How to Become UNGVRND and Embrace Chaos

Temperatures were dropping, leaves were changing color and crunching underfoot, and the fall race season was winding down! Maybe you ran the 50th Marine Corps Marathon, or were gearing up for the original marathon in Athens, or maybe you were aiming for a personal best at a Turkey Trot before the year was over. Regardless of what you were running, you likely had a plan—multiple plans, even.

First we have our training plan. Week 1 is 3-miles, 5-miles, 3-miles at race pace. On top of that we have strength training twice a week with squats, calf raises, Bulgarians, hamstring curls, Copenhagens, RDLs, and we can’t neglect our upper body so curls, dips, pullups, and on and on. Then we have our 8-mile long run. Week 2 we increase this to 9-miles, then 12-miles, then a slight decrease, then up to 15-miles, and eventually all the way to the dreaded 20-miler. Were we remembering to stretch during all this?

Next is our nutrition plan detailing to the gram how much protein and carbs we need in the lead up to the race. We need 0.5-1 grams of protein and 2.7-4.5 grams of carbs per pound of bodyweight. Aren’t we supposed to be eating fruits and veggies too? What about all the leftover Halloween candy in the breakroom? While we’re running we need three mouthfuls of Nerds Gummy Clusters per 1.36 miles, a gel on every fourth mile, water with electrolytes on every even mile and plain water on odd miles. With a plan this detailed nothing is left to chance, we can’t fail…

Race Day comes and we have our pre-race plan mapped to the minute. We arrive at 6:27 AM, bag check at 6:34 AM, porta-potty line at 6:38 AM. Sixty seconds on average per person with 18 people ahead of us, and we’ll be relieved and to the start line at 6:56 AM. Three minutes thirty seconds of lazy stretching and jumping that we tell ourselves is activating our muscles, 25 seconds to make sure our Garmin is ready and double knot our shoes. Five, four, three, two, one, BANG the gun goes off at 7:00 AM on the dot. GO GO GO! 

Now we’re running with a plan for negative splits. We’re off at 3.4 seconds/mile below our target pace. We’re running the tangents shaving off every extra fraction of an inch. We speed up slightly on the downhill and slow down slightly on the uphill. At the halfway point we’ll pick up the pace to 3.4/mile faster than our average pace. When we get to mile 10 we’ll move to the left side of the road to run by the NETC Hype Pit, don’t forget to smile! MAINTAIN THE PACE!

But we’re slowing down, there are too many miles left to be losing ground…how many seconds do we need to increase our pace by to pick up 4 minutes and 38 seconds over 7.83 miles? Race math…F*CK! Energy is draining so we eat more nerds and double up on a gel. We can grab something at the next aid station.

SH*T! We dropped our gummy clusters taking out water and are now down a water bottle and gummies. We keep pushing to the aid station where we grab a water and pour it on ourselves to cool off, but it’s Powerade. Now our eyes are on FIRE. We keep pushing, harder, faster, we need to get back on pace, faster, we’re panicking. Push it…stop being WEAK! Stop panicking. Is that rain? No matter, push HARDER! Ignore the calf cramps we trained too much for this, push, don’t walk, suppress the PAIN! Move, push, panic, faster, Push, Panic, Move, Faster, Pain, FASTER, PUSH, PAIN, PANIC, MOVE, PUSH, PAIN, PANIC, PAIN, PANIC!

BONK!!! Bonk, bonk, bonk, we feel it like a heartbeat. Eventually we realize we’ve bonked before the halfway point…

How? We’d planned everything to perfection, but as Mike Tyson said “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” and I assure you every race is just waiting to punch you in the mouth. A perfect plan assumes it will be a perfect race which it will never be. Bonking out happens and will happen for a variety of reasons both in and out of our control. We plan everything out in hopes of minimizing the chances of something going wrong. We create structure and routine so that our body can do what we trained and planned for on autopilot. However this can also be our downfall as we try to control too much of something that is inherently chaotic.

