True Course - Pilot

How did a construction industry executive end up training for a 50-kilometer trail race he never planned to run?

In this first episode of True Course, Adam Melnick shares the real origin story — the decision that started it all back in January, the road to Haliburton Forest, and the honest why underneath a season most people would assume he'd talk himself out of.

No elite background. No shortcuts. Just one real amateur build, told as it happens.

True Course follows a working professional's ultramarathon season in real time — training that works, plans that fall apart, and conversations along the way with coaches, athletes, and experts who understand what it actually takes to go the distance.

Your true course is never the line you planned. It's the one you actually run.

New episodes every other Thursday.

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Transcript

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There's a point in every long race where the trail changes the plan, and what we do next tells us who we are. Your true course is never the line you plan, but the one you actually run. This season, you're running mine with me. Welcome to the True Course Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Melnick. Thanks for joining me on the True Course Podcast. This show came together based off of my experiences in trail running and ultra marathons. Now, full disclosure, haven't run my first race yet. I'm two weeks out. In two weeks, I'm gonna run the Halliburton 50 kilometer trail race. Now there's a 50 miler and a 100 miler, but I'm not there yet. We're starting with 50 kilometers, and it will be my first. My training journey started back in January, and it's had tons of ups and downs, which is kind of interesting because over the years, you know, I'm in my 40s. About 30 years worth of journeys in health and fitness. I've had a variety of episodes and seasons. And what I mean by that is I've done a lot of things from either the couch to an event, so a couch to a sprint trathlon, a couch to a Highland Games. Um, I did a bodybuilding show when I was like 20. I was a 330-pound 16-year-old. I've dabbled with every diet under the sun that you've heard of or not heard of, to limited success and pretty much consistent failure. I've been up and down between a 180 and 330 pounds, off and on for 30 years. None of that is really anything people like to celebrate. But I bring that here to this podcast, and I bring that as a culmination of all these experiences, good, bad, and indifferent, that have landed me in the world of trail running. And this isn't just a fad. This isn't just the latest trend of thing I'm gonna do. This is the one that feels like it completes the journey. This is the first endeavor I've taken on that utilizes all of those elements over the years. There's elements from the Sprinter Athlon, there's elements from Highland Games, there's elements from all the different diets and nutrition and learning. Sure, I failed at a lot of this stuff over the years, but I've pulled a lot of lessons into this too. So last December, sitting around 260 pounds, I knew I had to do something different. I had to figure something out that was sustainable and long-lasting. Now it's funny to say that ultrarunning and trail running is going to be sustainable and long lasting, but I'll be honest with you, it is. It certainly is for me, and it probably is for you too. You probably ended up here from a variety of other journeys. And maybe like me, you're not an endurance athlete, you're not a long distance runner, you don't have a running background, you barely have an athletic background. Heck, I almost would beg to say that I barely am a weekend warrior. But there's something about this community, there's something about this whole package of trail running and ultra marathons that fit. I love working out, I love training. I I that is something that's always been able to stay, even when I'm not doing well with diet and composition, I'm still lifting. I was always lifting. But I was avoiding cardio, and I almost treated it like it was one, not the other. Different modalities, all these different excuses and rationales. And the truth is, the fact is, you should be doing both. You should find a way to do both, you should find a way to use them for each other. And that was something I was always missing. And that's the cool part about trail running and ultra running that works for me is that all these things that I've dabbled in as in isolated silos kind of things, they actually work really good in harmony together. And in fact, they're important to work together, and that's where this all comes together. So the nutrition, the time in the gym, the strength training, the mobility, you know, the cardiovascular training, obviously, for the running component, the mental work around this, your sleep, it all comes together in such a deliberate way because when one isn't working, everything starts to fall off. And with everything else I've done over the years, you're able to mask some of those things when they don't work and still push through. You get limited success, but it doesn't become as detrimental as it does when you're doing trail running, which to me helps it stand out much higher and give more prominence. And to be fair, all these elements of training then have value at a different level, like all have equal