History

My wife and I had started hanging out with the Fleet Feet of Nashville Dirtbags on Thursday evenings in the summer of 2012. My wife wanted something we could do together, which for me wasn’t going to involve road running. So she suggested trail running. I love being out in the woods hiking and camping but had never considered running on the trails, after a week or two I was hooked. At that point in time I could barely manage 2 ½ miles once a week, it took everything I had to go that far. As that summer came to a close, my wife suggested we sign up for a training program and run a race together. As I began to read the requirements for the training program I was really nervous. I read that I needed to be able to run for 5 miles, I’d never gone that far before ever. So I talked with the Fleet Feet coaches that would be doing the training and they assured me that I would be fine. In the course of getting ready for the training I ran the Mossy Ridge Trail, aka Red Trail, for the first time, it's a 4.5 mile loop not counting the access trail. About 2/3’s of the way through and on the who knows how many climbs since I had started I think I stopped and cried because I was so exhausted. I had no idea how much longer I had to go, I wasn’t even sure that I could finish the loop. At this point I honestly thought I was just going to wait until someone came along and they figured a way to carry me out, but that didn’t happen. Obviously I finished the loop and these many years later I still can’t believe how far I’ve come. That race we trained for was 9 miles and basically flat and I thought it was the hardest thing I had ever done.
In 2014 our local Fleet Feet opened its second location and during their soft opening they told us that we should go write on a chalk board toward the back of the store what we wanted to accomplish with our running. I had just learned that several of my friends/mentors where signing up for 100 milers, so I wrote that within 5 years I hope to run my first 100 miler. My wife thought I was nuts. Trail running has taken me out west and kept me in the southeast.
My while my training and racing has had many ups and downs one thing that a friend said has stuck; Jobie threw out this statement to several of us newbies a few years back “I like to run each distance at least 3 times before moving up.” For some reason that just seemed to ring true with me and I have followed that piece of advice. By the time I had run a 50k race, 31 miles, I had covered the distances between 10 to 20 miles at least five or more times. By the time I did my first 50 mile race I had at least 4 races at the 50k distance and at least 3 adventure runs at the 50k distance. When I started looking at the 100k distance, 62 miles, I had done 50 miles several times either as races or adventure runs.
One of the biggest things I’ve learned about trail races and myself is that I need to come close to doing the targeted race distance on my own before doing it for a race. It is truly a mental thing helping me to know that I can go the distance, even if it takes me longer on my own than it will for the race.