Before and After
Some consequences of running and resting off the grid for a week
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After being offline for a week and traversing some 170 miles of sandy, rocky, spiky, steep desert terrain, I remain in a foggy headspace. My body wants to sleep at least nine hours a night. My feet don’t fit into regular shoes. My eyes scan headlines about war, natural disaster, and political debate, but my brain won’t focus to process it. I left home for eleven days, but it felt like a month.
I don’t know where to begin this post, so I’ll describe this photo. It’s a before/after juxtaposition that the event photographer of the Grand to Grand Ultra created for all 38 finishers (38 finished out of 56 starters). The photo on the left was taken Friday, September 20, in Kanab, Utah, during our gear check, the day before we were shuttled to the north rim of the Grand Canyon to camp overnight and start the race on Sunday, September 22. The photo on the right was taken last Saturday, September 28, minutes after I crossed the finish line in 13th place overall, 5th in the Female Self-Supported category.
The weeklong race did not fundamentally change me, but it profoundly affected me physically, psychologically, and emotionally.
The person on the left, the “before” version of me, was wound tight with nervousness and focused energy. My mind was buzzing with thoughts and checklists related to race preparation—making sure I had the correct gear and food for the week, second-guessing the weather forecast, getting household and work-related matters organized, answering messages before going offline, and worrying about my husband and kids’ well being. I also was wondering how I’d measure up to the other competitors; I tried not to care, but part of me always will. I felt that I had to perform to a certain level and be a top contender as the event’s past female champ and as a three-time prior finisher of it. I wished I could approach the race with the innocence and wonder of a rookie, but I couldn’t. I knew what we faced, and I was bracing myself for one of the most physically challenging weeks of my life. I was concerned with the remote but reasonable possibility that my 55-year-old body, with its wonky knee and weaker stomach, would break down and finally say “enough,” unlike five years earlier when it had transcended hunger and pain to win it.
The person on the right, the “after” me, has cheeks and forearms speckled with new dark-brown sun spots. My left foot’s pinky toe and big toe throbbed from infection. My lower back hurt to the touch from a large open wound that developed from my backpack banging and rubbing against the skin there. My stomach felt clenched in a knot of hunger, and I wanted to get that photo done so I could get slices of finish-line pizza provided by the race organizers.
Yet, in spite of my impatient desire to eat, I felt profoundly calm and satisfied. I had been “a closer”—a goal in any race I run—meaning, I had finished strong, running as hard and fast as I could on that final stage, which featured a relatively runnable hard-packed hilly road (unlike the countless miles of deep, soft sand we could only slog through during earlier stages). I felt giddy while running those final miles, amazed at what my sore legs and feet could do. I thought to myself, “I’m still a runner! This is who I am.”
In that “after” shot, I am fully depleted but fulfilled. I have nothing left to prove. I am my own independent self and self-reliant. I’m wholly proud and have suspended self-criticism. My life had been boiled down to the basics for seven days—eat, run and hike, recover, journal, talk with others, sleep—and everything I needed was reduced to what I could carry on my back.
My only worry in that “after” photo related to my phone. I did not want to turn it on; I kept it off or in airplane mode all week, using it only for music, and carrying it in case of emergency. I wanted to call my husband to let him know I finished and was OK, but I dreaded the inevitable onslaught of message notifications and the possibility of learning about catastrophic news that had happened. I took deep breaths and resolved to accept whatever my phone delivered, and to take my time responding. I also resolved to care less about all the things transmitted through the phone that seek to distract my attention. I would savor these last moments in the desert, with the pink cliffs of Bryce National Park forming the backdrop, next to the fellow runners and volunteers—my new community of friends.
Let me detour here to make a pitch for going offline for an extended period, be it a long hike with camping, or a river trip, or whatever. The “digital detox” is magical. I felt calmer and more creative, filling a whole journal while writing in the late afternoons. I felt more observant, challenging myself to look and capture scenes in my mind rather than pulling out my phone to take photos. (I took hardly any photos, knowing the event photographer would take and share plenty.) I heard and took part in a stream of conversation at camp, as runners and volunteers sat around while free from electronic devices, simply talking nonstop or listening quietly.
This device-free downtime is a big reason I favor this small, intimate, off-the-grid self-supported stage race format above the new trend of continuous 200+-mile ultras. Participants in this event were forbidden to use any devices to transmit data, and we ran in areas that mostly lacked cell coverage anyway. Nobody posted to social media in the middle of the event. Nobody did anything online. We were fully present for each other. As a stage race (each day’s race featuring a segment of the overall route, ranging from 26 to 53 miles), we all stopped at the same point each afternoon and then recovered and camped together. Compare that to a popular 200+-miler, such as the Cocodona 250. In that event, runners are constantly on their phones to be in communication with their crew, and they feel compelled to post performative selfies and videos during it. They do not get to know the community around them very well because the continuous event doesn’t involve stopping to camp together. An ultra like Cocodona is a media hotbed featuring live broadcasting with commentary. It’s entirely online instead of offline.
I did, however, get one short moment in a videocamera’s eye, when my friend Mike McTeer who lives in Kanab met me on his bike as we ran the first portion of Stage 3, the 53-mile long stage (which for me was 55 miles, another story for another time). I’ll share that video clip here so you can see what running with a pack, which weighed about 19 pounds that day, looks like. This is about as fast as I ran all week, due to the pack weight, heat, and sand. This is also an example of a runnable stretch, unlike the majority of the route’s segments that were some combination of deep sand, cliff walls, rocky dry river beds, or off-trail dense vegetation.
