32.76 miles. 23 miles. 20 miles. 10.7 miles. What do all of these have in common?

They are all tremendous accomplishments by some amazing trail runners.

Last weekend, a gang of Boise area trail runners (from Nampa, Meridian, Middleton, Boise – even Missoula, MT) took a road trip to Orcas Island, Washington, to run a trail 50K. About 1/2 of the folks in our group had never run a 50K before. Some ran the entire distance; some did not. But each of us ran what we were supposed to run for that particular day.

The course was hard as you can see from the elevation map.

But the difficulty of the course did not deter us. It did, however, slow us down a tad – so much that a few did not make the cutoff. Check out that climb from miles 13-15! But we were out there to have fun, and I can’t think of anyone in our gang who didn’t have some fun.

How was it that we all ran what we were supposed to run if the race measured 32.76 (on my gps, that is)?

Let me give you an example. Take the list of numbers: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11. What is missing? A normal response would be 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. But I say…nothing is missing. What is there, is there.

So, whether it was 10.7 or 20 or 23 or 32.76 miles, what was run, was run. Nothing was missing.

For those who didn’t go the full distance, I know it is a bit of a disappointment…at first. No one wants a DNF. But rather than “Did Not Finish,” I prefer to go with “Did Nothing Fatal” instead. Every race and training run are opportunities for us to learn, to gain experience, and to use that knowledge to make adjustments.

I “DNFed” in my first 100-mile attempt. Was I disappointed? Yes – for about 30 minutes. Then, after an appropriate, but short, personal pity party (b/c I felt embarrassed and that I let other people down – both which are irrational AND crazy), I was amazed and happy that I had just run 88 miles! Ok, so it wasn’t the full 100, but dang, that’s a long way.

The same holds true for any distance – 10.7 miles out of 32.76 on hilly, rocky, muddy terrain is no small feat, and it should be viewed as a huge achievement.

I believe that when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

Some may say that if you don’t run the whole distance, then you’re a failure. I say, if you run 20 miles of 32.76 that you didn’t FAIL to run 32.76 miles – you SUCCEEDED in running 20 miles.

So, congratulations to all the Boise Ridge Runners (and one stray) for whatever miles you ran on Orcas Island. Now it’s onward to the next adventure!