value and they all matter. And some of the bigger pieces, like nutrition, are really, really integral, and this is great because it's conducive to a good quality of life. Like, I'm not gonna go out there and try to act like I'm gonna try to make my life longer, bonus if it is, but I want the quality of life that I have to be good, the best I can do, and the things I've been doing haven't been helping that. Ultra running and trail running, the composition, the makeup, the things you need to do really lend themselves to a good quality of life. Now, one could argue with me that running these giant races might not be the healthiest thing. I would argue there's many things out there we do that aren't healthy for ourselves that we band-aid as okay and no one says a shit about. I would much rather do this as my endeavor that sure it's got some risk to it, but I know all the parts that make it up, all the parts that make its composition are really good for me. And I know that just from the quality of life I'm having now training. So nine months into this training, I've had some hurdles, had some challenges, but I would tell you that I'm probably the best shape I've ever been in my life in my mid-40s. There's plenty of road to go, there's plenty of ways to improve. And the cool part is by consistently showing up and doing the work related to my trail running and my ultra marathon training, I'm doing just that. So let's talk about January to now. We're in August 2026. I signed up for this race in December 2025. Started training in January, got about three months into it, and I got bored. I'll tell you that right away. I got bored. I was training on a treadmill for the running. I was still going to the gym four days a week, doing upper, lower split, doing my bro stuff that I like. And I was justifying not doing the running. That I could do athletic training, I could do sprinting, I could do jumping and bounding, which is all great stuff. Um, and I use that as an excuse to kind of fall off the treadmill, to put it that way. Fall off that time on feet. And before I knew it, I justified not doing it at all. So I hadn't completely given up, but I had certainly stopped the cardiovascular and the actual running training. Get to about June, and I think, well, what am I gonna do with this bib for this race? I jump on the Facebook group for the Halliburton trail race. I get on there with the intention of getting rid of the bib. I'm gonna trade it off, sell it, you know, to somebody so they can go on. All of a sudden I start seeing how many people want to get into this race that can't. All of a sudden I realize I have something people covet. Now I didn't go all capitalistic think I was gonna make money. I realized I had something that a unique opportunity that I could use. I could do this. And looking back retrospectively, all these challenges I've tried over the years, I always saw them through. Like not with great success. But I trained, I show up, I tried it, I competed, I finished to some form of limited success, but I finished. Was this really gonna be the first thing that I didn't do that? No. So this was like on a Friday. Sunday, I lace up the shoes, I hit out on the trail, and I hit two hours on the trail to think, where am I? How far am I from actually being able to do this? Maybe the truth is I'm too far removed and September isn't gonna work. So I get out there, I get running, all of a sudden, to my surprise, I ran the two hours. Sure, I walked the uphills. That's what you do in trail running. This isn't, you know, being sadistic. The reality is you got to balance and energy manage and think about the technical part of the trail and all that comes with it. And so I did that. And I finished the two hours. I can't remember the distance that I covered, but I know I did well and I had energy to spare. I could have done more, and that would have been really cool to be able to do more. And then I got really excited about the fact that I could do more, and then it became, oh man, we're gonna do this. So I came home and realized I had to adjust my training program because I originally had one put together from January to September. It's a big hole in the middle. So jump on, I start punching punching things into AI, I started shaping the AI agent to be a bit of a jerk of a coach and hold me accountable. And I was honest about the fact that I walked away from it. I was truthful about the timelines, talking about where we were, what we had to do, and we pulled it all together, and I had a nine-week block. And so we start building that block. And I'll be honest with you, I'm often quite surprised on how these training blocks are built for trail running and ultra marathons. And I even had to fact-check this one a little bit because I didn't understand that this was the 100% accurate. Like I just wasn't gonna blindly trust AI. But the fact that you're running three to four times a week, and then you're doing a long run on a Sunday, and then those times in the week don't really build up 45 minutes to an hour. They might be hills, they might be intervals, they might be repeats, they might be rolling hills, uh, but there's easy runs, there's recovery runs, and all these things. I had to figure out what all the stuff meant. And what I saw consistently was 45 minutes to an hour in through the most of the runs through the week, and on the weekend I had an escalating