Reflections on a DNF

by Chase Parnell — September 15, 2021

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This one is tough to write. Feels a bit like I committed a heinous offense and now I’m before the judge recounting the crime with everyone I know in the gallery. I dropped out of the Wasatch Front 100. We are a few days removed and of course the whole experience is on repeat in my mind and I can’t quite seem to turn it off. Maybe by spewing it out onto this electronic page I’ll get to the bottom of how I feel about my decision to quit, and if I really even care.

The race went off Friday morning at 5am into some pretty steamy conditions. The course begins with a 4,000 foot climb up Bair Canyon, which I took super easy. I settled in with a crew that was moving at a similar pace and just walked up that sucker in roughly 30th-40th place. As we approached the top of the climb, the sun was rising, illuminating the mountains around us. I turned off my headlamp off and…

Actually, I’m not going to waste your time with a full recounting of the day. This isn’t an inspiring story. What were the take-aways? What did I learn? Here’s the thing. About 30 miles in, I was moving like I had 70 miles on my legs. I was already reduced to a pathetic hike/run ratio that had never hit me that early in a 100. I knew I wasn’t in the best shape of my life but I thought I’d be faring a little better than that! Lesson #1: running ultras “just for fun” is something I guess I’m not quite ready to embrace. In the past, I’d usually start a race conservatively and then my training and fitness would help me pick people off throughout the day and create a satisfying experience. At Wasatch, I was out of the race from the start and I didn’t have the legs to be chasing people down. That sucked. No momentum, no competitive energy. I was left only with a vague possibility of some sort of satisfaction if I hung on and finished. I guess that wasn’t enough, at least on this particular day. I’m a competitive being and maybe I didn’t realize until now how much that element was actually driving me to dig deep and do my best in ultras.

Jumping forward, it got hot out there in the afternoon but overcast skies and some rain actually made it feel not all that bad. I was getting my calories in and staying hydrated. My brother said at both Big Mountain (mile 31) and Lamb’s Underpass (mile 47) that I was looking a lot better than many of the others coming in. And I actually believe him, I don’t think he was just saying that to motivate me. Leaving Lamb’s was a little rough but during that nine-mile stretch to Big Water (mile 56) where I ultimately dropped I sort of felt like I’d found my 100 mile pace for the day. It was cooling off and I was doing fine, just fine. I knew I had a disturbing amount of hours left to go but in my head I was still thinking that if I just jogged the flats and downs, and hiked the ups, a finish was likely.

Wrong.

Literally right when I arrived at Big Water aid it started to rain hard. We actually got hailed on earlier in the day but this time the sun was down, it was almost time to put the headlamp on, and now I’m starting to wonder about what these upcoming exposed ridgelines were going to look like. There was an aid worker who told me I should hang out for a bit to wait for the rain to pass but in my head I wanted to get out of there, get moving and keep clicking off the miles. This aid worker also said that the upcoming section was heavily treed, which would provide good cover, but that the next stretch was all exposed and that I’d want to have all the clothes I have in my pack on considering the rain and wind. Great, anxiety activated.

Nevertheless, I get out of the aid and start up the climb, up up up. I have my jacket on and I actually had some light gloves and a buff if needed but I also knew that those things would do very little if we got slammed with a real storm. But isn’t that always the case? I thought earlier in the day that we experienced a classic Rocky Mountain afternoon thunderstorm, but now we’re getting hit again and I didn’t see any of this in the forecast so it definitely caught me off guard.

Just when I flip on the headlamp, the lightning starts to crash. Maybe 4-5 clatters, really close. Strike, boom. I’m now soaked and a little cold but again, it was still more a fear of what was coming. I continue on, the heavy rain passed and I’m gathering myself, trying to push the fear of the unknown back into the recesses of the brain, when I come around a bend in the trail to find two moose right in front of me, ten feet away maybe, one directly on the trail and one just off it in the brush. Cows. Big. I slowly retreat and the anxiety dials up a notch. And listen, I say anxiety because anxiety is something I’ve dealt with for a long time. I’ve written about it in the past, it’s no secret, I really struggled with it in my 20s but now it only flares up in moments like this. It makes things worse than they should be. Sets off panic. It’s a fear booster, I think irrational thoughts, I feel nauseous, my breath quickens, and I immediately start looking for an exit. How do I get the hell out of here and make it stop?

