By Dr. Nate Moller, D.C. | Living Well Family Chiropractic, Chelan, Washington Road to 100. Five weeks to the Lake Sonoma 100 on October 17, 2026.
Short version: Five weeks out from my first hundred mile race, I am seriously considering dropping to the 50. Not because of fitness. Because of what it is costing my family, and because I finally figured out what I am actually training for.
Sunday evening I was supposed to run fifteen miles.
Instead I hiked 3.25 miles with my wife, my kids, Chris, Kelli and their kids.
I want to tell you that was a hard call. It was not. I did not agonize over it for one second, and I would make the same choice again tonight.
Which is exactly the problem I have been sitting with all week.
First, the part that is going well
The day before, I ran 32 miles.
Up at 5 AM. Two hard boiled eggs and a piece of toast, which I finally learned to do after running 22 miles on almost nothing back in August. Six hours and fifty-five minutes on my feet.
I finished and felt like I could have gone another twenty. Ice bath, feet up for ten minutes, felt like a new man. Woke up Sunday with no soreness at all.
That was the biggest day of this entire build, and it answered the training question.
Can my body do this? As best I can tell from here, yes.
So this is not a post about fitness. This is the other question.
Is it worth it?
Then Jeff Browning collapsed at mile 80
On August 24, Jeff Browning had a heart attack about 80 miles into the TDS at UTMB in Chamonix.
If you do not run ultras, that name means nothing to you. If you do, it means everything. Bronco Billy. More than 200 ultra finishes over 25 years. More than 30 wins at the hundred mile distance. He won Hardrock at 47. He is 55 and he was still beating people half his age this summer.
He collapsed at an aid station. Medical teams defibrillated him on site and airlifted him out. He had three stents placed in a hospital in France.
Nine days later he left that hospital and posted a video from France saying there is a path forward and a path back to the trails. His friends started a fundraiser for his family because he is a self-employed coach with limited insurance, three kids, and an emergency that happened overseas. The running community put in more than a quarter million dollars in a matter of days.
I got to run with him for a few minutes at Cold Water Rumble earlier this year. A few minutes, that is all. But he is one of the people whose running made me think any of this was possible in the first place.
And then he nearly died at mile 80 of a race shorter than the one I signed up for.
These sports are not free. Not in time, not in what they take from your family, and not always in your body. I have spent this whole series writing about smoke and sodium and treadmills, and the truth is there is a real cost that no training plan lists on the schedule.
So when I ask whether this is worth it, I am not being dramatic. I am asking a fair question and I would rather ask it now than pretend it does not exist.
Why I signed up in the first place
I should say what I am actually chasing, since I have never laid it out.
I want to know where my breaking point is. Not in a tough guy way. Everything in a hundred miles is designed to find the place where your body starts screaming at you to stop. I have hit lows in 50s. I know a hundred will find something a 50 never touched. What I actually want to know is who shows up when it does.
I want my kids to see it, not just hear it. We have a line in our house. We eagerly do hard things well. I have said it to them a hundred times. Then this summer I asked them to do ten laps around the inside of the house and my son did fifty. Nobody gave a speech. He just did what he had watched somebody do all summer.
I want to show my patients, not just tell them. Same reason as my kids. I tell people every week that their body can do more than they think, that it wants to heal when you give it what it needs, that we are stronger than we give ourselves credit for. It is a different thing to say that after you have tested it on yourself at the edges.
And honestly, that is who I trust too. Not the person with the best explanation. The person who has actually done the thing I am trying to do and can tell me how they got there.
And I want to make my wife proud.
That is the one I have not been able to put down.
Because I am doing this partly for her. And she is the one paying for it.
What nobody tells you
Everybody talks about the miles. Nobody talks about the arithmetic.
Since June this build has taken most of my Saturdays. It has taken 4:30 alarms. It has taken evenings, and energy, and a version of me that comes home with something left over.
That last one is the part that hurts.
Not the early mornings. I can do early mornings. It is walking in the door already spent. It is answering my kid in three words when he deserved a real answer. It is being in the room and not in the room, because I ran before work and I will run again tomorrow and part of my head is already on Saturday.
I signed up for a hard thing. My family did not.
Emily has been remarkable about all of it. She has encouraged me the whole way. She has covered for me on the mornings I disappeared. She is going to crew this race and pace me through about 23 miles of it, most of that in the dark.
But encouragement is not the same as free.
When a family is already running close to empty, one person’s big goal can be the thing that tips it. Not because anybody resents it. Because there is only so much of any of us to go around, and I have been spending mine somewhere else.
Support is not infinite. It is generous. I have been treating the first one like it was the second.
What I actually want
Here is where I landed this week, and it took me by surprise.
I do not care about the buckle.
What I want is to be able to run with my wife and kids. To hike with grandkids I do not have yet. To be seventy-five and still moving well, and ninety and still getting out of a chair without thinking about it. To have a body at the end of my life that lets me actually be in it with the people I love.
That is the goal. That has always been the goal. It is the same thing I tell patients every single week.
So the hundred was never the point. The hundred is a test of whether I am building the right thing.
And that reframes the question entirely. It is not “am I tough enough.” It is “is this the right way to build a body that will still work in forty years?”
