Dear 2025
We were supposed to crush it.
In the end, you absolutely disappointed me.
The 2024 racing season ended abruptly. Not much to show for it. Just the remnants of severe chafing, a dog bite scar on the back of my leg, and a trip to the ER for 17 stitches. Same leg. Add to that the emotional bruise of a failed double-barrel attempt that still hadn’t healed.
But 2025…
The plan was simple: just fucking run.
Take what I learned. Admit how my head got the best of me. Be smarter. Do better. Crush it.
I had it planned out early in the year.
And of course, you blew every single piece of it apart.
First, the 48-hour race. The goal was a solid 24-hour split, plus some bonus miles just to see what I was capable of. A real shot at the Canadian 24-hour team. I knew I still had it in me. March and April were supposed to be about that.
Instead, you filled my schedule with coaching. Our kids program grew to 50 participants per session. An incredible thing. A draining thing. Somewhere in that growth, the drive to be that competitive athlete disappeared. Not dramatically. Just quietly. Maybe I’m not that type of runner anymore.
Then there was Vol State.
Again.
Unfinished business.
My heart wanted to crush it so badly. I dreamed of that ascent up Sand Mountain during training runs. Inspired by stronger runners the year before, I wanted to be a better power hiker. That led to tire pulls and posterior-chain work. I hit the trail behind my house pulling a tire down the road. No shame in how I looked. Anyone who asked knew exactly who I was and why I was doing it.
Instead, you delivered a nagging pain in my left hip. It kept getting worse until I couldn’t run. Eventually, I couldn’t even walk one kilometre to work. Standing hurt.
You forced me to slow down.
Because the signs were exactly what I feared: a stress fracture.
You did give me one small mercy. The MRI showed it wasn’t a fracture. Just the hip of an almost-50-year-old ultra runner reminding me of reality.
Vol State, if you’ve never experienced it, gets into your blood. It leaves you craving more.
I mourned for weeks.
Holding back tears whenever I thought about what was gone.
Shutting down any mention of the journey run.
Muting the podcasts.
Avoiding social media.
Telling myself: just wait for 2026.
Instead of late-night training runs and obsessively prepping my pack, you allowed me to create something else.
An event. A 15:38 timed run around a 400-metre track. An opportunity for 19 runners to attempt something unknown. For some, their first half marathon. For others, entry into the 50-mile or 100-kilometre club.
You allowed me to watch people start with excitement, hit the lows of real struggle and pain, and slowly realize that ultra goals don’t come as easily as a marathon. Then, in the final hour or two, determination took over. Grit. People pushing through to reach something they weren’t sure they could.
The week of Vol State, I still took the vacation time. I was barely getting back into running. My fitness wasn’t there. So instead, I packed up my car and went camping. By myself.
Four days of struggling to put up a tent and canopy. Sleeping alone in my tent, not knowing where the nearest person was.
Listening to animals rifle through what I thought were clean pots outside my tent at night.
Convincing myself it was not a bear.
Learning how to light a camp stove. A campfire.
Doing all the things I usually delegate to my husband.
Determined to be independent.
That first night, you gave me hell. No internet. No work. No distractions. Just sitting. Just being.
Day by day, I started to embrace it. No showers. Did I brush my teeth? Wearing the same clothes day after day. Back on the trails again, hiking with determination and joy.
Returning home felt heavy. Dragging, really.
But the second week, something shifted. Still avoiding the laptop and insanely long to do list. Dusted off my sewing machine.
Returning to a part of my life I thought was gone for good.
Creating again.
Fabric as my medium.
Bright colours.
Quilts I loved.
My brain started to obsess again, but not about running, coaching, or building something bigger. This time it was colour. Drawing. Pencils. Painting. An analytical mind trying to approach creativity analytically.
Still, I tried.
Keeping the Rideau Trail on the schedule.
I kept the dream anyway. Quietly. Tucked away. I needed it.
But I told myself I could be ready. That I could do it.
I talked it through with my coach. I told him I felt ready. Until he switched places with me and asked the question that landed like a punch to the chest:
“What would you say if I were your athlete?”
I already knew the answer.
You’re not ready.
Six weeks isn’t enough time.
You need a three-hour run. Maybe back-to-back.
And then a taper.
A suicide mission.
So you shut it down. Not dramatically. Not emotionally. Just logically.
That week, the one I was supposed to start a 330-kilometre journey with, you had me sitting in a council meeting. Listening to the mayor list off my accomplishments over the last 11 years. Not as an accomplished athlete. Of course not. But for the club I built.
I was turning 50 that October.
I wanted to do something epic.
Instead of logistics, planning, and training, September and October gave me more coaching. Kids, especially. The Prescott–Russell Recreational Trail Challenge. The Russell Run.
I watched my nieces find joy in running.
I watched an aspiring runner take joy in just showing up at a Learn to Run Program.
I watched the sun rise across cornfields as nineteen runners embarked on a journey across Prescott–Russell. You still made it challenging. Distance. Logistics. Volunteers. Coordinating everything. Holding it all together. It was like watching sausage being made. However the runners appreciated the end product – through emails and messages and smiles from the race photographs.
I watched Russell Run registrations grow by almost 50 percent. Something that was supposed to be plug-and-play created new challenges and lessons to learn.
Could I do an FKT?
In the end, I waved the flag.
Fifty arrived quietly. Alone. Sewing. A day with no work, no coaching, no presidency of a growing club. Not even a run.
Just me. An environment I’m comfortable in, after years of trying to fit into a crowd.
Somewhere in all of this, burnout settled in.
A quiet exhaustion that made everything feel heavier than it should have.
Training felt like an obligation.
Leadership felt like pressure.
Even the things I loved started to ask more than I had to give.
I wasn’t broken.
I was depleted.
And pretending otherwise was costing me more than slowing down ever could.
Of course, you wrapped it all in doubt. Doubt about my ability to lead. A familiar box of impostor syndrome, reopened and dumped at my feet. A reminder that leaving that life seven years ago didn’t magically fix everything. The same patterns, the same questions, just showing up in a different format, a different place, with different people. I wasn’t failing. I was being tested in a new way.
Now you’ve handed me a new struggle: climbing out of that hole.
“Just a few weeks,” I told myself. “Then we’ll be done.”
As we step into 2026, that’s the tension I carry.
You gave me the gift of pulling back. Of rediscovering a life I once had.
And at the same time, you’re quietly bringing back the drive. The determination. The pull to build a club. To be an athlete again.
We end 2025 with energy, persistence, and momentum.
But also with a desire to slow down.
2026 doesn’t arrive with clarity. It arrives with a tug-of-war.
Between slowing down and wanting more.
Between who I was and who I’m becoming.
Between rest and the familiar pull of the next challenge.
I don’t need to resolve that yet.
For now, it’s enough to notice it and stay honest inside it.
