Stoking Optimism No Matter What
Plus a profile of Junko Kazukawa, my ultrarunning role model for the new year
Happy new year! I love saying and writing that. We’re all starting a new phase and experiencing a spark of promise, no matter how daunting the circumstances.
Before I share this week’s story, I want to thank you for taking time to read this newsletter. Over 3150 people have subscribed to receive my Wednesday stories and commentary. That amazes me. I’m sure you all have more newsletters, books, and other media to read and view than time, so I appreciate you make time for this one.
Scroll to the bottom to read a new year’s poem inspired by a party at my house. First I have a life update and a profile of a badass older woman.
The gifts of running and optimism
2025—wow. I can’t believe it’s been a quarter-century since I rang in the new year as a 30-year-old new mother in our first little two-bedroom cottage near north Berkeley, holding my almost-two-year-old baby girl and watching Sting perform his song “Brand New Day” on network TV (back when we watched network TV) while we collectively held our breath to see if the Y2K bug would make everything malfunction and lead to chaos.
My husband and I had just bought a big house that was in escrow, so I was nervous about affording it and moving and fitting into the new neighborhood. I wanted to plan a second child but felt nervous and overwhelmed about that, too. I faced a deadline for an assignment for a local magazine that I was stressed about writing, because I had no real structure or workspace at home since I quit my job as a daily news reporter to prioritize being a mom.
To calm and focus myself, and to boost my confidence and ego, I trained for the Boston Marathon—my first Boston.
Twenty-five years later, similar anxieties and hangups dog me—about the future, my kids, my place in the community and reputation (although I’ve mostly let that concern go), productivity, purpose, health and longevity—even with all of adulthood’s experience under my 100-mile belt buckles. Still, and thankfully, running goals continue to focus, calm, and fortify.
This year, I am not making resolutions, but I am endeavoring to be optimistic. I will “fake it ’til I make it” if necessary—that is, act optimistically even if inwardly I slide toward pessimism—and I will will myself to believe that my optimistic outlook and actions will become reality. That’s it, and easier said than done.
I’ve been coaching myself through injury (I have not run since November 2), and through anxiety about the state of politics and the environment, to stay positive and do what I can to make things better, to believe in the body’s healing power, and to count my blessings. With optimism, I’m bolstering faith and confidence that I’ll be ready to tackle and finish the Hardrock Hundred in July. Getting a spot in that storied event has been a decade-long goal. If I can’t run it due to injury, I can’t defer the spot. It’s all or nothing this July.
I repeat to myself: I’ll be ready, and with the magic of race day, I can do more than I think I can.
Now I’m being tested to role model and practice optimism for my daughter. She got in a skiing accident last week. At first it didn’t seem that bad, but an X-ray then CT scan showed it is, in fact, quite bad, and we need to line up surgery for next week. She fractured her tibial plateau. It’s an awful accident more common than I had realized, caused by a twisting jump or bump that makes your femur (thigh bone) smack down so hard on the tibia (shin bone) that it cracks the top of it.
I’m in total mama-bear mode to treat and heal her, channeling my energy to get her the best care possible. Scheduling treatment—which has to happen within two weeks of the fracture—is complicated by geographic distance, the new year’s holiday, surgeons being on vacation, orthopedists overly busy with an influx of ski-accident patients, and insurance. I’m suppressing imagined worst-case scenarios (involving complications, pain, and healing time) and being as positive and pro-active as I can. I’ll personify optimism manifest. I know she will get good care and recover well because I will drop everything and move a metaphorical mountain if necessary to make that happen. And I’m doing it.
I need someone to role model optimism for me. I need a mentor. I need inspiration.
A role model—meet Junko Kazukawa
With that in mind, I reached out to a Colorado ultrarunner I’ve admired from afar and wanted to get to know. We had a lively Zoom talk last Sunday—the kind of talk where you bond with someone and within five minutes you’re both laughing and agreeing, “That’s so crazy!”
I can count on one hand the strong female ultrarunners over 60 whom I’d call friends and who give me confidence that I can keep doing my sport into the next decade (Sophie, Suzanna, Becky, Tina, Ali). I greatly value them and want to be that role model for younger female trail/ultra runners when I’m in my sixties.
