Running Home

by Katie Arnold

  Dad loved the grass, but it was okay to hate the grass, too, to want to leave. As weird as it sounds, I wish he’d left more. For a weekend, a week. Mowing is not all it’s cracked up to be. Everyone needs to go. But you come back; the grass is what you know. There is solace in the grass. History, duty. What do you do out of duty, and what do you do out of love? Where do you draw the line between walking the line and running in the opposite direction?

  Time passes so swiftly: a blink and this moment is gone. A dove flaps its wings and flies away, and water drips from the clouds so softly it doesn’t make a sound, shooing me home.

  * * *

  —

  There’s so much noise in the world, and, back in the happy mayhem of home, it all seems amplified. I’d forgotten how loud small girls can be, piling onto me gleefully as I pull them in. They have freckles and bruised knees and they have lived ten days without me and no one died.

  Even silent things make noise: the taunting blue screen of Facebook, the blinking light on my answering machine. I long for the rolling lanes and clear, wide days of France. Attachment—and discontent, too—is its own kind of noise.

  One morning, jet-lagged, I wake up before 5 a.m. and tiptoe out for a run. I know where I can find the silence: where it’s always been, outside, on the trails. I run hard, and when I get home, my wild, tangled life is all right there waiting for me, pleading for soft-boiled eggs and a bike ride to school. But the silence is also inside me, part of my muscle memory, moving through the trees and into my legs and onto the paper.

  20

  Spirit Running

  PHOTO: STEVE BARRETT

  Winsor Trail, Santa Fe, 2012

  In July, I sign up for the Mt. Taylor 50K, held in western New Mexico in late September. Like the Jemez 50K, Mount Taylor is a technical course, much of it above ten thousand feet in elevation. I’m forty years old and coming off a surprise win at my first ultra. Maybe I’m good; maybe I could even be great. Probably I’m merely above average, but either way, I want to find out. The clock is ticking.

  I talk Steve into signing up, too. He’s still leery from the Jemez race, but I convince him that he still has the fitness to run another 50K without too much additional training. Selfishly, I want the company, but I’m also hoping he’ll fall in love with the sport, as I have.

  Stony Lake, where I take the girls for a month each summer, is not the most obvious place to train for a high-altitude mountain race. It’s at 600 feet above sea level, and there are few hills. The country roads are narrow, winding between lumpy pastures rife with Queen Anne’s lace and limestone boulders. This the scabbiest, lumpiest, least productive farmland on the edge of the Canadian Shield: unforgiving granite all the way to bedrock. The silos are all tilted and falling apart, and I can see sky through the ribs of the barns. There are only a few stop signs, and no traffic lights, so I rarely have to stop, which is good, because you can’t slow down for even a second or you will be devoured by mosquitos, especially on roads and trails where the trees are thick—which are almost all the roads and trails—and after a rain, when it is humid. One upside to mosquitoes: they are very good for speed training.

  I’ve known this country my whole life, but running changes it. I notice all the things I previously missed—dry-docked boats for sale and scrap-metal piles and white-brick farmhouses—and I feel proprietary tenderness toward them, not unlike the way I feel about my mountains at home. On the ground beside a mailbox, someone has left a box of toys, free for the taking: Barbies, a small plastic Lion King, rubber balls, mermaids. Each day, there are new ones in the box and I pick one to bring home to Pippa and Maisy.

  Near the dock where I park my boat, a network of trails winds for seven miles through the birch and hemlock trees. On hot days, it’s shady and cool beneath the canopy; after a rain, the puddles are so big you can’t run through them; you have to skirt the sides, slopping in up to your ankles. I’ve maybe seen one other person on the trails, ever. The paths meander in such an illogical, unmarked fashion that it’s easy to get turned around, and when I first discovered them, I would often be several miles in the wrong direction before I realized I was lost. Now, though, I can run without having to remember where I am or memorize intersections, without having to think. At first my legs are tight, but I also feel fast, as though all the oxygen in the world is available to me, and my lungs stretch wide to breathe it all in—no tension, no hitches, no holding back. If it’s hot when I get back to the lake, I run straight onto the dock, pull off my shirt, socks, and sneakers, and jump in.

