Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  So that’s what I end up doing. I drop all thoughts of ever getting to the top. I focus only on the bit of trail I can see directly ahead, until the next turn. Huff, puff, right, left, plant the right pole then the left one, breathe in, breathe out . . .

  IT’S SWELTERING NOW. It must be in the 80s. I come across this guy sitting down, slumped against a tree. He’s red in the face, silent, and dazed looking. In ultras, especially the really long ones like this, runners have to think of themselves as de facto first responders. Tahoe City must be about six miles away; four miles of that is steep uphill. Move at a solid pace and the next aid is ninety minutes away, minimum. But this guy isn’t moving at all. He’s not gonna die. We’re in the Sierra, not the Sahara. But there’s more at stake than mortality statistics here. There’s also the ethics of the thing. How we want to relate to one another. What sort of culture and community we want to have, our merry little band of sweaty freaks in trucker hats. Venus was the god of love. Humans are a social species, and love is the emotional gravity that keeps us together.

  “How are you doing?” I say. “Not good,” he says, shaking his head. His voice is hoarse, and his eyes have a disoriented look. “Whatcha need?” I say. He doesn’t speak.

  Having had my fair share of rough spots in long ultras, I understand that this man is having a hard time parsing a diffuse yet global sense of overwhelm into signals for specific tangible needs. Under ordinary conditions, when you’re hot or thirsty, you know you’re hot or thirsty, and you can easily separate those two perceptions as distinct. But after hours of intense exertion, those signals get harder to discern as dissociable needs—they start melding together into a vague overall awareness of reaching or appearing to exceed some safe upper threshold of What You Can Handle. I can’t do this, you might think, or I’m done. But take stock of the situation, ask yourself, When was the last time I drank something, or ate something, or ate something salty, or cooled my head down? Then attend to the body’s basic needs for food, water, or salt to ensure the water gets absorbed and the heat is regulated, and usually what happens is the diffuse sense of overwhelm resolves into awareness of a specific unmet need you’ve now succeeded in meeting. I CAN do this! you think. It takes practice to reach the point where you can read the signals by yourself. Everyone starts out like this, and I don’t just mean runners. Once upon a time you were this teeny little thing that couldn’t do anything. You didn’t know you were hungry or thirsty or tired. You were just this cute little bundle of sensation. Someone else had to read the signals for you. Oh, there, there, baby. Mama’s here. Dada’s here. They had to have names for your needs, and know what to do.

  I ask the runner by the tree if he’s okay for water. “I’m out,” he says, turning an empty bottle upside down. I’m almost out as well. There’s about six ounces left in one of my bottles. But I do well in the heat. I’ve trained my body to handle extreme heat by doing things like ninety-minute runs in 100-degree weather in southern Mexico and push-ups in a sauna, so I figure I can manage the six miles to the mile-30 aid station down by the lake on three ounces of water. I pour half the contents of my water bottle into the man’s bottle. “I’ll tell them to expect you at the aid station,” I say, making a mental note of the number on his race bib. He drinks the water and stands up. He begins to walk up the trail. I say goodbye to him and then I’m off again, hiking uphill through the trees.

  I reach the top of the climb. The trail heads downhill. Not long now until I reach Tahoe City. It will be so good to see Miriam and my son and daughter. I can already picture their smiling faces, as if the feeling of being with them then has traveled back in time, so I’m feeling it right now. Sometimes the mind runs ahead of the body.

  The Dark Age

  I chased the other boys along the path from the tree near the pond toward the edge of the woods. I could hear myself panting. The pain in my chest was the worst agony. How I wished for it to stop! But there was no escaping it. Perhaps I could have pretended to be sick when I woke that morning. But Mum and Dad would never have believed me. They sent me to school even when I really had the flu. No, there was no turning back now. This was cross-country. It was going to hurt. That much was certain. The pain would go on for a very long time before the run was over. If I had any choice in the matter I wouldn’t be here in this desperate scramble, feeling the acid burn in my legs and the panic of fighting for air with each heaving breath. I watched the phalanx of skinny, fast boys pull farther and farther ahead and then disappear in the trees while a wave of other runners passed me one by one, and I fought with all my might to hold my pathetic position somewhere near the back of the pack.

