|
How do you turn pain into purpose? How do you quiet the inner critic that insists you're not enough? And how do you meet the person waiting at the edge of your own capabilities?
To help us contend with these questions, I'm joined by an ultrarunner who has spent years living inside them.
Mark Dowdle answers all three with his feet.
A former football and lacrosse player who came to running late, Mark cuts a very different figure in this world: a team-sport athlete in a sport of solitary mountain purists. But don't let that fool you. This past spring, he won the BPN Backyard Ultra, covering 306 miles across 73 hours.
He once quit his job and ran 475 miles from Chicago to Windsor, Ontario — racing college athletes along the way — just to reach the starting line of the Beer Mile World Classic. And in the process, he has quietly dismantled the notion that the capacity to endure is reserved for extreme people in extreme situations.
But his story doesn't begin with a love of the sport. In fact, he'll tell you he doesn't even love running. It's simply the vessel — the way he finds out who he actually is when the rubber hits the road. It begins instead with a college kid chasing acceptance in destructive ways, until a late-night run broke something loose, and running became the way he processed what he otherwise couldn't face.
Which is the thing to understand about Mark: he's less an ultrarunner than a change agent who happens to run. The miles are just the platform.
|