long run. Well, that was actually really relieving because I became really easy to manage. My biggest fear about trail running, my biggest excuse about trail running was that it was going to take up too much time, and then there's other things that other priorities. I have a full-time job, you know. I'm, you know, we we own a hobby farm here, we've got a lot of things on the go. I got a part-time job on top of that. I have so many things going on, I could come with a million excuses why I don't have the time. But the truth is, we all know this truth. If we look at the screen time on our cell phones and our devices, there's plenty of hours we give away every week, if not every day, to something that gives us nothing back, but makes us feel pretty shitty about ourselves in most cases. So taking an hour of that at the most to put out there on my feet to do something better for myself, that was an easy decision to make. And I held myself honest like that. So the cool part was how much my screen time's gone down too, right? Like, like I think most people discover that along the way here. So, anyways, out we go. And that's been amazing, that whole process of getting out there on my feet and doing these things. It's kind of weird that my routine now is like an easy run or a light run, and 45 minutes is a minimum of five kilometers, maybe more. Like, I remember the first time I ran a five kilometer, it took me like an hour and a half. Now I'm doing a 45, 40 minute 5k as part of my recovery run as a light run. I'm not fast by any means, but it's pretty cool to know I can do that routinely. Like right now, I can probably grab a drink of water, go to the washroom, a little bit of a warm-up, go out and hit 5K, come back, and yeah, I'll be sweaty because I'm a big dude. I'm 210 pounds. Uh, but I'll be fine. I can talk to you, probably talk to you the whole time doing it, be honest with you. That's wild. Um, and such an improvement from where I've ever been. So that's the program where we are. I will celebrate with you, even though this is like the pilot podcast, just getting the ball rolling, give you a sense of where we are. We got a lot of things to talk about coming down the pipe. But even just a couple weeks ago, I hit was it two weeks? Yeah, two weeks ago. I hit a four-hour run. It was the peak of the program. Now we're getting into our appropriate taper, two weeks out, we're structuring it all for the actual run. This is stuff I'm helpful to have a program for. Um, and again, I had to go fact check is this how people actually do it? It it is okay, it's cool. So, anyways, I hit the four-hour run, and I I remember going into that run thinking to myself, okay, 20 kilometers, 25 kilometers, I'd be wild. Like, I've never ran that far. If I could get that far, well, geez, I can actually do 50. So, like, what? Maybe I can do 50 kilometers in eight hours. I'm like, that's not like unreasonable, I don't think. Although when I say all this out loud to anybody else, they think I'm insane. So, but hopefully you don't think that. And if you do, well, welcome to the club because maybe you're doing it as well, and you know, people think that way of you as well. Anyways, all joking aside, I I it all started to feel real. So I put my four hours in. I finished the four hours. First, I was amazed I finished. I finished with the the feeling that I could have done more, which was also a really good feeling. Um, I ate well during the run, because that's a cool part of this. You learn how to do nutrition while you're running, you learn to eat while you're run. And as someone who's been overweight their whole life and loves food, sugary food, tasty food, which is stuff you get to do while you ultra run, and actually it doesn't really beat you up. Like you don't pay the price on the scale, by the way. Uh, even the body composition, I'm quite shocked of the stuff I eat and how I look and feel. So that was a great success. I was able to keep all that rocking and rolling. We finished the run, finished the four-hour run. Fueling's been good, fueling was good, nutrition was good, body was a little beaten up, sure, knees were sore, and that it's gonna happen after four hours. Um, I could have done more. That was wild. This was all really cool. I'm like, okay, awesome. And then I then I looked at my watch and I saw that I covered 30 kilometers. Never run that far in my life. Never imagined I was gonna run that far. I'm still struggling to visualize that I'm gonna run 50. After finishing that 30, I realized 50 is real, it's doable, and I also know the other totals that I'm hoping to achieve over time are going to be doable as well. So it was that moment I signed up for the next trail race. I haven't even run the first one yet. So I got September 12th, Halbert and 50k, and I signed up for the fat ass trail run in November on November 15th, which is actually my birthday, will be my second 50k trail run. That's what this sport does. It lets you believe in yourself, and that's amazing. I like doing the hard shit, I always have, but I've never done an activity or sport or hobby for that matter, that constantly offers you more hard shit to keep doing. And I don't just mean more races. I mean challenging yourself to keep up with your nutrition and your food, realizing you have to eat more. As a person who has a horrible relationship with food, I have to learn to realize that food