Carpe-ing a Couple of Diems: Part Ⅱ

Now I’m home, now I’m a visitor

Image by Kanenori.

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This is Part Ⅱ of the story about my first 100-mile race—the “I’m in it now” part. You can read Part Ⅰ first if you prefer, but it’s not essential. Briefly: I signed up for an unnecessarily difficult race, trained my butt off, started, had a bit of a freak-out a few hours in, and pulled myself together just before reaching the second aid station (26 kilometers/16.2 miles).

You can now read the whole thing in one place:

Carpe-ing a Couple of Diems [Full]

1.4 wild things, wild places

Aid Two sits at the intersection of the race’s figure-eight course. This is where we have access to our dropbags—first now, then a second time about halfway through the race (when it’s renamed to Aid Five). The inside of the nondescript brick structure is the size of a small-to-average kitchen, so the atmosphere is rather intimate. Crouching over my dropbag cheek by jowl (ahem, literally) with half the butts in the race, I grab what I’ll need for the next 20-ish hours. The sunglasses call to mind the comfortingly inevitable sunrise, now a mere five hours away.

Shortly after leaving the aid station, I have to pee. The dirt road bends just often enough to provide equal parts privacy and the thrill of being caught with my pants down. Getting into position is not unfussy, what with all the layers I have on, and I have a feeling the whole preparing-to-squat thing will get very old as the race progresses.

Business done, I resume winding up the dirt road, excited to be on the second big climb of the night. Now that we’re nearly seven hours into the race, I feel significantly more “in” it. I guess I came here for the big numbers, and I’m becoming increasingly more immersed in and receptive to the experience as I tick off the smaller ones.

A brightly lit cabin (no humans in sight) marks the beginning of the steepest part of this climb: 1,280 meters (4,200 feet) of gain over 7.2 kilometers (4.5 miles). A dense pine forest covers most of the slope. I’ve been alone for a while now, or believe I have. The night is at its darkest as I sneak among the trees, not a traveler just passing through but a nocturnal mountain creature whose home has always been the woods. I’ve never quite been able to recreate the calmness of being alone in the mountains at night in any other setting, yet the feeling is one of instant and effortless belonging.

A bunch of other mountain creatures’ headlamps appear not far ahead as the forest thins out near the end of the ascent. We’re never as alone as we think, are we? I manage to pass a total of eight runners up the windswept slope before we crest the ridge.

I can’t see very far around me, but the top feels like an inhospitable place. And sounds like the inside of a vacuum cleaner. The frigid wind blusters and bites, each gust stealing more of my body heat and my calmness. There’s something about cold wind that sets off a hundred wailing alarms in my homeostasis-loving body. Urgency upon urgency: self-preservation on top of physical and mental exertion.

I hurry to get off the ridge, but the ridge is not in a hurry to be gotten off of. I can only manage a gingerly shuffle over the wobbly rocks that keep trying to slip out from under my feet. Upon closer inspection, I discover the rocks are covered with an uneven, thin film of ice—frozen dew, or perhaps rain from earlier.

I deduce a connection between that and my fingers hurting like the absolute dickens, so I speed up, bracing for an imminent fall each time my feet slip on the ice-coated rocks shifting and clattering beneath them. My poles are invaluable in keeping me upright and moving fast enough to avoid becoming coated in ice myself. But after a while, I’m shivering a worrying amount, and I’ve completely lost feeling in my hands; the chilling near-gale finds the weak points in everything I’m wearing.

A wind so violent it’s difficult not to attribute a malevolent will to it.

Meanwhile, a male runner whose chosen amount of leg coverage is inversely proportional to the size of his cojones casually settles onto a slab of granite to enjoy a snack. Grins at me and says something about being in the moment. Right on, shorts dude, right on.

My calmness returns as I leave the frozen ridge behind. The shivers abate, sensitivity tingles back into my fingers. The sky to the east is brightening almost imperceptibly.

For many runners, the arrival of dawn after a full night’s running triggers an energy boost—probably something to do with the body’s circadian rhythm and psychological response to light. Luckily, this effect doesn’t seem to be diminished by my partiality for night running: When the sun comes up, my body reacts with the appropriate elevation in mood and alertness. I have made it through the first night of the race.

The first quarter of the course, as well—I arrive at the third aid station.

✙ ✚ ✛

Entering the large mountain hut that houses Aid Three, I am met by a volunteer’s enthusiastically descriptive “A woman!” to which I curtsy. We gals are few (five) and literally far between in this race. I wonder where Lady Longlegs and Not-Her-Pacer are, I haven’t seen them since the last… Oh, there they come.

The air in the common area/dining room is stove-warmed and smells of socks and cooked food—runners changing one, volunteers serving the other. Long tables and benches are being used for either purpose.

