The End
Not going out with a bang
It was bound to happen eventually. Five to six–hour races at World Championships, the emotional hangover from not–so–stellar days, a long international trip home, and then hopping right back into training at 8,000 feet after six and a half weeks below 4,000. The bodies finally cracked.
As Hemmings, we have what we like to call “aggressive optimism.” We come up with grand plans, look at each other, and say, “Yeah, that’s definitely reasonable.” We convince ourselves it’s smart, even logical. And if you’ve followed along long enough, you probably know how this story usually goes: the plan caves in, something goes sideways, and we’re left wondering how two people with functioning brains can make one (barely) functioning adult.
So, naturally, we thought we could fly home from Worlds, keep training hard, and then 10 days later hop a plane to California for Kodiak by UTMB. Totally normal. Totally fine.
About eight days out, Eli started saying he felt “off.” Ten hours later, he was horizontal on the couch with a fever, chills, and a pounding headache. Tabor, in full nurse mode and armed with enough vitamins to start a pharmacy, thought she was in the clear, until Tuesday of race week, when she started to feel the same thing creeping in.
But, as any reasonable runners would do, we doubled down on liquids, stacked the sleep, and told ourselves we’d bounce back by race day. Spoiler alert: we did not.
By Friday, Tabor still had a fever and had developed a raspy voice that could only be described as “Miley Cyrus meets a Kardashian” Eli, being the trooper (and needing a UTMB 2026 qualifier), decided to start the 100k anyway. But by mile 34, he was coughing up a lung and knew it wasn’t worth pushing through. And just like that, our grand California plan turned into a shared DNF story and a lot of soup.
Sometimes we bite off more than we can chew and maybe to see if we can pull off something mildly insane. We’ve done the “Hemming Double” plenty of times before: Broken Arrow to Mont-Blanc Marathon, Kodiak to Golden Trail Finals… somehow it always worked out. But not this time. The sport is getting deeper, faster, and more competitive and that’s a good thing. It means you really do have to show up with your A-game.
So, for now, we’re leaning into rest mode. A big, solid break…because apparently, we’re not indestructible (shocking, we know).
How much of we as athletes want to run almost every race impedes our bodies recovery. I know both of you have tried doubles but running 100 KM in a deep field requires some fresh body & mind to compete. We can't keep running longer races back to back to be the best in the world.
We can see that at Worlds that the people who won were fresh except Jim who had run a race full of lactic acid in his body at UTMB.
We can't keep emptying our tanks while building up to the races, running n number of races. Our bodies can crumble I think so and we can't compete if the reservoir is half empty all the time.
After my recent DNF at Mt. Taylor here in NM, it is encouraging to hear your story. Even rockstar runners are humans. When AI can run ultras, maybe that will change!