If you pursue it long enough, running can certainly teach you about mindlessness and, perhaps, give you a sense of being “open to time and death painlessly.” It takes you down deep and shows you the beauty of pursuing a “single necessity.” Even without intending to, by training the body to accept long distances, you train the mind what not to think about, such as how much long-distance running hurts and how slowly the time passes. Surrender—an acceptance of the fate you’ve chosen—provides you with the ability to endure more suffering, and the more times you do it, the higher the pain threshold rises and the more finely tuned your ability to endure becomes. Owning responsibility for what you’re doing, whatever that may be, empowers.
Combating boredom requires more than flights of fancy, although they certainly help. Music helps, too, something I’ve been slow to adopt compared with most other runners. The bulky old players were cumbersome, and I always thought the music would ruin my concentration. Besides, I’d never had music during physical effort before, so I didn’t know any better. Sometime in 2005, though, I finally put on a pair of headphones with a sleek little mp3 player and discovered that, if I like a song, I can listen to it over and over again, sometimes playing it forty or fifty times, falling into a rhythm, waiting with anticipation for a few words or motivating phrases that I especially relate to, applauding when they come. It doesn’t mess with my concentration, and has turned out to distract me in a good way. During the transcon, there were about a dozen tunes I gravitated to, among them “Say Hey” by Michael Franti and Spearhead, “The Underdog” by Spoon, “Sing the Changes” by The Paul McCartney Project/The Fireman, “Real Real Gone” by Van Morrison, “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits, and especially “Just Us Kids” by James McMurtry. Hearing the same song over and over operated like white noise, having a calming effect and blotting out everything else, the music fusing with the motion and taking the edge off the physicality of running.
The most effective boredom-beater is something I call “time compression.” The longer you’re out there and the more experience you have with the repetition of running, time can speed up. Or, maybe more accurately, time becomes less and less relevant. The miles and the moments melt into one another; as the terrain passes underfoot, the time passes, too. The two become almost indistinguishable.
It’s a way of playing mind games with yourself to your own advantage. For example, with a set distance, you can focus on how quickly you’ll move as you cover it, and set intermediate goals. It’s wise to pay attention to those split times but not to get too hung up on the clock. I do know people who are totally into splits and beat themselves up if they don’t reach those smaller, intermediate goals, but I’m more of a run-by-the-seat-of-your-pants guy: if I’m not feeling well, I slow down, and if I’m feeling good, I always try to work hard effectively—I focus on what’s happening right now and make the most of it. I’ve had my best races when I loosely paid attention to my time and was pleasantly surprised by the split and the finish times.
In races where the finish is based on duration (say, twenty-four hours) instead of distance (as in a hundred-mile race), I take a slightly different approach. It’s an ambiguous mind-set with the distance to be determined, but I can compare it to my old contests with Steve: How many bales can I put up in an hour? How many miles can I run in twenty-four hours? I’ve seen people who drop out once they meet a mileage goal in such a race, but for me, it’s always about upping the ante and achieving a personal best. I go till the clock runs out.
In fact, it was during that first twenty-four-hour race in Buffalo, New York, the one where I wound up winning by running 122 miles in the allotted time, when I’d realized I had a talent for ultra-distances. I owe this, in part, to the advice of a gentleman I met during the race, who suggested that I slow my pace and take my time for the first fourteen to eighteen hours and then, he said, “Look around and you might be surprised to find that you’re in the lead.”
His words stayed with me. I thought about him often in the years that followed, especially when I was out there in the void, running. I found out after the race that he’d been diagnosed with cancer not long before we met, and he succumbed to the disease a couple of years later. To my chagrin, I can’t remember his name, but his advice was emblazoned in my mind: Pace yourself. Believe in yourself. Don’t sell yourself short. You have to think that you can win.
During my run across America, neither time nor distance could occupy my thoughts. I would run at my own pace; the distance was set and the time it would take to run that distance didn’t matter; it was what it would be, and so I could (try to) relax and not think about how long it would take me each day to cover the miles. Sometimes I succeeded in letting this go; sometimes I didn’t.