  One evening in my final year at St. Peter’s my mother had entered my room with a little brochure in her hand. There was a picture on the front of a giant building with a tall clock tower. “This is King Edward’s,” she said. “It’s a private school. A place for clever boys. You’ll take the entrance exam next month.” I got into the back of our green Citroën 2CV. I looked at the fields through the window on the twelve-mile drive to Southampton. It felt like a world away. Sometimes on Saturdays we would go shopping at the big department stores there. After shopping, my parents would take us to La Margherita, an Italian restaurant, where we would have pizza and Coca-Cola and zabaglione. My father parked the car a few hundred feet from the gates of the school. The entire edifice of the school’s south-facing aspect stood as barren as the monochrome illustration in the brochure. Inside, I joined a group of boys sitting at old wooden desks set in a geometric array in one of the classrooms. There were two little booklets on my desk. I opened the first one. It was the math portion of the exam. I raced through several pages of easy arithmetic problems. Then the questions got harder. I read something like “2x = 4 + y” and the instruction: “Solve for x when y = 2.” Panic hit me as I struggled to interpret these alien concepts. I closed the math booklet, feeling my stomach turn somersaults. I opened the English exam. The examiners directed me to write. I wrote a story in the first person about a boy on holiday in Northern Ireland. “I wanted to climb Binnian,” the story began. “My parents wouldn’t let me. I decided to go there by myself. In the middle of the night I crept out of the house and went to climb the mountain. It was dark and hard to find my way. I reached the craggy summit and started back down the mountain. In the darkness of the trail, I wandered off a cliff and fell a thousand feet to my death below.”

  The Dark Age, Sebastian remembers calling those years: why that particular phrase came to his mind, he wasn’t sure at the time, but there it was. For reasons that didn’t make sense until much later, we stopped speaking to each other sometime around then, retreating to our bedrooms, in his words, like “solitary soldiers.” It was certainly dark and cold when my father woke me on winter mornings. I got out of bed, shivering, and then put on my uniform and hurried downstairs, to find the cereal sitting in the milk and forming a mushy slop. I ate the cereal and downed a cup of orange juice. The milk curdled in my stomach. I felt sick. I put on my parka and left the house. I got in the back of our green Citroën. Dad drove me to the railway station. I walked onto the platform. I looked down the track, where the line stretched to a vanishing point in the distance, where a small black dot appeared and then expanded to become the front of the incoming train. The train entered the station with a roaring sound. I boarded the carriage and slid onto one of the blue upholstered seats near the heater. I felt warmer. At once the gas smell from the heater intensified my nausea. The train left the station. I looked through the window at the passing fields and meadows where the cows were still asleep. The countryside turned into gray and white factories and warehouses. The train went into a long, dark tunnel and emerged at Southampton Central station. I stepped from the railway carriage to the platform. The aroma of buttered toast wafted from the railway cafeteria, where slot machines chirped and shimmered. I followed some other boys in their dark blue uniforms up the stairs that led across a walkway to the other side of the tracks. I showed my ticket t
o the guard and left the station. In winter and spring it was often raining. By the time I’d walked the mile from the station to school my hair and clothes were soaked. I followed the road that led to the giant brick rectangle of King Edward’s.

  A huge green lawn extended from the gate on the street to a tall front door through which only the headmaster and teachers were permitted to enter or exit. I walked to the back, where a throng of boys in uniforms fluttered around a gray asphalt yard like a murder of crows. Among them strode the sixth formers, giant men seemingly double the size of me, bearing hardcover physics and Latin books in the crooks of their long arms, and others twice my width, massive shouldered and laughing like they ruled the place.

  In morning assembly, we would sing the hymn “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past” by Sir Isaac Watts. It was the school anthem. Sir Isaac was right, I thought. God had helped us in ages past. But he was no use in ages present. I walked to 1B, one of the rooms for the younger pupils on the southern side of the ground floor. I took my seat at a wooden desk three rows back on the right-hand side. I sat shivering, my clothes still drenched from the rain. Mr. Butler, a man with curly brown hair and a suit jacket, entered the classroom. Everyone stood up when a teacher entered the room until they were told to sit down again. Mr. Butler read an alphabetical list of surnames from his light blue attendance book. He reached Thompson, and I said, “Yes, sir.”

