One mile. Forty-eight minutes and sixteen seconds. A personal worst, possibly. A dark PR. What was I doing with my life?
I was waist-deep in freezing cold alpine lake water, gritting my teeth and wondering, not for the first time that day, how exactly I’d ended up here, borderline hypothermic and bargaining with the universe over a bag of gummies in a non-consensual cold-plunge.
This wasn’t a summit day. It wasn’t some photogenic detour for the ’Gram. It was just a dumb detour on a long run at the tail end of a monster training week for my 100K. My legs were cooked, my brain felt like damp toast, and if I had to choke down one more “citrus-flavored” gel, I was going to start biting rocks instead.
To skirt around a sketchy snowfield that was just icy and steep enough to force me to circumvent it, I downclimbed through a scree field before stepping into the extremely still and extremely cold water of Capitol Lake. As I waded around the snowfield, the glacial water lapped at my belly button, causing my legs to feel intermittently numb and painfully cold, like an icy electric current ran through my quads.
I stood on tiptoe, wobbling like a baby giraffe after a generous hit of nitrous, trying to keep the bottom of my hydration vest, and my two most precious possessions, my phone and a bag of Scandinavian Swimmers, out of the water. My hand plunged into the overhanging lip of snow to steady myself as my shoes skated across slick, moss-covered rocks. That’s when I caught a raging case of the screaming barfies: that delightful sensation when your hands get so cold you want to scream, or barf, or both.
When I finally reached the far edge of the snowfield, I hauled myself out of the lake, dripping and semi-hypothermic, and began the slow, crunchy crawl back up to the trail. The rocks shifted menacingly under my feet as I inched upward.
A marmot emerged from the scree field and sat back on its hind legs while chewing on a blade of grass while looking down on me in a manner that can only be described as condescending. Apex predator my ass.
When I finally scrambled back to the singletrack, the same one that had led me to this snowfield fiasco in the first place, I glanced at my watch.
One mile. Forty-eight minutes and sixteen seconds.
A personal worst, possibly. A dark PR.
I swore, partly because that is an extremely slow mile, and partly because it meant I was definitely not getting to the trailhead in time to grab a sandwich from my favorite deli before it closed.
In those 48 minutes, I could’ve run five miles around town. I could’ve baked a loaf of banana bread. Finished a full wash-and-dry cycle. Called my mom. Watched an entire episode of The Golden Bachelor, with commercials.
What the hell was I doing with my life?
I sat down, frustrated, on a mossy piece of alpine granite, not even bothering to pause my watch (why bother? Any hope of a dopamine hit of validation via Strava trophies had flown out the window 48 minutes ago). I grabbed a Scandinavian Swimmer from my vest, hoping to at least soothe the ego burn with a carbohydrate balm.
So there I was: a fully grown adult, sitting alone in an alpine cirque sculpted by millennia of glaciation, sulking while chewing on a novelty candy from Trader Joe’s.
A Sky Pilot swayed gently in the breeze, its bright violet puffball petals impossibly delicate against the harsh rock. Nearby, the marmot munched his trail snack with visible smugness.
I had almost forgotten this was the whole point.
Not the pace. Not the route efficiency. Not the perfectly executed training plan or whether my watch told me I was “detraining.” Not even the sandwich I was now absolutely not going to get.
No, the point was this. This ridiculous, inconvenient, slow-motion circus of a mile. The marmot. The alpine wildflowers. The glacial water that turned my quads into static. The screaming barfies. The Scandinavian Swimmers.
It’s easy to forget. When you’re deep in a training block, when your watch keeps yelling at you about recovery time, when you haven’t PR’d in months and your inbox is full of race lotteries and Strava crowns you’ll never win, it’s easy to let running become just one more thing to tick off your to-do list, somewhere between laundry and cleaning out the pantry. A means to an end. Another metric to chase.
But the good stuff? The real stuff? It doesn’t show up on your watch. It shows up in the quiet moments that happen because you slowed down, or in my case usually, were forced to, like sitting half-hypothermic in a mountain cirque, chewing on a melted gummy shaped like a dolphin while a marmot looks at you like you’re the joke. That’s the point. That’s always been the point.
So if you find yourself forgetting, try this: leave your watch at home and run without tracking anything. Say yes to a weird route that might involve more bushwhacking than progress. Stop at the overlook. Let your friends catch up. Wade into the creek just to feel how cold it is. Take a blurry photo of something small and beautiful and unnecessary. Run for the story, not the stats.
In the age of supershoes, high-carb fueling, sodium bicarb, VO₂ max intervals, threshold tests, and perfectly optimized strength training, it’s never been easier to lose the plot. We fine-tune everything—our gear, our guts, our lactate curves—until running starts to feel more like a lab experiment than a love affair. And look, I love a spreadsheet. I love seeing progress. But there’s a difference between training with intention and turning the thing you love into a performance review.
That’s why I keep coming back to this line from the poet John Keats: “The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water.” He’s talking about poetry, but he could just as easily be talking about trail running. The point isn’t always to get somewhere, or to understand everything, or to measure the outcome. Sometimes it’s just to be in it. To feel the cold water. To flail a little. To accept the mystery.
Somewhere between the trailhead and the snowfield, I forgot that. I forgot that the whole reason I was out here wasn’t to prove anything, but to be in the lake. So next time you find yourself slogging through glacial runoff or being side-eyed by a marmot with a superiority complex, take a beat. Eat a gummy. Feel the ridiculousness of it all.
And let yourself remember: oh yeah. This is the whole point.
I love the Keats quote, glad you included it. It’s always so much easier to be ‘in the moment’ or place once you have some miles (a mile?) behind you. Leading up to a race, or a run, remains anxiety riddled for me.
Nice write up, I can really feel what you were feeling out there!
Wonderful essay. Very enjoyable & one to which I can relate.