. And I’m committed to choosing my body’s health, over and over. The brain can learn. It *will* learn.

Likely to no one’s surprise, putting on this weight along with reduced mileage led to my healthiest training block ever. In 6 months, I missed 2 days of scheduled running for tiny niggles, which is unheard of for me. I’m not sure I will ever be what they call a “durable” runner - I think too many years of starving myself coupled with some chronic stuff due to structural/anatomical issues with my hips will always keep me a bit more on the injury-prone side - but I am on a constant quest to figure it out.

Writing this, I went back and forth on whether to call it a “relapse.” Was it? It’s hard to define with a disorder like anorexia, and I’m not sure the label matters. What matters is what you do about it. It’s not the first time I’ve had to pull myself out of hole and if I’m playing the odds, it likely won’t be the last. Maybe that’s the natural cycle of recovery, or maybe I can hope for more smooth sailing from here on out. I guess only time will tell.

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As I ran the best I could up the 400m Swear Hill at mile 99 of HiLo, I finally began to relax that history wasn’t repeating itself. I wasn’t going to break a femur, not today, I said to myself. Because I had done the hard things to make sure my path was different this time around. I had spent two years catching myself and rewriting the script, and I am fucking proud of myself for doing that, especially when no one else knew. I am strong, I am durable (falling on knees notwithstanding), and I am so lucky to be out here.

Several hours later I sat in the bottom of the 1950’s shower tub at our AirBnB as the beads of water mixed in with the tears streaming down my face. The tears weren’t from pain or from fear, but because I had just done the thing I didn’t know if I would ever get back to doing. It took a lot to get to that finish line, but even more to get to that start line. And that was more than enough.

1. I still don’t know the correct label here for myself, and perhaps it doesn’t matter. Since I wrote about this several years ago, I’ve had a lot more clarity - more to come in a separate post.

2. I realize this is a rather shallow heading, and perhaps it should be more like “I corrected a minor slip/relapse with my eating.” Your weight does necessarily correlate with how badly you are struggling, and eating disorders are about so much more than weight. However, I do think weight *is* important and relevant when it comes to sport, especially in a sport like running when you are subject to impact forces, so to completely gloss over it is doing a disservice to us all. Sometimes, to run healthy, you need to gain weight.

3. I will always caveat that yes I do acknowledge that objectively this is the case. That being said, regardless of the size of your body, a person who has struggled with an eating disorder is going to have feelings about gaining weight. Those are valid, but there’s a lot of nuance in how you talk about it. I believe this acknowledgement is extremely important in personal storytelling and how you thread the needle here.

4. Fueling solely with Spring Energy Awesomesauce also really didn’t help me here. Fuck that company and what they did to so many athletes everywhere.

5. It’s funny - in my 25+ years of dealing with this, I have never intentionally tried to lose weight. I would subconsciously restrict out of the fear of gaining weight, but the goal has never been to lose it. The problem is, when it happens, then digging myself out of that hole becomes the issue.

6. I could try and be more eloquent, but legitimately sometimes those are the best words to describe it.