COACH’S CORNER - A DNS and a DFL by Andrea Doney

I’m a passionate and committed runner and coach, but you wouldn’t know it to look at me. I’m duck-footed, lumpy, red faced and short sighted, and about as talentless as its possible to be with a fully able body.

As a child I pretended to be sick to get out of school sport carnivals and avoided activity at all costs. But a few years ago, for a complex set of reasons fuelled by trauma, I decided to go for a run. And despite having no natural ability, no competitive spirit, no athletic intuition, and no kinetic intelligence, I fell in love with it.

Over the years I’ve graduated through the full race spectrum, from parkrun to ultramarathon and back again, and relished in the sense of personal progress and pride that the races have given me.

In November 2022 I took on my longest run, the 80km Bondi to Manly ultra, and to nobody’s surprise I was dead f&%*#ing last across the line. I loved it though, and rode the high of this accomplishment for a long time. But it came with its own toll of a mild hamstring strain and some physical burnout, and I returned to shorter distances for the next year or so, until the ‘what else am I capable of’ curiosity rose like a ballast in the second half of 2023. Which brings me to the point of my story.

In my head, 2024 was meant to be a year in which I returned to ultra-running. So with naïve goodwill and the indomitable courage that is fuelled by a few gin and tonics, I signed up for Sydney’s backyard Ultra in April. I mapped out my plan with my amazing couch (shout out to Anne-Marie Cook if she’s reading) and began to clock up the training runs.

But as you might have guessed by the title of this piece, it didn’t go to plan. Training on the course of the backyard ultra I had a significant fall, the biggest of my running career, and I suspect I broke a rib amongst a significant litany of bruises and cuts and scrapes. It hurt to run and I backed off the plan for two or three weeks, hoping that I hadn’t lost too much time. Then just as I was getting back into it, I was struck down by a mega dose of covid. As someone who rarely gets sick, I was astonished at my own frailty and diminished capacity, and retreated to bed for around ten days while I snivelled and coughed my way through youtube videos on trail ultras and wondered if six cups of tea a day counted as a hydration strategy.

When I finally returned to real life, I had to make the hard acknowledgement that there was more than a month missing from my training plan, which was likely too much for my mediocre talent to rebound from in time. So, in my next coaching-catch-up-slash-counselling-session (thanks AM!) we agreed that withdrawing from the BYU was the safer and wiser choice, because as the saying goes we have but one body and many races. And instead I would focus on my other A goal of the year which is Gold Coast Marathon.

But withdrawing from races comes with its own baggage, right? It’s a bit embarrassing, it feels wasteful and there’s a fair bit of self-criticism in the process. Until I remembered that whether I lined up at the start or not didn’t change the fundamental fact that was NOW A PERSON WHO SIGNS UP FOR ULTRAS. And that, I think, is my journey. From an anxious, bookish couch potato incapable of running to the corner, to a coach and ultra-runner, my identity and my trajectory is forever changed because of my decision to try. Even the so-called ‘failed’ version of me is more wildly capable of anything that old me could have dreamed of. So if DFLs and DNSs are part of my ultra-mediocre journey, then that’s fine, because they take little away from the work that it took to get me here.

But there’s one more thing to this tale. I’m currently overseas, watching my adored mother succumb to a cancer diagnosis and fade through her final chapter. Both her experience of this and mine have strong parallels to ultra-running, and I’m sure it’s my training in endurance that’s allowing me to cope, just barely, with the grief. What’s more, the fact that I don’t have to train quite so hard at the moment has become a blessing, amongst other things allowing me to sit on her bed for guiltless hours, rifle through her drawers full of trinkets from my childhood, browse the family photo albums and type this tale.

So I guess what I’m saying is, running is about more than being on the start line, being eight laps in to a backyard effort, or emerging on a podium. The real race is in becoming the version of yourself who has the courage to sign up, the grit to face whatever the training throws up and the experience to know when its better to drop out again. Ultra-running gives us capability to explore, to endure, to try, to grieve and fail. If you were to measure my year so far in metrics, I’d be an unmitigated failure. But the truth is, it’s ultra-complicated, and I’m in it for the long run.