Gaius Julius Caesar. King Arthur. The Greek god Apollo. At one time or another, I imagined that I was one with each of them. At least twice a week for a year in preparation for the transcon, a friend helped me condition my mind for the run this way. We’d discuss my fears, hopes, and goals. She’d tell me about how formidable a warrior Caesar was—ruthless, a master of leadership, beloved and admired by his men. She’d compare me to the heroes of the Greek classics, talk to me about myths and mystery and mastery, and say that when it came to running, I was operating on another plane: No one could touch me.
You are a lion, Marshall, and show no mercy in the contest. You are one kingsized son of a bitch.
As I listened, I could feel her brainwashing at work, toughening my mind, impassioning and emboldening me to run. Even when I couldn’t buy into it, I just kept my mouth shut. As she talked, I would inevitably feel powerful, like there was nothing that could stop me. I became invincible. Even as my farm-boy humility fought it, some part of my spirit latched onto the grandiosity that she knew I needed to complete this task.
People think Apollo is the god of light and niceties, but he was actually a raging, ferocious god responsible for sending the plague through the Greeks and the Trojans. He was easy to anger, and when provoked he would come crashing down the mountain, spreading black death ...
There’s an older story, one of the lesser-known chapters of Homer’s Iliad (which is the story of the Trojan War) about one of the great warriors, Diomedes, who actually wounded several of the gods, including Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, and Ares, god of war. Who knew a god could be wounded, even by such a warrior? Their veins run with ichor, not blood. To taste it is to die . . .
Remember the wizard Merlyn turned King Arthur into a badger so he could learn a few things, finish his education. Hear this, from The Once and Future King:If you are feeling desperate, a badger is a good thing to be. A relation of the bears, otters and weasels, you are the nearest thing to a bear now left in England, and your skin is so thick that it makes no difference who bites you. So far as your own bite is concerned, there is something about the formation of your jaw, which makes it almost impossible to be dislocated—and so, however much the thing you are biting twists about, there is no reason why you should ever let go.
And listen, when Arthur meets a badger (himself in the same form), the animal tells him, “I can only teach you two things—to dig, and love your home.” Yes, badgers dig, dig, dig, going deep, down six or eight feet into the earth. They are relentless, noble creatures.
The stories she told me stayed with me. When we faced difficulties with logistics or other issues during the early stages of getting the run’s start date secured, did I style myself after Julius Caesar to move the battle plan forward? No, but I drew something from the legacy of his strength. When I came up with plantar fasciitis and tendonitis, did I imagine myself an injured god? No, of course not, but the story was there somewhere in my mind, making me believe on some level that I was still invincible. And when Charlie angered me to the point of rage, did I rain down black death like Apollo? Or poison him with the ichor of my blood? I suppose I did, a little. But only once, and I’m getting ahead of myself now. Many emotional ups and downs had to happen before I completely los
t it with him.
In McCook, the headwinds had come up again, and the hills had started to roll, both of which slowed me down, although I was pressing myself to maintain elite status. (Defining that status as sixty miles a day, a slightly adjusted “world-class” distance, was overly strict, but that’s what I had in my head, nonetheless. Usually, this standard is set on a sheltered, flat track or field, not out in the elements, on the road, with unpredictable elevation changes and traffic. So I’d taken the usual number, one hundred kilometers/sixty-two miles, and done this calculation—let’s see, every thousand feet of altitude gain is equal to an extra mile—to come up with my goal of a minimum of sixty miles per day, cutting myself a whopping two miles a day in slack.) Having run over sixty miles the second day after my MRI and pretty much maintained that mileage since then, I was compensating, setting second-tier goals since I had to make my peace with not breaking Frank Giannino’s overall world record. It was beyond my reach now: We’d figured that setting a new record would require covering seventy-seven miles a day from this point forward, nearly the same mileage that we’d done at the beginning of the race, before my injuries. Realistically, that wasn’t going to happen.