So I’m standing there in the dark, wet, yelling at the moose, and getting cold because I’m standing still. The moose were unperturbed, just nipping leaves off the branches and munching. A hiker I passed coming up reaches me and I brief him on the situation. We stand there dumbfounded until another runner comes up with a more tactical approach. This guy picks up a stick and chucks it into the brush right next to the moose, which actually worked. The moose slowly sauntered off the trail but not far because there was a drop-off down to a creek and the moose really didn’t have anywhere to go. Runner dude and hiker dude start edging closer, saying they’re just going to go for it. I stay put, reflecting on my encounter with a much more aggressive moose in the Big Horns of Wyoming. And then a calf materializes and jumps across the trail. Delightful. So there’s now two big cows on the left and a calf somewhere on the right and the trail passes in between. Never get in between momma bear and baby bear, right? Well, runner and hiker dudes end up making it through just fine, they weren’t trampled or hoof-slapped into a gory bag of bones. I yell ahead to them that I’m going to give it another minute. This twenty foot stretch became the crucible of the race. It felt like if I committed and passed by the moose then I was also committing to the potential storming ridges, the fear and uncertainty, and whatever else was going to happen throughout the night and final 40 miles.

It was a quick analysis: F this. Why? What am I doing? For what? For a finish? A buckle? I wasn’t seeing it. My proclamation before the race that I’d use all 36 hours if needed proved hollow. I didn’t know how close I was to breaking; throw in a little storm and a couple moose and I was done.

I have gotten more conservative in recent years when it comes to risk. Spot trackers, emergency blankets, whistles, and more have all made their way into my running pack and I know that’s the “smart thing” but some of it is actually a result of this semi-irrational thinking around risk and fear and death. I don’t have good control over it. So yeah, in that moment I ran the equation in my head, tried to be rational, but I chose flight over fight. Get home to Nikki. Dash. Belen. Greta. I just wasn’t in the right headspace, so I quit. I’ve now DNF’d two out of six 100 milers I’ve started.

So of course this all leads to some difficult contemplations. First, do I even really like doing this anymore? I mean, knowing what you know now about how my brain operates, are mountain hundreds really something I want to do given my sensitivities to variable factors and conditions? I mean, I finished UTMB, it’s not like I’m a total wuss, but I don’t know if I see myself doubling down and working on developing more comfort in the mountains. I would never get through Hardrock in this state. I probably need some exposure therapy; kind of like driving in the snow, sometimes it helps to go spin some cookies in the parking lot to get comfortable with sliding, but ugh, why can’t I just run races that aren’t that wild? Is ego the only thing that attracts me to these really hard 100 milers?

It gets worse. So I get back down to the aid station after making the decision to drop and I start talking to this man who is trying to convince me to keep going. I’m feeling all the feels but there was no way I was going back out there, I was done. I don’t know if it was perceptible but when I explain to him that I was physically fine, but that I was dropping because of mental stuff, there may or may nor have been a quiver in my voice. And he was exactly who you’d want in that moment, old-timer with all-knowing soft eyes. He told me he was a 10-time Wasatch finisher. He tells me he would’ve killed to feel (physically) like I did at that aid station, that he always felt awful, sick and beat up, but he always kept going. And honestly, as he was telling me this and I’m trying to receive his messaging, all I could really do actually was feel bad for him. Don’t get me wrong, he was a perfectly nice guy, but this 10-time finisher ring he showed me was not inspiring. It was depressing me actually. You did what exactly ten times? Why does that mean anything at all?

Now, I’m fully aware that this narrative would be very different if I finished the race. So maybe I’m pouting? I don’t know. When I looked around at the other runners pressing on from that aid station, I thought that maybe they were all having a very different experience than me because they were doing things the right way. I’m in my head, I’m driven by competition, I don’t have a pacer; maybe I’m the one sucking the air out of the room. I have the thought then that maybe I need to spend a year pacing/crewing/volunteering and not racing at all and see if that injects some life into these lenses. But that was just a thought.

This is clearly precarious territory here as Treeline Journal is a website about ultrarunning and the stories within the sport, but my allegiance to honesty is far greater than any desire to succeed so I’m saying how I was feeling at the time, and really, how I’m still feeling now. Sorry, the stoke is low my friends. Maybe it’s just this phase of life: professional uncertainty, three kids, etc. I took a gamble and ran the race despite conflicted feelings. Not sure if it was the right choice. Not sure where to go from here. I love to run. I’ll never stop running. Might need to just take a step back for a minute and think. Just what I need, more thinking.

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