I was always an athlete, not necessarily a good one. It's the thing to do from when you're little and your parents send you off to soccer so that you have something to do, to get you out of their hair. I was a swimmer for the longest time and started running in my junior year to pass the military’s physical test. I joined track and I was pretty terrible at it. It was a pretty steep learning curve, but the thing that got me hooked on running was how it created a space where I could work on going further.

There wasn’t really a limit to what I could try to do — continuously engaging in this idea of how far I could go. I ended up joining the military and the Coast Guard and running my first marathon. But I didn't stick with it for very long.

Road running is very hard on your body and it is very monotonous. My knees were shot. I was running in double-knee sleeves and it didn't seem like the best thing to be doing. But what relit the spark was this idea of moving up in distance through ultra-running, and it wasn't as difficult as I thought it might be.

There's a lot of variation in 100-mile distances and the type of terrain you get — you can have a totally flat course, an insane mountain course, a hot desert course and so on.

So I spent a lot of time experimenting and just getting more comfortable with that distance. There are so many factors and things that could happen during that time, that you want to learn how to manage yourself pretty well. Like with transitioning, there was an adjustment in terms of dealing with surgeries, hormones and training, and my metabolism shot way up and suddenly I had to figure out how to feed myself better during races and training.

I spent a few years looking into 200-mile races. They're a lot more expensive and intimidating, and it's more training and more time. But again, I was like, "Why not? What can I do? What am I capable of?"

Especially considering trans athletes — you don't see a lot of us in the ultra distances, at least not many of us who are open and vocal about it. It's very difficult to know.

I don't even know if I'm the first openly trans athlete to run a 200-mile race. I may not be, but there's such little conversation there. There's such little visibility that it's really difficult. But the ultra community is pretty open and accepting because it's just this group of misfits already.

As you go up in distance, ultra running equalizes in gender

I went out to this race that I just did in 2020 and paced a stranger for 100 miles on the course to kind of get a feel for what it was like and if I liked it or felt like I could do it.

Last year there were some medical things that I had to work out and this year it finally happened. Now, of course, I'm already thinking about the next one. I don't know if I would want to go further than this, which was 240 miles. You really don't sleep in these races because you don’t have time. Maybe you sleep an hour a night.

The clock doesn't stop. For the 240-mile races, the cutoff was 113 hours, which is faster than 30-minute miles for the whole thing, so that includes any time you stop and use the bathroom, eat, or nap. I slept like an hour to an hour and a half each night. Sometimes you absolutely can't keep moving or you're falling over on the trail because you're tired. You might lay down on the side of the trail for like 15-20 minutes, but you do not have time to like roll up in a tent or something and sleep the whole night.

What I really like about ultra running in particular is that as you go up in these distances, it really starts to equalize in terms of gender, physical abilities and so on.

Several of the course records for these 200 miles are held by women. It seems like cisgender women's bodies are better designed for endurance and so you start to see this equalization.

There are more cisgender men in general participating because of access, money and family support, so there are more of them. But the women who participate — they're tough, they're tenacious, they're not in the back of the pack.

Something I'm always insecure about as a transgender runner

I really love watching the gender gap close in ultra running. For somebody who identifies as a woman, any person is easily their competitor just as much as the person who identifies as a man — Amy Hughes who's kind of a breakout 100-200 mile runner, is podiuming with the men.

But there aren't conversations happening about gender in a good or safe way. Something I'm always insecure about as a trans runner is if someone’s gonna see me go to the bathroom on the side of the trail or something and be like, "What's going on?"

I don't use any kind of device, I haven't had any kind of lower surgery. I very much go in the same way a cisgender woman would. So I was worried about that, but in that community, we're all getting very intimate with each other. We're sharing the gross details – we all have our nasty feet together, we often go poop in the woods together. So people just don't care.

The places where transphobia comes out in these events are simply because there's a lack of discussion, lack of visibility. So a lot of it is unintentional – like printing names on race bibs without asking because it's the name that that person was registered under. Or requiring IDs to pick up race bibs, where you registered under your preferred name, but it's got your legal name.

Most of these incidents really happen just because people aren't thinking about it, which is generally a nice thing when you're actually in the event, but sometimes it can be a problem, so there does need to be a balance there.

For the most part, the higher up in distance you go, the more unique the people are that you're running with anyway. The ultra running community is often composed of former addicts and people with mental health and wellness struggles, who are using running as an outlet. These aren't the kind of people who are judging the folks around them.

There’s a camaraderie in ultra running, where you help each other

I think what makes the ultra running community what it is, is the way things are streamlined or simplified so everybody is running the same race.

As opposed to a 400-meter sprint, there’s a certain camaraderie in ultra running because you're doing something that's long enough and hard enough that you may need help from other people. Runners might exchange electrolyte tablets, or share water and snacks on a really long section.