  What were my instructions as Thompson at King Edward’s? You may wear a sweater only in the winter—permissible colors are black and navy blue. Never remove the school tie, except for PE or Games—even upon exiting the gates during lunch and walking between school and the train station. You are a King Edward’s pupil. You represent the school. You must maintain the uniform’s integrity. Arrive at your form room no later than 8:45 a.m. Your group master may have information: listen to him. Lessons, with the exception of Tuesday, will begin at 9:00 a.m. Tuesday starts with assembly—you will sing hymns and listen to the speaker. There will be announcements: pay attention to them. At the sound of the bell, pick up your books and pencil case and find the classroom for the next period. You must carry your books in your hands—bags are forbidden. As a first-year you will take Mathematics, French, English, Latin, History, Geography, Science, Music, Art and Design, Religious Education, and Physical Education. Every day, with the exception of Wednesday, has four periods in the morning and three in the afternoon. Wednesday has five periods in the morning. Watch the Math teacher draw chalk equations on the blackboard. Listen to him speaking. Open your textbook to page whatever and do questions blah to blah. Calculate the highest common factor. Wait for the clock hands to say 9:15. Observe the rebels cackle and pratfall, the teacher grimace, the detentions administered to exterminate dissent. Calculate the lowest common denominator. Feel the weight of time already traversed since 9:00. Contemplate the vast expanse of Being until break time. Watch the clock hands reach 9:30. Experience each minute as an epoch in history. Witness each such era successively lengthen in duration. Hear the bell ring. Thank Lord Jesus for his mercy. Go to second period. Open Histoires Illustrées to a cartoon about a boy who steals some apples on a farm. Write a story about naughty little Pierre in the third-person perfect: Il était une fois un petit garçon méchant appelé Pierre. Un jour, il a grimpé à un pommier. Soudain, le fermier est arrivé. “Oh mon Dieu!” a dit Pierre. Il s’est enfui aussi vite que possible.* Wait for the bell. Feel an immense burden lifting. Follow the other boys to the mob by the tuckshop. Find a path through the melee to the window. Hold your money high above your head. Yell for Mars or Twix, or Marathon or Maltesers, or Wispa or Bounty or Revels. Swap your coins for sweets. Suck each chocolate orb until your saliva dissolves it. Hear the bell signaling the end of morning break. Go back inside the school: your Revels now are ended.

  Then came the wilderness of lunchtime. I would walk the playing field perimeter with Roland, a fellow choirboy, complaining about the futility of everything. The nuclear missiles had arrived in England. Outside the US military base at Greenham Common a group of women set up a permanent protest camp: the Greenham Common women, people called them. One time the women arrived in their thousands from all over Britain, joining hands in a giant circle that surrounded the base. But all the protests had come to nothing.

  School was stupid, Roland and I agreed. They had rules for the sake of having rules. There was no rhyme or reason to any of them. Maggie Thatcher the Milk Snatcher was stupid. “There is no such thing as society,” she once said in a speech. You’re an individual, she said. Get a job, make loads of money, and shut your bloody mouth. Ronny Raygun was stupid. He loved the Milk Snatcher. He thought ketchup was a vegetable, and he believed that poor black women were driving Cadillacs in the ghetto. He came from Hollywood and thought he was still in a movie. He called the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire,” as if Gorbachev was Darth Vader and he was Luke Skywalker. Church was stupid. Sometimes I’d remember how I’d believed in God and Jesus and all that rubbish when I was little, and it was hard to believe that silly kid and me were the same person. God was a fairy tale. I could see that now. You might as well pray to the Easter Bunny. Why I went through with Confirmation is hard to say. It was a way to meet girls, I suppose, at the youth club disco.

  Rugby was stupid. PE was stupid. Sports Day was stupid. Roland would listen for a while, but then one day he ran and joined the Lads, the taller boys on the sports team with deep voices and girlfriends and mindless grins and not even the slightest fear of detention or failing grades or the fury waiting for them at home. “Pile on!” one of the Lads would yell, summoning Lads from all directions, who would leap onto one of their brethren and form a giant mass of squirming bodies on the ground, and as Roland’s body joined the Lad pile, I left him there and followed the playing field perimeter on a path toward the library, where I would typically sit in the corner by the window and the radiator and disappear into Middle Earth or Fantasia until the bell rang and I went back to class and sat gazing at the blackboard and watched the minute hand on the clock and wished I had the power to propel it forward in motion with my mind.

