Carpe-ing a Couple of Diems: Part Ⅴ

The finish

Photo by Frederico Almeida.

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Here it is: the finish. Thank you to all who read the previous chapters, I hope you’ll like the end of this journey.

And in case you haven’t been following along: Part Ⅰ was about the decision to run the race and the early miles. In Part Ⅱ, I found myself at home in the mountains, and later found myself a mere visitor. Part Ⅲ was where I first encountered sleep deprivation and its extremely fun effects. In Part Ⅳ, I lost my dignity in some bushes, had an epiphany about strength, and said goodbye to Lady Longlegs—my unwitting “competition” of 40 hours. Currently, I’m nearing the end of the final long climb of the race, about 126 kilometers (78.3 miles) in. The cutoff is 50 hours.

You can now read the whole thing in one place:

Carpe-ing a Couple of Diems [Full]

3.3 friends in high places

To the uninitiated, the final section of this ascent is a gut punch (or any punch of your choosing). After two hours of climbing in a pretty much straight line, a ridge with a prominent saddle appears in the path of that line a short distance ahead. Nothing to the left or right suggests we can go in those directions, while the saddle—picture a ridgeline with a giant bite taken out of it—looks very much like the logical end of the climb. An easy end, too, by the looks of it (well, mountain-easy).

But then, uh-oh, we’re veering to the left as “left” suddenly becomes an option. Logic and ease slowly disappear behind my right shoulder as the manicured trail crashes into a towering, barely traversable heap of rocks choking the narrow chute between two near-vertical walls. Bam!, gut punch.

This is the kind of steep that makes your neck hurt when you look to the top, which is your body’s way of telling you that you don’t want to be looking to the top. The sound of my heartbeat pounding in my ears blends with the rest of the noise in my head. New voices join in, as well—it takes me a moment to realize they’re not hallucinations but actual sound waves traveling through the air. There are people here. I look up (ouch, my neck) to see two more runners, a man and a woman, clawing and grunting their way up the rocks.

The man stops to catch his breath as I get near. They exchange a few words in a language I don’t understand, and she pushes on without him. The two of us reach the ridgetop together and begin the equally steep descent on the other side.

This one talks. I can’t understand a single word, but I think she’s trying to ask me something, pointing at her watch and then down the slope. After an exhausting yet futile pantomimic exchange, I give her a sheepish thumbs-up, hoping it’s a yes-or-no question and the answer is “yes.” I miss Legs and her noninteractive presence.

We get down from the ridge, just barely, onto a terrace-like valley with a gorgeous lake that takes up about half of it. Jagged peaks the color of gunmetal rim the valley on three sides. Their proximity is unthreatening: I know the trail traverses straight through the valley—lush green on one side, cerulean blue on the other—before dropping further down the mountain. There isn’t much climbing to be done anymore.

I’m saying it as if it’s a good thing. It’s not. My feet hurt a lot more going down.

Near the lake, an ice-cold spring provides the last drinkable water before the final aid station. Chatty continues on without stopping, which I think is a mistake. After baking in the sun for three hours on the climb, we’re only about halfway through this leg of the course, and I’m not running out of water twice in a single race. I drink from my cupped hands, splash my face, and finally top off my soft flasks before jogging after her.

You would think sprawling face-down on the ground would be a more fitting reaction to the past 40-something hours, but no, I’m jogging.

Faster and faster as we cross the valley and plunge down a set of pebbly switchbacks, where I overtake my new friend. I don’t know how to say “good job” in her language, so I give her my goofy thumbs-up again. It’s ultrarunning—you can’t go wrong with goofy.

Loose scree has never been my strength, but for some reason, I’m full-on running now, ignoring the burning pain in my feet because you don’t need feet when you’re flying. At the bottom, I make a sharp right, zigzag across a river by hopping over the larger stones jutting out of it, and continue up a gently inclined rocky singletrack. I keep turning my head, but nobody’s following me—not across the river, not on the singletrack, not over the boulder field along the shore of a placid lake.

After the lake, I continue up a short ascent (30 minutes barely registers as anything on the scale of this race) made up of talus and shrubbery. I can’t remember the last time I climbed something that didn’t take me hours.

At the top, thankful for the small breeze in the otherwise still, heavy air, I turn back one last time. Nobody’s coming.

✛ ✙ ✚

In one unhurried, absentminded motion, my hand again wanders to the tiny pocket of my pack near my collarbone. For the thousandth time, my fingers find the stubby antenna of my inReach Mini sticking out of the pocket, pointed at the sky as the manual advises. I brought the satellite device for worst-case scenarios, but feeling its friendly chunkiness on my palm has become a source of reassurance as I made my way through some truly wild places.

No more such places remain. I can turn off the device right now—I don’t, but it would be perfectly safe to do so—as the remainder of the course doesn’t deviate from the touristy trails of the lower altitudes, and cell coverage abounds.

I keep running wherever I can, slowing to a hike only when I’m out of breath. There are five hours until the cutoff.

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3.4 ‘a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!’

I spot the final aid station from atop a small escarpment. The slope below is littered with shrubs and scarred with the hairpin turns of the trail twisting around them. I do not have the agility to run down hairpin turns; however, I also don’t have time to walk a perfectly runnable trail. So, much like chasing a wheel of artisanal Double Gloucester set loose down a steep hill,¹ I descend the only way there is: no control, no caution, no chill.

