Carpe-ing a Couple of Diems: Part Ⅳ

What got me here won’t get me there

Image by sun jib.

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This is the fourth part of my race report from my first 100-miler (Part Ⅰ, Part Ⅱ, Part Ⅲ). Thirty-two hours after the start, I’m about 105 kilometers (65 miles) in, and just spoke very politely to either a cow or a boulder. Yet I still haven’t exchanged a single word with Lady Longlegs and her running partner, the two runners with whom I’ve been leapfrogging pretty much since the race began. They just passed me on the way to aid station six. It’s the middle of the second night of the race, and my head is buzzing with disembodied voices.

You can now read the whole thing in one place:

Carpe-ing a Couple of Diems [Full]

2.3 the paradox of daylight: the things we miss when we can see everything

About an hour into the climb, the mountain hut I’m looking for is easy to see. From space. The bustling, obscenely lit-up aid station stands in open defiance of what nighttime—astronomically, biologically, and symbolically—is. It takes a while for my haywire nervous system to adjust to the sudden influx of noise, light, and chaotic motion. What kind of 5:30 a.m. is this?

Inside, there are runners chatting excitedly while slurping hot beverages, and others slumped despondently into chairs that they know will be their finish line. A volunteer offers a beverage and a chair to me, as well. I wouldn’t mind taking the weight off my feet for a while, but I decline the hot tea/coffee and go for the yogurt instead. That’s a fun thing to have at an aid station. It makes me colder than I already am, but it settles my stomach, which has been queasy for the past hour or so.

The volunteer then attempts to make small talk, and it quickly becomes apparent that the amazing conversational skills I possessed when talking to the cow/boulder have since taken a spectacular nosedive. Just as well, because the floor is beginning to feel like quicksand.

As I prepare to leave, I notice Legs and her partner eating on their feet near one of the tables. I find myself excited that they’re going to continue (because who eats standing up if they’re going to drop out?). With a final, over-enunciated “thank you” to the volunteer, I walk out of the aid station to begin the five-kilometer, 19-degree ascent to the course’s highest point.

With the silence returns the cacophony. Conversations, laughter, sometimes music. This time I know they’re not coming from the aid station—that’s well out of earshot. I also know they’re not real voices but ambient noise that my brain interprets as signal. Still, the noise has to originate from somewhere. I stop, quiet my breathing, and concentrate on the world around me. There’s no flowing water nearby, no wind whistling in the trees. Not a single decibel of sound for the voices to morph from: they have taken a life of their own. A thousand TV shows playing simultaneously, with only myself as the unwilling audience.

Lamentably, the in-house entertainment is not engaging enough to counteract my sleepiness. My eyelids have drifted to mid-eyeball level, seemingly permanently, and any attempt to lift them merely causes my eyebrows to rise.

✙ ✚ ✛

It’s often at nighttime when the plainer things win the bid for attention (for what can compete with the splendor of the mountains on full display?).

I may forget to look more closely while luxuriating in daylight, but now close looks are all I have: a short bit of trail, the trailside shrubs, the dust in front of my headlamp. I watch the tiny particles dance and dash and sparkle, illuminated by the artificial glow that barely filters the predawn murkiness. Does dust ever settle in the mountains?

Transfixed by the hypnotic closeness, I push my grainy little spotlight up the slope. Beyond its halo, the world fades to black. I am thus a threshold between light and darkness; I’m liminality in motion.

And I am also in a threshold state myself: I’m neither fully awake nor fully asleep but suspended in perpetual hypnagogia—the state between the two. Time is a single moment stretching indefinitely. My thoughts escape from me, my vision blurs, I drift away from my physical body. A feeling I’ve experienced every night of my life now feels like torture. It’s so tempting to let my eyes shut all the way.

Tempting… Eyes shut…

I wake up with my feet in the air, butt to the sky, and face full of shrubbery. A split second of confusion, then I almost have a heart attack: Several human heads are floating above the bushes to my right. To my immeasurable relief, they turn out to be firmly attached to human bodies (one of which has very long legs).

The runners stare at me as they move past, probably wondering who hung laundry to dry here with a person still inside it. For ego reasons, I make a production of fumbling with my drawstring: Nothing to see here, this is how I always dive forward and bend over a bush when I need to use the bathroom. I wait until they round the switchback before dragging myself back onto the trail. Either day breaks soon, or I do.

An infinite half-hour later, pale incandescence backlights the horizon and brushes against the mountaintops at just the right angle. The alpenglow. Champagne- and marigold-painted granite and marble. Masterful command of attention.

Then, long-awaited yet flaring all too suddenly, the crescendo: Skies ablaze, mountaintops erupting in molten orange and pink. The sun finally rises.

And not just rises, but rises for the second time since the race began. This is it: The final milestone before the finish. My mind clears. Time resumes its flow.

I haven’t yet reached the top of the ascent for the full 360-view, but I have a solid 180 degrees behind me as I dig my toes into the final stretch. I turn around to take it all in—and stumble backward at the realization that most of the course is not only behind me, but it’s behind me: Stretching before my eyes are the peaks and valleys, metaphorical and literal, of the past 35 hours.

Months and months of training and studying maps, 35 hours on the course, and I still haven’t fully grasped the immensity of where I am and what I’m doing. Had little Melinda Mae, when she had eaten 70 percent of her whale?

✚ ✛ ✙

Among the casualties of extreme fatigue: thermoregulation. I’ve never felt so cold in my life. The ferocious, omnidirectional wind that pummels the exposed mountainside pushes my exhales back into my lungs, setting off the wailing alarms again: Move, leave here, save yourself. The reptilian part of my brain is increasingly the smarter one.