Now I’m optimistic I’ll be able to count one more after I meet her in person this summer, based on our talk last weekend: Junko Kazukawa, 61, who lives in Denver and originally is from Sapporo, Japan. She moved to Colorado in 1987 at age 24 to study English and get a degree in exercise physiology and kinesiology from the University of Northern Colorado.
Junko, like me, got into Hardrock through the “female never” lottery pool after a decade of trying. But she is much, much more experienced with big mountain ultras than I. She credits her longevity in the sport and lack of injury largely to ongoing strength training.
She works full time as a personal trainer and endurance coach. She coaches mountain/trail/ultra with Boundless Coaching, and coaches strength and mobility through her company Junko Mountain Training.
Some of her ultra credentials:
In 2015, the summer she turned 52, she became the first person to tackle and succeed at both the Grand Slam of Ultrarunning (four 100-milers in one summer: Western States, Vermont, Wasatch, and Leadville) and the “Lead Challenge” Leadville Race Series (doing all five 50- and 100-mile mountain-bike and trail-running races put on by the Leadville race series in one season).
In the past two summers, she finished the 205-mile Tor des Geants in early September only a month after finishing the Leadville 100. This past year, she also again finished the whole Leadville series to become one of only seven women—and the oldest—named a “Leadwoman.”
In 2021 and 2016, she finished the 106-mile UTMB in Chamonix, France.
In 2018, she finished the Ouray 100—the only 100-miler I’ve ever DFN’ed, that same year—and in her mind it’s the hardest 100 due to terrain, weather, and a route with over 40K feet of elevation gain.
She discovered marathon running at age 37 (she has run Boston and New York multiple times) and five years later was diagnosed with breast cancer. In 2009, the cancer returned, and she had a mastectomy. It was then that she became determined to run 100-mile ultras, having learned about 100-milers from doing mountain bike races in Leadville. The Leadville 100 was her first in 2011, at age 48.
She’s single, no kids and no pets, and her family is in Japan. “But when I retire, I’d like to have a cat. My life goal is I’d like to go back to northern Japan, where I’m from, and do a bed-and-breakfast type of thing, so I could have a pet and an organic vegetable garden.”
I started the conversation by explaining that I like to spotlight over-50 runners whose accomplishments as endurance athletes are overlooked, and she said, “People really don’t pay attention to those over 60.” At last September’s Tor des Geants (TdG), she won the women’s 60+ age group, “and I got no attention.” But she addd and laughed, “It’s for my own satisfaction.”
In 2023, she had finished second in her age group at TdG, so she set a goal to finish first this year and lower her time. TdG makes a massive 205-mile loop over the tallest Alps of Northern Italy, often featuring extreme weather. It’s so difficult, it takes several days to complete and has a time limit of 150 hours (6 days, 6 hours), and some of the aid stations are called “life bases” with sleep stations. (Junko thinks the Ouray 100 is even harder than TdG, however, because TdG’s life bases provide hours-long comfortable breaks from the race, whereas the extreme conditions and sparse aid stations at Ouray mean steady going without much time for sleep breaks.)
At the Tor des Geants last September, only about 20 miles from the finish and in the middle of the night, Junko encountered a snow storm. She was the last runner to get out of the aid station before the organizers held other runners back until the weather calmed.
“After I left the mountain hut, there was nobody in front or behind me, and the wind was blowing really hard with snow,” she said. “But it wasn’t that severe to me, living in Colorado and coming from Sapporo. I wasn’t scared of anything, because I had the right gear—my microspikes on, and I was warm enough—so I had the whole trail to myself and got excited about it. It was great!”
(I want to bottle up and ingest that intrepid enthusiasm for my final 20 miles at Hardrock!)
She finished the 2024 edition of TdG in just under 140 hours, three hours faster than she had in 2023 in spite of much worse weather, and won her age group.
Embracing being flat and bald from cancer
We talked about her breast cancer, and I asked a personal question that I feel not enough women discuss—reconstruction with implants versus going flat-chested. Athletic women who go through a mastectomy, or who get implants for aesthetics but later need them removed, privately debate whether to stay flat and defy society’s standard of how women should look. So I asked Junko what she did.
“Flat, 100 percent,” she said. “I may be a little on the weird side about that, but the doctor showed me pictures of ladies who did reconstruction, and I thought, I’m never doing that. As a runner, I don’t want anything bouncing around. I never had big breasts, but just enough to annoy me when running. The doctor also told me that if I got them, I’d have to replace them in 10 to 20 years, and I don’t want surgery again.”