As with anything the pendulum swings both ways. I’d never suggest taking on a big race with no plan at all, but I do encourage you not to have so specific a plan that the second something unplanned happens, everything falls apart. As our club motto states you have to Embrace Chaos…so how do we do that?

We have to train for some chaos and put ourselves outside of our comfort zones. Eat varied meals before runs to keep your body guessing, make a spontaneous detour up a big hill on a run, go bouldering instead of a formal strength session, stay up late watching movies with your partner before a run, run at random times of the day.

None of that is the full chaos of a race though and that is where UNGVRND comes in! This was a Track Dad fever dream created with inspiration from the Barkley Marathon, an unmarked, ultramarathon where runners navigate with a map and compass. UNGVRND doesn’t take it to that much of an extreme but before participating this year all I was told was a meeting time and location provided the day before with a cryptic message to come ready to challenge myself mentally and physically. Would there be navigating with a compass, T-Swift trivia, bare knuckle boxing, calculus problems to answer, do I need fuel and water, trail shoes…I had no idea?

But I show up and proceed to run with a team of new friends around the City, trying to navigate the most efficient route from waypoint to waypoint, without the aid of Google Maps, and only knowing the general vicinity. While my team is doing this, other teams are navigating to a mix of the same and different waypoints all in a different order. We’re running north, another team is headed west, and a third seems to be running in circles. I have no idea how long to the next waypoint or even where the following waypoint is. I don’t know how long I’m running total. Is a 5K pace too fast, is a 10-mile pace too slow?

There is trivia of a sort…we get clues about our next location and rack our brains to think of the location. What if I lead us 2 miles in the wrong direction, what if our destination has moved since I was last there? There is strategy, do you take the easy question with a time penalty, or the hard question without? Do you get more clues for a time penalty, or do you guess off one clue? 

Throughout all this the only thing you have control over is your attitude. It was encouraging to see my teammates smiling and laughing as we discovered we needed to run a mile to a new location that was right next to where we just came from. There was no finger pointing when I took us an unfortunately circuitous route to our next waypoint, just a feeling of accomplishment that we continued to move quickly through.

UNGVRND is an incredible race, and unlike what we typically participate in. It demands that you think and adjust on the fly, to work as a team, to use your head and be present, not just following the crowd in front of you. Most importantly, it forces you to let go and be in the chaos, adjust on the run in the face of the unknown, and to have fun doing so!

I urge all of us to step back from all these detailed plans which are stressful just reading and develop a different plan, to be ready for whatever Race Day throws at us! Will that have weekly miles, in race nutrition and a plan to get to and from the race? Of course, but it will also strengthen our mental toughness and tolerance for the unknown. This type of training allows us to thrive when the unexpected happens. Every race may try to punch us in the face, but we hit back stronger!

The chaos of UNGVRND may only be once a year, but there are all sorts of other races where you can train your tolerance for chaos. I ran a relay race with a ton of strangers in Colorado with no real sleep, running up hills at altitudes over 11,000 feet above sea level, while dodging moose and porcupines on the course, all while having some of the worst race nutrition, a massive quesadilla with rice and beans, all that dairy and the sheer volume of food, washed down with Modelo and tequila. The most inspiring example this year was an incredible group of NETC ladies who ran from Chamonix to Marseille, France as part of the The Speed Project. They were on roads in a foreign, non-english speaking country, hopping in and out of cars while self navigating across hundreds of miles. Did I mention that they were the 1st overall women’s team, the 1st overall American team, and set a women’s course record? Truly they embraced chaos! Find ways to train your own chaos, jump into that Taco Bell 50-miler, hop into a pastry or hot chocolate run, create your own chaotic run, and of course sign up for UNGVRND next year!

My friends, I urge you to plan and train your response to your plan falling apart in unexpected ways. We can’t eliminate or control the chaos, but we can control how we adjust to it. So, next race when the rain is falling sideways, your nutrition is not sitting well, and you forgot about the big hill at the end of the race, know that you’ve trained for chaos, smile and hit the race back in the mouth!

Embrace Chaos and be UNGVRND!