I Wanted to Remind Myself I Can Do Hard Things

By Natalie Voss

There's a particular kind of silence that settles over you at mile 70 of a 100-mile race. The cheering from the last aid station has long faded, your crew is somewhere ahead in the dark, and it's just you, your headlamp, and the relentless drumbeat of your own footsteps on the trail. That's the moment I signed up for. That's exactly why I was there.

I'm not chasing prize money. I'm not trying to qualify for anything. I'm a thirty-four year old high school English teacher from Flagstaff, Arizona who runs ultras because somewhere along the way, I forgot what I was made of — and the trails have a funny way of reminding you.

How It Started

I came to distance running late. I was twenty-six, freshly out of a relationship that had quietly convinced me I wasn't particularly capable of much, when a coworker casually mentioned she was training for a marathon. Something about the way she talked about it — not the race itself, but the process, the early mornings, the earned exhaustion — lit something up in me.

I ran my first half marathon eight months later. I cried at the finish line, which I hadn't expected at all. Not from pain or relief, but from something closer to recognition. Like meeting a version of myself I didn't know existed.

A marathon followed. Then a 50K. Then, because apparently I have no sense of self-preservation, a 50-miler. Each finish line handed me something I didn't know I was missing — a quiet, unshakeable confidence that had nothing to do with anyone else's opinion of me.

Why the San Marcos 100

This past spring I toed the start line of the San Marcos 100 in the hill country of central Texas. It was my second attempt at the 100-mile distance. My first, two years ago, ended at mile 62 with a DNF that I'm still making peace with.

I signed up for San Marcos not because I was certain I could finish it. I signed up because I needed to look myself in the eye and try again. The mantra I kept coming back to during training, the thing I wrote on a sticky note above my desk and repeated to myself on every long run, was simple:

I wanted to remind myself I can do hard things.

Not just in running. In all of it. The hard conversations. The uncertainty. The mornings when getting out of bed feels like its own kind of ultramarathon.

The Race

The first 40 miles felt almost deceptively good. I stayed conservative, kept my nutrition dialed, chatted with other runners, soaked in the pre-dawn beauty of the hill country. I felt strong in a way that almost made me nervous.

Then mile 55 happened.

My stomach turned on me. My legs, which had felt fluid and easy just hours before, started sending urgent complaints with every downhill step. The little voice that lives somewhere behind my left ear — the one that specializes in catastrophizing — woke up and started running its mouth.

You're not going to make it. Remember last time? You know how this ends.

I stopped at an aid station and sat in a camping chair for eleven minutes. I know it was eleven minutes because I stared at my watch the entire time, negotiating with myself. My pacer, my friend Dani, crouched down in front of me and didn't say anything for a long moment. Then she said, "You didn't come all this way to sit in a chair."

She was right. I got up.

Miles 55 to 100

I won't pretend the back half was pretty. It wasn't. There were stretches where I was moving so slowly I'm not sure it qualified as running. There were tears somewhere around mile 80 that I couldn't fully explain. There was a hill at mile 88 that I'm fairly certain was put on this earth specifically to break my spirit.

But I kept moving. One aid station to the next. One mile marker to the next. I thought about my students, the ones who sit in my classroom convinced they aren't smart enough or capable enough. I thought about what I tell them — that difficulty is not the same as impossibility. That struggling through something hard is not failure. That showing up is most of the battle.

I crossed the finish line of the San Marcos 100 in 27 hours and 14 minutes, just as the morning light was starting to turn the sky pink over the hills. Dani was right beside me. I ugly cried. Again.

What I Took Home

A buckle. A finisher's photo where I look approximately one hundred years old. And something harder to put into words — a renewed sense of trust in myself that I didn't realize I'd been missing.

Running 100 miles doesn't make you special. Plenty of people do it. But doing the hard thing you were afraid you couldn't do — whatever that hard thing looks like for you — does something to you at a cellular level. It rewrites a story you've been telling yourself, quietly, for years.

I can do hard things.

And honestly? So can you.

Natalie Voss is a distance runner and high school English teacher based in Flagstaff, Arizona. She runs trails, drinks too much coffee, and is already signed up for her next 100-miler despite swearing she wouldn't be.