DAY 8
Waking up in the Els Cortalets refuge, more than 6,500 feet above sea level and a little over 60 miles from the nearest beach, is enough to give me the energy to persevere to the end. I start running, content with the knowledge that this will be the last morning that I get up not knowing whether my legs will respond, not knowing whether the pain has gone or will return with the first strides I take. Knowing that although I am in real pain, I only have to continue until the sun sets one more time is a huge relief that allows me to enjoy the adventure and indulge small whims, that allows me to make small concessions to a body that won’t have to pay for them the next morning.
It’s hard warming up my muscles under the hot sun, which has swept away yesterday’s rain, but gradually they spring into action, and when we reach Arlès after a long descent, I am physically and mentally equipped to face the last 60 miles. I make a small stop to eat a tasty cheese roll and start off again as the heat continues and my legs clock up the miles. The landscape has changed radically, becoming steadily more arid and dry. We have left behind the meadows and rocks of the high sierra to tackle the woods of Les Alberes.
It’s midday when I reach El Pertús, and we now face only one final obstacle before we can splash our feet in the cool waters of the Mediterranean: Mount Neulós. But joy hasn’t completely taken over. The heat of the last few hours has brought back much of the pain I’d been feeling over the last few days.
The team and numerous friends who have come to keep me company on the last few hours start running up Mount Neulós with enormous enthusiasm, but though I try to look as if I share their glee, I’m beginning to feel ever-more-searing pain. As I run up the mountain, pain in my right calf starts to worsen, beginning not only to cramp but also to slowly stiffen. We finish the climb and I think the pain will end, but it has only just begun.
Accompanied by Marc, I start running along the ridges of Les Alberes, a sharp edge between the plains of Rosselló and the Empordà that spread before us as far as the sea. I try to forget the pain by contemplating the magnificent panorama and sharing with my companion the high points experienced on the run and the many other adventures I have had, and it works for a time, making me forget my woes as we enjoy the conversation and laughs or the breeze blowing us along as we fly across these ridges. However, at other times the pain stings and sears and makes me realize that by adapting my stride to stop pain from the cramp in my calf, I have now strained my left hamstring. I keep on slowly, try to lengthen my stride into a run, but not too much, to avoid that violent stab of pain when I overstrain my leg, a pain that brings on nausea and makes me want to immediately sit on the ground and immobilize my leg. I thus avoid any careless movement that would bring back the stabbing pain.
We arrive for the final food break, where the whole team is waiting for me, just over 18 miles from the sea, 18 miles from the end of suffering and the end of our adventure. I feel neither happy nor triumphant. Rather, I feel worried. Once again we are relishing the approaching end, and yet this is the hardest time. These final few hours are the most difficult of the whole run. The pain from my hamstring is making me feel dizzy and sick, and it hurts whenever I try to stretch my leg and put my foot on the ground.
“What should we do?” I wonder out loud, even though my only option is to continue. We’ve not come this far not to finish, to give up today, 18 miles from our destination.
I don’t allow my body enough time to get used to the well-being brought by rest. And, above all, I want to ensure that the rest of the team doesn’t notice the pain I am in or how tired I am—even if my face makes that obvious. I start running very fast, with lots of rage. Probably too much rage. I can’t feel the ground, the branches catching against my legs, or the rocks hitting my feet. I can’t hear the voices of Marc, Pere, Pau, or Joan, who are talking behind me. I see only the images I want to see, those that enable me to continue to forget the pain and make me think that what I feel isn’t important. I think of Dick Hoyt, a triathlete with a son who suffers from a bone-marrow disease that has left him paraplegic. So that his son can experience the joys of life just like anyone else, Hoyt runs Ironman® races dragging his son in a boat behind him on swims, transporting him by bike, and pushing his wheelchair on runs. I picture fierce battles in the Middle Ages, when soldiers ran and dragged themselves along when wounded; even though they’d been severely wounded, they never lost the energy or strength to continue. If they could do this, if people can stand so much pain, why can’t I? And so I enter a spiral that has only one outcome as far as I am concerned: the sea. Nothing else exists. I am no longer myself; my reason is no longer in control of my steps and thoughts. Pain has induced a blindness to everything around me.
The miles pass very slowly, and my colleagues can see that I am dragging my hamstrung leg more and more and am slowing down. It’s not yet pitch-black when we start to see the lights of Llançà. It is at this point, when Joan realizes I’ve abandoned all reason, that he decides to bring me back to the real world and rescue me from all those medieval battles and life-and-death struggles. He puts his hands on my shoulders, lowers his glasses, and looks me in the eye. I can hear his breathing, and his voice brings me back to consciousness and reason.
“You have achieved great things, Kilian. You don’t have to prove anything to anybody.”
I know I don’t have to prove to anyone but myself that I can do it. I want to prove it.
“I know you can get there today; we know you can reach the sea in two, three, or four hours, and that it’s not a problem for you. However, do you really want to get there today and provoke an injury that will stay with you for the whole summer, if not winter as well? Don’t you want to keep running through summer? Don’t you want to be able to do all those projects and races we were talking about only a few hours ago?”
