The Lowest Low is before Sunrise
What happens when you go full send to set a record on an 800 mile trail
April 16, 2024
The lowest moment is right before sunrise. For those living on the trail for days and weeks, we also know it’s one of the coldest moments. I was bundled in all my gear as I had been unable to stay awake enough or have enough reserves to move more than a few steps uphill at a time before exhaustion would hit. Shuffle, shuffle, stop. Breathe.
Mile 401, the Crux. Halfway.
My friend Tasha was with me, looking back at me as I stopped on a small incline, almost unable to breathe with even the small exertion of walking a few steps uphill at a time. My legs were so dead. A particular point of difficulty was an understatement. The next nearly 40 mile section through the Mazatal Wilderness felt like an impossibility on a body that was drained and a foot that was infected and swollen.
I was still ahead of the women’s course record pace, but couldn’t have felt farther away from finishing. I had fallen off the overall course record after my crew were unable to get to me on a 40 mile section 100 miles earlier. My pacer and I went the entire way without support, sleep or calories. We had calories for 18 miles and about 5 hours, not the 24 hours it took, running through the entire night. It left my body without any reserves. I was a shell.
The overall course record on the 800-mile Arizona Trail requires a 100k-a-day distance on foot for nearly 2 weeks, something that felt easy the first three days. I knew it would be hard, but I was well on pace for the record. On Day one I knocked out 72 miles and didn’t even feel sore when I laid down for bed in the trailer RV at our crew stop.
But here I was drained and a shell of myself with a foot that was festering after so much effort and still just halfway. I had been putting Voltarin anti-inflammatory cream through the mesh of the shoe to ease the pain, but at some point it just wasn’t working anymore and the shoes weren’t fitting as the joint swelled. My deformed bone had stretched and broken the shoe’s material wearing a hole where it pressed.
This was a pain I had become accostomed to over the past few years as the kinds of shoes I could wear that were wide enough dwindled. I was left wearing Nike alphafly road racing shoes. The shoe material was stretchable with shoe stretchers - a technique I’d learned a year before while running a world record 200 ultramarathons in 200 consecutive days. Unfortunately for me now, the joint had become infected and no amount of shoe stretching was going to fix it.
Tasha and I had just left Mile 401 after a sleep and in the cold and dark of an early mountain morning— me bundled in multiple layers top to bottom, her in shorts and a jacket. One thing to know about Tasha is that she’s one tough woman and neither my fatigue nor the frigid morning were going to budge her cheerful spirit or make her cold.
She was the kind of friend that would follow up just about any life tragedy you might tell her about with a positive refrain forcing you to right yourself on a more positive course because she wasn’t going to sit in the goddamn mud with you. But she would sure as hell pull you out of the mud with an “It’s ok!” A smile, a hug and a proverbial slap in the face if you were inclined to spend too much time feeling sorry for yourself. Just what was needed here.
The night before I’d stumbled into the mile 400 resupply location my crew had set up for me knowing I had to sleep. The original plan had been for me to grab some calories (and Tasha as a pacer) and proceed through the night on the Mazatal Wilderness section, one of the most remote and dauntingly long sections with no resupply. But that was not to be, I’d been hallucinating hearing people running up behind me and my legs were weaving around the trail unable to keep a straight line for many miles before I saw my crew.
I’m experienced enough to know that I was in bad shape. I’d let myself go too far into a deficit over the course of the previous 400 miles pushing— and because of the unexpected crew locations that fell through (as mentioned earlier) and roads that were unpassable leaving me and my pacer on trail for nearly 24hrs without expected support, much of it without food. At the time I didn’t realize how bad that would be. How it would leave me without any strength.
When you’re pushing for a record, you take risks that you wouldn’t otherwise take. You push your body to places you wouldn’t otherwise go, especially when time feels like it’s slipping away and your goal is far more ambitious that it needs to be to get the record. But I wasn’t interested in the women’s record, to be honest. I wanted THE record. The overall record. I knew I was capable of it, but I didn’t know if I could execute it. This record put me squarely outside of my comfort zone as a 100-200 mile kind of ultra runner. This record required me to run 800 miles. It required strategic sleep and pacing oneself for a couple weeks - not just a couple of days.
A record like this requires a monstrous amount of eating. So much food had to be consumed over those 2 weeks, it’s hard for someone who hasn’t run an ultramarathon to fathom. Imagine needing to consume 200-300 calories an hour for up to 20 hours a day. Sometimes for 24 hours a day. For 2 weeks. Might sound fun from the outside, but to be fair, it becomes a force-feeding race to eat as much as you can while moving as fast as you can— where you can barely stomach the food. You have no saliva. Your mouth is filled with sores and it’s painful to even swallow. This happened on day 3 or 4 and lasted through the record. I could barely eat, my mouth and throat were so painful. Any kind of spice or fruit caused extreme pain. It became torture to eat. Which made it harder to eat. So I ate less.
But, bright eyed and bushy tailed on Day 1 of my Arizona Trail Record-setting run project on the 800-mile trail I ran 72 miles. Not in a cocky way at all, no. I just wasn’t interested in following anyone else’s rules of careful strategic pacing. I’m going to do all the miles that I can, fuck it, full send. And the Full Send technique can be the stupidest, most effective and most painful method out there. If you succeed, you succeed brilliantly. And if you fail, you will fail brilliantly. Either way, you learn a lot about yourself and your sport.
And it was ok on Day 1 because I finished in the evening and still had time to get sleep before the next day’s 100k-ish run. Though it was a bit less sleep than I would have liked because it was either run 56 miles on Day 1 and sleep at an easy crew spot OR run 72 miles to the next crew spot. 56 miles wasn’t a 100k. 56 miles didn’t beat the overall record. At least not if averaged out. Naturally, when the day was going well, I opted for the 72 miles because that was on the Full Send menu.