Face numb, teeth achatter, I reach the summit and begin the descent toward Aid Seven. On the sunlit, windless slope, early winter quickly turns into late spring. I stop to shed some layers, then stop again for what’s got to be my hundredth bathroom break (I stopped counting around the same time I stopped waiting to pull up my pants before getting back on the trail) (calling it a “bathroom break” at this point only emphasizes how long it’s been since I’ve seen an actual bathroom). In short, progress is slow and bumbling.

On top of that, the trail is difficult to follow because there are so many of it—slaloming tracks diverge and converge over the entire slope, skirting nonexistent obstacles. I haven’t seen Legs since my embarrassing human-laundry moment in the bushes some hours ago. She was always better at picking out the trail.

As I get to what from above appeared to be the bottom of the descent, I discover there is an equivalent to false summits: false bottoms. Instead of reaching the aid station, the trail widens and continues to descend into a forest. My watch could’ve saved me the disappointment, except it keeps adding distance. I haven’t run as far as it says, and so I’m not as close to the aid station as it says. For some reason, this feels disproportionately disheartening.

I know the reason: It’s one of those lows that I’ve already had a bunch of and have learned to accept and take in stride. I mean, it’s normal to be cranky—I’m more sleep deprivation that person at this point, my stomach still feels weird, and everything hurts.

So I embrace, as they say, “the suck,” and continue to shuffle toward the aid station. Its position is reliably fixed in space, so if I keep shifting mine in the right direction, physics will eventually bring us together.

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§3 me & the clock

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3.1 training hard got me to where hard training becomes irrelevant

There are plenty of chairs at the aid station, but having my legs together and locked straight is all the sitting I need. Even the embers inside my shoes don’t bother me as long as I stand perfectly still. I feed my rebellious stomach another pacifying yogurt as I inquire of a volunteer about the long climb that I’ve been looking forward to for hours—surprisingly for this late in the race, going uphill has emerged as the most alright type of going. The climb is a “monstrous” one, apparently.

As I leave the vicinity of my unused chair and start swinging my poles up the hill, I feel as if time has been turned back by hours. Not a lot of hours, but some. What a miraculous indulgence, simply to stand without moving a muscle.

After the initial steep incline, the slope lets up a little as the forest falls behind. The eight kilometers (five miles) to the top will end up taking me three hours, but right now I’m not paying attention to distance, time, or a future of any proximity. All I’m consciously doing is resisting the urge to lie down on the warm grass and close my eyes.

And then there are the voices. I know many people flinch at the prospect of being alone for such long periods of time, but for me, escaping the crowds of the city is very much part of the allure of ultrarunning. Except—what a cruel trick—I seem to have brought the crowds with me.

If I had imagined any form of desperation befalling me during a 100-mile race in a remote mountainous area (and I had), a desperate need for quiet was not it. No amount of training could’ve prepared me for this. All those hill repeats just made it so I could get over enough hills to reach the point where hills are the least of my concerns. This “monstrous” climb could be twice as monstrous for all I care. Climbing’s not that hard. I just want to climb in silence.

Can it be that all this chatter is just the sound of being a human? An echo of all of humanity in an ever-present broadcast that a rested brain can easily tune out, but that sleep deprivation amplifies to a roar?

To regain some sense of control over my own person, I decide to finally heed the ardent pleas of my upset stomach. Throwing up seems like a solid reset option, plus, who knows, perhaps it will scare away the voices. Unfortunately, despite giving it my emphatic all, I only manage to produce a few impotent dry heaves and some excess saliva (yes, ultrarunning is gross). The voices are unfazed.

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3.2 let’s not talk again sometime

Step after tediously identical step, I reach a meadow with a kiosk-sized, oddly colored boulder inexplicably in the middle of it. This is what’s called a glacial erratic—incidentally, the exact two words I’d use to describe my pace and cognitive function, respectively. As I come around the boulder, I notice a familiar pair of legs stretched out beside it. My old companions start gathering their scattered belongings as I shuffle by, and catch up to me a few minutes later.

Our unspoken not-speaking agreement stands. Hours and hours I have spent running either next to or close behind/ahead of the woman I keep calling Lady Longlegs, and I have no desire to learn her real name or where she comes from; she’s perfect the way she is. But I’ve learned to read her stride and catch the nuances of her silence: She’s tired now, yet flowing, using the terrain as much as her own power. Her perseverance seems awesome to me—in that disused meaning of the word. Does she think about the enormousness of her feat, or realize she’s among the rare few who would even attempt it?

A lightbulb moment, a flash of a mirror; and suddenly I’m certain beyond all doubt: our leapfrogging ends here, and I’m the one ending it.

It took 40 hours and carefully watching myself and a couple of strangers struggle for me to gain the ability to see: The longer you’re in the race, the less doubt there is that you belong in the race. Nobody still out here after almost two days is an impostor, including my undertrained self. The Lady and I—and her partner, and all the others currently on the course, and little Melinda Mae—we’re all strong enough to stick with our “whale,” even though we’re damn sick of it.

It feels like permission. I harness what’s left of my mental faculties to mobilize what’s left of my physical strength (or possibly the other way around) and slowly pull away from the couple. I should’ve gotten their contact information. We could’ve spent hours not talking on the phone.

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Continue reading:

Carpe-ing a Couple of Diems: Part Ⅴ

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