Yeah

...

these 100 mile finishes and it made them dream that they could.

I, uh, had no idea, and to me a marathon sounded, like, insane.

So what, what advice would you give to somebody who wants to be a runner?

Uh, that it's that.

It's hard at first, but it's tiny, consistent, you know, blocks that you're adding, or grains of sand even on the pile.

Like, you're just putting one more grain on there, one more tiny block each day.

And like, what, what motivated that? You know, at this stage of your career, is it addressing a perceived weakness, or just switching things up in order to keep things fresh and exciting? Would just love to hear you riff on those two marathons that you ran, and the motivation behind it.

Yeah, it was unplanned.

Last fall, I, um, after UTMB, at the end of August, decided to kind of fully switch gears and pump the brakes on what I had been doing with training.

I was just feeling like, uh, yeah, a little bit overcooked in a lot of ways, and UTMB was a great example of that, just kind of marching it in to the finish line.

Um, so we pumped all the brakes.

We kind of zoomed out, and then started pulling on the thread of road marathons, just because we were curious.

I knew at some point I wanted to revisit a road marathon, because it's kind of the first domino that got pushed over that led me to the ultra world.

Tell me about the intention behind going back to basics.

So with all that, was that an intentional move, getting ready for Cocodona? Or how are you thinking about that year in the context of these 200s?

Yeah, I had last year scheduled fairly heavily up until the end of summer.

I had races quite a few times.

quite long.

Cocodona was in the mix there.

And then Labaredo and UTMB.

And then after just a big stretch there of training and racing and asking a ton of my body, it needed a full reset.

And how am I going to like race this hard? How do you approach something of this magnitude when it comes to like allotting your effort, burning your matches, however, whatever analogy you want to use for like expenditure.

When Tenerife got canceled due to extreme weather earlier this year, was your first instinct to take the week off and restart? Was it to immediately start looking for something new? Walk us through that decision-making calculus.

Oh man, it was a whirlwind.

I think that week felt like... three months by the end of it, we were just like, what just happened? But going to Tenerife, we had been watching the weather and definitely seeing that up high because the summit of that race is at like 11,000 feet or something really high for starting at the beach and ending at a beach.

Yeah.

Um, but we had seen that it was some weather coming in for that summit.

And so Kevin and I had been, you know, kind of talking about like, oh, maybe they do reroutes or, you know, what might be the alternate option for this race.

But We knew there was weather coming in, but it hadn't crossed our mind that potentially the weather could cancel it as well.

Was it a decision you made? Was it, could you just like feel something shift, like walk us through that part of the race? Cause it was just, I mean, from what I could tell, it was thrilling.