My season comes to a close this weekend with a new adventure, The Ultracentric Experience, a 24-hour race in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It will be my first 24-hour event.

What took so long? To be honest, 24-hour events once seemed kind of nuts to me. I loved running 50 or 100 miles on a trail, spending a day and night in the wilderness following a ribbon of singletrack –- that seemed sane enough. But running around a small pavement loop or rubber track for 24 hours just to find out how many miles I could crank out, well, I didn’t really see it.

Then in 2000 while training for my second Western States 100, a coworker at Seattle Running Company, Jeff Dean, gave me his old paperback, Ultramarathon by James Shapiro. He said it was a must read, a classic from the early 80′s. It was worn around the edges and had that musty old book smell, and it took me a couple of months to get around to reading it.

Well, the book blew me away. The first chapter describes the author’s experience in a 24-hour race at the Crystal Palace in London, and the writing is some of the best I have read on what happens to the human psyche in an ultramarathon. After reading that chapter I started to think I could wrap my body and mind around a 24-hour race. And I began to appreciate the mystery and adventure of an event so many see as mind numbing and insane. Here’s how Shapiro says it:

“The 24-hour is one of the classics. Too many men and women I admired had done it and I hadn’t. It had too perfect a shape and handle for me not to yearn to pick it up and use it to pry myself open to see what I am made of. One learns to accept the destinies one creates for oneself. Besides, a race would be impossibly dull without some fear and doubts to wrestle against.”

So there are many reasons I’ll find myself on the starting line this coming Saturday: a book written three decades years ago, the challenge of seeing where I stack up against the legends of ultramarathoning, and a desire to pry myself open once again and see what I am made of.

If you can’t get your hands on one of the few existing copies of Ultramarathon, check out Shapiro’s article:“It’s Seven O’clock In The Morning” Sports Illustrated July 28, 1980. It’s an excerpt from the first chapter of Ultramarathon. It might just move you to run a 24-hour race!