Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  If I let my mind wander to how it’s going to feel at, say, mile 190, the whole adventure starts to seem impossible. The trick, I’ve found, is to screen everything past the next ten miles completely out of awareness. So that’s what I’m doing now. I’m running through the trees, feeling the warm breeze on my face. If I let my thoughts turn to the future at all, I think about the aid station at mile 10: Stephen Jones, it’s called, in honor of a man who finished this run a couple of summers ago and died in an avalanche the following winter. None of us is here for very long.

  I’m also reminding myself of my plan. Get to mile 50 by midnight. Sleep for an hour. Get to mile 100 by midnight on day two. Sleep for another couple of hours. That’s when Emily joins me. If you go to pieces, it’s good to have a doctor around, in my experience. Hence: Emily. Once upon a time she was a professional skier. She competed in that event in which the skiers race for miles cross-country with rifles on their backs. Then she went to one of the top medical schools in the world and aced all her exams and stayed awake for thirty hours straight every week saving people’s lives. It’s hard to imagine a more competent person to have with me by the time I’m hobbling up some hill on wounded stumps, moaning, Why? Emily will run with me until mile 180. That will put me about seventy hours into the race. I’ll likely be unraveling a bit mentally by then. That’s when Miriam comes in. She is used to seeing me lose it, and I am used to her seeing me in a state of loss. Miriam will be with me until the bitter end, sometime late Monday night or Tuesday morning.

  I’M HUNGRY. I GRAB a sugar GU packet from one of the front pockets in my pack, tear it open, and swallow the gel. Salted caramel: not bad.

  I choose my GU flavors carefully. I think I can say that I choose everything in my pack with quite a fanatical measure of care. Head out on a really big adventure, and it pays to sweat the small stuff. Last night, after we left the ski lodge and drove a couple of miles to our lodgings, I laid out all my running kit on the bed. I wanted to review my equipment checklist one last time before I set off into the mountains.

  Lace up your shoes, grab your house key, and get out the door—any normal sort of running tends to be quite simple. That’s one of running’s joys. You don’t need much of anything. I can run for a couple of hours with nothing on my back but the wind. But beyond that two-hour threshold, I do need to carry a few things. Water. Food. Maybe an extra layer or a raincoat. The more miles, the more stuff. When you’re planning a really long run, say a hundred miles, you have to keep a few principles in mind. You don’t have to be totally self-sufficient, like a climber heading off to the Himalayas. Every few miles you’ll reach an aid station, where you can fill up on food and water. During the really long ultras—sixty miles, a hundred miles, even farther—you can leave a bag at some of the aid stations with extra kit like a spare pair of shoes or a headlamp. But the aid stations in long mountain ultras tend to be quite spread out. You might be out on your own in the wilderness for ten or fifteen or even twenty miles, for instance, before you get to the next one. Depending on how steep the trail gets, and how exhausted you are, that can mean being out by yourself for six or eight or even ten hours, in the wind or rain or snow or blazing heat, depending on the part of the country you’re in and the time of year. Out in the wilderness solo for any length of time, and you need stuff. You want to travel as light as possible—but not too light. Is it better to have something and not need it or end up needing something but not have it? That was the question I’d been pondering for the past six months, getting ready for the run. I must have gone through my kit list twenty times to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. Here’s what I laid out on the bed:

  Shoes, socks, extra socks

  Shirt, shorts, bandanna, gloves, cap, shades

  Lightweight carbon-fiber fold-up trekking poles

  Energy gels and bars

  GPS tracker, phone, waterproof camera

  Digital music player (Loaded with tunes appropriate to the full catastrophe of human emotion, from Whitney Houston to Slipknot, for there will surely come a time when I’ll feel so blissed out I’ll want to sing like Whitney: “I wanna dance with somebody!” But doubtless there also will be moments when, in the words of the Slipknot song “Psychosocial,” I’ll be close to tears on a mountaintop, thinking, “I did my time, and I want out.”)

  Hand wipes (I can’t stand having sticky hands. I’ll put up with almost anything: cramps, diarrhea, blisters, lacerations, illusions, hallucinations, delusions of omnipotence, despair, mosquitoes, bloody urine, backache, leg ache, knee ache, neck ache, butt ache. But having sticky hands really puts me over the edge.)

  Twenty dollars in cash, a little laminated card with my address and phone number and emergency contact, photos of my kids, and a lucky bracelet that my daughter made for me

  Race bib (I’m number 108. The race organizers let us runners choose our own numbers. I like the number 108. It’s the number of names of the Divine Mother in Hinduism.)

  Whistle, compass, knife, waterproof matches, survival blanket (Likely I won’t get lost and need this stuff. But better to have it and not need it than the other way around. I’ve learned that lesson the hard way. Go out into the wilderness and you need to have a plan for when everything goes to shit and you’re on your own. You have to assume the non-zero risk of a catastrophic outcome and think through what is required to survive. The survival blanket is a thin golden Mylar sheet folded into a four-inch square. You get cold fast when you’re exhausted. Unfold your little golden square, wrap it around you, and it keeps you warm by reflecting your own body heat.)

