Heya and welcome back to Five Things Running!
I’m back to swimming. I only went running once last week and then developed my annoying back pain again. This time I somehow managed not to run with it, but instead tried to rest a bit. Maybe I do get older and wiser, at least every once in a while. Sunday I went swimming again for the first time in a year or so and my back immediately felt better. I really do know about the benefits of swimming, but it really is so utterly boring. Also, I still have water in my ear from swimming this morning.
I’m also back to wearing a beautiful lumbar support orthosis, which is ideal for walking around in the summer sun and helps me keeping an upright posture. Getting older sucks, but I’m fighting back.
Here’s this week’s Five Things Running!
For as long as I can remember I’ve experienced frequent episodes of oceanic hunger to expand outward into the universe and be more than I am currently. These moments of bottomless yearning are always channeled through one of my two great passions: writing and running. Friedrich Nietzsche would say I’m feeling the pull of the will to power, or the desire to become the fullest version of myself. People tend to associate yearning with discontent, but for me these waves of soul hunger are a kind of ecstasy—pleasurably painful in the manner of ice water poured over your head in the middle of a desert marathon on a record-hot day.
This keeps us young, both mentally and physically.
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I think this sense of a shared experience with him explains why I couldn’t stop thinking about Roche after he declined my interview request. On one of my three-mile runs by the creek near my house, I listened to his appearance on Roll’s podcast. “I just wanted to have a day out there,” Roche said. “Whether it was a good day or a really hard day, it was going to be my day.”
Perhaps it was selfish, but I wanted that too. I wanted a purpose outside of my family. I wanted a goal that didn’t include putting an infant to bed or wiping a toddler’s butt. By finally spilling his secrets, maybe Roche had made that possible. Maybe Daniel had just done the program wrong. Maybe I could do better. Maybe, I thought, Roche was the real deal.
I love listening to David and Megan Roche’s Podcast and I think the openness is amazing - both during victory and defeat. It’s a great idea to use his guidelines for a training block and a race, even though the outcome will be vastly different.
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In a sport like trail running, where popularity, prestige, and prize money are all growing, are we unintentionally creating the perfect conditions for doping to take hold?
And more importantly, could we design financial incentives that actively discourage it?
Can we use financial and economic levers to incentivize staying clean?
I hope that the strong sense of community among trailrunners prevents runners from trying doping to get more podium finishes.
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The brain does a funny thing when you dip a toe back into relapse - your shit that wasn’t fucked up gets all fucked up again and you have to unfuck it all over again, slowly, if you want to right the ship.6 And so I did over these past two years with a lot of intentional work. Very slowly, and imperceptibly at times, the recovery mindset started coming back. At some point, my fear of being sidelined (again) from the sport I loved to do outweighed my fear of that second bowl of ice cream. My fear of what low energy availability was doing to my brain and risk of dementia outweighed my fear of that extra slice of pizza. My desire to move through the world in a body that I wasn’t afraid of breaking on a steep descent outweighed my desire to be the smallest person in the room.
I admire this perseverance, I really do.
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Corey Bellemore doesn’t enjoy the same name recognition as Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt. He hasn’t amassed the earnings or brand endorsements of LeBron James or Lionel Messi.
Yet over the past five years, this unassuming 30-year-old Canadian has put together an extraordinary level of dominance that may be unprecedented in world sport, his achievements surpassing anything that his better known peers have achieved.
Bellemore’s sport of choice is the beer mile, which involves downing four beers while running a mile really fast. He has won the Beer Mile World Classic, an international event which brings together the best of the best at drinking beer while also running a mile, for the past five years in a row, a staggering success in a hotly contested event.
Not all heroes wear capes.
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Now, go running!
— Nico
🏃🏻♂️
