This one Matters to me

Most of the prints I make are for other people but this one is for me, the Buffalo 100 #buffalostampede Special Edition taking pride of place on my wall is the first print I've made just for myself (yeah OK I will let you have one as well if you want).

It doesn't look any different to the other special editions, it still has the checkpoints, the elevation curtain to show the effort, the 3D landscape and the race stats but the reason behind it is important for me.

At the start of 2025 I was the fittest I had ever been and just weeks away from the inaugural UTA Miler, the first time the UTA #UltraTrailAustralia had ever run a Miler and I was signed up to do the very 1^st one, there would never be another first edition and then I got injured and spent over a year away from racing. I missed towing the start line of UTA Miler and It sucked, worse than that it meant no training, no mountains to decompress in and no race to build for.

I stayed involved through crewing, filming races and helping mates chase their goals while slowly rebuilding myself in the background but there was a missing piece that only racing could fill.

There were moments where it felt like everyone else was moving forward while I was standing still and there were plenty of times where I thought I was moving forward only to go backward again – this is the nature of recovering from a bone stress injury.

Before getting injured I had already signed up for UTA Miler, Kosci 100 and Buffalo 100, and suddenly there was no guarantee I'd make it to the start line of any of them.

Four months before Buffalo I lined up to Kosci hoping things were finally coming together, but the day didn't go to plan and I ended up with a DNF, that was OK I went into that event mentally prepared that I may have to pull out if the injury flared up and it did.

As disappointing as it was, it answered the question. I wasn't back yet.

Buffalo became the next test, my training hadn't been perfect and I knew I wasn't arriving anywhere close to the conditioning I was used to for a 100k, but by that stage the goal wasn't about chasing a particular time. I just needed to get to the finish line.

For me, ultras have always been about the experience, the persistence and the people around it and Buffalo gave me all of that. It was the longest time it ever took me to do 100k by a massive margin, it was the first time I had ever spent any time back of pack and it was a day of pure mental challenge.

Crossing the finish line didn't erase the previous year or suddenly make everything easy again, but it did give me something I hadn't felt for over a year, Confidence. It showed me that just because I wasn’t in peak condition I still had the experience and toolset to get the job done.

It isn't a reminder of a race result, it's a reminder that after more than a year away from racing, I was back.

Kosci Miler is next, it's probably the first race since the injury where I genuinely don't know what is going to happen. I don't know if everything will hold together. I don't know where the limits are anymore and that will make ringing that finishers bell so good because I'll know exactly what it took to get there.