by Donald Buraglio

A guy doesn’t just wake up one morning and decide he wants to run 100 miles. That would be crazy.

Instead, the decision evolves gradually. It’s a succession of minor goals that become progressively more ambitious from year to year, as each small accomplishment lays the foundation for a larger one to follow. Keep this up long enough, and actions that once seemed unthinkable eventually enter the realm of possibility.

Think of it this way: even Britney Spears was normal once. She was simply a cute girl who sang catchy songs and became famous for her, uh … precociousness. Then she started making questionable life decisions, her behavior grew increasingly irrational, and before we knew it, she was shaving her head and flunking out of rehab. It seems now that she went completely off the rails — but we forget that it took her quite a while to get there.

In other words, craziness is very much a slippery slope — one I’ve been sliding down for a number of years. And now I’m the special kind of idiot who thinks that running 100 miles seems perfectly reasonable — but it took me a while to get here, too.

Sure, I was normal once. In my younger days, I started running to lose some weight, and soon thereafter thought that a marathon would be the ultimate challenge I could set for myself.

One marathon turned into several per year, which eventually became more than 40 overall. For the last decade I’ve also branched into triathlons of increasing length, including the ironman distance. My marathon habit slowly gave way to 50K and 50-mile trail races, which I’ve done on a regular basis for the past few years.

star shaving her head, to me, it just seems like the next step. (I almost used the phrase “logical next step”, but didn’t think I could sell it there. See? I haven’t totally lost it.) I’ve known about the Western States Endurance Run for many years, and always knew that I’d try to enter it one of these days.

Having said that, there were two other critical criteria I used to determine whether I was ready to enter Western States. They are decent guidelines for anyone to use as a general rule of thumb.

First and foremost is that you have to enjoy trail running. This sounds obvious, but it’s absolutely essential. In fact, I should emphasize it more: you can’t just like trail running, or even love it — you have to LOVE it. Here’s what I mean …

Picture your favorite activity. Maybe it’s golfing, or playing cards, or watching TV — it really doesn’t matter. Chances are, the longest continuous duration you’ve ever done this activity is somewhere in the neighborhood of several hours. In those situations, you’d probably take short breaks for meals, or (if it’s an outdoor activity) turn in when it gets dark outside, or call it quits when you feel like grabbing a few hours of sleep.

One hundred miles of trail running takes most people somewhere between 24 to 30 hours. Those hours are straight through — taking meals on the go, adapting to nightfall and whatever extreme weather conditions you encounter, and without sleeping.

There will undoubtedly come a point (more likely, several) where any rational person would decide to simply call it a day — unless he is doing the one thing he would rather be doing than anything else in the world. And that’s where love comes into play.

Over the past few years, trail running has gently crept its way into my soul. There’s almost nothing I enjoy more than experiencing the beauty of nature while testing the capacities of my body on a remote, secluded trail through the wilderness. On the trail, I feel an inner peace and serenity that make each run a spiritual revival. It’s addicting, compelling, and empowering — and hopefully, it’s the kind of love that will get me through 100 miles.

By comparison, the second criterion for running 100 miles is much simpler, and much more trivial: namely, you have to pass the laugh test.

Politicians use this to determine whether they have a realistic chance of winning public office. They mention their plans to a casual acquaintance, then gauge that person’s response. If you tell somebody “I’m running for President,” and his first reaction is to laugh, you probably shouldn’t consider yourself a legitimate candidate.

As I described, I’ve participated in endurance events for many years.

I’ve built up my activity tolerance to the point where 50-mile runs are relatively unthreatening. And to my delight, when I finally started discussing my Western States aspirations with my training partners, none of them burst out laughing. So I took that as a sign that maybe the time was right to give this thing a shot.

Obviously, it took an abundance of preparation over an extended period of time to convince myself that I was ready to enter Western States.

However, even after all those pieces fell into place, I still needed to tackle what is becoming one of the greatest challenges of all in regards to the event: getting selected in the race lottery.

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