Some days I think yes, this is exactly how. Push the edges now, learn what your body does under load, take care of it properly, and you build something durable.
Some days I look at a 55-year-old man with three new stents and I am not sure.
About balance
Somebody is going to read this and say running a hundred miles is not balanced.
They are right. It is not.
But neither was my first 19 miler at the time. Neither was my first 50. Neither was my first Olympic triathlon. When I was a kid, one pullup was somewhere between hard and impossible. That number is a lot bigger now, and it moved because I kept asking for a little more and then supported my body while it caught up.
Impossible is a moving target. It moves for everybody, in both directions, depending on what you are doing with your body right now.
So I do not think the useful question is whether the goal is extreme. Somebody’s extreme is a hundred miles. Somebody else’s extreme is walking to the mailbox and back after a hip replacement. Both are the edge of what that body can currently do, and both move.
The question is whether you are supporting the body you are asking to do the thing.
For me that comes down to four things, and it is the same list I go through with patients.
Eating right. I spent this summer learning that one the hard way, twice.
Moving right. Not just running. Strength work, stretching, and getting adjusted before something hurts rather than after.
Thinking right. The emotional and spiritual side. A hundred miles is going to be a mental event more than a physical one, and I have no illusions about that.
And the recovery work. Sleep, sauna, cold, the boring stuff nobody posts about.
Pull any one of those out and the whole thing gets fragile in a hurry. I know, because I pulled a few out this summer and I could feel it.
That is the real answer to the balance question. Not “is this extreme.” It is “am I doing the work that makes this survivable.”
So I have been thinking about the 50
Lake Sonoma has a 50 mile option.
I have run 50 before. I know I can finish it. It would cost my family a fraction of what the next five weeks will cost them, and it would still be a hard, honest day.
Emily and I have talked about it. We have not decided.
I know how that sounds this deep into a series called Road to 100. I thought about not writing it. Then I decided a series about doing something hard is worthless if I only report the parts where I look committed.
There is also something I want more than either distance. On my second 50 miler I spent hours running alongside a married couple who were doing the whole thing together. I have not stopped thinking about it. Whatever happens on October 17, what I actually want next is to race with Emily. Not her crewing me. Both of us out there.
That sounds better to me than any finish line I could reach alone.
For anybody training through something
Two things I would want you to take from this.
The work is already banked. Whatever happens October 17, that part is done. Fourteen miles on a treadmill in the dark with a towel on the rail. Twenty-two miles in ninety-one degree heat on a fifth of the fuel I needed. Forty miles indoors during a smoke week. Thirty-two miles that ended with me wanting more. I showed up for a version of myself I was not sure existed. That is not contingent on a distance.
And you are allowed to be all in and still asking whether it is worth it. Most of what you read about endurance makes you pick. Either you are committed or you are wavering, and wavering means you did not want it badly enough.
That has not been my experience. I have never worked harder at anything and I have never questioned anything more. Both are true this week. I suspect both are true for most people doing something difficult, and most of them just do not say it out loud.
So I have been thinking about what this race actually cost her and my kids. We have a big decision to make.
It is not a comfortable conversation. I am glad we talking about it.
Can I. Will I. Should I.
Those are three different questions and I have only answered the first one.
Can I do it? I think so. The 32 miler said yes.
Will I do it? I do not know yet. Stay tuned, I will keep you updated.Ā
Should I do it? That is the one I am still working on.
Taper starts soon and the volume comes down from here, which gives me back hours I have not had since June. I am going to spend them at home.
What are you chasing right now, and who is paying for it? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.
Following along? Start with why I signed up for a 100 miler in the first place, or read about the 22 miler I ran on a fifth of the fuel and what a book about rock bottom taught me about movement.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many hours a week does ultramarathon training take?
For a first 100 mile race, most plans run 10 to 15 hours a week during peak training, with the biggest weekends taking six to eight hours in a single day. That is before travel to trailheads, recovery time, and the reduced energy that follows a big effort. The time cost is usually larger than people expect when they sign up.
How do you balance ultramarathon training with family?
Honestly, imperfectly. What helps most is running very early so the hours come out of sleep rather than family time, folding training into family activities where it fits, and having explicit conversations about what each block will require instead of letting the cost accumulate quietly. The common mistake is assuming that because nobody has complained, nobody is paying.
Is it a failure to drop down to a shorter race distance?
No. Choosing a shorter distance ahead of time, for stated reasons, is a decision. Dropping out mid-race because you never made that decision is something else. If the cost of a goal has changed since you signed up, reassessing is the reasonable response rather than a lack of commitment.
Is ultrarunning bad for your heart?
The overall evidence still favors regular endurance exercise for cardiovascular health, but very high training volumes are an area of ongoing research rather than settled science. Anyone taking on extreme endurance events, particularly over 40, should have a real conversation with their physician about cardiac screening rather than assuming fitness equals cardiac health. Being fast is not the same as being safe. This is one reason I try to do a majority of my training in zone 2 or less.
Should endurance athletes see a chiropractor during a training block?
Many do, and the reasoning is that high training volume exposes restrictions and asymmetries that lower volume lets you work around. Pain tends to be one of the last signals a body sends rather than the first, so the useful window is usually while things still feel mostly fine. I train and practice in Chelan, Washington, and this is the same approach I take with my own body during a build.