Now, the Arizona Trail doesn’t make crewing easy. Nor does it make breaking the trail into bite-size 100k sections easy. Here’s the crux of pace-planning on an oftentimes tough crew access trail like the Arizona Trail: Day 1-3 had limited crew locations if you wanted to run closer to the 100k a day. You can’t break it into 100k sections. There would have to be longer sections and much shorter sections in order to finish where crew could access you. This hurt our brains and made it difficult to strategize as we went back and forth on what was best to do.
100k-a-day is the distance that would secure the overall FKT (fastest known time), not just the women’s FKT which lagged 4 days behind the men’s record. I was aiming for the overall FKT and my lack of patience early on in the record meant less sleep, a potentially major mistake I was willing to make. Had I not missed out on so many calories, it might have worked.
Interestingly, I wasn’t even sore after Day 1. The previous year I set a world record 200 consecutive ultramarathons in 200 days, finishing without any injuries or issues and I postulated that the huge base from 2023 running was what set me up to run high mileage on this project too. During my world record attempt I also noticed that my body revved up healing in order to do so much running. Not only did my body become more efficient, it worked more effectively.
The world record wasn’t without negative effects, however. My body became tighter and tighter over the course of the 200 days and even walking down stairs felt painful at times. I ran through what most people would consider major injuries and somehow was ok, not something that I could recommend to anyone else. My right foot bunion also became much worse and by the end of the record I was only able to comfortably wear Nike road racing shoes that I could stretch with shoe stretchers. As I prepared for the Arizona Trail record, I knew my foot might be the biggest issue as I might not be able to wear trail shoes the entire 800 mile length of it. And it sure was an issue.
I began with trail shoes on Day 1 of this record as we had snow and high mountain running, but by mile 20, my right foot was in agony. I switched to the road racing shoes and hoped for the best. Road shoes have much less protection from the trail and are a very thin and perforated to make them light and fast, but on the trail this meant dust and dirt could enter and if it was cold, there wouldn’t be any real protection to keep my feet warm. It meant bruising toes and toenails from rocks. It meant less stability in my ankles and legs. But it also meant the bunion wouldn’t rub on the shoe and the extra soft cushion on the road racing shoes helped soften the blow of 20+ hours of running a day.
So here I was at the crux, a few lifetimes lived over the past 401 miles, and in the deepest despair. Mistakes were made. Unexpected challenges that were well beyond what we had imagined had happened. How could we possibly do this for another 400 miles? My friend Tasha and I were on this segment and our videographer Dave. My crew back at the truck were anxiously watching my GPS tracker as they weren’t sure I should’ve left in my condition to do a 40 mile unsupported section. I wasn’t sure either, but I wasn’t ready to give up.
After a mile of climbing, the trail flattened out and the magnitude of the situation became unbearable for me. This was supposed to be my year. I was supposed to finish. I knew I could finish and yet here I was barely halfway: an insurmountable number of miles ahead— another 400 and impossible to comprehend— with a very broken exhausted body that wouldn’t respond. I collapsed to the ground in a fetal position, in a moment of deep despair.
I began crying and Tasha sat next to me, we hugged and sobbed together, a vulnerability I rarely would’ve expressed with anyone, even friends. I don’t remember our exact words but I remember telling her that I didn’t think people would love me if I didn’t accomplish big things. That my value was in what I do and that I wasn’t sure I could get through this, if I didn’t finish this trail.
She grabbed my face and held it, staring fiercely at me. “I love you more for seeing this side of you, I love you for you, not for what you do and you’re never getting rid of me,” The sun was slowly rising and we sat next to each other watching the glow, arms intertwined. It was weird to feel this intimate with a friend. To be this open. I didn’t normally let myself get so close.
“Well, I guess we better get going then,” I said as the sun slowly spread oranges and yellows across the sky, shaking away the dark, heavy blanket of night. A ladybug crawled over my gloved hand. I felt free. Free from needing to do this trail for some outside idea of love. Free from tying my self worth to my running accomplishments. What did it mean if I was able to do my big running feats without doing them for validation? I had never realized that this was part of my motivation and the realization floored me.
The gift of unconditional friendship powerfully propelled us through that 40 mile section, certainly not strength or training. Certainly not my very broken and infected foot. Each step I took was into a world where I ran for myself. What that meant wasn’t yet completely clear to me, but it was exciting.
I knew I was going to have to slow down, stop even, and get surgery for my foot in order to come back and do what I wanted to do on this trail. I needed to start really fueling myself.
I needed to love myself. I didn't know what that meant, but I was going to find out one step at a time. For now, that meant letting my friends, like Tasha, love me. It meant finishing the hardest section of the trail, even if I couldn’t finish the entire trail for now.
We made a movie about the record attempt and it’s been submitted to a bunch of film festivals. It was made by some really amazing videographers — Dave and Danny— You can watch the trailer here, but stay tuned for the full 40 min film “Halfway to Crazy” when it shows at film festivals and eventually on YouTube!
Movie Synopsis: What happens when you push your body to try and run 60+ miles a day, over and over again? Ultra runner Candice Burt finds out as she attempts the fastest time on the entire length of the 800 mile Arizona Trail.
This journey ends up being not so much about the record, but what happens when things start to fall apart as she pushes her body to the edges of what’s physically and mentally possible. Follow along as Candice explores the depths of her mind and ultimately the meaning of success.
You are incredible
can't wait to see the film!