Soldier completes first 91-mile ultra marathon, continues to push limits

Story by Sgt. Zoe Morris
West Virginia National Guard

On mile 35 of the 91.1-mile West Virginia Trilogy ultramarathon, West Virginia Army National Guard (WVARNG) Soldier Cpl. Avery Liller slipped and slammed his knee into a rock. He was on day two of the three-day race, slogging through foot-deep mud in the Monongahela National Forest, a remote area of the Appalachian Mountains known for rugged landscape with spectacular views, rivers, blueberry thickets, highland bogs, and open areas with ancient exposed rocks and boulders.

“For the rest of the race any downhill running was so painful is was almost unbearable, but I refused to quit because that’s not what I do,” said Liller. “The final day my ankles were swollen the size of baseballs, my knee hurt so bad that I couldn’t walk down any stairs. I tried to run and was quickly brought to a walk and was almost in tears from the pain.”

Liller’s mental fortitude and habit of constant training beyond his comfort zone worked to get him  across the finish line.

“All that pain was immediately replaced with reward,” Liller said.

Liller, a policeman with the 157th Military Police Company, is a senior at West Virginia University majoring in Wildlife and Fisheries Resource Management. Rising to meet mental and physical challenges in a natural environment is a reoccurring theme for the Moorefield, West Virginia native.

As a Guard member, he has earned the German Armed Forces Proficiency Badge, the Air Assault Badge, won the WVARNG 2017 Best Warrior Competition (BWC) and was subsequently named 2017 Soldier of the Year after an intense competition.

“Cpl. Liller is a model citizen Soldier,” said WVNG Senior Enlisted Leader, Command Sgt. Maj. Phillip Cantrell. “He demonstrates the mental and physical ability to take any situation and create a positive outcome. Cpl. Liller is personally dedicated to being the best Soldier he can.”

Recruiting and Retention Battalion Command Sgt. Maj. James Jones says Liller is a humble guy who quietly takes a little bit of guidance and just runs with it.

It was a 2015 challenge by Jones, then Liller’s first sergeant, that led to Liller’s first marathon.

“It was the worst pain I had ever endured and my body completely hit the wall but it was the first time I had ever felt that kind of fatigue and I immediately fell in love the that pain from the challenge,” Liller said.

Liller had been active in sports throughout high school and had done a few 5k runs before and after attending Basic Training, but the extreme rush of that marathon set him on his current path.

“If Soldiers will take the time and step outside their comfort zone and try something they perceive as impossible, they’ll find out they have the capability to do it and it unlocks everything from that point,” said Jones.

Noncommissioned officers have a responsibility to present challenging opportunities and then lead from the front, said Jones, who ran alongside Liller and other Soldiers in that 2015 marathon.

Just two years later, Liller came in 25th in the WV Trilogy. Thirty people, out of 52 registered, completed the event, climbing more than 16,000 feet of elevation.

In addition to graduating college, Liller said he is continuing to focus on ultra-marathons with an eye on the Bigfoot 200-miler in Washington’s Cascade Mountains.


Fitness Question with Cpl. Avery Liller

Favorite running tip/trick

Consistency is the number one most important thing I would have to say. I have a lot of tips, but without the consistency those tips mean nothing. My tip would be back to back long runs or “sandwich” long runs. What those do is it teaches your body to go those long distances without doing your race distance in your training and cause havoc on your body. Plus is teaches you to learn to run on exhausted legs. I always try to train for the second half of a race. I want all the miles of my runs to be hard. Not just the latter miles. Also, have at least five different types of runs you can do each week in your training to mix it up. Your body reacts when it is forced to adapt. If you’re doing the same kind of runs everyday then you won’t improve at the rate you will want to. I like long runs, tempo runs, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) intervals at the track, and maintenance runs. Also 90 percent of my runs are on trails and with a massive amount of incline. My favorite trail to run is at Seneca rocks.

Do you have a running soundtrack?

I can't listen to music when I run. It messes with my breathing because I’ll be wanting to sing or hum along. But most importantly it prevents me from being able to lose myself in the run, meaning I lose the ability to fight the pain and makes the run seem a lot longer for me. Plus some of my training runs take six hours on my long run days and honestly I’d be more tired of the music than I would be physically so therefore I don’t listen to it on the trails.
I will listen to songs that pump me up prior to the run. My favorite song pre run is Footsteps by Pop Evil. I don’t know what it is about that song but it just get me in the proper mindset to crank out a lot of miles.

Who inspires you?

There are two people that inspire me to push harder even on days when I’m feeling soft - David Goggins and Cameron Hanes. Retired Navy SEAL David Goggins is known for his breathtaking mental toughness and is pretty much known for being the hardest person on the planet. Three hell weeks in one year, 100 miler without any training ... the man makes any excuses I have seem so minor that I won’t care any more and I’ll be in the right mindset to kill it that day. Cameron Hanes is a hardcore bowhunter that runs ultra marathons to harden his mind for challenging hunts in the mountains. His philosophy is “train hard, hunt easy,” meaning that he wants his training to be so hard that no matter what goes wrong on the mountain on a hunt, it’s simply is minor because of how brutal he trains everyday.