Five weeks out from The Lap, and I keep catching myself standing completely still in the middle of doing something else — making coffee, closing a laptop, halfway through a sentence to someone — because a wave of something has just moved through my chest that I can’t fully name. It isn’t only nerves. It’s closer to the feeling of watching a door that’s been shut for a long time finally start to open, and realising I don’t actually know what’s on the other side of it.

I have to admit something I haven’t said out loud until now. When I signed up for this, my mind wasn’t in a good place. My dog was sick, seriously, and I was living with the specific, exhausting knowledge that any given day could be the one I lost him. I didn’t really have the words for what that was doing to me at the time. Looking back now — after losing him this past February — I think I understand exactly what I was doing. I was looking for a distraction. Somewhere to put something that otherwise had nowhere to go. Training became the one part of my day I could actually control, when almost everything else felt like waiting for news I didn’t want.

This is my first ultra. I don’t have the accumulated wisdom yet to know what this stretch of a build is supposed to feel like. So I’m not going to pretend to have it together more than I do. I’m just going to write down what’s actually happening in me right now, honestly, while I’m still inside it and before finishing the race turns it all into a tidy story.

The maths that won’t leave me alone at 2am

I keep doing the same arithmetic on a loop, usually at the worst possible times — lying awake, staring at a ceiling I can’t see. Longest training run so far, versus race distance. That gap is the part of the day I have genuinely never lived through — not “haven’t done recently,” not “haven’t done at that pace,” but never, not once in my whole life, put one foot in front of the other for that long. A marathon build has a comforting logic to it: the distance eventually shows up in your long runs, a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Ultra training has offered me no such mercy. I’ve built the engine, I’ve trusted it in the dark on a hundred quiet mornings when trusting it was the only thing I had — and on race day I’ll be asking it to carry me further than I’ve ever actually proven it can go.

That’s the real, unglamorous root of what I’m feeling. Not “will I be fast enough” — I let go of caring much about pace for this one a while back, more easily than I expected to, if I’m honest. It’s the quieter, more frightening question underneath it: what does my body actually do, who do I actually become, out past the point I’ve ever asked myself to go before. I don’t know yet. Five weeks from now, alone on that course somewhere, with nobody able to answer it for me, I will.

What all those quiet, unglamorous miles were actually for

Most of this build has been achingly ordinary. Zone 2, on purpose, over and over, fighting the urge to push every easy run a little harder because slow never once felt like it was doing enough. Cutback weeks that felt, in the moment, like giving something up rather than banking something. A lot of dark, cold, completely unremarkable mornings that didn’t feel like training for anything — they just felt like showing up, again, for a version of myself I was hoping I’d eventually get to meet.

Five weeks out, something in me has finally started to understand what all of it was actually for, in a way I don’t think I let myself believe while I was living through it. This race isn’t going to be decided early, in the easy hour when everyone feels invincible. It’s going to come down to whatever’s genuinely left of me deep in the back half, when it’s just me and the dark and however many hours are still standing between me and being done — and every single one of those quiet, patient, unremarkable mornings was a deliberate, almost stubborn act of faith in a version of that moment I couldn’t see yet. I didn’t feel any of it accumulating at the time. I only ever felt tired and a little bit foolish for caring this much about something so slow. I am hoping, more than I’ve hoped for almost anything in a long time, that I feel it being spent when it actually matters.

The taper fear nobody warns you about early enough

There’s a specific, creeping dread setting in now that I genuinely didn’t see coming: grief, almost, at the thought of tapering. Everything I’ve read insists the drop in volume over these last weeks is exactly what lets everything I’ve built actually show up on the day — that fitness doesn’t evaporate in three easier weeks, only fatigue does. I believe it, in the part of my brain that can still think clearly. But there’s another part of me that has come to genuinely love the discipline of this build, the identity of being a person who does the work quietly every single morning whether anyone’s watching or not, and that part of me is going to spend the next month fighting an almost physical urge to sneak in “just one more” long run I don’t need — not for the fitness, but because slowing down feels dangerously close to admitting the version of me who trained this hard might not be enough as he already is. Writing that down now, while I still have five weeks to be honest with myself about it, feels like the only real defence I’ve got.

The fear I’ve chosen to keep close

The other live worry is fuelling — not eating enough, eating the wrong thing at the wrong moment, my stomach quietly giving up on me deep into the race because I got greedy or careless early on, when everything still feels easy and invincible. Unlike the distance itself, this is something I still have five real weeks to test, to get wrong in private on a long run and fix before it costs me anything that matters. So I’ve decided, deliberately, to let this particular fear keep nagging at me rather than trying to talk myself out of it. I’d rather it sit uncomfortably close for five more weeks than let me get even one long run complacent about it.

Why I’m actually doing this

I keep landing on the same answer whenever I let myself ask honestly, and it’s smaller and truer than I expected it to be. I want to find out who I am somewhere past the point where everything stops being comfortable, past the point where willpower alone runs out and something else — or nothing else — has to carry me the rest of the way. Not for a finisher’s photo. Not really even for the number on a results page, if I’m being completely honest with myself at whatever hour this is. For the plain, terrifying, precious fact of finally knowing, instead of only ever wondering. I’ve carried that particular not-knowing around for a long time. In five weeks, one way or another, I get to put it down.

To everyone who’s had to listen to me talk about fuelling strategy and cutback weeks for months now and pretended it wasn’t repetitive — thank you. I mean that more than the offhand way I’ll probably say it out loud. And to whatever version of me is standing at that start line in five weeks: I hope you know, whatever happens after the gun goes off, that showing up scared and doing it anyway was always going to be the real victory. Everything past that line is just the universe finding out what you already decided.