Running Home

by Katie Arnold

  I’ve always been torn: between my two fathers, two mothers, two homes, New Jersey and Virginia, Northeast and Southwest, water and desert, suffering and joy. I could live or die. I could be a good mother or a good writer. Between the worry and the love, the heartbreak that my babies will someday grow up and leave me and the fear that they will never sleep through the night, my insatiable urge to go and my longing to stay, there’s a middle way, a third thing building. I just don’t know what it is.

  It’s the same with children. Sometimes Steve and I arrive at a moment when it seems that maybe we’re finally getting a grip on parenting. But no sooner do we congratulate each other than the girls stop napping and redouble their addiction to their pacifiers. I’ve read that in very young children, regression is a sign that they may be on the brink of a major developmental change, like learning to walk or talk. The brain is so busy conserving bandwidth for the big leap that other systems go haywire.

  Maybe the swirling turmoil of the past year has served a purpose after all. It has led me here, to the harebrained notion to run thirty-one miles. The resolution flies out of my mind and onto the page. The words stare back at me from my notebook like a proclamation. Like the craziest thing I might ever do, and the one thing I absolutely have to try.

  The third thing.

  Deep down, I know that running has the power to save me. Only it won’t be enough to run up my mountain for an hour in the evenings while day turns to dusk. I need something huge enough to swallow my intractable grief, a goal that requires total commitment. I need to go farther, longer, deeper.

  The next day, I give Steve a piece of paper with the words “My athletic goal for 2012 is ______” written on it. He never makes New Year’s resolutions, and I haven’t told him about mine. He reaches wordlessly for a pen, pauses to think, and bends his left hand around the paper, humoring me. A moment later, he gives it back. In his scrawly penmanship, he’s written, “Run a 50K ultramarathon.”

  I stare at his resolution to make sure I’m not imagining it. It’s the exact same thing I wrote. The coincidence is uncanny. It’s been so long since we shared a goal beyond parenting, beyond just getting through the day, yet somehow we’re still in sync.

  “You know what this means,” I say, handing him my paper. “Now we have to do it.”

  Then I tape our resolutions to the refrigerator so we won’t forget.

  * * *

  —

  Fifty kilometers is thirty-one miles.

  Thirty-one miles is only five miles longer than the marathon I’d accidentally run with Dean five years earlier. If I have to, I can always walk the last five miles.

  Aside from Dean’s can-do mantra—“Just run to the next tree”—my only training advice comes from a professional ultrarunner named Darcy Piceu, who lives in Boulder, Colorado, and whom I’d recently interviewed for a magazine story. Darcy has a young daughter and a full-time job. She told me that the only thing that really matters when training for an ultra is your long run each week. She ran for six or seven hours every Saturday, trading childcare duties with her husband, who was also an endurance athlete. During the workweek, she said, as long as you get in some “short” runs, you’ll be fine. I figured Darcy must know what she was doing, because she’d finished fourth overall at the toughest mountain ultra in the country, the Hardrock 100, in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado.

  Ultrarunning is one of the rare sports in which, at the highest level, women are physiologically capable of beating men; ultrarunners of both genders call this getting “chicked.” The longer the distance, the greater a female runner’s advantage. In the nineties, ultra legend Ann Trason won the women’s division at Western States 100 fourteen times; she twice came in second place overall and finished in the top ten eleven times. While there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence of rampant chicking in the sport, there’s little hard science to explain why females fare so well in extreme endurance. The most widespread speculation is that women’s innate ability to withstand the ardors of childbirth also enables them to keep going for hours in other pursuits, even when they feel that they will surely perish from the effort.

  My own labor with Pippa lasted thirty hours, an ultramarathon of childbirth. I subsisted on Popsicles and contraband energy bars Steve smuggled in when the nurses weren’t looking. People kept handing me giant plastic cups of water and begging me to drink. I declined an epidural; I’d decided to do it naturally, as my mother had with me. (“I don’t remember any pain!” she reassured me, with a straight face.) The pain was outrageous and unrelenting, huge horizontal waves that crested and broke, only to rise again almost immediately. Steve and my birthing coach, Simone, slumped on plastic chairs while searing blades of agony tore me in two. A living, breathing creature was trying to claw its way out of me.