  Some days, the doubt slides in and I wonder how I can possibly train for New Mexico’s high, thin air and mountain passes in the flatlands of Ontario, but then I look around, at thick trees and goldenrod meadows and Barbie’s blond head shoved into my sports bra, and I know how I’m doing it. By running where I am.

  * * *

  —

  When I get home to Santa Fe, most of my miles are in the bank. All I really need to do is reacclimatize to the altitude and stay healthy. I should be feeling strong, but instead my joints ache and my right Achilles tendon feels tight enough to slingshot a sweet potato. My rational brain tells me that the obvious culprit is too many fast miles. But I can feel my anxiety spiking, taunting me with improbable scenarios. It must be Lyme’s disease, from the tick I pulled off my thigh when I was at Huntly last spring. Though I showed no symptoms six months ago, the disease is, right this very minute, worming inside my joints, corroding my heart, zapping me of vitality and stamina.

  The blood test I ask Dr. G. to order comes back negative. I ice my ankle twice a day for three days and lay off the hills, and the tenderness in my calf subsides. I’m not sick or injured. I’m just burned out, running for the wrong reasons: not for the pleasure and self-confidence I felt all spring, but because I want to win and am afraid I won’t. Because now I have something to prove. That my first ultra wasn’t a fluke.

  One morning, as I’m running up Atalaya, I think about bailing out of Mount Taylor. It would be so easy to cancel my registration, to let my ultrarunning career fade out after one freak victory. After all, this is what I’d done as a girl, by competing only once a year, at the Fodderstack. Had I given up racing for Meg, or for myself, out of defiance? Or maybe there was another piece: fear. Maybe I hadn’t wanted to risk losing face in front of Dad. Now, thirty years later, scuffing my feet up the mountain, my heart a bag of bricks in my chest, I can’t fathom why this seemed like a good idea.

  When I get to the top, I sit on a rock, looking down on Santa Fe. If I quit now, I would miss so much. I would miss the clarity of purpose I feel when I have a goal and it absorbs me so completely I stop caring about the outcome. And I would miss this: the full moon sinking into the Jemez Mountains, and behind me the sun inching up over Thompson Peak, equidistant above the horizon. I stretch out my arms, cupping the moon in one hand and the sun in the other, and they align exactly, as though, in this one moment, the world hangs in perfect balance.

  I feel Dad rising around me, through the thick reptilian skin of the ponderosas: I know it’s hard. You are doing a good job. Keep going.

  And so I do, dropping off the north side into the shadows, leaning into the turns. I don’t feel strong, but I feel better, less afraid. If I want to stay healthy for Mount Taylor, I will have to let go of my ego’s insistent posturing and run instead for the love of moving through mountains, for something bigger than results and beyond myself.

  * * *

  —

  The August days are full of gorgeous, fading beauty. At seven thousand feet, the seasons switch over briskly, without warning. Moths stitch themselves into the tiny checkered squares of the screen doors, manic for the light. We live outside with the girls, hiking beside trickling creeks, collecting pinecones that stick to our hands. We dunk our toes in the Rio Grande and flick watermelon seeds into the current one last time this season. Th
e aspens up high labor from green to pure gold, and all of Santa Fe climbs the mountain to gawk at their brilliance. Days this happy make me a little melancholy. There is not a lot of time left before the snow closes down the high country, but this is the very best time and I don’t want to waste it.