He is right. It isn’t about being heroic. It isn’t a matter of proving to anyone that you can conceal pain; I’d already proved that to myself. We must be able to identify the difference between when our body is in pain because of the effort it has expended and when it is asking us to stop to avoid more serious consequences. The problem is that, in those moments, pain usually has the strongest voice, and to avoid it, our thoughts take us elsewhere, where colors don’t exist, where there is only black or white. Life or death.
Eight days and three hours after leaving the waters of Cabo Higuer, my feet leave the sand on the beaches of Llançà to enter the salty water of the Mediterranean. Only an hour ago I was on the Sant Miquel, sitting with Thierry and Sònia listening to “Island in the Sun,” our thoughts far away, looking out and remembering the moments we experienced this week. The host of memories sailing through my head made me feel as if we had set out months before. Rain in Eina, snow over Goriz, thickets in the Basque Country, morning in Somport, Tor, Andorra, friends, food, heat, cold, blisters, joy, and sorrow …
Today there are only tears. Tears of joy? Perhaps they are, now that I can see we succeeded at last and can relive all these moments that will remain in my memory forever. Remembering the people who helped me get this far, remembering conversations and images etched in my mind.
Tears of relief? Very likely, with the peace of mind brought by the knowledge that tomorrow I will get up and not have 62 miles on my agenda and that I won’t suffer if my legs hurt when I get out of bed or worry whether I will be able to reach my destination before sunset.
Tears of sadness? Perhaps that, too. Sadness at leaving the Pyrenees and abandoning a routine so charged with emotion, at abandoning days that seemed to expand into weeks.
I really don’t know where the tears come from, but I let the calm and pleasure of living this moment fill my spirit for a few minutes before setting off on the path that will finally take me to the sea.
My legs feel light without the burden of knowing that many miles still lie ahead. I don’t have to manage reserves of strength, and the massage I had yesterday evening and the hours of rest seem to have erased all the pain I felt
last night. Now I only have time for a pleasant run with friends and family, in this last hour before we leave these mountains.
We were in bed after a fantastic day’s training, and my eyes were still sparkling as I recounted the day to Alba. I was under the quilt and started talking, telling her what I had done and seen on the training session, reliving it, whispering when I wanted to suggest my fear or exclaiming jubilantly and even getting out of bed to show how exciting it was: “It was beautiful when we reached the top. The sun started to come out from behind the peaks, lighting up the glacier I’d just climbed. Then, because I was feeling good, I wondered, Why don’t I scramble up the narrow gullies to the right of the black needle? I started climbing and it went well; I ran all the way. If I’d been competing in a race today, I would have performed extremely well. The views were incredible! I could see every single lake, could see our house down below, a speck. And all that snow on the descent! What a descent!”
She listened silently, taking in the story I was recounting so dramatically, and smiled at me from her place beneath the quilt. When I had finished my lengthy tale, I asked how her outing had gone.
“Fine,” she said simply.
“What do you mean, ‘fine’?” I asked, somewhat surprised. “You must have something to tell me after such a wonderful day! How did it go? What did you see?” I insisted, and she replied, in that self-assured way of hers, “You can tell your story and people will see it through your eyes. You can take photos and they can hear the birds singing and the snow moving the branches on the trees. You can write it down so they can feel the wind on their faces or smell the wet earth. But you can never get them to truly feel the excitement you felt when you were there. You can’t make them cry as you cried or make their hearts beat as fast as yours did.”
Then she smiled, turned away, and quickly fell asleep, leaving me crestfallen.
Alba was very strong. Maybe too strong. I craved finding something worthwhile in the things I did, and I couldn’t do them and then feel gratified only within myself. I needed someone else to value what I had done. I needed to be told I had just been on an incredible hike. To be congratulated when I had won a race. I needed only a gesture, a look of approval, to give me some self-satisfaction and motivate me to train the next morning. I needed the people who loved me to feel proud and celebrate my good results, for my friends and acquaintances to acknowledge and remember what I had done so that I could feel sure of myself and more at peace. More simply, I needed to create a past so that I knew where I was coming from and could continue to move forward.
Alba needed none of this. She was able to feel self-confident and fulfilled simply by the emotion she experienced in the moment, a moment that she then forgot when her body could no longer feel it, and so she’d seek out another. I don’t mean by this that she lived only for the moment or aimlessly. On the contrary, she was able to trace out a path in life without needing herself or others to create a past. On the one hand, I admired her and marveled at her inner strength; on the other, she made me feel inferior. I couldn’t act like that, however much I might have wanted to. I felt the need to communicate what I had done, seen, or felt. Consequently, mostly to annoy her, I would say she was selfish, that she saw and felt incredible things and shouldn’t keep them to herself, that she should share them with other people.
“Why?” she would reply. “What’s the point of telling others about things that they couldn’t have seen, that they will possibly never see, about feeling things that others haven’t felt? Just so you can feel you are superior? To make it obvious you have something they don’t? That you have experienced much more in life?”
