Into the Storm: A 100-mile race out of darkness and an antidote to the chaos

By Greg Phillips

For the first time, experience the thrilling, mind-altering personal transformation journey of ultra-endurance athlete Greg Phillips, where he discovered his purpose and changed his life.

Written and dedicated to his daughters, Into the Storm is half-memoir, half-self-help and combines universal truths with perso

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: May 20, 2025
• ISBN: 9798822981355

Greg Phillips

Greg Phillips is a lifelong resident of Yorktown, Indiana, a small town fifty-five miles north of Indianapolis. He is the president of Phillips Patterns & Castings, where he has worked for thirty-four years. Together with his wife of twenty-two years, Stacy, he has a son, Garen, who also works for the family business.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

The Starting Line

It’s the truth I’m after, and the

truth never harmed anyone.

What harms us is to persist in

self-deceit and ignorance.

–Marcus Aurelius

T

he pain was almost unbearable. The darkness was a claustrophobic coffin, and I couldn’t see a way out. Constant rain and lightning, complete isolation, and a lack of calories wasn’t doing much to help the knee injury that had been torturing me for the last fourteen miles. I had been running for almost twenty hours at this point, had covered seventy-two miles of single-track muddy, rocky terrain. As I tried to push the thought that I still had twenty-eight more miles of Hell to get to the finish line, my brain went to a place I had never been before. A level of self-pity was starting to consume my thoughts and the emotional breakdown that would follow could shut my race down for good. The small ball of light bouncing around my feet was my only focal point, and then, in an instant, it was gone.

Total blackout. I could not see my hand in front of my face, much less the winding single-track trail that I was running on through these bear infested woods. I stopped in my tracks and immediately sat down exactly where my feet were. Trying to feel my way forward was not an option as I would certainly end up off course, lost, or lying dead at the bottom of a cliff.

Sitting in the darkness, in the middle of this thunderstorm, and waiting for the next psychotic ultra runner to come by, I decided to conduct as thorough of a self-assessment check on my body as I could. I had about twenty ounces of water left, no food, and no back-up battery for my headlamp. However, the good news was that my right knee was rapidly swelling to the size of a soccer ball. The pain was specifically behind my knee and was probably a meniscus injury. I did have a small roll of tape in my pack, and I proceeded to wrap it as tight as possible around my knee. As I continued to wait for the next runner to come by so that I could run behind them and follow their light to the next aid station checkpoint, I was hit with the reality of my situation. I was in a tough spot, and I had no idea, in that moment, of what to do next.

Ultra trail-running is an extreme endurance sport that most people are smart enough to stay away from. I am not one of those people. However, the lessons learned from voluntarily putting oneself in the vice and feeling it start to squeeze can only be learned from such a brutal teacher. Ultra running will always deliver on certain things: pain and joy, highs and lows, misery and euphoria. Running ultras will also deliver options. Some are good, some are not. One always has the option to quit when they shouldn’t and just accept a life of mediocrity. But they can also choose to take another path: a path of acceptance where they can problem-solve their way through it by embracing and learning to be calm amongst the struggle, choosing to make friends with pain, and being comfortable with being very uncomfortable.

This particular night I was in Hell, and it was going to be my teacher. The bell had rung, class was about to begin, and I needed to get comfortable with where I was and make this hell my new home. It’s often said that when you’re going through Hell, just keep going. However, there are times in life when it gets bad enough that a more drastic approach is needed. To make it through to the other end of this Hell, I was going to have to confront the Devil himself.

Obviously, my race didn’t start at this point. All races have a starting line, but the starting line of a 100-mile ultra-marathon is not what you would probably expect. This low-key, underground sport of endurance races, apart from some of the major international events, is one of the most eye-opening and shocking environments that you can imagine. Not because of what can be seen, but because of what can’t be seen. There are no big corporate sponsors, no television camera crews, or live bands playing hype-music. ESPN is not on scene to film that night’s footage of the Top Ten Plays of the Week. The reality of where this brutally demanding sport begins is somewhere on a trailhead in the middle of the woods with a few tents and some trucks. A few runners or their crew might be wandering around talking among themselves while others are filling water bottles and stuffing some last-minute peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into their running pack for later that day.

