She Runs 250 Miles Through a Desert. I Watch, Amazed, From a Safe Distance

Three weeks ago, Heather Jackson finished fourth at the Cocodona 250 — a 250-mile race through the Arizona desert. This week the news is that she's eyeing the Unbound XL, a 350-mile gravel cycling event. I read that sentence twice, then went and made a coffee, then read it again. Three weeks!

Let me be honest about where I stand relative to all this: nowhere near it, and happily so. My relationship with the outdoors is a much quieter arrangement — a trail, decent weather, no particular hurry. I'm never going to run through a desert for four days, and I've stopped pretending stories like this "inspire me to push my limits." What they actually do is something gentler: they remind me how wide this world is. The same trails hold people chasing 250-mile finish lines and people who stop to look at lizards, and the mountain doesn't rank us. I find that genuinely lovely.

What struck me most about Jackson isn't the mileage anyway — it's that she refuses to be one thing. Not a runner, not a cyclist, just someone who loves being out there across every terrain. That part translates to any of us, at any scale.

One practical thing from this week's reading did stick with me. Coach Gabe Joyes wrote about what he calls "vertcovery" — the idea that climbing accumulates stress in your legs in a way flat distance simply doesn't, and most people underestimate the recovery it demands. That's not just an ultrarunner problem. Anyone who's done a steep hike knows the strange arithmetic where eight flat kilometres cost nothing and four steep ones leave you creaking for two days. Count the climb, not just the distance. Filing that away.

The nutrition corner of my feed had two things worth passing on. A review in the journal Nutrients found that creatine combined with regular exercise may meaningfully improve blood sugar regulation — interesting because creatine still carries this gym-bro reputation while the research keeps pointing at plain metabolic health. And there was a piece on magnesium, which is apparently involved in over 300 processes in the body, sleep and muscle recovery among them, and which most of us don't get enough of. I'll be honest, this one felt personally targeted. [ANDREAS: have you actually changed anything about sleep or recovery lately — magnesium, earlier nights, anything? One real line here would land better than the research summary.]

Also spotted: Nike is turning air into a fabric for running clothes, which sounds like a prank but apparently works. No idea what to do with this information except share it 😄

That's the week. Somewhere out there Heather Jackson is probably already on a bike. I'll be on a hill, at my speed, counting the climb.