Running Home

by Katie Arnold

  Running Home is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2019 by Paper Sky LLC

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Arnold, Katie, author.

  Title: Running home : a memoir / by Katie Arnold.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Random House, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017060112 | ISBN 9780425284650 (Hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780425284667 (Ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Arnold, Katie. | Women runners—United States—Biography. | Marathon running—Biography. | Fathers and daughters. | Grief. | Extreme sports.

  Classification: LCC GV1061.15.A75 A3 2019 | DDC 796.42092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017060112

  Ebook ISBN 9780425284667

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Anna Bauer Carr

  Cover photograph: David L. Arnold

  Photo colorization: Debra Lill

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One: Leavings

  Chapter 1: Home Stretch

  Chapter 2: Dares

  Chapter 3: Edge of Memory

  Chapter 4: Signals

  Chapter 5: Matters of Importance

  Chapter 6: The Faraway

  Chapter 7: Progression

  Chapter 8: Letters from Home

  Chapter 9: The Things We Threw Away

  Chapter 10: The Short Goodbye

  Chapter 11: Darkness

  Part Two: Shadows

  Chapter 12: This Is the Way the Mind Works

  Chapter 13: Breaking Down

  Chapter 14: The Thin Edge

  Chapter 15: Resolve

  Chapter 16: Into the Heart of Fear

  Chapter 17: What I Carry

  Part Three: Upward

  Chapter 18: Plunging In

  Chapter 19: Practice

  Chapter 20: Spirit Running

  Chapter 21: Resistance

  Chapter 22: Mind Like Sky

  Chapter 23: Drinking the Wind

  Chapter 24: Continue Under All Circumstances

  Chapter 25: The Opposite of Emptiness

  Chapter 26: Belonging

  Chapter 27: Lying Down in the Tracks

  Chapter 28: The Long Way Home

  Epilogue: Ghosts

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Be who you really are and go the whole way.

  —LAO TZU

  PROLOGUE

  Miles from Nowhere

  2012

  PHOTO: KMA

  Valles Caldera, New Mexico

  I’m floating alone through a million-year-old volcano. Less than a week from now, a wildfire will torch the edges of this high, scooped-out basin, but the only thing burning here today is me. I’m just a body in motion, arms and legs firing in unison, swallowing the dirt beneath my feet, spraying a fine mist of silt in my wake.

  The caldera extends for miles in each direction, tawny grassland fringed by fir trees, which from this distance look as tiny as toothpicks. At ten thousand feet above sea level, the air is thin and the sun ferocious, beating down on me from a cloudless sky. In the stark light, everything stands out in sharp relief: chunks of glossy black obsidian strewn across the rocky track, bleached white elk ribs, a lumpy cow skull. A knee-high dust devil swirls across the trail ahead of me, a miniature cyclone throwing its arms in the air.

  It’s late May 2012 in the mountains of northern New Mexico, and I’m twenty-one miles into a fifty-mile ultramarathon. After nearly four hours on the trail, my brain has gone quiet at last, lulled by the repetitive motion of limbs, lungs, beating heart. It has ceased its tireless, stubborn spinning. Without words for pain and fear, without the conscious thought of them, the discomforts of the day have lifted, like skin sloughed off by the wind.

  I’m a speck on this enormous land, suspended between earth and sky, more sky than earth. More flying than running. For the first time in months, I’m no longer afraid. I wonder, briefly, if I’ve lost my mind. The answer is yes. Finally.

  * * *

  —

  Everyone follows a different path. The path starts with a persistent voice inside, nudging you to try the unexpected, the improbable. This is the voice to listen to, not the voice saying No. Not the one saying Are you crazy? Don’t worry if you don’t understand it yet. You can’t possibly see where the path will take you, twisting and kinking out of sight. Follow it anyway. Sometimes the path will be faint and you will think you’ve lost the way and you will be afraid. This is normal. The path will lead you on, out of your known world and into a new one, and deeper into yourself than you’ve ever been before.

  Running is my path.

  I’ve run through winter, on steep, snow-packed peaks with metal spikes strapped to my shoes so I won’t slip. I’ve risen early to sneak out at first light in late spring, the air sweet with lilacs. I’ve run high above the tree line at twelve thousand feet in late August, climbing through wildflowers and into the clouds until the world below feels like a dream. I’ve run across river canyons, hurdled rattlesnakes, startled bears, and outsprinted mosquitoes in damp, boggy woods. I’ve run to win and to be loved and I’ve run not to be noticed but to disappear, into the forests and my own heart. Some days I can no longer tell if running is madness or the clearest kind of sanity.