In this clip, I’m describing how I had to start with the 10 a.m. wave of front-runners, unlike the bulk of participants who started at 8 a.m. that day and thus benefitted from cooler morning temps and more daylight hours. (The temperature was hitting 90 when he shot this at around 11 a.m.) In the clip’s first and final shots, you can see the sandstone buttes in the distance that we’d climb and traverse. I’m running with Szilvia of Hungary, the eventual female champ.
During the Grand to Grand Ultra, I also practiced and valued the art of doing nothing. As much as we worked hard physically, we also engaged in daily rest—true rest. I gave myself permission to do nothing except lie down with my feet up. As someone who has tried meditating but inevitably gets restless and bored, and who always skips the shavasana (rest) portion at the end of a yoga session, this restful time of the day felt blissfully restorative. I wanted to stay in that position, simply listening to sounds around me, letting my mind wander, and feeling my body melt into the inflatable sleeping pad. I’m going to try this at home now in the late afternoons and lie still for the shavasana minutes following yoga.
So by now you may be thinking, “Yeah, but what happened? How did the race go?”
Ordinarily I would write a race report, a blow-by-blow account of how the event unfolded and how I felt along the way. I’ve written race reports for over 20 years. In the early 2000s, a few years before I started blogging, I’d write a narrative to email to a circle of runner friends. Creating that narrative helped process the experience and share lessons learned—from the runner-geek minutia of calculating mile splits and timing 100-calorie gel infusions, to the more universal experiences of goal-setting and risk-taking.
Swapping race reports strengthened bonds with these runners and almost always proved entertaining. I still have a friend’s lengthy tale emailed to me in early 2007, when he tried to break four hours at the Way Too Cool 50K, because it’s such a vivid and absurd odyssey—and its readership numbered maybe twelve people. Those were the days when running pumped the flow of our creative juices and made us eager to chronicle the journey in words for the satisfaction of storytelling, even if hardly anyone read it. Those were the years before Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok shortened attention spans and turned us into “content creators” overly concerned with followers instead of being writers for the sake of writing.
I’ve decided not to write that kind of report here this time—but I will write it. This race report instead will be layered into my life report.
I’m making my experience at the Grand to Grand Ultra the spine of my memoir, which will have a two-track timeline. The story of my past—involving the experiences and people who shaped me and compelled me to run in spite of a non-athletic and often unhealthy upbringing—will unfold in between chapters devoted to all that happened and all that ran through my mind last week while traversing the miles from northern Arizona to southern Utah. With a working title Running Stages, my book will show why I devoted three decades to running so many miles—what I was running from and toward—and why I felt compelled to put myself through this test of endurance. It will be a Gen X coming-of-age and aging story with an overarching forty-year love story that goes through stages like a metaphorical ultra.
And that is my next ultra: writing this manuscript, then getting it published.
New race announcement
If my posts related to the Grand to Grand Ultra have sparked your interest, but you don’t want to commit to the time or mileage of a weeklong 170-mile stage race, I have exciting news: Colin and Tess Geddes, the organizers of the Grand to Grand Ultra, are starting a new single-stage continuous race with 115-mile and 50-mile divisions, May 16 - 18, 2025. Called the Utah 115, it will start and end in Kanab (which is such a cool little town worth visiting, located in the center of the “grand circle” of national parks), and it will cover much of the Grand to Grand’s long stage, including a stretch on the Coral Pink Sand Dunes state park.
They have not formally announced it or opened registration yet but promise to soon. I don’t know what platform they’ll use for registration, but follow their website and Facebook page for an announcement coming any day. I do not plan to run it, but I will do my best to be there as a volunteer.
And if you want the whole enchilada, registration for the 2025 Grand to Grand Ultra opens October 7, and the dates for the next edition are September 21 - 27.
Thank you for caring about our public lands
I’m deeply grateful for the 52 donors who contributed almost $4300 to my fundraiser for Conservation Lands Foundation, to protect the public lands in southern Utah and elsewhere in the West managed by the Bureau of Land Management. We ran through and near many sensitive areas that have received special protection thanks to advocacy by Conservation Lands Foundation and their network of grassroots “friends groups,” and we also passed by other areas in need of better stewardship. Carefully managing and protecting the ecosystems of public lands, rather than over-grazing and developing them for energy extraction, is key for biodiversity and climate resilience.
It’s not too late to donate! Please visit my fundraising page to learn more about Conservation Lands Foundation and to make a tax-deductible donation.
Worth reading
One of the most interesting pieces of news I missed last week involved the saga of ultrarunner Camille Herron and her husband manipulating Wikipedia pages. All I’ll say about it is, I’m not terribly surprised, based on the tone and content of their tweets over the years. I appreciated this short narrative about it and the power of stories on
’s Substack, which links to the main news story if you want to read what happened.
(Related to the paragraphs above about how I’m trying to manage my relationship with my phone and social media: I resisted the urge to dive into the very deep and potentially time-consuming comments threads related to this news story. It had the allure of juicy gossip, but I told myself, “You really don’t need this in your life.” I read the main story, and that was that.)
And hats off to fellow Substacker and friend
, who lives not far from me in this region, for her leave-no-stone-unturned treatment of shitting in nature and what to do about it. I love the thought process and creative process behind her poop crusade, and as the owner of a dog who seeks out human waste to gleefully roll in it and eat it, I share her pain.
Thank you for reading this far, and thank you to all who sent messages of encouragement the last couple of weeks!
I love before and after pictures from races. Usually the afters look so haggard, but your spirit shines through both pictures. In case you want an unsolicited piece of advice, I've been using the app called Roots to track and limit my screen time. It's made a big difference for me. Congrats on the race. You're amazing.
Woo—congratulations! And I can't wait to read your memoir.