  As runs go, that’s quite a lot of stuff. But it all fits in a little twelve-liter purple pack that’s so light and fits so nice and snug on my back that I can almost forget it’s there.

  And even if it’s a lot to carry, by running standards, the list of things I won’t be carrying wouldn’t fit on a single page. For that, you’d need a whole book.

  Children need parents to keep them safe. The little ones need to know that Mom or Dad is watching. You start out crawling to a toy at the other side of the room; you wind up moving out and starting your own independent adult life. It feels okay to move away from Mom or Dad when you can sense their caring presence behind you, what the psychologist John Bowlby called attachment. At the beginning, this feeling of security means literally being held—cradled in a loving parent’s arms and knowing your needs are seen and will be taken care of. After feeling held and seen like this, you come to understand yourself as worthy of being held and seen. It’s not long until you can walk and then run, and even if Mom and Dad are thousands of miles away, you carry that feeling inside you of being held and seen, like a warmth-reflecting blanket tucked in your backpack.

  But some children don’t get held and seen when they’re little. Mom and Dad don’t know how—nobody taught them. You can’t remember being held and seen. Or you remember being slapped in the face, seen by eyes with a look that scared you or made no sense at all. You come to expect a life that slaps you in the face. You come to understand yourself as mad or bad or dangerous to know. Exhausted on the trail of life, you may reach for the blanket in your pack, and what it reflects isn’t warmth but all the times you cried and nobody was there. Or you get used to stumbling forward past the point of exhaustion because there’s no safe way of stopping. Or maybe you look for a better blanket. Compared to the tinfoil variety, a good emotional blanket can be hard to find. There are blankets that look good but turn out not to be. The booze-and-drugs blanket. The toxic-relationship blanket.

  To run ahead with confidence as a child means knowing your caregivers see you. This confidence is a type of bodily knowledge, or implicit memory, that shapes a young human’s basic sense of being knowable and worthy of attention and care. It is neurologically close to the way you remember how to ride a bike. Imagine not riding a bike for ten years and then picking up a bike and that feeling of your body knowing what to do. Your earliest relationships with caregivers likewise shape a basic
sense of your ability to move safely in the world. The word trauma comes from the ancient Greek word for wound. Bleeding defines the most obvious kinds of injury, but a less visible form cuts deeper: the enduring effects on the mind, body, and nervous system caused by a lack of dependable emotional nurturing in your earliest relationships with primary caregivers, called attachment trauma. Unsafe and unseen children become runaways. After you start running, it’s hard to believe that it’s safe to stop, hard to trust that the danger is really behind you.

  The unwritten manual of the human species lists certain items essential to survival. You need a good survival blanket—something or someone that reflects warmth and love and caring, a blanket you can crawl under a tree with in the depth of night and wrap around you until the sun comes, a way to feel held and seen and to believe that you deserve to survive.

  II

  Mercury

  Dreaming

  From the high country, the trail descends two thousand feet through the trees. I love running fast downhill. Build up the leg strength to handle the pounding, let gravity do its work, and soon you’re falling through space with the wind in your face and the feeling of bliss that comes along with everything rushing at you, the trail and the trees and this turn to the left and now a turn to the right, the rhythm of the ground coming up to meet your feet and then falling away again. The faster you go, the more time in the air. Run fast enough and you can almost imagine leaving the ground altogether and soaring like a bird in the sky above. I love the feeling so much, I’m tempted to let it rip: lean forward, hammer the ground, prepare for takeoff.

  But that would be a mistake. On a twenty-mile run, sure—have at it. Even on a fifty-mile run. Worst case, I roll an ankle or trip and hit the dirt and get scratched up a bit. And no doubt my leg muscles would feel a bit sore in the morning. But on a two-hundred-miler? No. I think of my muscles and tendons and ligaments as a family on an epic road trip. There’s a limit to how much the little ones can handle. If I’m nice and gentle now, later on, when everyone’s totally exhausted, I’ll still have a decent shot at keeping the whole crew somewhat together, instead of having everyone break down yelling and sobbing and screaming and saying, Please won’t you stop that, really. I’m begging you, please.

  * * *

  The garden covered a third of an acre. It might as well have been a country. In the autumn the lawn became a blanket of leaves, which my brother, Sebastian, and I raked into piles. We loaded the leaf piles into the wheelbarrow and rolled the barrow down to the compost heap, just beyond the line of fir trees at the bottom of the garden. To step into the trees was to enter another world, a little patch of wilderness. We called it the Jungle. It was a tangle of branches and overgrown weeds. Under the tree canopy, as we crouched through the thicket, everything looked dark green and shadowy. This hidden world existed within the rectangle formed by the line of fir trees and the neighbors’ fences. It can’t have covered more than a couple hundred square feet. It felt like infinity. Sebastian and I could lose ourselves there for hours. It reminded us of a picture of a forest that once we had seen in a storybook. At midnight, under a full moon, cats came out of their homes and gathered in the forest. The cats linked paws and danced around in a circle. Lying in our beds after our mother tucked us in, we would picture our own cat, a thirty-pound black-and-white tom called Briar, joining all the cats of the neighborhood in the Jungle, dancing in secret under moonlight, long after we both fell asleep. It didn’t seem impossible. Almost anything seemed possible in the Jungle.

