Training through doubt

or, how I wondered if I was too old for this and then decided no

Three weeks from today, I’ll be running the longest distance and the greatest elevation gain I’ve ever done, in a marathon race in northern Greece. The experience of training for this race—the 44km event in the Zagori Mountain Running races—has been a new one for me, as I’ve had moments of doubt. Doubt about whether I will be able to finish. I think about the route, which passes right through the middle of the tiny village my father’s family is from and where the ancestral home has passed down to me, and I wonder: when I get to the village, will I be too exhausted to continue? Will I even make the 4 1/2-hour cut-off time and be allowed to run the remaining 22km up the mountain and then down again? Will I see my son and cousin and other friends and family and just walk home with them? Or, as my husband jokes, couldn’t I just walk home and have a shower beer and then rejoin the race?

The good news is that today I feel like I can do this. And I guess that’s what the training has been all about. I’ve been putting in the miles even while trying to maintain my rowing fitness, and I’ve been strength training and making sure to hydrate and balance my electrolytes and all the rest. I’ve even stretched! In a way, I’m especially pleased that I have had doubts and have moved past them because I think that means I chose a goal that is right at the edge of my limits. Sure, I could take this event as just a fast hike. (As is common with mountain running, there are plenty of stretches where you don’t run: you walk.) And I know I can hike that distance, having done just about the same two summers ago, partly following the route the marathon will take in three weeks’ time. But this race is, quite literally, more than I have done before. It’s longer and higher. How long is it going to take me? Eight hours or nine or ten? Can I finish before they pack up the timing systems?

And—I’m not going to lie: I am thinking of this—can I medal in my age group?

There are likely to be only a handful of women in my age group. The registration lists don’t show age (oh, I’ve looked), so it’s hard to tell except by taking previous results as representative. I may in fact be the only woman in my age group. And this possibility is what prompted part of my doubt. The insidious thinking goes like this: if there are no other women over 60 doing this race, does that mean it’s stupid/dangerous for me to do it? Do they—all the 60-year-old woman runners in Greece—know something I don’t know? Am I an idiot for even trying? When it comes down to it, the question I’ve had hasn’t actually been can I finish. It’s been should I start.

Yes, I should. I should because of how I even got into this in the first place. You see, these are my mountains. The race runs through the village where my grandfather and great-uncles were born and where I still spend a few weeks each summer. I went on my first hike there when I was ten, in a little group that included my father and uncle and great-uncle, three generations of Lazaridises tramping over terrain that our ancestors likely knew by heart. That hike was a short one—three hours up to the saddle presided over by a refuge hut and three down—but my great-aunt equipped us with, no joke, a leg of lamb, roasted potatoes, keftedes, boiled eggs, and probably a bottle of wine. After lunch at the refuge (where we freed an owl that had been trapped inside) my uncles took a nap—in true Greek tradition after a meal like that. But my father and I clambered up towards the base of the cliffs that rise from the saddle to touch a patch of snow left from winter.

Astraka cliffs seen from Papingo

Over the years, I’ve hiked that same trail with my children, my family, and friends countless times, and other trails around there, down the backside of the mountain and up again to a spectacular alpine lake. About ten years ago, we started seeing newly-painted blazes on the trail, and every now and then people running—running!—the trails we steadily marched up and down. And then we noticed little signs for something called the Zagori Mountain Race. A few years ago, the timing lined up so that I was actually there when the race was run. I cheered for the racers who came powering through on their way up to that refuge (and beyond), and cheered for the ones who flew through on their way down. There were two races going on at once. A marathon that wound up through the village, and an ultra-marathon that came through on the downhill. In either direction, these runners were amazing. They were moving fast, and they were strong and determined. And they were right here in my village.

I’ve always liked trail running, dodging poison ivy while taking my dogs into conservation land in the Boston suburbs, and even finding a fantastic dirt trail along Mt. Hymettos in Athens on visits to my mother. But the trails around Papingo, in the Zagori region of northern Greece, are like no others. Cliffs tower over you, a turquoise river winds below you, eagles play in the updrafts, and the paths are lined with fuchsia thistles and cornflowers and exquisitely tiny succulents. I think my first inkling of what it might be like to run up there came on a hike with my son when we sped up to Gamila Peak in record time and he amused me on the descent by running ahead, arms flapping in the air and overhead, playing with the incline. He didn’t know it, but he was showing me my favorite thing about mountain running: running downhill, when your stride has no set rhythm and your arms help you almost swim down through the air, on the edge of control.

I did my first Zagori Mountain Running race in 2017, starting small with the 10k, in which, to my pleasant surprise, I came in third in my age group. In 2019, I did the half marathon. I think I was fifth in my age group that year, which felt good, since I was 59 and would have won the 60+ by something like twenty minutes. This year it seemed the right thing to do for me to push to the next level and take on the longer challenge of the marathon: 44km (27 miles) and 8,500 feet of elevation gain.

Now that the race is three weeks away, now that there is just one more week of big training before a two-week taper, I feel ready. Um, yes, my left calf muscle is tight right now but I am resting it and adjusting and feel confident that I will be ready on the day. It makes sense to me now that I would have gone through a period of doubt when I was also just really tired all the time. It makes sense that now, after that training, I would be on track to be ready. So, I’m not thinking about the fact that I am 60 and might be alone in my category. I can’t wait to run up from the village of Tsepelovo, down into Vikos gorge and along the dry riverbed with its large water-smoothed stones, from there to the source of the Voithomati River where I’ve dipped into the ice-cold water with friends and family, up to Papingo where I will see my son and cousin and friends, up to the refuge by the Astraka cliffs where I once touched snow with my father, down to the high plateau and along the Megas Lakkos gorge I first hiked along with my husband and with friends from the US, and back to Tsepelovo. I’ll start at dawn and finish in the heat of the early afternoon. And the whole time, I’ll be running in my mountains.

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What’s your place where you feel confident? How have you worked through your doubts?