The athletes themselves, however, are impressively tough humans, usually sleeping the night before in a van down by the river, or maybe a tent if they’re high maintenance. Most are usually skinny dudes with long hair and beards, covered in tattoos, and sporting some version of a beat-up, weathered trucker hat that has seen more pain than most people would ever be interested in going through. The female ultra-athletes are the most impressive to me. They exude a quiet confidence that says Don’t mess with me without having to actually say anything at all. I’ve always thought women were the toughest species on the planet, as their ability to go through childbirth and voluntarily choose to repeat that process is beyond my capacity to comprehend!

Besides the runners themselves, the only other people who are present to witness the start of such an event are the crew members that most (but not all) runners usually have with them. I have only had, and will only have, one crew chief who is with me. My wife Leslie (your mom, Sarah Kate and Ella). She has always been there with me at the start, through the ups and downs, and at the finish line of every ridiculous never-ending ultra that I’ve run. Most times she has been the only reason that I was even able to finish some of these races and without her, I would have struggled and suffered even more. She knows me as well as anyone and has always been the voice to tell me to suck it up, get it together, and keep moving forward when I didn’t know how I was going to take another step.

She works harder than I do during these events. Sleeping in the back of our truck for days, keeping food, water, medical kit, extra gear, and anything else that might be needed at any given point. You inherently know this already (although you probably hate to admit it), but she is a rockstar in every sense of the word. I’m not quite sure how I ended up with my single crew member being an adrenaline junkie who was riding motorcycles and jumping out of airplanes when I first met her, but I know that all of us are damn lucky to have her. To provide some context and understanding as to how I ended up in this world of extreme endurance sports, it only makes sense to recap a brief Cliffs-notes version of where and how it all began.

My entire life growing up, from the day I was born on February 28, 1977, until I graduated college, had always revolved around athletics. I was shown and guided onto the right path in life by my parents, Coach and Mimi. I had known no other way of living. I was obsessed with playing sports and religiously maintained a level of fitness congruent to being the best athlete possible. Football became the focus of my life, and I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to play football in college at the University of Alabama. Football introduced many hard, tough men into my life who taught me and helped shape my mental and psychological disposition. However, like most things in life, some of those skills and characteristics are perishable and will deteriorate if not maintained. Life can get too comfortable and the weak voices in your mind can start to guide you in the wrong direction (more on that later).

After college, I started my business career and things seemed to be going well, seemed being the key word there. Coach has always told me that when things are going great, they’re never as great as they seem. And, when things are going bad, they’re never as bad as they seem. Well, things seemed to be going great, but there was an erosion that had been slowly happening to me, and I was completely unaware that this attack had been underway for quite some time.

May 25, 2020, is the exact day that I woke up, and felt life hit me like a sledgehammer in the face. It was Memorial Day, and I decided that I was going to complete a CrossFit workout that day called the Murph Challenge in honor and remembrance of our military men and women who fought and died for our freedoms that we enjoy. The workout itself is a one-mile run, followed by 100 pullups, 200 pushups, 300 squats, and another one mile run on the backend of it. You’re supposed to wear a twenty-pound vest and complete it as fast as possible. I didn’t think too much of it, and since I had been an athlete my entire life, the assumption was that this would be easy. Here is where that sledgehammer comes in. I started the first one-mile run, made it 1/4 of a mile, turned around and walked home. I couldn’t breathe. My bones and joints were hurting so bad from simply jogging a few hundred yards and all I could feel in my brain was shame, embarrassment, and disgust from the feeling of my bodyfat bouncing up and down with every step I took.

Once I got home, I sat down on the steps inside our front door and proceeded to emotionally break down. I couldn’t hide, lie, or cheat my way out of this. It was what it was. I had become physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually weak. The most painful truth that I realized in that moment was that this