I always forget how plodding along for hours on end gradually slows my pace without my noticing, until I take even a short break and it resets my legs. So, for the first time in 11 hours, I decide to sit down. I choose a bench from the available few, one without lentil soup or hosiery on it, which has been recently vacated by somebody or something very wet. Sitting feels awkward and unnecessary, but at least I can use these few minutes to have a bite and sort out some gear. As I put away my headlamp, the thought that the race is a two-nighter and I will need it again briefly registers in the back of my mind but fails to fully compute. For now, I’m focused on getting to the next aid station—by my estimation, about nine hours away.

Nine hours through the most rugged, remote, untamed section of the course. No water, no cell service, often no trail, no feasible “out” except “through.” A whole lot of rocks.

I step out of the pungent coziness of the aid station and into the coldest part of the day. The sun is steadily gaining altitude in clear skies, and soon the mountain will warm up again.

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1.5 unstoppable forces, immovable objects

Off I go up the third big climb of the race. The off-trail portion doesn’t start for a good couple of hours, which for me pass in solitude and mounting apprehension. I haven’t seen this place I’m going to first-hand, but it’s been made infamous by the chilling stories of those who have. What can be so horrible about it?

Toward the end of the so-far-excellent trail, I pass a runner who’s having some gastrointestinal issues but seems upbeat and focused on resolving them. Smiling through the trots while mixing caffeine pills with Imodium has to be peak ultrarunning.

And then the trail is no more. There are only giant piles of giant boulders, splotchy with brightly colored lichens and mired in waist-high shrubbery with crooked, grabby, unyielding branches. The going is maddeningly slow and hurts my shins, the sole respite a sad-looking, dried-up lake. I take my time walking across its cracked bottom before diving back into the rocks and shrubs to scramble up toward an unnamed saddle, followed by an unnamed peak. It seems mildly incongruous to me that we would claim all of this as ours to name, only to leave out random parts of it.

High up on the moraine slope, moving parallel to but just below the physical ridgeline, I start slipping again. In the shade of the ridge, the ice patches that have formed on the rocks during the night haven’t yet melted. I notice the ice is thick and milky, whereas last night it was thin and transparent.

The other difference with last night is that I can now see where I’m going much better. Arguably a good thing, except I can also see where I don’t want to go, but would if I were to fall. The steep slope ends unnervingly far below, into the gaping maw of a deep, undulating valley that smothers everything in penumbral green. I try to picture the glacier that made all of this—snailing along, deforming under its own weight yet still reaching its tongue greedily forward, dragging with it its ever-increasing load.

❝For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either.

—Blaise Pascal, Pensées

I get now why this section has the reputation it does and why past participants in the race warned me about it. Their words cautioned of treacherous terrain, but it’s their voices that have always betrayed what I now recognize in myself: an overwhelming sense of isolation and inadequacy.

Funny, isn’t it? The vastness of mountains usually evokes a feeling of empowerment, of freedom. But what kind of freedom is it when the path I’m following is basically the only one my fragile body can handle? In every direction but one, I can’t be—the boulders are either too big to climb over, or they lead to a precipice.

This is the real mountain: forbidding, pathless, soulless save for the soul we sometimes like to ascribe to it. Unstoppable forces coexisting with immovable objects.¹ Far from the calm sense of belonging on last night’s forested trail, here I feel like an anatopism—removed from where I fit and function best, a squishy, short-lived being in a land of fierce, ancient giants.

But yeah, so, anyway, rocks slippery, falling bad. I am once again saved by the engineered miracle of carbide—the poles’ little tips bite into the granite where my shoes simply slide off, and so I remain upright. The squishy being has some tricks up her sleeve.

✚ ✛ ✙

It’s just past noon when I reach the top of the climb. As I poke my head over the edge of the topmost boulder, I’m greeted by a standby rescue team, who have been stationed there by the organizers in case any of us require, well, rescuing. Good news, bad news: The bouldery climb is over, but a bouldery descent is about to begin. At least the midday sun has finally done away with the ice.

I’m still clutching my poles as I begin carefully picking my way down the furniture-sized rocks. In hindsight, the poles were more a hindrance than a help, as they prevented me from using my hands. Instead of putting them away, I’m flinging them back and forth from hand to hand, both at once or one at a time, spinning them around behind my back, under my leg, over my head. I look more like a spider that’s lost four of its limbs than anything actually born with four limbs.

One hour later, the moraine abruptly ends, however unbelievably. I’m sure it will haunt my dreams, but for now, I’m safely among trees, on a proper trail, and I’m actually running.

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Continue reading:

Carpe-ing a Couple of Diems: Part Ⅲ

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed your time here, consider sharing “Carpe-ing a Couple of Diems: Part Ⅱ” or this newsletter with a friend. Then go tidy up some random corner of the house.

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1. Physicists/philosophers, don’t @ me.