Just as we were admitting that we’d have to lower our sights, I could smell the humidity in the air and knew rain was coming.
On day twenty-nine, near Hastings, the wet began and didn’t let up for five days, which seemed apropos, as a new depression was setting in. The act of saying, out loud, that the record was gone made my defeat all too real. Sure, the new goal of sixty miles per day would keep me in the running for the grand masters and possibly the masters records, but I thought I wouldn’t be able to maintain what I considered a world-class pace. The overcast weather suited my mood, and the rain fell like tears, slowly turning the dirt under my feet to sticky mud that threatened to tear my shoes off or, at the very least, weigh me down.
There were bright spots, though. My foot was actually improving, which baffled me. How was this possible? Perhaps it was because I was no longer running on radiant heat; day temperatures were pleasant, and the ground no longer sent fire up my legs. Perhaps it was because my body had become so efficient, with my metabolism revved up and certain systems shut down to preserve energy (my hair and nails had almost stopped growing), that healing was prioritized and sped up. Perhaps it was because I could, occasionally, get off the pavement and onto softer ground.
As the rain kept coming, some of the back roads became impassable for the van and RV, which meant that we had to either reroute or split up. On day thirty-one, we opted to go our separate ways, with me taking a direct route through a valley and saving four miles, and the vehicles following an alternate route and meeting me on the other side. For me, this turned out to be a wonderful solution: I had a good ol’ time dashing through the mud, slipping and sliding over the uneven terrain. I covered only about two miles in an hour, but I enjoyed every minute. It reminded me of adventure racing, being on the loose and off-road. I’d started across the pastureland and then the trail had disappeared completely, but I just kept following a direct line eastward. When I reached a creek where a bridge was supposed to be, I wound up dropping down about thirty feet to reach the riverbed, hopping across, then scrambling back up the bank. Sure enough, someone had erected a bridge there, but it had long since fallen down. Built of old timbers and square-headed bolts with large cast-iron washers, the bridge looked to have been from the 1920s. Judging from the thirty-foot trees that grew on the old roadbed on the other side, and the erosion of the roadbed, it looked to me as if this bridge hadn’t been used for forty or fifty years.
When I finally reached the crew again, I was in good spirits—better than I had been in some time—and Heather was glad to see it. While I animatedly talked to her about the bridge I’d found (I love old structures), I could see her eyes narrowing, but she just kept smiling, as I’m sure she was relieved to see me so excited about something. Only later did I find out that navigating had been the source of friction between her and Kate O’Neil, the producer in charge of the route, who’d kept insisting that, first, my crew could follow me on my way as planned and, second, if the roads were so bad that they really couldn’t go with me, then it should be a simple thing to detour and find their way, as the area’s roads were supposed to be laid out on a grid. But what Kate didn’t know, and what Heather couldn’t convince her of, was that out in the country, when it rains like this and roads get washed out, there’s nothing easy about navigating on the fly, and, besides, what you see on your sophisticated mapping software isn’t always what you get in the real world. So I’m sure Heather felt at least a little vindicated, not only because the old bridge, supposedly still viable for crossing the creek, was down and had been for a long time, but also because Kate’s production group had gotten stuck in the mud for a couple of hours. Heather good-naturedly wrote it all off as the ignorance of city folk and said nothing about it to Kate, except, “Yes, it can be difficult to get through out here.” We were lucky that the obvious problems with our route had detoured our vehicles elsewhere, and that our crew was skilled at dealing with bad road conditions, as the whole thing had turned out to be no inconvenience to me. That bit of cross-country was probably the best fun I’d had yet, even if I did wind up with about three pounds of mud on each foot.
We’d gotten into the routine of changing clothes and shoes fairly frequently, as the rain kept soaking through anything I had. No matter what they say about waterproof, breathable rain gear, it doesn’t work. Good old fleece is the best as long as it isn’t a complete downpour. So I made another costume change and got back out on the road after my adventure, feeling a little better about things, but it didn’t take long for my mind to spiral back down into the vague malaise that had become my default mental state.