  The only things that weren’t stupid were books and the inside of my own head. I had my own little kingdom up there. My thoughts ran wherever they wanted. Sometimes at Sunday mass, saying the Lord’s Prayer, I would remember the feeling of believing in God’s literal existence and marvel that something that had once felt so solid, no less basic to the structure of my perception than vision or hearing, could totally disintegrate. I couldn’t remember exactly when I’d stopped believing. But now it was obvious: my thoughts were my own and nobody else’s. I wasn’t having conversations with God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Saint Peter, or Saint Maximilian. It was me: the experience of a conscious being. Thoughts of the past and the future, ideas of good and evil, imagination, reason and fantasy: all of it happened in my mind. I didn’t know how. It was amazing, the way things showed up in awareness, but there was no reason to imagine a deity had put them there. Sometimes I noticed the gap between thoughts, the background sense of presence within which everything emerged, what it was like to have or be a mind. I noticed how it didn’t seem to resemble any other thing, because it was the medium in which things themselves existed. It was like the air to a bird borne aloft, noticeable only through its disturbance, sudden pockets of low pressure that pulled the bird downward. It was with me in waking awareness and receded in dreams and vanished in deep sleep. It could be frightening, knowing I was alone there, that my thoughts were nobody else’s. But I felt liberated too, knowing I was safe, that I could do anything I wanted there.

  But it was lonely at lunchtime, pacing the playground boundary in silent contemplation, kicking a soda can from one end of the lawn to the other, making solo sorties to the sweetshop down the road, where the old lady behind the counter gave me a quarter of rhubarb-and-custards at half price with a smile of grandmotherly commiseration. I watched the other boys play their mindless games in the field and was overcome by a feeling of weariness. How
busy they were with running and laughing, how pointless. I felt myself dwindling to a ghost. Perhaps the apocalypse had already happened, I thought. The bombs had already fallen all across Earth. Everything was burning. Nothing had survived. Not even time. The fire had sent a shock wave from the future to the past and burned me. I was nothing but a shadow on a wall.

  I came to understand the imperative to relieve myself from my chronic feelings of loneliness and isolation. In the summer between my first and second years at the school, I traveled to Cornwall with the school choir. On the journey home an older boy in the bass section handed me a can of Carlsberg Special Brew. It was fabled to be the strongest beer in Britain. I took some sips and soon felt something dissolve within me and then the kind of ecstasy that comes along with a sudden relief from a long and agonizing pain. I’m not afraid. The fear was gone. I had not known of its existence. It was like I had lived my life until that moment with a mysterious headache, then realized I’d been wearing a hat that didn’t fit me, and I took that hat off and felt the headache disappear. I looked around at the other boys and teachers in the bus and wondered if this fearless state might be how other people felt all or much of the time. I found myself giggling and singing and gazing out the window, learning that alcohol appeared to illuminate a basic need of which until then I hadn’t been aware existed in me—the need to feel carefree and expansive and spontaneous and say or think things without being afraid of what might happen, of a judgment from God, whose existence I no longer believed in, or someone else, I didn’t know.

  And other than booze was wanking—masturbation—a delight I discovered in the bathroom of a boat on the English Channel during the choir tour in Denmark the following year, although it was a delight that I understood to be dirty: a Good Boy was not a wanker. One time I was sitting in the living room reading a novel whose blurb included the word sex, and observing me with the book, Mum took it from my hands and read the blurb and asked me if I knew what sex was, and I said yes, and that was the last time we ever discussed the topic. Not that knowing the word got me closer to anything like the act it signified. I could recall the little kid I once had been, playing kiss chase with the girls at St. Peter’s, but now I would gaze at the girls at the far end of the train platform in the morning with their green uniforms and flicks of hair and callous smiles, and I yearned for them to notice me and wished for the touch of a warm hand and friendly eyes that met mine and saw me, but this never came to pass. Once at the Catholic youth club disco I noticed a girl called Ruth looking at me and not looking away, and I asked her to dance, and she said yes, and we stood swaying to the music, and I felt her squeeze my body closer to hers, and I pulled her even closer as I listened to the words of the song for the slow dance—“Arthur’s Theme” by Christopher Cross—beneath the glittering disco ball, with Ruth in my arms, feeling that, yes, it was crazy, but true, I was caught between the moon and New York City, and I spent the next day singing her name throughout the house, but when I saw her again at a roller disco and we held hands and skated in circles around the room, my palms went clammy with sweat and I was too afraid to ask her to go out with me, so I got another boy to ask her for me, and she said no, and a dark cauldron of sorrow and rage then ignited inside me as I pictured myself decades in the future, a famous astronaut, sitting in my rocket ship surging through the troposphere at escape velocity and into orbit while sad old Ruth sat at home watching me on television, remembering the boy she’d spurned at the roller disco all those years before and ruing her terrible judgment.