The Starting Point

I'm starting to forget when my running journey started exactly and how it has somehow overtaken my life. What's the saying "if it is your calling, it will keep calling you."

This is a full disclosure moment for me, although I’m questioning why, knowing my only subscriber on this platform is my mother. Sorry Mom! Even if this is mostly for me at this point, I want to go back and retrace my Ultra journey, so that one day I can look back and say “YES YES YES, I DID THAT!”

Not sure what you did the last week of March 2020, as the world started closing down, I’m guessing it wasn’t Ayahuasca. I on the other hand thought it was a great time to delve into plant medicine. I got onto a ferry, to Salt Spring Island and found myself with a Peruvian Shaman, his wife and one of my close friends, embarking on my first ceremony.

I wish I had some incredible story to share here, that will have to wait for my second ceremony. On this occasion, all I wanted was for the experience to end. I felt a lot of anger towards the Shaman as he kept smoking his mapacho, and the smoke took over the room. When it was finally over I went outside and kissed the ground. I enjoyed every breath of the cold morning air and thought well I never want to do that again. During the ceremony I kept thinking, all I need to do is go for a really long run. As I was bartering with myself during that experience I remember promising myself that I would go for a four hour run.

On April 1st, I started Calendar Club, which I will write about next week. Within five months of that experience I had checked of several Ultra milestones, 50km, 50miles, 100km. Maybe I got more out of that ceremony than I thought. Maybe that was all the plants had to communicate to me, RUN. Many other lessons have been learned in the 3400+ miles I have logged since.

So it started with Plant medicine and it has been fuelled by plants…