Kodiak 100 Recap

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]

To start, I didn’t finish. I dropped at mile 56 due to some debilitating knee pain. I think every ultra runner has probably experienced the DNF at some point. It’s happened more than once to me, most recently at Broken Arrow, where I dropped out at mile 3 because I pulled my hamstring. That was early June, and Kodiak was only a month and a half later. I spent a few weeks recovering, then ramped up my miles for a few weeks before toeing the start line at Kodiak. I started the race less prepared than I wanted to be, but I knew that if I kept moving, kept eating, kept drinking, I’d probably be okay. I didn’t bargain on yet another injury, but life is full of things we don’t bargain for.

In February, I ran Black Canyon 100k, and afterwards, had some tendonitis (or what a PT told me was tendonitis) in my right foot/calf. After addressing that issue, I injured my left hamstring at Broken Arrow. At Kodiak, the quad muscle that connects to my right inner knee grew irritated. Twenty-five miles in, it was bothering me, but I could ignore it. Thirty miles later, I could barely walk on it, and I decided to stop. It’s never easy to stop. I hate stopping. But the pain was sharp and constant and I knew 45 more miles would cause more damage than I wanted to reckon with.