is fuel. So all of a sudden I'm eating more food, I'm eating different varieties of food, I'm making sure there's lots of whole food. I'm adding all these things in that I wouldn't normally have eaten and I would be fearful of, like a lot of carbohydrates and stuff, all freaked out. I mean, I would talk carbs are horrible. Now I consume carbohydrates, eating three, four hundred grams of carbohydrates a day. I track my food, but I track my food so I can make sure that I'm getting enough fuel to perform and recover. I weigh myself on the scale. Of course I do, but I'm doing that because I don't want to lose a bunch of weight, because that means I'm not eating enough. But I'm also being mindful that I'm not overeating because I don't want to get that much heavier and make it hard on my joints. The wild part is I'm eating 3,000 to 3,500 calories. Scale's not moving. I used to have to eat 2,000 calories to drop the scale. I'm pretty sure I messed my metabolism up for years. Bad relationship with food, certainly psychologically. Now, just before this podcast, I threw down two bananas. I would be freaked out eating two bananas. I had those two bananas because when I'm done this podcast, I gotta go run for an hour. So it's wild how this all works. Um building purpose through these modalities, these tools, right? Like mobility, recovery, sleep, sauna, it all sounds like a lot, but you do these things. When you put structure and purpose around it, all of a sudden there's value to it. Like it has a purpose. It has a purpose other than just doing it, it's serving this these other goals. When you start interconnecting all these things, for me, this is how it becomes sustainable. It's how it becomes a lifestyle. And this is why I'm drawn to trail running in ultra marathons. And maybe that's why you are too. And if you're thinking about it, give it a shot. You'd be surprised at how all this connects. If a guy at 260 pounds can get started on this journey, and now at 210 be looking at not only my rate, my upcoming races, but future races, I can tell you, yes, my body is sore. I get tired, I get beaten up. But I also do the strength training, do the mobility work, and I eat the food and I feel better. I can feel the recovery as quickly as I get beaten down. I never had that with all the things I've done before with bodybuilding and highlighting games and powerlifting and all that other stuff. I haven't experienced that. This is the only place where it's all coming together for me. And maybe it's a place where it'll all come together for you. And this podcast is going to share that journey. The journey I've been on and the journey I'm going to keep going on. I'm going to bring some guests on and talk about some things. Recovery, nutrition, gonna get into the headspace. There's a lot of mental when we think about trail running and ultra marathons because there's a lot of time on your feet. It's a lot of mind over muscle. I'll tell you that right now. And it's be honest with you, there's a lot of ways it's really easy to want to quit and give up on this because you can justify it super easy. I'm also gonna tell you, we're gonna explore the commitment of time to this. Everyone uses that as the first initial barrier. And I promise you, you have the time. You have the time if you want to use it. And if you really look at yourself honestly in the mirror, you're using that same time for so many other things that aren't helpful. So it's there. It's there if you want to use it. And I'll share the tricks I've learned along the way. I am a busy person. I work three hours from my home. I travel for work beyond that as well. I have a part-time job as well as my full-time job. I have a hobby farm, right? I have a fiance, a stepdaughter. She has activities. We've got chickens for eggs, we got chickens for meat. We've got pigs, we've got a garden, we've got cows at our friends' farm. I play baseball on Friday nights locally. I got a lot going on. Like a lot of you. You probably have as much, if not more. You can find the time. I'm gonna get into the fact that this is not a solo sport. It sounds like it. Take yourself off for a run. Worry about your food, worry about your strength. You know what? The reality is, as much as I'm doing these things, the people around me are impacted. So, how does that work? How do you have those conversations? What does support look like? What do you really need from people? And can you wrestle with the guilt? Because sometimes there's guilt about doing all this stuff for yourself and what that looks like on everybody else. We're gonna dig into that. I'm gonna dig into what I've experienced, you know, how that's been a limiting factor, maybe in other things I've done, and how it's not now, what's been done differently to help use it, not have that guilt, but actually to have strength from the people around you supporting. And what does support really look like? And so I'm gonna talk to people about that and talk about people who do actual support, whether it be volunteers supporting the races, people who um are out there, you know, being pacers and supporting people on a hundred-mile journey and beyond and stuff like that. So we're gonna get into that. This is not an individual sport as much as it's an individual run. It's really weird. Personal best, personal records, you know, your individual journey, your mental journey, but you're