They're all starting at the same time. They're running the same course, within the exact same event as opposed to track and field where they're going to have a men's team and a women's team.

There isn't any systemic separation and I think there are ways to probably incorporate that into other sports.

The biggest issue is that sports and people in general, are obsessed with categorization related to awards and winning. Obviously, those are important to us athletes, and I don't want to take away from that. The best thing about the ultra community is you can be competitive if you want to be, but it really doesn’t have to be about competition if you don’t want it to.

Ultra running doesn’t always have this same focus on categories. There are the top three men and women, but they don’t usually get into things like age groups and other forms of categorization.

When I was running the regular marathon distance, there was a lot more competition. People care so much more about age groups, gender groups, awards and rules — it's all unnecessarily reinforced.

Do we really need awards for every five years of human life? Probably not.

In marathons, they'll have different waves and different heats. So there possibly are ways to make sports more accessible by addressing these gender-restrictive barriers.

As a transgender man, I am not really perceived as a threat in running

When people think of trans athletes, they usually think of trans women or trans feminine athletes, because they’re the ones who are perceived as a ‘threat’. Trans men and masc athletes are often left out of the conversation. Or people are like, "You guys don't need extra rules. But trans women and femme athletes do."

It doesn't work that way. If you're going to impose policies, you need to impose equal policies for everybody.

If I'm in a race or something and eventually it comes out that I'm trans, people are typically surprised about me. I remember I was running with this woman for maybe 20 miles or so, and she realized I was trans because of the bathroom thing. She was like, "Wow, this whole time I didn't know." And I was like, "Well, yeah, why would you?"

People have this misconception that it's very obvious if you're trans one way or another — that a trans man is a woman in men's clothing and vice versa.

I enjoy disrupting that stereotype and that narrative. I do think that as a trans man, I have the ‘advantage’ of people being pleasantly surprised and not upset, because they don't feel that I'm a competitive threat, so to speak.

I'm also not in the front of the pack, I'm usually in the middle. But again, because there's more of an evening-out of like male-female competition and ability levels in ultra-running, it just doesn't stand out that much. It's not as controversial as it might be if I was winning a marathon.

Mostly, I purposely will not tell people I’m trans until later or maybe even never, because I want people to realize that the odds are that you've met a trans person, interacted with a trans person, flirted with a trans person, and you just didn't know it.

Because, we are in fact, like regular human beings and the same goes for trans athletes.

We're just trying to do something that we're passionate about. And the only reason it becomes obvious is because of controversial policies and different levels of competition.

There’s always some dysphoria - how much do we divulge about our past?

There are a lot of sports, like watersports, where gender euphoria and dysphoria come in a lot more strongly, depending on what you have to wear. Whereas in running, we're pretty lucky. There's a wide range of things from one gender to another — maybe the length of your shorts change, but maybe not.

It's definitely been simplified for me post-transition, in terms of not having to worry about a sports bra or having your period during a race, and that's pretty euphoric, that freedom.

But it is still kind of funny because you'll always have these incidents: there was someone in a 200-mile race who was talking about their sports bra chafing, and I was like, "Oh, you should try this." And they sometimes look at you like, "Well, how do you know that?"

It’s been euphoric post-transition, but there's also a certain amount of dysphoria with any trans person in terms of how much do we divulge about our past life?

Sometimes you want to out yourself because you want to identify yourself as a safe person. One of the disadvantages of running as a male-presenting human is that women might be more afraid of you. If I accidentally run up behind somebody on the trail, I don't want to scare them or have them think that I'm going to attack them, but I also don't want to say, "Oh, don't worry. I'm queer!"

And that is one of the interesting pieces about trusting. I walk into a lot of spaces where I'm not as trusted because I am presenting as someone who might be a lot more of a ‘threat’ than the former lesbian me.

Many transgender athletes don't feel comfortable identifying themselves

I don't even know how many other trans athletes have completed a 200-mile race. I just hope that all of the current discussion around sports doesn't discourage people from being open.

There are a lot of things that have become less taboo, especially with elite athletes who are very open about their sexuality. I just hope to see that continue with trans and nonbinary identities because I still think that many trans athletes don't feel comfortable identifying themselves. And it makes it hard to hold that space in sports and have that community when you don't know who each other is.

Even with me, I thought about wearing one of Schuyler Bailar's "Trans athletes belong in sports" shirts when I went to check into the race but decided not to because I didn't want to get into an argument with people before I even started the race.

I think it would have been fine realistically. But those insecurities really keep the community from coming together and from being visible and it's real — it's a safety thing.

Similar to how Nike and Runner's World are starting to celebrate gay and lesbian athletes, I want to see the rest of us be able to come out of the woodwork because we're here, we're putting in the work, and we're competing – just maybe not on a very visible level.