  “I can’t do this,” I moaned.

  “You are doing it,” Simone corrected me. “The only way out of this is through it.”

  I burrowed in. You’re stronger than you think you are.

  Finally, at the end of the second day, Pippa scrabbled into the world. I held her and looked around the room, marveling at how different it appeared. It was much smaller than I remembered. The walls pressed in, and the bed was narrower and seemed to be oriented in a different direction, though I knew it hadn’t moved. I felt like I’d been away on a long journey, traveling vast distances, when in fact I’d been here all along. It was my mind that had left—it had to, to escape the torments of my body.

  I tell myself that if I can withstand thirty hours of labor, then surely I can run for six or seven. This shouldn’t be consoling—almost anything is easier than a day and a half of natural childbirth—but somehow it is.

  * * *

  —

  For a few weeks, I bask in the glow of our resolutions on the fridge, as though simply writing them was noble enough and we don’t actually have to go through with them.

  These are the darkest days of winter, and I’m a creature of light. My body wants to sleep and ski and bake chocolate chip cookies—anything but start training. By late January, though, I can’t take it anymore. Procrastinating is harder than running.

  First we have to choose a race. Steve and I agree that it needs to be in New Mexico; neither of us wants to drive a long distance to run a long distance. This narrows it down: There are only a handful of 50Ks in the state, and the closest is the Jemez Mountain Trail Run, thirty-one miles through the backcountry above Los Alamos. It’s in late May. We have four months to train, just barely enough time.

  I start with a rolling six-mile run along the railroad tracks south of town. The Rail Trail follows the Santa Fe Southern Railway twenty miles from downtown, through bristly grasslands and a scattering of subdivisions, to the whistle-stop of Lamy; thirteen of these miles are dirt. In the summer, the railway operates a tourist train, but in the winter the tracks are quiet, just the jackrabbits, a few mountain bikers and dog walkers, and sometimes one of the Kenyan marathoners who live and train in Santa Fe.

  Santa Fe’s elevation of seven thousand feet is widely considered the sweet spot for high-altitude endurance training: It’s high enough to condition your body for the thin air of mountain running, but not so high that you dramatically compromise your speed or aerobic output. The Rail Trail is five hundred feet lower, though, so it’s usually clear of snow when the town and mountain trails aren’t; it’s also relatively flat and thus fairly fast. Some days I feel like I’m bounding along like the Kenyans, and only when I turn around do I realize that the wind has been at my back; now it’s howling in my face. (Note to self: If you can’t feel the wind, it’s probably behind you.) The wind can be awful out there.

  I run five days a week, rarely more. I don’t keep track of my pace or my mileage, and I’m not following a training plan. Though there are plenty of regimens floating around the Internet for free, something in me rebels against the obvious. I want to list
en to my own instincts, not someone else’s. I’ve never been a very good follower.

  * * *

  —

  The year we moved to Summit, I joined the Brownies. I was in second grade and had no aspirations to be a Girl Scout, but I signed up for the junior troop because I liked the brown uniforms with the sashes, pinned with badges. I imagined my own wide sash drooping and jangling under the weight of them as I walked alongside the other girls.

  But when I put on the uniform for my first meeting, the perky brown cap sat uncomfortably atop my brown bowl cut, and my brown knee socks itched in my dull brown penny loafers. Even the penny was brown. A terrible, unforeseen monotony. I looked in the mirror and saw that I looked just like every other Brownie in every other town across the land—the world, even. This unsettled me. I did not want to look like every other girl, and I was ashamed that I’d made my mother spend money on the uniform, which I knew now to be unremittingly drab. I longed to be on my blue bicycle, streaking home from school, wind strafing my face, exactly me, unlike anyone else.