really not alone. And there's a variety of ways how this all shapes out. So that's something I think really worth covering. And as I've recognized coming into this space and doing this work, this is quite the community. And it's not even that you're just it's just trail running, like it's not a cult, you know. People that run, run. And whether you're running a mile, uh, five kilometers, a marathon, an ultra marathon, there's a connectivity. And I we all know there's elite people doing elite things, but there's such a small percent of people doing those elite things that the rest of us in the middle really become cheerleaders and fans for each other. And whatever you're celebrating in this space, I have learned very quickly. Others will be very quick to celebrate and champion with you. In some cases, you might even struggle on how to celebrate, but they will show you it's worth celebrating. They will show you what's worth using as a confidence builder and using as a building block for what you can do next. You know, what I've discovered in Trail Running and Ultra Marathons, the really limitations are only of self. The only way you're gonna get limited is by self-limitation, building those barriers, building those roadblocks yourself, putting those hurdles in front of yourself. That's a you thing. And I hope this podcast will help shed some light on that and help you understand that you don't need to do that. You also don't need to go run 200 miles. You do something in between. You can you can explore however this space works for you. Putting some running shoes on, staying hydrated, getting outside, getting that natural vitamin D, just being in contact with the earth, shutting off the devices, run without headphones, run with headphones, run with friends, have conversations. There's all these strengthening and building blocks, and there's this amazing space you get to live in when we think about trail running and ultramarathons. And I want to share that with you. I want to share what that's done for me, the experiences I've had. I'm gonna get others on here and share that as well. Gonna walk you through my journey, gonna keep you along for the ride. With the race coming up, we'll have episode pre-raced, post-raced, what happened after my first 50k? How did I feel going into it? I'm gonna tell you two weeks out, I'm already a little nervous. I'm not even nervous about the race. I'm nervous about the night before. I'm sleeping in a different bed. Am I gonna bring the right food? I'm worried about the fact that my heat, like my race, doesn't start till eight o'clock, but everybody needs to get there early, parking, all the logistics that need to happen as well. And this is where, you know, my fiance and my support team are gonna give me a hand. So I'm not trying to do all this alone. So I can focus on the race, and they're gonna focus on helping get me kind of to the race and then hopefully home from the race. Because that's other piece too. Like you finished running 50k. What kind of shape are you in? I know what kind of shape it was after 30. It wasn't too bad, but it wasn't it certainly was glad I brought my 30k back to my doorstep and not to my car and trying to drive my car from the trailhead home because I think that would have done me in pretty bad. So it'll be interesting to see what 50k looks like as well. But I'm gonna bring you along for all those journeys. I'll try to keep up with the camera. I'm not the best at social media, love podcasting, but I will certainly try to bring that along too because I would like to share the journey with you. Um, this is a pretty interesting and wild sport, to be honest with you. The barrier to entry is incredibly low. Everybody that is even slightly intrigued can do this. I encourage you to try doing this. Um, maybe it isn't for you, but at least you tried and you would know. And for those of us that we have become bitten by this bug, we are addicted to this ridiculousness called trail running an ultra marathons that others can't wrap their heads around. We know. We know the value, we know the space it creates for us to escape, to heal, to connect. Yeah, there's a whole conversation around there. You spend enough time with yourself, you can you can you can really accomplish a lot of good, you can get a lot of clarity. I personally love the disconnecting part, it's nice. Um, in a world that has us connected all the time. Like I have multiple email accounts, multiple devices. I'm sitting here right now with like three laptops in front of me, and I'm not even a techie guy. I know how interconnected we all are to shut it down, run with nature, listen to the world around you, watch the sun come up, watch the sun come down, whatever time of day you're running you are. There's something just so peaceful, so resetting, so fulfilling. That's pretty wild, anyways. Uh, there's a whole emotional soul piece tied to all this stuff, too. And this is wild. This is what's really cool about trail writing, I find. And I'm gonna share all that with you. And if you connect to any of this and you're interested in this, join me for the ride. You know, follow the true course podcast. Try to find your own true course along the way. And what does that mean to you? I'm excited to have you along for the ride. Excited to share this journey. And until then, you know what? Good to see you on the trail. Catch you all next time.