And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily
miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy.
-Kahlil Gibran
Just before 5:00 AM I stood in the cold dark by the Bear
Mountain Inn, surrounded by tiny pockets of light thrown by headlamps and fire
rings and strings of electric bulbs.
As the clock ticked down the announcer called for the first wave of
runners to gather at the starting line.
I positioned myself at the back of the corral, my shoulder blades quite
literally touching the cold metal barrier. My plan was to go out softly and try to run easy all the way
to Anthony Wayne at 41 miles. I
wanted to arrive there without feeling too beat up. If I managed that, then I would race hard over the last ten
miles to the finish. It wasn’t
much of a strategy, but it was what I had.
Coach Jimmy Dean Freeman is fond of saying, “An ultra is
ninety percent mental, and the other ten percent is in your head.” What he means is that a runner’s
physical capacity is fully determined well before he or she reaches the
starting line, and that virtually everyone on that line has the physical
capacity to finish well. The
deciding factor between running well or failing from that point forward is the
mental – or more importantly, emotional – strength required to push the body into
the depths of that physical ability for hours and hours. A race of this distance on this terrain is virtually guaranteed to provide
plenty of physical pain and exhaustion.
As runners, it is up to us to float above that pain, grind our way
through it, or succumb, and all three are possible.
My mother is a psychologist and councilor. She told me once about a training course she took that covered psychosomatic strength and weakness. In one of the sessions the participants
held out their arms at ninety degrees from the shoulder and gripped a heavy weight
in the extended hand. They closed
their eyes and told first a truth, then a lie. With the truth, they could hold the weight steady. With the lie their hands trembled, or
even dropped. The cognitive
dissonance confused the brain and interrupted the neural signals that keep the muscles firing in their arms.
The psychosomatic test is a distilled version of what I
would face over and over during the race.
Over fifty miles I would take between seventy and ninety thousand
steps. If my brain could convince
just a few extra muscle fibers to fire on each of those steps, I would fly
through to the finish. If it
couldn’t, I would slog along, the effort building with every step. What
determines whether on not my brain would perform are all of the ephemerals:
happiness, confidence, resiliency, and adaptability facing off against sadness,
confusion, loneliness, and rigidity.
I’ve run both ways in the past. Just two weeks earlier in the North Face DC marathon an aid
station volunteer had chided me for making the race look too easy. I was twenty miles in, in third place,
gliding along and chasing down the leaders. It actually wasn’t easy, physically. I was running against the edge of my
ability, hot and tired and hurting, but I was running with the joy of visiting
my sister’s family, the beauty of the day and the positivity of the other
runners. It must have showed.
I wouldn’t have that advantage in this race. Just three days before I’d gotten the
news at my job. Not getting what I
wanted was hard, but for many reasons it became far worse than that. Hearing through the rumor mill hours
before anyone got around to telling me directly made me angry. It devalued the months of managing
uncertainty and the effort of creating a base of support. The patronizing consolations and
realizing how deep the breach of trust ran finally shattered the thin veneer of
civility I’d been able to maintain to that point. I felt shocked, hurt, and adrift. I try to remember how badly I lost my temper in the ensuing
conversations, but the exact words refuse to arise from memory.
Afterward I drove to my refuge on the Watchung trails. I burst immediately into a reckless
sprint, no warmup, and burned over the first mile. I stopped suddenly, wanting to scream. Too suddenly. I’m prone to cerebral hypoperfusion when I stop an intense
effort, as my body maintains blood flow to the muscles and forgets about the
brain. My vision turned blue,
narrowed, and I fell to the ground.
I bizarrely got up and started running again before coming to, only
regaining consciousness as I crashed through a thicket and slammed into an old
oak. Blood dripped from my elbow,
and I cursed it as it splashed on the ground. Then I finished the loop.
With the Bear Mountain 50 mile coming on Saturday I knew I
was in for trouble. I couldn’t get
my mind right. I cancelled our
reservation at the Bear Mountain Inn; I didn’t think I could run the race. Then on Friday my buddy Andrew Siegmund
texted, asked if I was ready to crush it.
I told him I was mentally wrecked, and he understood. He told me to do it anyway. I told him I would try to run, just to
see if I could go fifty miles on spite and anger. He told me to fly like Peter Pan instead. I asked what he meant, and he reminded
me: happy thoughts.
I set my alarm for 2:30 am on Saturday morning, but woke up
at 2:20. I was quietly thankful
that the alarm wouldn’t wake my family.
I drove north, and there were no distressed thoughts or worries this
time, not like last year. There
was only a yawning, empty sadness.
I wanted the black night to be comforting, but looking out at it only
felt like looking in a mirror. I saw
grey hair and stubble, blank eyes and a wrinkled face.
I caught the last shuttle from Anthony Wayne to Bear
Mountain, arriving at the start/finish at 4:20. I milled around, picking up a bib and arranging my drop
bags. I tried to be sociable,
honoring the connections I made with Lena in DC, Sue and Maya at the Skydive
Ultra, Adam and Eric at the Hurl Elkhorn, and Karen at Cayuga Trails, but
mostly my attempts fell flat. I
did chat a bit with an Ironman triathlete named Rob, who has a two-year old
daughter and another on the way.
We joked and commiserated about the difficulties of parenting while
training for ultras, and glorified the hot coffee offered up by volunteers in
the predawn chill. The
conversation felt almost human and almost real.
