What Cross Country, Wildland Firefighting, and Fitness Taught Me About Competing Against Yourself

A story about finishing dead last, finding redemption in the wildland fire service, and discovering that the most important competition isn't against other people—it's against the person you were yesterday.

I’ll never forget my first cross-country meet in high school.

I had spent the summer dabbling with weights at the gym and occasionally jogging a half mile under the belief that I’d be playing football that fall. Of all the sports I’d played growing up, football wasn’t one of them. Still, I was freshly out of Provo Canyon School, an institution for troubled youth,.I thought I needed to become the “All-American Boy Next Door” to be good enough—in everyone else’s eyes, and especially my own.

After trying football for a short time, I realized I wasn’t enjoying it and switched over to cross-country, where more of my close friends were.

Football had presented a greater number of technical skills to learn. Cross-country seemed much simpler:

just run.

What I didn’t anticipate was the level of physical and psychological discomfort that came with trying to run three miles continuously—even at a snail’s pace.

Then came my first meet.

It took place during halftime of the homecoming football game. The race started and ended on the track surrounding the football field for everyone in attendance to see.

The race kicked off.

I ran. I paced myself.

My legs burned. My lungs burned.

And I came across the finish line dead last.

I remember hearing my parents, some teammates, and some other people in the stands cheer for me regardless.

I also remember feeling shocked by it. Up until that point, even if I wasn’t the best athlete, I’d never experienced what I saw as true defeat. That is, giving something everything I had and still coming in last place.

After crossing the finish line, my lungs still burned and nausea sat heavy in my stomach. I told Coach Matson, “I feel like I’m gonna pass out.”

He calmly told me to sit in the grass for a bit.

A few minutes later, physically, I was fine.

But mentally, that race stuck with me for years.

I stayed with cross-country the rest of the season and improved substantially. By the end of it, I looked far more like a runner than a football player, and I could run much faster than I could at the beginning of the season.

Still, finishing dead last lingered in my mind.

At the time, it felt like proof that even giving something everything I had wasn't enough to keep me from failing publicly.

Years later, at 29 years old, after getting my life back on track and rediscovering fitness and the outdoors, I searched for a job that blended those two passions and enabled me to serve my country. I found that as a wildland firefighter on a Type 2 Initial Attack Handcrew with the U.S. Forest Service.

One of the conditions of employment was to pass the “Work Capacity Test” at the “Arduous” category. This is also commonly referred to as the “Pack Test.” It requires firefighters to cover three miles with 45 pounds on their back in under 45 minutes on flat terrain without running.

The Pack Test isn’t a competition. It’s simply an event you must pass to prove you are fit enough to fight fire. In truth, the fitness demands it requires don’t encompass all of the fitness demands needed for critical fireline tasks like swamping for the sawyers, cold spotting, or digging fire line. These require their own forms of strength, endurance, and grit.

Still, I saw it as a way to earn my redemption from that fateful cross-country meet so many years earlier. It was organized. It was done in a group. And it was usually done on a track.

To prepare, I followed a very specific Wildland Firefighter Pre-Season fitness program religiously.

Come the day of the Pack Test, I pushed hard and finished first.

My time wasn’t extraordinary in the grand scheme of things. I’m certain other people there could have easily outperformed me had they wanted to. Despite this, it felt like long-needed redemption—proof that if I trained hard, I could outpace a group of peers. Proof that I could perform.

Yet, this feeling of redemption was surprisingly short-lived.

As my time with the Forest Service continued, I had to pack test each year to keep my red card up to date. I didn’t stay on the handcrew after that season, instead pursuing a more typical forest ranger role, working around campgrounds and trailheads—talking to people and doing my part to ensure they could make the most of their outdoor experience while keeping the land clean and safe. Still, I wanted to keep my wildland firefighting status current so I could help out with fires on the forest if needed. (Technically, you couldn’t even put out an abandoned campfire without a red card.)

Each Pack Test, I finished first.

After a couple of Pack Tests, that feeling of victory faded, and something shifted for me as the Pack Test took on a new meaning.

Rather than a chance to prove myself against others, I began noticing that my completion time got quicker each year. Not massively, but by seconds. Soon, I began to view it as a way to measure how much I had improved compared to previous versions of myself.

When I ran cross-country my junior year of high school, one of the things Coach Matson often told us was that one of the powers cross-country has that many other sports don’t is that you’re competing against yourself. (I imagine this concept can be applied to most sports, but it made sense given the autonomy involved in cross-country.)

At 17 years old, that message only partially resonated with me.

At 31 years old, standing at the finish line of yet another Pack Test, I finally began to understand what Coach Matson had been trying to teach us all along. The lesson had finally finished resonating.

“Am I improving compared to who I used to be?”

That mindset has given me more growth, confidence, and peace than constantly measuring myself against other people ever did.

It took me fourteen years to understand what Coach Matson was trying to teach us.

What it really came down to was being honest about who we were and where we were, regardless of where we hoped to be.

Part of me wishes I'd understood it sooner, but I suppose we have to arrive at that realization in our own time.