  Mom went with me to the meeting. Outside the school, we paused by the bike racks and looked up. Above us, a jumbo jet was cresting the last ridge on its descent to Newark Airport. It was lower than any plane I’d ever seen, and it hung in the sky, bloated and silvery and eerily silent. Somehow it was not moving, as though it were tethered by a thread. I could see the jet’s black wheels already lowered for landing, and I could imagine the people’s faces looking down through the oval windows at the low-slung brick school and the bikes all crammed together with their rat traps and little tin license plates, at my own awestruck face looking back. Mom sputtered with disbelief and joy, squeezing my hand in hers. She always had such an amazing capacity for delight.

  Who else had seen the plane? It was possible that we were the only ones. And already it was gone, coasting east. Watching it disappear from sight, I knew I didn’t want to be a Brownie anymore. I went inside because I said I would, but then I relinquished my uniform and never went back. These weird wonders, they didn’t last. But if you kept your eyes open, instead of just following along blindly, you could catch them.

  * * *

  —

  My only real plan is to increase my longest run by fifteen to twenty minutes each week. It’s an inexact science, but at this rate I figure I’ll be up to four or five hours by May. I vary my routes so I don’t get bored. I run up Atalaya and along sandy arroyos and only rarely on the road. I prefer slow, long runs to speed work, and hills over flats. No two weeks are ever the same.

  Grief has its own topography, jagged and unpredictable. In the beginning it was like dragging myself up a vertical face, the surface loose and slippery, trying not to slip backwards into darkness; then there were the brighter days when I skimmed along the rolling flats in the bright sun. As the first anniversary of Dad’s death approached, I felt like I was running fast downhill, picking up speed toward a date I’d been anticipating all year. I didn’t want him to be gone that long, but I was restless to put the pain behind me and finally feel better.

  There’s a fine line between coasting and crashing, though, and by early December time had begun to accelerate too fast, sweeping me along with it. On December 9, I was frantic all day. I felt as I had a year earlier, that I was rushing to get back to Dad before he died, as if there was a seam in time into which the past twelve months had disappeared and if I hurried I could slide back in and change the ending. All afternoon I checked my watch obsessively. It was 5 p.m., then 5:30. The urgency was futile. Dad had been dead for a year, and he would always be dead. His deadness would grow until he’d been dead longer than he’d been my father, and dead longer than he’d been alive.

  Then the digital clock blinked 6:10, and he was gone all over again. The past irreversible, the future unscripted, as always.

  * * *

  —

  By late winter in northern New Mexico, the ponderosa pines begin to smell like butterscotch. All it takes is a few mild days in a row for the sap to start flowing. You can press your nose into the trees’ thick skin and know that spring is coming. The sweet scent of sap mingles with fallen needles, warmed by the sun, and snow-soggy trails drying into dust. By summer the needles will have begun to crisp like a million tiny bonfires lit along the trail. For now, though, they smell sweet, like hope.

  I run with the weather, moving higher as the days warm and my mileage increases. The high point of the Jemez 50K is ten thousand feet, and I need to acclimate my legs and lungs to the altitude. I run to nine thousand feet beneath ponderosas along Tesuque Creek, hopping boulders and shimmying along ice-slicked logs. By early May I can make it to ten thousand feet, sinking into patchy foot-deep snowbanks in the shade, scratching my shins on the crusty, dying drifts until they bleed.

  Steve and I trade off, make deals. When he runs, I stay home with Pippa and Maisy; when I run, he does. Sundays are the only exception, when our friends take the girls so we can run together for a few hours—the most time we’ve spent alone together outside since before Pippa was born. Mostly, though, I train alone, on weekdays when he’s working and the girls are at daycare. I don’t want to take up family time for something that feels self-indulgent, maybe even frivolous. This is classic mother’s guilt: the persistent worry that we should be caring for someone besides ourselves, tending to the daily details, being there just to be there. No matter how fast and strong I feel when I run, my guilt dogs me like a shadow.

  Some days, I don’t want to go. I’m sluggish, sucking wind, slogging uphill at a turtle’s pace. The voice in my head is sharp and loud. It says, Running is selfish. You should be at home with the girls. I think about my babies in someone else’s care, not so far away that I can’t be with them but far enough away that I’m not. I bend over and put my hands on my knees and stare at the ground, longing to turn around, not because I’m tired in my legs, but because I’m so tired of leaving, of being left.

