In three months time I will attempt to run 100 miles in one go. I tend to not bring up the actual distance of my runs and races and just put out there “I have a race coming up” or “I have a long run this weekend”. If the question comes up “How long is your race?” I will actually answer it, which tends to generate a lot of disbelief and tends to lead to the same question: “Why?”

It’s a valid question, and one I asked myself a few years ago when I first learned about ultra-marathons. It doesn’t seem possible. I ran a marathon before that point and felt that was one of the hardest physical things I’d ever done. However, something kept calling to me, and eventually I caved, deciding to go for it. Since that day I’ve run multiple 50k’s, timed races, and two 50 milers and I will often ask myself the same question everyone else does. “Why? Why do I do this?”

The answer I always come back to is, “because it’s hard and to see if I can.”

Like most people, I’ve struggled with many different things in life, and it’s human nature to find issues with things even if there are none. If not, we all should be a lot happier in our daily lives because everything has been made for our comfort and to make things “easier”, which is not the case. It’s easy to think something is really hard, or the worst when your perspective on hard has been skewed by a world of comfort.

I have two great twin boys and an awesome wife, and if I don’t keep perspective it’s easy to get lost in the minor stresses of a child throwing a fit, some unforeseen expense, or some minor thing your partner does that might annoy you. Instead of feeding into that loop, I deliberately choose difficult challenges as a reference point. These ultra distances redefine what “difficult” means in my life, making everyday stresses seem more manageable by comparison. When I’ve run 50 miles through punishing conditions, a toddler tantrum doesn’t seem quite so overwhelming.

Growing up and into my early 20’s I suffered from depression. It was a miserable thing I did not get to choose, but I had to face the ramifications of it. That experience taught me how paralyzing it feels when suffering is imposed on you without consent or control. Ultrarunning offers me the opposite experience - voluntary discomfort where I control the terms. Each long training run becomes an act of reclaiming agency over my suffering, transforming it from something that happens to me into something I deliberately engage with. If my runs are the hardest things I have to deal with that day, week, month, or year, it helps keep the perspective that my life isn’t that bad.

Again you’re probably asking “Why the hell would you do that?” and I would answer, “I get to choose the hard. I get to choose the suffering.” This philosophy has become central to how I approach challenges. There’s profound freedom in voluntarily stepping into difficulty rather than having it thrust upon you. So much in life is out of our actual controls and it’s about how we react to it. Instead I decide to do the hard thing, and see if I’m capable of withstanding the storm that comes with it. I am picking to do something I may not be able to finish, and that’s intimidating. I don’t go unprepared because the journey is the destination. My preparation for this 100-miler has involved not just physical training - running 50-70 miles per week, strength training, and nutrition planning - but also mental conditioning to embrace discomfort rather than avoid it.

When the day comes when something in my life is really hard, like having to put down my two dogs 7 months apart, I have a reference point I can point to and say “I went through all that training, on days I didn’t want to, I suffered for something I didn’t know if I could finish, and regardless, I came out the other side. I survived.”

So why do I want to run 100 miles? Because it’s hard.