ericportis.com

I finished a 50K

In June I ran the Orcas Island 50K. When I finished the race I also finished a 2+ year journey, which I’d started, in part, because I was staring down 40-years-old and had feelings about aging and my body.

I signed up for the 2024 edition of the race way back in 2023. I started training early. Then, I sprained my ankle. I rested, recovered – and sprained it again! I’d thought running uphill was going to be the hard part of all of this, but once I learned to slow down and listen to my heart – it was the downs that got me.

Then I broke my pinky toe (on a donut run1).

That series of injuries left me quite behind on my training. I tried to “catch up”, acquired a predictable case of runner’s knee, turned 40, and spent the 2024 race sitting behind a desk, volunteering:

Me, in a flannel, sitting behind a table, handing a racer their bib. I’m wearing a serious expression.

Photo by Somer Kreisman

Try, fail, try again. Here I am in 2025:

A head-to-toe portrait of me, in three-quarters view, running on a trail on a bright sunny day. There’s a beautiful view of the sea and islands behind me. I’ve got a bright, wide-eyed expression, like the tail end of a smile, and am looking straight ahead.

Photo by Somer Kreisman

Feelings! I have feelings about aging and my body! And how do we process feelings? With charts.

Training

Here’s all of my long runs (the race is the last set of bars, on the right):

Someone recently asked me if they should run a marathon. I replied: I don’t know, maybe not? The training takes so much time. Time alone. I say I want a life rich with community and yet I spent seven months waving goodbye to my wife on weekend mornings, driving to the woods, and putting one foot in front of the other for hours (before spending the rest of the weekend wrecked).

So, if you like and/or value other people, maybe don’t pursue a solo endurance sport goal.

On the other hand! It is rewarding to work steadily at something, for a long time, and watch the impossible slowly become possible. That’s in these charts. They go up and to the right.

(Mostly.)

Runner’s knee bit me again in week 17; I spent week 18 icing and running less; when that didn’t fix it I spent week 19 not running at all. I instituted a regular routine of exotic squats. I built back distance and time, then re-introduced climbs and (scariest of all) descents. It went well. I fixed it!

Encountering and solving problems like that changed how I think about running, what I think it’s for. When I was younger running felt like a test of character. Success was about, alternately:

  1. finding flow and getting in “the zone” or,
  2. digging deep and pushing through.

Contrary to this, Matt Webb recently described training for a marathon as a kind of engineering challenge: learning to understand your body as a system; using that understanding to solve problems; new problems teach you new things about the system. That’s how it went with my knee. That’s how a bunch of things went. Patient research and careful trial-and-error hits different than a Nike commercial, but for a 39 40 41-year old, who has feelings about aging and his body? It hits deeper. It is thrilling.

Race Day

So after a more-or-less successful seven-month training cycle, my longest long run had been for just over 80% of the both the 50K’s distance and elevation gain. On the final descent of that longest training run, I contemplated what it would be like to run for six more miles and climb/descend another twelve hundred feet. The training plans say you can do it. I wasn’t so sure.

I did it.

During those last six miles of the race, here’s what I was thinking:

  1. I am going to finish!
  2. I need to slow down.

I did not feel like I was “finishing strong.”

One fun (?) thing about a race though, is that you get to compare yourself to other people. A lot of other people needed to slow down, too.

Here’s a box plot of the distribution of racers’ paces over the four officially-timed segments, with the median pace marked by a black line and my pace marked in blue:

A box plot of the distributions of the four segments of the race. The first segment had the fastest p25-p75, with paces ranging from 11:40-16 minutes per mile. The median was pace around 13:40 and Eric’s was around 12:50. The second segment had the slowest p25-p75, with paces ranging from just over 15 minutes per mile to 21:30. The median pace was around 17:50 per mile and Eric’s pace was a brisk 15:50. The third segment got faster; the p25-p75 ranged from around 12 minutes to around 16 minutes per mile. The median was around 13:50 and Eric’s pace was around 13:20. The last segment gets noticeably slower again (although not as slow as the second segment). The p25-p75 ranges from around 13:20 to around 17:00; the median pace was 15:10; Eric’s pace was around 14:30.

Thoughts:

The distributions are interesting; there were few-enough racers that a chart of everybody’s paces through the four segments is more-or-less legible, too:

More than a hudred lines showing the individual paces of each racer over each of the four segments. You can see more individual stories than in the previous chart -- like racers who DNF’d because they did not hit cutoff times after reaching the top of Mt Constitution. The fastest racer is also notable - they were one of the few who got faster over the last segment. In general people got faster or slower together – the order of folks doesn’t change that much, generally – but there are a few outliers (people who got much faster or slower than the people around them from one segment to the next). The transition between the third and last segments involved a lot more chaotic change than the transitions between the earlier segments, as racers either finished strong or hit a wall.

I’ll close with the best piece of endurance-running advice I’ve heard: “If you feel bad, eat something. If you feel good, slow down.” Advice for life.