  When I began, I did not have a map of where I was going or how I would get there or where there even was. In the span of three months in 2010, my younger daughter was born and my father died. I’d lost him once before, but this time was for good. My world flipped upside down, and the ground dropped out from beneath my feet. Consumed by grief and terrified that I was dying, too, I fumbled forward into the wilderness alone. I lived in terror of my body breaking down, but I pushed it to its limits almost every day. I had two young daughters at home who needed me, whom I needed even more. But I went anyway. I had so many questions and so few answers. All I could do was see where running would lead me.

  * * *

  —

  A caldera is a large, shallow crater formed when a volcano explodes and collapses in on itself. The crater at Valles Caldera National Preserve, in the Jemez Mountains, is not one crater but seven, strung out like pearls on a necklace, nearly thirteen miles across, a staggeringly huge sea of grass that dwarfs everything within it.

  A week before the Jemez Mountain 50 Mile Trail Run, a friend of a friend named Jacob, who’d run the race before, sent me a message on Facebook. “You need to keep it together in the caldera,” he warned, “because the climb out of it is brutal. You’re going to be pulling yourself up by tree branches. It’s like a sick joke.”

  On the morning of the race, my alarm went off at 3 a.m. I dressed in the darkened bedroom so as not to wake my husband, put the kettle on for instant
oatmeal, drank a glass of vitamin C–spiked water, and was out the door by 3:30. It was still cool, the black sky gleamed with stars, and the highway north was empty and lonesome. When I pulled into the starting line at 4:30, the night hadn’t brightened one bit. My heart whomped against my ribs and goosebumps pricked my bare arms and legs; how I longed to be home, snug with my family in our sleeping house. Then the race director shouted Go! and my legs began to churn and there was no turning back.

  I picked my way through rocky arroyos under my headlamp’s dim beam. Except for the narrow cone of light illuminating the ground beneath my feet, I could see nothing. It is difficult to gauge speed when you run in the dark. You have to go more slowly to avoid falling, but without visible landmarks, just colorless, indistinct shapes lunging up at you—trees, boulders, sharp turns—you feel as if you’re careening along at a reckless velocity. Sensory deprivation creates the illusion of speed.

  As the sky gradually lightened to dull gray, the objects around me became recognizable. I was on the side of a rugged, dun-colored canyon, steep and treeless in places, forested in others. The sky appeared cloudy, but there were no clouds, just the absence yet of sun, the eastern horizon whitening on its way to blue. When the sun rose, an hour later, I whooped with joy; daylight was a shot of optimism straight to my heart. Far below, the canyons puckered and wrinkled, slouching downstream to the Rio Grande.

  Halfway to the summit of 10,440-foot Pajarito Mountain, I hooked my foot on a rock and slammed into the ground. I knelt in the dirt and licked my gritty palm and used my spit to wipe my bloody shin, remembering horror stories of runners who’d nicked their knees on a root and kept running, only to look down hours later and find that the scrape had bled down to the bone.

  Barreling down the other side of the mountain, I watched the runner in front of me trip and rag-doll through the air, landing in a heap, and then stagger to his feet and keep running. My fingers turned into fat sausages and I peed urine the color of Dijon mustard and I force-fed myself two energy gels and a few swallows of electrolyte water to bring myself back from the brink of dehydration.

  I’d been running for three and a half hours, and I hadn’t even gotten to the caldera yet.

  * * *

  —

  Running is linear, almost tiresomely so. You’re moving forward through space and time, sometimes for a very long time, over a very long, sometimes idiotically long, distance. Even when you’re running in a loop, your progress is forward—arms and legs aligned, you take one step ahead and then another until you reach the end. Your mind, though, takes a more circuitous route: jumping from the past to the future and back again, like a movie reel or a time machine. Sometimes it projects a whirring jumble of memories and impressions, zooming in on minute details. Other times it pans out and makes cinematic leaps. At the beginning of a long run, you may be excited and impatient to see what will happen. Did I train enough? Will I make it? What’s going to happen? So many questions. You’re running to find out.

  The middle miles are the hardest. The early thrill has worn off, and you still have so far to go. You just have to put your head down and do the work. There’s no glory in the middle, but it’s beautiful in its own way, because at last your looping mind has nowhere to go but right where you are: your shoes striking the ground, dust puffing up around your ankles. Can you smell the pine trees? Like magic, they’ve been there all along. It’s every runner’s dream—maybe everyone’s dream—to make this feeling last.

  Eventually you cross the threshold where you’re closer to the end than the beginning. You can’t see it, but you can feel it. With each step the finish is calling you forward, reeling you in. It’s a force bigger than you, invigorating and impossible to resist. You’re running home.