  One time I was exploring the thicket underneath the compost heap when I heard the sound of breathing. I wriggled deeper inside the thicket to follow the breathing sound to its source. It was a hedgehog! I looked at its tiny nose and mouth and eyes. Its body got a little bigger every time it inhaled, and then smaller again as it exhaled. With each exhale, it let out a little sigh. “Sebastian, you have to get in here,” I said. I wriggled out of the thicket. Sebastian went inside to see.

  Soon it was getting dark. It was almost time for supper. We would need to leave the Jungle and walk back up through the garden to the house. If we were lucky, Mummy would make us chocolate fudge pudding for dessert. Perhaps we would tell Mummy and Daddy about the hedgehog, we thought. But it would be hard to explain the feeling. We could go on talking until the end of time, telling them how it felt, two little boys together seeing something otherworldly in the undergrowth, but nobody else could ever really know the hidden world Sebastian and I knew, the feeling of a mystery glimpsed only by us, deep in the trees, before the light began to fade and we went indoors for the night.

  * * *

  Running is powerful medicine for the mind. Put on your shoes and run down the trail or sidewalk and something shifts on the inside. A feeling of mellow euphoria soaks through you as the brain releases natural chemicals called endocannabinoids. Your mind feels clearer. Sharper. But run far enough and the mind soon shifts from euphoria into a kind of waking dream state.

  A person is a fusion of two beings: reasoner and dreamer. The reasoner can think and plan and remember. The dreamer can wonder and create. Run down a steep, rocky trail and you have to focus. See that hole: land on the other side of it. Your body works hard to keep you upright and moving. Sweat cools you down. A lot of these things carry on in the background. Run for an hour and your brain goes about business as usual. But run all day and your brain senses some sort of disaster occurring. Automatic mechanisms switch on in deep brain regions, hardwired by millions of years of evolution to make sure you survive. You need to swallow and pee and keep on moving. The thinking parts of your brain go quiet. Psychologist Arne Dietrich coined the term transient hypofrontality for this phenomenon.2 Hypo means under, as in underactive. Frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that supports higher cognitive functions like memory and reason.

  Lucky for you this holiday from thinking doesn’t last forever. Lose some functionality of your prefrontal cortex and it tends to get tricky to, say, find your car keys. Imagine losing it all, waking one morning not knowing who you are or even what you are. You would be in hell.

  It turns out there are gentler ways to turn off all that thinking. One of them you know well. It’s the place your mind runs free at night: the dreamworld. Your dreaming mind stitches together a crazy story from random memory fragments as it runs wherever it wants to, through the traces of everything you’ve ever thought and felt, all the way back to the womb, perhaps to the origin of the species and ancient evolutionary time. You wake up and your mind feels clearer.

  But sometimes you can’t sleep, or your dreams are terrifying nightmares. I used to have a recurring dream in which I was being chased. I tried to run, but my legs couldn’t move, like I was held in place by some invisible force. Without the ability to dream, the mind starts getting messy, like a dense forest where all the trails are overgrown. Today feels like yesterday, or last year.

  There are different kinds of dreams. There are night dreams and daydreams and times when reality goes dreamy and unreal because you’re blissed out or scared. There are many trails back to the dreamworld. Humanity has mapped that psychic trail system since the dawn of time. There are trance dances. There are pilgrimages. There are psychedelic drug states. And there are runs in the mountains that go on for days and nights.

  When I run, my body leaves the ground for a moment but then comes back down again, a cycle between earth and air, gravity and flight, the terrestrial and the heavenly. With my every step, Earth says, I am here. So that’s what I’m looking forward to these days and nights ahead of me on the trail. Not thinking. Dreaming.

  Hear the Clock Tick-Tock

  I chased the firefighter inside the smoking tower block and followed him sprinting up the spiral stairwell. I could hear him panting with the hard effort in his blue woolen suit and black plastic helmet as I matched his pace step for step, propelled by the energy of a fit twenty-eight-year-old in ripped jeans and a yellow sleeveless soccer shirt with nothin
g to lose. At around the sixth flight of stairs he glanced back at me, and I registered the surprise in his eyes as he saw that I was still behind him. I followed him through a door from the stairwell to the top-floor lobby. Smoke billowed from the open door of one of the apartments. He took three deep breaths, held the last one in, and strode into the apartment.

  It was the spring of 1999. Two decades before the Tahoe 200, I was in Mumbai, India, working as a documentary researcher for British television. I spent my days in Mumbai talking to Bollywood action movie stars and one-limbed beggars and a cabdriver who had come to the city as a runaway five-year-old orphan from a village hundreds of miles away and had a huge distended belly from what he understood was cancer and who drove around in his yellow cab with a sign on the back that said DON’T FORGET GOD AND DEATH and in the sunset stood by the brown polluted waters near the fancy hotels at Nariman Point drinking whiskey, a bottle every night, which he split with me, fifty-fifty.