Motivation: How a hurricane is to blame (39ish weeks to go)

I bet you might be curious as to what prompted this whole “I want to run 100 miles” shenanigans.

Well. If you ignore the part where I probably have some strange emotional hangup about achieving difficult things, I would say the driving factor was actually because of a hurricane.

Just a bit of dramatic background here. I live in Asheville, North Carolina. I’ve been here for about nine years and absolutely love this city and the surrounding Western North Carolina area. It has provided me with easy access to beautiful running and hiking trails, as well as some fantastic beer. It’s a great fit for me and my wife and we have no desire to leave.

Leading up to September 2024, I had been running somewhat frequently for most of the year, maybe averaging around 15 miles a week with some big pushes and some flat out zeros mixed in there.

The biggest achievement of the year was a fantastic 50k trail race called Ridge to Rails out in Old Fort, NC in June. After that, I kind of fell in to a bit of summer time laziness, enjoying drinking out on the French Broad River, hiking a bit with my dog, and checking out breweries with my friends and wife. It was pure Asheville bliss.

Enjoying floating down the French Broad River. Not a training plan in sight.

Then, Hurricane Helene made landfall on September 27th, 2024 and really fucked us all up. 

Not only did the hurricane cause the deaths of more than 230 people nationwide, it absolutely devastated Asheville and our surrounding towns. We had some serious rain leading up to the hurricane so the ground was just too saturated. Down trees and flooding absolutely wrecked our community. Many people lost their homes and businesses. We had three major areas of town that were pretty much completely washed away or destroyed. Besides not having power, internet, water, or cell phone service for the first few days, a mini gas crisis also broke out. It was truly chaotic, scary, and just straight up surreal.

And then it just got worse.

A majority of my friends went without power, running water, and internet for weeks and the entire city also went without clean drinking water until Thanksgiving! Once I was able to access the internet and see the scale of the destruction, it was unfathomable. Complete towns were washed away. Many of my favorite breweries, restaurants, shops, bars and art galleries were just… gone. Imagine your instagram feed showing tutorials on how to make outdoor showers and information on where the closest water and food resources were located. It was our new normal to use a port-o-potty that had been set up in a Whole Foods parking lot.

No, not a concert venue. This was in the downtown Asheville Whole Foods parking lot. Temporary port-o-potty set ups like this were all around town since we were without running water.

Having a hurricane cause so much damage to our mountain town was something none of us ever expected. It’s not even been 3 months and the effects are still lingering. Our community really banded together and rallied during this time and I am extremely proud of how resilient we have been. But if you drive around town, the remnants of the destruction are still there and for me, the smell of freshly cut pine will now forever be associated with the feeling of utter grief.

Not surprisingly, I had fallen into a bit of a funk post-Hurricane. Like many of my friends, coworkers, and community, the hurricane really fucked us up. I felt physically and emotionally not in a good state to run. I actually didn’t run again until October 15th, and it was an awful 2.38 mile run around my neighborhood with a sad 12:16 minute/mile pace. And then even after that, I still just couldn’t muster the energy to put my running shoes on with any sort of consistency. 

Part of the reason was that besides my neighborhood, there really wasn’t anywhere to safely run. My favorite trail spots were completely inaccessible due to the tree destruction. Down power lines and trees also still littered sidewalks and roads all over the city, making urban running, and driving, unsafe as well.

It also just felt… wrong. It didn’t feel okay to be out running around as if everything was fine. Because everything wasn’t fine. 

Since running is such a huge part of my mental health, I really was not in a good place. I work at a grocery store so once we (luckily) restored power two days after the storm, I went right back to work and poured all my emotional trauma into my job. Providing groceries, compassion, and at times being a pseudo-therapist to customers during this time became the thing that really got me through the weeks. And alcohol. A lot of alcohol.

I can’t say for sure what exactly prompted me to finally claw my way out of the sadness. I had been seeing a therapist before and during that time, who was also Asheville based, so they too were also in the throes of this whole disaster. I perhaps can credit them with providing me with the suggestion of setting a goal to focus on instead of all this awfulness. Maybe I was just sick and tired of feeling negative. Who knows. 

I decided that I needed to choose a goal that would distract me from all this. And this goal had to be big. 

After I had run my 50 mile race in September of 2023, I had told my wife that there was no way I would ever do a 100. She had laughed at the time and told me that she knew I would change my mind.

Apparently it just took a natural disaster to kick my butt into gear.

Sign at the Hard Times Connector trailhead at the Bent Creek Experimental Forest in South Asheville taken on November 5th, 2024, over a month after Hurricane Helene.