  There’s no way to enter a crater without going down. The trail into the Valle Grande, the largest of the seven calderas, pitches down through thick forest, loose rocks, and bare roots at a nearly thirty-five-degree angle. I leaned back on my heels in a semi-controlled slide, grabbing for branches and tree stumps, anything to keep myself from somersaulting all the way to the bottom. My shoes and socks filled with pebbles and dirt, and sand sloshed between my toes, but I was too impatient to stop.

  It was then that my brain detached from my body, a kite cut loose from its string. It was no longer calling the shots, as it had been all morning—slow down, speed up, don’t trip, don’t fall, eat more, drink more, keep going, don’t die. Instead it said to my body, You take it from here. Suddenly I was all legs, no thoughts. It was much easier this way, and faster.

  * * *

  —

  The trail across the caldera is a wide, rolling dirt track, so for the first time all day I don’t have to watch my feet. Instead, I lift my eyes and look around. It’s nothing but grass, waving in the wind. I can see twelve miles across to the scallop of trees on the far side, tugging me forward like an invisible cord. I’m running faster and with less effort than I have all morning.

  This must be what it feels like to hallucinate, a lightness in my body, my senses absorbing every detail: the skeleton bones and swirling earth. Far in front of me, a shimmery pond glints like a dime-size mirage. As I get closer, I see that it’s real and I’m overcome by the urge to jump into the water. Toy trucks waver like vehicles in a model town. It’s a faraway aid station.

  The caldera was once a scene of cataclysmic change, but time has turned it into a place of stillness and silence. Half a mile ahead of me, a black spot lopes along the contours of the rough road. Another runner. He’s slowly, almost imperceptibly, getting bigger. I’m gaining on him, if only by inches. Beneath this massive sky, I’m outrageously lonely, but as the runner grows closer I realize that I don’t want to talk to him, or anyone. Solitude is my fuel.

  People think long-distance running is about speed, about getting from point A to B as fast as possible, but really it’s about slowing down. In the quiet of prolonged effort, time stretches, elongates. I look around at the hot blue sky, summer settling down on northern New Mexico, and feel my legs moving automatically and do what comes naturally. I run.

  * * *

  —

  Twelve miles disappear beneath my feet. The back side of Pajarito Mountain rears up, the off-kilter doubletrack road disappearing into tall grass. I stop at the aid station and the race volunteers press watermelon slices into my palms and send me on my way. Past the pond, the course goes up, up, up the slope, trees stacked upon trees stacked upon trees: ponderosa pines, Douglas firs, blue spruce, aspens greening with the first heat of spring. This is the climb Jacob warned me about. It’s so steep I can’t see the top.

  I’ve run all day to get out of the caldera, but now that I’m almost there, I have the strangest sensation that I will miss it. I will miss the scale and solitude, the simplicity of the task before me. Running reduces life to its bare essentials: sky, ground, skin, breath, flesh, bones, muscle.

  Then, as if on cue, the orange flags marking the course vanish. There’s no trail, just knee-high bunchgrass atop tussocky earth. The footing is uneven, and the course could be anywhere on the side of the mountain. I slow to a walk, scouring the meadow for the neon stick flags. Nothing.

  In every long run, there comes a moment when you ask yourself, What the hell were you thinking? This is it. I stare at the ground, the steep slope rising above me, and think about my father and my daughters, and how I ended up alone and lost on a mountain in New Mexico. A million steps along a crooked path have led me here. And only I can find my way out.

  PART ONE

  Leavings

  I would like to beg you…to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as though they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perh
aps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE

  1

  Home Stretch

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Fodderstack 10K, Flint Hill, Virginia, 1984

  The journey has taken all day. We got up before dawn and we’re still not there. The road before us winds and swerves, up hills and down. It is very narrow, and you can’t see around the curves, so you have to stay to the edge and hope that no one’s coming in fast from the other direction. My older sister, Meg, is driving, like she always did. My three-month-old daughter, Maisy, is in the back, asleep in her car seat.

  There are fences and walls on either side of the road and, beyond them, green fields and horse pastures unfurling to dense woods. I’d forgotten that trees get so tall, taller than the second story of a house. I’d forgotten that there are second stories of houses. I’d forgotten about grass. I’ve been away so long.

  We pass a small sign for Huntly. There’s nothing here but a low white house where the rural post office used to be. It shut down years ago, and now Huntly is just a name on the map. A mile later, we turn left onto a smaller road. Meg slows down as the asphalt gives way to gravel, as Dad taught us to do out of respect for the neighbors. The lane tightens as it passes a row of mailboxes and a neglected stucco chapel that was once a slave church. To our right is a house abandoned when we were children, its rusting swing set still lurching in the weeds. On the left is the overgrown apple orchard where a horse named Mack used to graze, so skinny we could count his ribs.