  On the last day of summer, I run twelve miles to the radio towers, at twelve thousand feet, and back. The season that began with late nights falling over hay pastures in France is ending beneath a million golden aspen leaves in New Mexico. I run as though drawn upward by a kinetic charge that’s bigger and stronger than me. All I have to do is let it in and I will never run out. At the top, I sit and eat a peach, the juice running down my chin, the sugar giving me speed. I spread my hands out to the sky and say “Thank you! Thank you!” the whole way down.

  * * *

  —

  When race week arrives, I’m frazzled again, as though there’s not enough time to get it all done, until I remind myself that I’ve already done everything. I’ve trained hard while trying to set aside pride and preoccupation with winning. I don’t need to do anything; I only need to do nothing.

  A couple of days before the race, Natalie and I are walking around the neighborhood when she says, out of nowhere, “Writing should be for the whole world, for all sentient beings. Maybe your running can be, too.” She says this plainly, the way she does everything, nothing to suggest she’s transmitting the wisdom of the ages, handed down from teacher to teacher, all the way back to the Buddha.

  “You could make an altar for your running, you know, a little table filled with meaningful things to sit in front of and focus on,” she continues in her even tone, as if building altars is something I do all the time. As if I have the foggiest idea how. Still, I pocket a couple of pebbles from the trail and pick a sprig of yellow chamisa flowers. They bloom in September along the roadsides and arroyos and smell musky, like wet dog, reminding me of my first fall in Santa Fe.

  When I get home, I find a bundle of dried sage I brought home from our last river trip, along with a votive candle and a photograph of Dad. I climb the stairs to my writing loft, a small room under the eaves, and spread them out on a low table. I sit on the rug, looking at the arrangement for a moment, moving things an inch this way, half an inch that way, and light the candle. I’m not sure what to do next. Pray? Cry? Plead to the running gods of Mount Taylor for mercy? Instead I sit in front of my offerings, looking at Dad looking back at me, grinning and quizzical, through his tortoiseshell glasses.

  PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD

  Dad, New Hampshire, 1985

  I took this picture, in a diner in New Hampshire, in 1985, the summer I was thirteen. Meg and I went kayaking with him for a week down the Connecticut River. The river was flatwater, with so little gradient we could barely feel the current. At the end of each day, we pulled our kayaks onto the bank and dragged them and all our gear across lawns or down gravel lanes to whatever “riverfront” country inn Dad had booked for the night. Time has distorted the trip so that, when I remember it now, it seemed dominated by an excessive, even cruel, amount of dragging, when in fact we probably had to do it only once or twice. Memory can be so catastrophic.

  The river trip was part of a series of ambitious self-propelled summer adventures that Dad planned for us. The year before, we’d gone walking in England. The year after, we bicycled around Prince Edward Island, where it rained constantly and we were always riding into the wind, no matter which direction we were going, and somehow we found this funny, even when it wasn’t. Some things are good to learn early in life, and this was one of them: There is always a headwind, just like there is always a false summit—sometimes many.

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Meg and me, England, 1984

  I study the picture closely. Dad’s glasses reflect the light, as they so often did, so I can’t see his eyes, just a blurry, whitish glare, and for a second I can’t remember. They were green, weren’t they? He cups his chin with his left hand and leans forward with a thin, crooked smile, as if to say, Okay, what’s next, Katie? Whaddya have for me now?

  The house is quiet and empty and I can feel it breathe me in as I breathe out. Whatever happens on Mount Taylor will be okay. It will take me someplace new and teach me things I didn’t know. I just need to let go and receive it.

  * * *

  —

  Mount Taylor is an extinct volcano that blew its top two million years ago. On a typical, clear New Mexico day, you can see its hulking profile from nearly a hundred miles away, south and west of Santa Fe. At 11,305 feet, it’s the tallest peak in the San Mateo Mountains, but because no other mountain nearby comes within a thousand feet of its summit, it appears to stand alone, wavering in the far distance. For the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, and Acoma people, Mount Taylor (or Tsoodził, “Turquoise Mountain”) is a sacred peak, part of an ancient Native mythology and one of four mountains that define the Navajo people’s traditional boundaries.

