My Review of the Burning River Ultramarathon

A while ago, I saw a clip of a standup comic making a joke about surviving a zombie apocalypse. She argued that if the networks went down, and people did not have access to phones or social media, nobody would survive. Without the ability to share how well you are doing, to post on TikTok how many kills you have or on Strava how fast you can outrun the undead, you would just lay down in a ditch and give up. What is the point if you can’t tell everyone else about it? The absurdity of this is funny, but mostly because it holds truth. If you existed in a vacuum, would you still do all of the things you do?

I signed up for the Burning River 50 mile ultramarathon about a month ago. Signing up for a 50-mile ultramarathon might seem like something worth announcing. But the strangest part is that I haven’t really told anyone. For one reason, the absurdity of it. For another, to do something just for myself.

Most long distance runners make their mileage their entire personality. Can you blame them? It is a lot of time, work, and energy to commit to such a feat. But what would happen if someone did something like this and kept it to themselves? I am here to test that. (Other than telling you – but you don’t know who I really am anyway.) The Venn diagram of people who know who I really am and know I am training to run 50 miles through 4500 feet of climbing in the national park is essentially a circle.

I think about people like Alex Honnold climbing El Capitan without a rope. An objectively insane thing to do. But imagine if he did it alone, didn’t film it, didn’t tell anyone, and just went back to his car and drove home. At that point it stops being a historic accomplishment and starts being a secret that nobody asked you to keep.

Even the first person to run a marathon, Pheidippides, made sure to tell someone. Granted, he died right after. But the message got through. History remembers the run because someone was there at the end of it.

Henry David Thoreau went to live alone in the woods to strip life down to its essentials and prove he didn’t need any of it. He stayed for two years, two months, and two days. Then he went home and wrote a 350-page book about how great it was to be alone. Nobody has been more publicly committed to privacy.

Which makes me wonder how many extraordinary things have been done that nobody knows about. Someone, somewhere, probably ran fifty miles through the woods at some point in human history and never told a single person. No medal, no results page, no finisher photo where you look like you are about to pass out but also want everyone to know you finished. And that raises a different question: if nobody knows you did something hard, does it still count?

I think it does. Maybe even more. There is a kind of pride that only exists when there is no audience. When the only person who knows what it took is you. No applause, no congratulations, no proof other than the fact that you remember how difficult it was and you kept going anyway. That’s what I wanted: to do something demanding, something unnecessary, something that would not change anything about my life except the quiet knowledge that I did it. Without an audience, you could quit at any time. And the only person who would ever know is you. But you keep going.

But I did tell a handful of people, including my mom. Not because I wanted encouragement, and not because she is a runner, which she is not, other than one half marathon over a decade ago. I told her the way you tell your parents things that you know they will not fully understand, but you say them anyway because it feels strange not to. She listened very carefully, in the way people do when they are trying to decide whether to be supportive or concerned. A week later, she called me and told me she signed up for a 100k ultramarathon.

This was not the outcome I expected. And it made me realize that maybe telling people about the things you are trying to do is not always about getting credit for them. Sometimes it just gives other people permission to try something they would not have tried otherwise. Maybe the point is not to prove that you can do hard things alone. Maybe the point is that nobody actually does.

Subscribe to Cleveland Scene newsletters.