I told her it was exactly the opposite: that it was so that people would keep on searching until they saw and felt it themselves. But our argument was never-ending.
I haven’t seen her in a long time. The memory occasionally plays tricks on us. We eliminate what’s painful and only remember the moments of euphoria. This happens with training sessions, too; from one year to the next, you only remember that day when you managed a series of impressive feats and felt good, or the week when you were able to sustain a very fast pace for six hours a day. You never recall the days when you struggled and were longing to get home, jump into bed, and forget your training. Rather, you always think that you were much better last year and that this season you’ve been laboring under pressure, exhausted by effort expended on previous days or by bad planning. You are always worrying why you aren’t feeling as good as last year. That was what happened when Alba and I stopped seeing each other. But on her parting shot before she shut the door, my memory is clear: “Where are your posters of Daehlie and Brosse? Where have you put your myths? When did you change your idols?”
Now, in their place, photos of my victories and trophies of every size and shape fill my walls and closets. The moment you surpass the people you idolized and become your own idol, the magic of sport is lost. Idols are reference points that act to mark out a path, to help you know what you have to work at and fight for so that you can emulate what they have done. And when you have succeeded, when there is only one person you can surpass, and that person is yourself, it means you have understood nothing.
Alba’s departure forced me to think a lot about what I meant to myself. If I was the person I wanted to imitate, I couldn’t see ways to improve, had entered an impasse, and couldn’t gaze humbly at those my idol was surpassing.
When you lose your way, when the train you’re on stops because it has crossed all the boundaries it wanted to cross, you realize you have crossed none, that no goal is real, that no victory is valid anywhere else but within yourself.
Alba disappeared from my life, but her leaving taught me that victories are what you as an individual decide they are, and that however many victories you achieve, in the end they will be of worth only to you. Everyone can be king of his own castle, but outside he is vulnerable and can lose his way. This did not discourage me at all; in fact, it gave me the strength to seek out new idols—the ones within each person. It motivated me to find strength and inspiration from those around me, because the winner isn’t the strongest, but rather the one who truly enjoys what he is doing.
I managed to reach that state of pleasant equilibrium I had so admired in Alba, not by drawing on moments spent alone, but rather by delving deeper into the lifestyles of others, which inspired me to discover new paths to explore.
Mountains give us the time and space to rediscover ourselves, but we also use them to share everything and create cast-iron links to other people. I’ve never been able to decide whether what I practice is a solitary or team sport. The food supplies, pacers, and group runs surely make it seem like a team sport. But independent of all that, the question I continually ask myself when I run is “Who am I running for?” On the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, when I am climbing the Grand Col Ferret and haven’t seen anyone for seven hours and can’t see any runners behind me, why do I keep on running? Whom do I keep running for? Am I running for myself? If that were the case, when I was tired, I would stop to rest, would sleep and admire the scenery, which is what I like doing and what my body wants me to do. But, in fact, am I running for others? I know I no longer run simply for myself: I run in order not to disappoint my partner and the friends who urged me on before I ever arrived in Chamonix. For family and the people who came out and helped during the race and who expect me to succeed. Or at least this is what I tell myself. I think I tell myself that I do it for them, at least in part, so that the whole weight of my decisions doesn’t fall on me. However, when I don’t stop and I keep on running, I do so mostly because I want to prove to myself that I can do it; it’s not the others, but my own self who compels me to keep going.
At 6 p.m., the Place Balmat in Chamonix is packed. It is impossible to walk down the streets, and people stick their heads out of windows and jam into doorways and come out onto their balconies. I try to pass through the crowd unnoticed by the photographers and fans who have come to see th
e most prestigious, legendary ultra-trail race on the planet, the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc. Some people ask me for an autograph or want their photograph taken with me; everyone congratulates me and wishes me well in the next 20 hours. Why are they congratulating me if we’ve not even begun the run? I wonder. As I said, there is no difference among us on the starting line. You can’t tell one individual from another based on what they have achieved in the past, but only by what they can demonstrate now. And we haven’t begun yet.
I slowly approach the starting area and leap over the barriers. I look around. I am surrounded by great runners, and the mere sound of their names fills me with awe because they have etched lines of gold in the history of this sport. I anticipate a long, hard battle against all these faces made famous by sports magazines and against other elite runners who compete far and wide to get into these same pages as well. I look behind me, where thousand of runners are also waiting for the starting gun, waving their arms in the air. Like me, they’ve come to fight extremely hard, but it’s not a battle in which they try to eliminate their rivals, but rather a battle among colleagues, where the struggle is internal and the rivals are the reasons to keep going. I am in the first row and don’t like that; I move back to the fifth. I prefer to leave discreetly, and I believe the race will put each runner in his place.
While runners engage in animated conversation, the start gets kicked off with music by Vangelis, which grows louder and louder until the shouting is silenced by “The Conquest of Paradise.” The emotion is visible on the runners’ faces: tears, smiles, and sober expressions. Each of us feels excitement at embarking on one of the most incredible adventures in a lifetime, but we also feel fear, not knowing whether we can make it through to the end. Will our bodies and minds resist?
Run or Die Page 11