  The day before the race, Steve and I drop Pippa and Maisy at Blair’s house for a sleepover with their two daughters. At four, Pippa is old enough to understand that we’re going to run a long way, but too young to know what thirty-one miles means. She’s more concerned with results.

  “Are you going to win again, Mama?” she asks eagerly.

  I’ve been trying not to think about this for weeks.

  “Oh, sweetie, I don’t know. I’ll have to see how I feel.”

  It’s a three-hour drive west to the town of Grants, at the foot of Mount Taylor, and by the time we arrive at the Red Lion Hotel, just off the interstate, the race briefing and pasta dinner have already begun. Volunteers sit behind a registration table in a conference room, doling out goody bags and race bibs, and a hundred athletes wearing fleece jackets and oversize GPS watches hunch purposefully over paper plates sagging under spaghetti and garlic bread.

  One of them, tall and lanky, with shoulder-length black hair and angular cheekbones, stands up to address the room. His name is Shaun Martin, and he’s an elite Navajo ultrarunner and a high school cross-country coach who lives over the state line in Chinle, Arizona. “It’s a sacred honor to be here, running on Mount Taylor,” he tells us. “For the Navajo people, the point of running is not to be faster than anyone. We were raised to get up every morning as the sun is rising and run east to meet the birth of a new day. Running is a celebration of life, a way to honor a new day. It’s also a prayer. You are out there moving, breathing in all positive things.”

  A hundred forks hang in the air. Pre-race meetings typically focus on logistics, like carpooling to the start and following course flags so you don’t get lost, not personal tributes to the sport’s spiritual side.

  “Running is a teacher,” Shaun continues. “As we run, we experience hardship. In moments of doubt and pain, and we’ll all have some of those tomorrow”—at this, the room erupts in nervous laughter—“what you do will define who you are. It’s your character shining through at its truest. Running teaches us to balance the negative and positive and to live in beauty and balance.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me,” Shaun says, eyeing his altimeter watch, “I’m camping on the mountain tonight, so I’d better get up there while there’s still light.”

  * * *

  —

  It’s still dark as night when we pull into the staging area at nine thousand feet on the flanks of Mount Taylor the next morning. An almost full moon hovers above the horizon, and it’s cold—barely forty degrees. The course description promised a scenic, challenging circumnavigation of the mountain, which is laced with jeep roads and singletrack trails, including a section of the Continental Divide Trail, a long-distance through trail traversing 3,100 miles, from Canada to Mexico along the backbone of the country.

  This time, Steve and I have agreed to run at our own paces, and though we stand together waiting for the start,
I quickly lose him in the jostle. Within a hundred yards, the course veers off a jeep road and climbs a steep gully through aspens. Shaun is way out in front. The trees thin, and the road gains an open, grassy slope to a high ridge, the sky getting brighter by the minute, as though someone’s turning up the dimmer switch on the sun. As I crest the first high ridge, there it is directly in front of me, beaming above the horizon and straight into my eyes.

  Mount Taylor has several false summits, and after the first one, the course drops steadily along a dirt road. In ultra trail marathons, descents are a good chance to make up time lost on the slower, steeper climbs. For the past six weeks, I’ve been training for the downhills, trying to run fast rather than lean back and coast. Even so, several men whom I’d passed on the climb fly by me with disconcerting speed, and I watch them from behind, trying to mimic the way they lean forward and swing their arms loosely like overcooked noodles. The feeling I have is one of running ahead of myself, restless and striving and a little bit reckless.

  Don’t look back. Keep running.

  At the ten-mile aid station, volunteers huddle in down jackets, warming their hands over a campfire. “First female!” they yell when they see me. Up until now, I hadn’t been sure. One runner ahead of me in the twilight had thighs like a woman’s but looked to be at least six feet tall; another bounded along, ponytail bouncing, but I was almost positive they were both men.