I reach the aid station in one piece, although a little flustered and with more twigs in my hair than I normally like to wear. The volunteers don’t seem at all bothered by my appearance but offer to feed me instead. No time for that. Yes, I’m sure, okay, gotta go.

The descent continues down a wide, much less steep gravel road. I look down to see whether I haven’t lost my shoes somewhere—it feels like I’m running barefoot, every sharp piece of rock piercing the bottoms of my feet. The pain makes my ankles twist and my knees buckle, and I keep glancing at the idle chairlift overhead, wondering whether my willpower would have been as shaky as my legs if I’d gotten here during the lift’s operating hours.

The course switches back and forth between the gravel road and a grassy ski slope until it reaches the parking lot at the chairlift’s bottom station. I’m about to make a sharp left when, among the parked cars, I spot a familiar red hatchback.

My friend, whose red hatchback got us to the start, had promised to meet me at the finish and not a moment earlier. Could he have driven up here anyway? Is he sitting inside with an ice cooler full of snacks and drinks for me?

By car, the finish is a few short kilometers down a smooth paved road. The race course goes in a different direction and meanders through the woods for… the distance that remains of it. I don’t know what that distance is—my watch hit that surreal “100” a half hour ago—so I’m helplessly, hopelessly clueless about whether it’s even physically possible to make the cutoff. And I won’t know until either the finish or 10 p.m., whichever comes first.

Or, I get in that car and save myself hours of pain and effort for which there is no guarantee they will pay off.

The triple-digit number on my watch sure looks good. Even though I know it’s wrong, looking at it reminds me that this was never about running a hundred miles; my goal was to complete the 100-mile course. A distinction without a difference, perhaps, but it’s the latter that gives me the unflinching confidence with which I turn my back on the parking lot. I hope it wasn’t my friend’s car with him waiting for me inside.

I was never going to get on that chairlift, either.

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3.5 light the fuse and get away

Speed equals distance over time. With the distance missing from the equation, I guess speed better equal “full throttle.”

Running as fast as you can will test your self-control on any day. Running as fast as I can now, after two full days on my feet, requires that I give up control altogether; that I surrender the last of my agency to the discomfort, let it dictate my thoughts and actions as I slip into a state of feral single-mindedness that would make me unrecognizable to regular-life me.

I’m grunting and groaning to keep awake, drooling over myself, dry-heaving without breaking stride. The voices in my head are louder and more numerous than ever, but I ignore them. My feet, which I’m convinced are held together in foot shape solely thanks to my shoes, have been hurting for so long that I’ve come to believe this is what feet feel like. I ignore them, too.

It’s so weird, I would never willingly choose to feel this way, yet I am here of my own volition.

✙ ✚ ✛

It’s getting dark. Under the canopy of the dense forest, the third night arrives early. I feel like I only agreed to two…

“A 50-hour race that starts around sunset will enter a third night 48 hours in.”
—math

Where did I put my headlamp? I chuckle drunkenly at how obsessed I was with organizing all my gear perfectly, and now everything is just wherever and in various states of stickiness.

Only two more hours. Anything can happen in two hours to render the past two days’ efforts futile. With almost the entire race behind me, I have much to lose. It’s not sunk cost fallacy, it’s sunk cost fact.

But instead of stressing, I find myself encouraged: What could possibly happen in the next two hours that hasn’t happened in the past 48? I mean, sure, I could fall and break something due to running with barely any light. I should stop and change my headlamp’s nearly dead batteries, but right now, the only lights I care about are the ones I see through the trees each time the winding trail turns toward the town in the valley below.

Of course the final stretch feels endless, they always do. An infinity within an infinity. I can no longer differentiate between sleep and wakefulness—am I really approaching the finish, or am I still napping at the halfway aid station, dreaming about finishing the race? Perhaps the race itself is unfolding inside a dream.

At a pace I’d normally consider a jog, I am practically sprinting as I burst out of the forest and onto a paved road. My headlamp is either dead or I’ve turned it off. So is my brain.

I enter the town on a sleepy Sunday night. Not a soul on the streets, save for a few curious onlookers. The cobblestones are wet again, I think I am as well.

The inflatable arch rises in the middle of the town square in all its garish magnificence. A small crowd has assembled behind it. The final few steps condense into a single moment, and then it’s over, I’m finally still. My mind and body are my own again. The cheers are so loud, and the hugs are so crushing. What time is it?

✚ ✛ ✙

I mentioned in the beginning that signing up for this race was mostly an emotional decision, and at least a little premature. A few more years of experience and training could’ve saved me the desperate sprint to the finish.

But then, so could dawdling less at aid stations, or investing in a pair of elastic-waist leggings (my cumulative bathroom time probably adds up to an hour, thanks in part to a stupid drawstring).

So did I lack enough training, or did I just spend too much time at zero speed?

I finished my dream race a few years early. And two minutes too late.

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the end

Yes, the race was many miles, and it took many hours, and left me with many blisters. And this whole thing here is like 11,000 words. I hope I managed to convey that this experience was measured in depth, not numbers. Much, not many.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed your time here, consider sharing “Carpe-ing a Couple of Diems: Part Ⅴ” or this newsletter with a friend. Then go tell somebody some nice things about them.

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1. If you haven’t heard of the Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake, this short video explains what it is (it does not quite explain why people do it):