Two things were working on my psyche.
First, I simply could not get my head around the remaining effort, about fourteen hundred miles and too many days to go. Now, I know I shouldn’t have even been trying to comprehend it: Thinking about how much more I have to run is a bad idea in any long-distance endeavor, and this was beyond anything I’d attempted before. But I couldn’t help it, especially at dusk, when whoever brought me the reflective gear would arrive. Everyone hated that job, because I was predictably uncooperative about putting it on. I’d start thinking about having another night on the road, which meant I had hours to go before sleep, which meant that when I woke up in the morning I’d be tired again, which meant that the first marathon of the day would be another period of “warming up” and “recovery” from the night before, which meant that . . . my mind would just take me out of the present moment and into a future I dreaded. Every day was like the next, so it made the current effort feel pointless, endless, empty.
And second, I was starting to feel helpless, even more dependent on Heather than ever before. Since I was out there on the road alone most of the time, I spent most of it missing her. Sure, I could distract myself with my usual tricks, remembering old Native American legends about the area, admiring a vintage 1950s 8N Ford tractor that reminded me of the one I’d driven as a boy, or just cranking up the music. But it seemed that my mind would always come back and settle in this unsettled place.
I was on a roller coaster of emotion.
Good thing Caleb Beasley caught up with me on a major road later on the same day that I’d gone cross-country, because I really needed another boost. He was someone who’d signed up on the Running America website to be a guest runner, and when he found me, I was delighted to have the company. As we ran, he told me that his wife and their newborn baby were in a car tailing our crew van, and Caleb said he’d be happy to introduce them when he was done running for the night. When we stopped, and his wife brought that little girl out into the darkness, my heart soared! She had the biggest, most beautiful eyes I’ve seen. As I held her, a wave of hope washed over me. How precious life is! Oh, this little one has so much to learn, and has such a bright future with these two grea
t parents loving and supporting her.
Welcome to Iowa!
“The Hawkeye State”
Arrival date: 10/13/08 (Day 31)
Arrival time: 10:53 p.m.
Miles covered: 1,779.0
Miles to go: 1,284.2
The rush from that encounter lasted for hours, throughout the rest of the night. It was a strange sensation, to feel so “up” yet melancholy at the same time. Holding that baby had put me in mind of my own children when they were that age, and all the old feelings of new fatherhood warmed me as I continued through the rain, running on Highway 2 and crossing the Missouri River. Not long after that, we arrived in Iowa, and early in the morning, just after 1 a.m., I finished my sixty miles for the day ahead of schedule. Although the weather was slowing me down, the exhilaration of seeing the newly born baby had allowed me to make up the time I’d lost, with very little perceived effort. It was fortunate that I’d had such a good night, because the next day would bring devastation.
A couple of days before, Heather had met with Charlie, Chuck, and Kate in Charlie’s RV to discuss several crewing and production issues. There were budgetary constraints and the time-line slippage to cover, as we were behind schedule. They were also asking Heather to take a break, step back a bit, and let Chuck take up the slack. Someone had convinced Kate that Heather was overloaded, and supposedly there had been some complaints about my wife’s demeanor: She was “too specific” in her instructions and requests; this didn’t “empower” others, the mysterious “someone” had said. Charlie made some accusations that were both inaccurate and, frankly, insulting, but Heather kept her mouth shut, even when she was threatened with being sent home if she didn’t shape up. (Surely these were empty threats, even if Kate actually believed this crap. Who would send a man’s wife away from him when he needs her most?) She felt strange undercurrents in that meeting, as if there were some behind-the-scenes maneuvering, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, but she decided to let it go, not address any of it or mention it to me because it just felt like “drama.” Instead, Heather would get back to work and let her dedication to me speak for itself. While the personal criticisms surely hurt, she set that aside and chose to go with the flow, even though she knew that at least one of the decisions in that meeting would prove to be agonizing for both of us. But she didn’t know exactly when the hammer would drop.
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