Jiri Mountain 48km Trail Run Part 2 — A Clean Failure
Trail Running Log | Hwadae Jongju — Part 2
Jiri Mountain 48km Trail Run Part 2
A Clean Failure
"Worst case, I'll finish inside 14 hours. I've run 100km twice, after all..."
The actual time was 15 hours and 17 minutes. And not even at the finish line — I came down somewhere on a trail leading into a small mountain village.
It wasn't a result I ever expected, and at the time I was too exhausted to think about anything at all.
When I finally drove to the actual finish, there was nothing there — no sign a race had even happened.
An empty parking lot.
That strange, hollow feeling of having pushed through something enormous — and having nothing left to show for it.
Legs barely holding me up, I made my way down to a nearby stream to rinse off, then drove home to Anyang.
I. The Race I Can't Stop Thinking About
Usually, after a race, I ride a good feeling for days — that sense of pride, of having done it.
This time, I just keep circling back to the same questions. Why did I fall apart? What went wrong?
Five days later, my calves are still sore in a way that doesn't make sense to me.
My mind isn't in a good place, and my body hasn't recovered either — I still haven't been able to run since.
Which makes the whole thing feel even heavier.
II. Overconfidence
Looking back, I think overconfidence was the real problem.
A month before the race, I did an 8-hour training run through the hills around Anyang and told myself, "This should be enough."
One of the club members running the race with me suggested we do one more, a 10-hour session. I was the only one who skipped it.
Everything else stayed the same too — the same drinks with friends, the same diet, the same sleep schedule.
I never once trained or prepared with any real sense of urgency. That, I think, was the root of it.
If I'm honest, there was a thought sitting quietly in the back of my mind the whole time.
III. Mountain Trails Are Not the Same as 100km
It started somewhere on the long climb up to Nogodan, right at the very beginning.
Looking back now, running on flat ground and climbing a mountain turned out to be entirely different problems.
I couldn't be sure of the exact cause, but I wanted to understand what actually happened to me that day, so I asked AI about it.
After 2 to 3 hours of continuous climbing, there comes a point where your muscles' demand for oxygen outpaces what your heart and lungs can supply.
That point is called crossing the lactate threshold.
From there, your muscles start producing energy without oxygen, and lactic acid begins to build up.
A minute or two of rest won't fix that. Clearing lactic acid actually takes 5 to 15 minutes at minimum — so when you rest briefly and start climbing again, you hit the wall again in under 15 seconds.
On top of that, if you're sleep-deprived and 2 to 3 hours into a pre-dawn start, your glycogen stores are also starting to run out. When both hit at once, even experienced runners have no way around it.
100km ultras are mostly flat, so this rarely becomes an issue. Mountains are different. No matter how strong your flat-ground running is, the muscles and cardiovascular demands of climbing work in a fundamentally different way.
The training just needed to be different."
Hearing that made things click a little. Flat-ground running and mountain running needed different preparation — that's something I had to sit with again.
IV. Excuses and Acceptance
I started running for my health, but at some point, I noticed I ran hardest whenever I was stressed or upset about something.
"Why does that guy have to nitpick everything?"
"I can't stand that guy anymore."
But running is the one thing where nobody else can stress me out.
No one runs for me. No one sets my time for me. The result is simply whatever I put in — however much I moved, however much I prepared.
It's the one thing that depends entirely on me, and only me.
Which is exactly why no excuse holds up in running.
Not being prepared enough. Underestimating the mountain. In the end, both were choices I made myself.
this Hwadae Jongju was a clean failure.
And more precisely,
a clean defeat — entirely my own.
Clean enough that I don't even have an excuse to offer.