At the 5:00 am start I jogged off behind the first wave of
runners. I had no intention of
overrunning the early miles. I
held back on the first rocky climbs, and soon the lead racers from the second
wave came streaming by, their headlamps shining through the dark. I let them go. I knew I would see most of them again,
and I did. Over the first twenty
miles of hilly, broken ground I passed each one of them and many others, one by
one or in bunches, the race unfolding exactly as I intended. I still felt sad, but I felt strong.
On a different day, after a different week, I think I could
have kept it up. I wouldn’t have
won – the talent in the field was far to deep for that – but I might have had a
chance at the top ten or fifteen.
On that day I would have been mentally strong and happy. I would have waved at the
photographers, maybe clowned around and flexed the muscles on my thin
arms. Instead I could barely
smile. When the pain came I
gritted my teeth and forced my way through it, but I couldn’t float above. Half way to Anthony Wayne I realized that my
strategizing was already lost. I
slowed, and on the way into the Camp Lanowa my legs cramped in a strange way
behind the knees, hamstrings and calves betraying me together. On the way out of the aid station the
volunteers cheered and clapped.
They told me I was doing great and to keep up the good work. Secretly I wished they would stop
cheering. I felt so worthless, and
I wished they would turn their backs and shun the useless creature before
them. I covered my mouth with my
hand, hoping they wouldn’t see my expression.
By mile thirty I was walking. It was by far the easiest section of the course, on a paved
road of all things, smooth and only slightly uphill. The runners I had passed earlier passed me back. One asked me if I was okay, and I told
him I was walking back to Anthony Wayne to drop out. He told me I’d feel better in while, and to keep going. Another told me it wouldn’t last, and a
third told me he’d see me again when I caught up. Then a young guy gave me a chunk of ice he’d kept in his hat, to cool
my hands and face in the growing heat.
It was the kindness of the other runners that finally broke
through my sadness and shame.
These were the people who were facing the same struggle I was, and that
commonality allowed me to hear and feel their support. In their presence I was not alone. I began to jog behind a trio of
European runners, letting their energy pull me up the hills and over the
rocks. I felt like the end car of
a freight train, no longer responsible for my own motion, but filled with the
inevitability of that movement. I
was no longer competing, but I was running.
By the return to Anthony Wayne I felt a small measure of
strength again. Many families and
friends of the racers were there, cheering on their runners and laughing and
smiling. Amazingly my own family
came running across the parking lot, looking beautiful and clean and not at all
like the beaten down lot of us who’d been running for eight hours. I told them that I would be slow on the
last ten miles, that it wasn’t a good day for me, and they said they would meet
me at the end.
Amazingly, I beat my family to the finish. They were at the park, playing, when I
came across the line. Alone, I
bent over and buried my face in my hands. For so many, this would be a moment of victory, a chance to
celebrate the accomplishment. I stayed
bent over and let the anger and shame and sadness wash over me for another
minute. I felt the pain and
exhaustion in my bruised and broken body, then I straightened up. I walked through the finish festival to
a pine tree and lay down on my back in the shade. I thought about the race and the pain, my failures and my partial
recovery. I thought about mental
strength and emotional weakness. I
thought of what Christopher McDougall said: “If you don’t have answers to your
problems after a four-hour run, you ain’t getting them.” I asked myself why I felt the way I
did. At first there were no
answers, but slowly I gained a modicum of understanding. I felt like I'd been led on. I was ashamed that I fell for it. I felt betrayed, and I felt embarrassed
to see my raw ambition paraded so publicly about. I looked in at the core of my self and saw the shriveled,
seething mass. It stank of base arrogance,
petty selfishness, and foolish wounded pride. I recoiled from it.
It was my worst self, but I couldn’t escape it. It was part of me.
In the end I knew that nothing had changed, not in the ten
hours of the race and not in the week before. I was the same person, living the same life, albeit much
more bruised and scraped and sore now.
Only my perspective had shifted.
That morning Bear Mountain had glowed crimson in the sunrise; now it
glittered green in the afternoon light.
Soon night would fall, and it would loom ominously in the gray dark, but
it was the same mountain. I was
getting to see a different side of my life from the one I usually enjoy, a
darker, more ominous side. I would
have to get used to its presence, but I knew I had to stop letting it consume
me. If spite and anger weren’t
enough to fuel me for fifty miles, they certainly wouldn’t sustain me for months
or years. I would have to find
the freight train of runners in my real life and join in, become part and
parcel of that support and inevitable motion, and refuse to allow the unstable
rocks a place in my foundation.
By the end of the day my wife and son had lifted my
spirits. Together we dragged my
body back to the truck, and I followed them home. I began to mentally rebuild the veneer of civility. I began to take back my right to feel
good about the better parts of who I am and how I conduct myself. I began to prepare for the difficult
part.
Postscript
As always, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the volunteers
at the start/finish and the aid stations, particularly to the girl at Camp Lanowa
who kept me focused on taking one section at a time and to the woman at Tiorati
who sunscreened my burning skin. Without
these people, and without the organization provided by The North Face, I
wouldn’t have been able to start the race, much less finish. My thanks and my wish of blessing for each of them.
I would also like to acknowledge Dave and Paul, who, in the midst of
their own tough moments, let me walk along with them, and Ryan, who may have
managed to run every step. My
memory will always keep the images of them, along with the aforementioned
European trio, the guys blaring heavy metal from their truck outside Anthony
Wayne, the matching red shirt family, the passing cyclists, my buddy Chris
and his family who found me at the finish festival, the pacer wearing heart
emblazoned socks to match her runner, the hiker who made way in honor of his own
many competitions, the WTC girls at Queensboro, and Karen Holland, who called
out my name as I closed on the finish.