  I don’t turn around.

  On the last day of March, nine weeks after I started training, I run the Rail Trail alone, nine miles out and nine miles back. Eighteen miles. It’s my longest training run yet. The spring wind blows tumbleweeds against my ankles and grit into my teeth, and by the end my legs are sore and heavy, but I can’t stop smiling.

  A funny thing happens: The more I run, the less I think about the race. I’m not training to race; I’m running to live. What I crave, what propels me out the door, is the same thing that always has: the strength in my muscles, my beating heart, my brain lulled by motion, the wonder all around.

  16

  Into the Heart of Fear

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Dad, self-portrait, early ’60s

  There’s one question that people always ask me about running alone. It’s the same question they ask me about taking young children down whitewater rivers or into the backcountry. I know their question because it’s also the one I ask myself. Aren’t you scared?

  The answer is: Absolutely.

  I’m scared almost every time I run.

  I’m scared of getting lost and getting hurt and of being attacked by animals, wild and domesticated—even livestock. Dogs that lunge out at me from yards; cows grazing in backcountry meadows, staring at me with their mean, blank eyes when I sidle by in the bushes, daring me to pass. They’re just cows, I chide myself, feeling foolish, but they are large and lumbering and ten times my weight, and they could mow me down in an instant.

  I don’t worry about lone coyotes—at forty pounds, they’re too small and skittish to do any harm—but packs of coyotes, though rarely encountered, are unpredictable. (A solo female hiker was killed by a pack in Nova Scotia.) Rattlesnakes are uncommon in Santa Fe; they don’t do well above seven thousand feet, or so I thought, until I leapt a pair of mating rattlers in the middle of the trail. Now I keep my eyes down.

  Lightning exists in its own cate
gory of horror. On summer afternoons, heat rises from the desert and slams into the mountains, forming monsoon thunderstorms. There are more ground strikes in New Mexico than in almost any other state. The temperature can plunge twenty degrees in five minutes, and dry arroyos turn to raging rivers. I’ve been in the high country when the lightning strikes were so close that white flashed behind my eyelids and the thunder roared from inside my ears. I’ve seen the long serrated scars on ponderosa pines, their bark flayed open from top to bottom. When I run up high, I leave early in the morning so I’m off the bald peaks by early afternoon; I always keep one eye on the sky, trying to remember what to do if I get caught above the tree line. Do I squat with my shoes on, or take them off and crawl under a rocky outcropping? Or do I sprint like hell for cover?

  Of all the objective risks, though, mountain lions scare me the most. They’re not as big as black bears—adult males can weigh up to 180 pounds, to a bear’s 300—but they’re much stealthier. They prowl silently through the woods and can leap forty feet in pursuit of deer, coyotes, and rabbits; sometimes they even wander down the arroyos and into town. As the saying goes, you might have never seen a mountain lion in the wild, but they’ve seen you. Black bears galumph around eating berries, almost endearing in their shagginess, so big they can’t hide. But cougars are wily; cougars sneak. When I run, I scan outcroppings for movement, listening for rustlings. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched.

  * * *

  —

  Statistically, the biggest threat to a woman alone on the trails isn’t lightning or wild animals, but people. I know this because I am a statistic.

  It was November 18, 2008, a Tuesday, 4:15 p.m. Pippa was four months old and weighed ten pounds. I strapped her onto my chest and walked alone into the foothills on a trail I’d run countless times on my own. I’d hiked throughout my pregnancy, and walking was the only thing that could reliably put her to sleep. At the trailhead, I nursed her in the front seat while her spindly legs kicked the gearshift. Then I laid her on the hatch, wrapped her like a burrito into a cotton insert shaped like an oversize tortilla, buckled the baby carrier around my shoulders and waist, and shoved the entire package inside. She was still so small that she faced forward, legs sidesaddle, her chin to my chest. She almost always fell asleep before I even left the parking lot. The only trick was that I couldn’t stop, not even to tie my shoe, or else she’d wake up and start fussing to be fed; breastfeeding her on the side of the mountain intimidated me more than climbing the mountain.