She continued, “You have to think about what’s important to you—to have breasts and a nice figure, or not. For me, being an athlete, I didn’t want to mess with any of that. If you want to get them bigger than they used to be, do it, but it’s nice not having them. You don’t have to have a bra, which is the best thing ever. … Losing breasts and losing hair from chemo wasn’t important to me. I enjoyed being bald. When can you be a skinhead when you become an adult? [She laughed.] So I really enjoyed being bald for once in my life and never had a wig either.”
Shifting to Hardrock, I observed that the race, which looms large and intimidating for me, should be quite manageable for her, given her past ultras. Will she find any parts of the Hardrock route challenging?
“For me, it’s not the course” that’s difficult, she said. “But for any overnight race, I have two things I need to deal with. One, I get queasy and dry-heave a lot and can’t eat much. That, and I get sleepy, no matter what.”
How does she cope with nausea and sleepiness? She just gets through it. She chokes down gels, and she goes off caffeine for several months prior to feel caffeine’s kick in the middle of the night of a 100-miler. But neither strategy really makes the problem go away—she still dry-heaves and moves down the trail barely keeping her eyes open during nighttime miles.
Fitting with her maverick personality and extreme endurance, she’ll take an unusual approach to tapering for Hardrock—she’ll do the Bighorn 100 three weeks prior to it on June 21, then the Leadville trail marathon the following weekend, “just for fun, because this year I can’t do a lot of Leadville stuff. Then I’ll have two weeks to recover for Hardrock.” (Actually, 12 days.)
That training and racing plan makes my head spin (my peak training run pre-Hardrock will be a 50-miler in early May, then I’ll only run regular long runs through June and taper for three weeks before the event)—but it also inspires me.
Junko raises the bar and what older female ultrarunners can do. I don’t have to think of myself as declining. I can aspire to think and act more like her and do what I can to improve instead.
For more on Junko’s background: this iRunFar profile on her. For more on the Tor des Geants, read my profile of Suzanna Bon’s stellar run there, when she finished in the top 10 of women overall at age 58:
Last night, on New Year’s Eve, we had a big bonfire party that we rescheduled from the winter solstice. On December 21, when we normally host the bonfire, not enough snow created a grass-fire risk. Thankfully, good snow fell the week after Christmas, so we celebrated with friends and neighbors. It was the fifth year in a row doing a party that began in December 2020 as an outdoor, socially distanced, Bring Your Own Everything pandemic gathering.
One of the guests last night was a notable poet, former Colorado Western Slope Poet Laureate Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. She writes a poem every single day or night and has maintained this streak since 2006! I subscribe to her poem a day (you too can here)—I start every morning reading her poem that arrives via email—and I’m sharing her one from today. It’s about our bonfire, but really it’s about mindful observation and wonder. It inspires me to pause, observe, feel, and try to find the words to capture the moment. It stokes my optimism. I hope it does for you, too.
At the Bonfire on New Year’s Eve
To the list of things I will likely forget,
add the color of the sky tonight
as we stood around the bonfire,
the way the deep blue gave way
to a deeper blue, to a deeper blue,
until it was blue no more—
every moment more lovely
than the moment before.
How many moments of wonder
have I forgotten in just this past year?
The forgetting makes them no
less wondrous. In fact, as I stood
at the bonfire, I was aware of all
the wonder stored in this body,
how it has shaped me, created me,
as much as any food I’ve eaten,
as much as every walk I’ve taken,
as much as any vitamin. And so
I gathered it in me, the vision of sparks
against the clear night sky, and Venus
perched atop the barren tree. The heat
of the flames and the crackle
of trapped moisture turning to steam.
There will be times this next year
when I desperately need wonder,
and though I will likely forget
the particulars of this night,
let me not forget how to be stirred
by beauty, remade by it, even.
So I practice now, this art
of falling in love with the world.
Come tomorrow, I will practice again.
-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Rosemerry has a new collection of poetry available, The Unfolding (this links to our local independent bookshop), and she writes and podcasts with Christie Aschwanden on Substack about the creative process at
.Wishing you the best for 2025.
Wow, loved reading about Junko. What an absolute legend!
Thanks so much for sharing Rosemary Trommer — I followed your link to her site to sign up and ended up staying to read 3 week’s worth of poems. It’s one of the nicest things I’ve come across in a long time.