by Katie Arnold
When I hear this, I know I want to win, but I don’t want to want to win. I just want to run. Settle in, I tell myself. Settle your body.
For a long, surreal stretch between miles 10 and 16, I streak beneath blazing aspens on the Continental Divide Trail, not bonking or hallucinating, not thinking about whether I’m in first place or how my legs feel. I’m riding the cusp between pleasure and pain, a simple love of running and the primal drive to win, past and future, start and finish, here and now. All around me I feel spirits—people I’ve known and loved and have never known and will never know, and those I still know and love. They rise up from the pine-needled earth. They are light as breath, like wind on my lips, floating into the sky.
One day, when I was seven and sat in front of my mirror in my bedroom, I realized I was my own self. I had legs and arms and thoughts, and they belonged to me. But out here on this sacred mountain, the boundaries have blurred. I’m not separate after all. Nothing is. I’d been running for myself, but now I’m running for everyone and everything that’s ever lived, that’s alive now, and that may someday live. For the stout Douglas firs with strong arms and the ancient sequoias in Yosemite, for my mother and grandmother and Pippa and Maisy and their great-great-granddaughters I can only dream about. For the whole world.
It’s the briefest flicker of enlightenment, a slit in the skin of the world big enough to slip through, if only for a little while.
* * *
—
A common misperception about ultrarunning is that races unfold slowly, gradually, over many miles. Running on the thin edge of endurance, your physical and psychological states can shift in an instant. One moment you’re in a heightened state of consciousness; the next you’re muttering Motherfucker! under your breath as a needle-sharp rock bayonets you through your sneaker and your hips feel like they’re rolling around, bone-on-bone in their sockets, and you still have the longest climb of the day ahead of you.
“Save your energy for the top,” the race director, Ken, warns me when I come into the halfway aid station just before going back up Mount Taylor again. “It’s three miles to the summit, but it’s gonna feel like more.”
Gone is the transcendent bliss. Now I’m just trying to survive. Eating is a job, and I’m all business: every half hour, a Gu goes down the hatch; bananas at the mile 20 aid station, sliced watermelon at mile 25, the long, zigzagging climb through high, grassy meadows more punishing than I feared. I pass a guy but am soon passed by another; I round a bend through a high notch; I alternate between running and walking the steepest parts, hating walking the steepest parts. I wonder where Steve is. I give myself landmarks: run to the next tree, walk to that bush, repeat. I look at my legs, my quadriceps sweat-stained and filthy, flexing and strong. Finally, a small wooden sign announces the summit: MT TAYLOR, 11,300 FEET. Aspens and firs above lumpy brown badlands far, far below.
Four miles to go, then two. Tune it all out: your creaky, rock-pummeled hips and your fiery IT band on the outside of your left thigh; the other runners and hikers with happy cheers; the final, sadistic, boulder-strewn downhill slam to the finish. Focus only on: crossing the line, staying ahead of the women behind you, wherever they are, and setting a personal best in the 50K. Three goals to distract your mind from the torment of your body.
Below, through the aspens, I see the tent and hear the cheers. There is the digital clock and the finish line, and I run hard across it. I’ve won: five hours and twenty minutes, nearly thirty minutes faster than my Jemez time, half an hour ahead of the second-place woman, and an hour and five minutes behind winner Shaun Martin.
Shaun places a medal around my neck, and I collapse into a folding chair. There were so many highs and lows crammed into thirty-one miles that I couldn’t keep track of them all. I wanted to stay on my feet. I wanted to run with the spirits the whole way, forever. I wanted to finish, to stop running. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to see a mountain lion, so that the mountain lion would attack me and put me out of my misery. I wanted to be joyful, strong, egoless. I wanted to win. I wanted to stop wanting. Even at the finish line, when it was over, I wanted something: Steve. Did I ever, for even one moment, want nothing?
On the way home to Santa Fe, Steve drives, and I stick my bare feet out the window. They’re calloused and grimy, and the wind feels like water on my inflamed toes. We’re listening to a country station out of Gallup and not saying much, and the silence between us feels heavy, like more than just fatigue.
“I don’t think I’m cut out for more than eighteen miles,” Steve grumbles as we pull off at an exit for chocolate-dipped cones at Dairy Queen. His knees bothered him after twenty miles, but he stuck it out and finished an hour after I did.
“But you hardly even trained! Your knees will get used to it. You could be so good!” There’s no question in my mind that this is true, but I can’t help but feel guilty and a little sad, as though my running and winning have somehow tipped the equilibrium in our relationship.
Victory is sweet, but also a little lonely. By bowing out, however reluctantly, Steve’s giving ultrarunning over to me. It will take me many more long runs and races to learn how to run fast without losing my balance, to run hard for something bigger than winning, and to experience what the Navajo have always understood about long-distance running: It will teach us everything we need to know. Like how to want nothing, even for only one minute.
21
Resistance
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
After the Fodderstack, 1982
Jumping from fifty kilometers to fifty miles is arguably the toughest transition in ultrarunning. A 50K is thirty-one miles, five miles longer than a marathon. If you’ve recently run a marathon or even a half marathon and have a solid work ethic and moderate pain tolerance, it’s not unreasonable to make the leap to your first ultra in six to nine months.
Fifty miles is a different sort of insanity: nineteen miles longer, nearly two marathons. Twice the commitment, almost double the distance. Un-freaking-fathomable. And yet I know I’m going to try. I want to see if I can run my way back to the oneness I felt at Mount Taylor, that brief but mind-bending sense of being no one, and everyone. I hadn’t known that such a thing was possible. I thought that you’d have to sit so still and so diligently, for hours and years, until your face wore an expression of tranquillity and you were free from all suffering. I thought that’s what awakening was. I didn’t realize it could happen in an instant, a cracking bolt of clarity cutting through the tumult. Here, and then gone.
I’d glimpsed the infinite. It was a kind of ecstasy, really, and I wanted it back.
I sign up for the Jemez 50 Mile, scheduled for May. In January, I begin training in earnest. My first long run is eight miles, low and slow. Starting is always hard.
A woman I know named Margaret has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Days after I hear the news, I develop a strange pressure in my head while skiing. By nightfall, my ear is ringing like a cricket. By morning, the cricket owns a chain saw and it’s clear-cutting my brain. Within days, my mind has reached into its linty pockets and pulled out its old nemesis: anxiety. Within the week, I’ve convinced myself that I have a brain tumor that’s causing not only the ringing in my ear but also my morbid fixations.
“Do you have headaches?” Dr. G. asks when I explain that sometimes the ringing in my ear sounds like belligerent insects and other times the pearly thrum of a seashell.
“Hmm,” I say, stalling for time. Do I? Not unless I think about it, in which case yes, like right this very minute there’s a chisel in my forehead.
“No, not really,” I say finally.
He looks in my ears and eyes and performs a series of simple diagnostic tests, like a policeman making me walk the line during a sobriety check. Can I touch my finger to my nose when my eyes are closed? Yes. Count backwards from twenty? Yes.
“I
don’t see anything to suggest this is serious,” he tells me. “Millions of people get tinnitus, often for no apparent reason.” Then he pauses and shakes his head. “I will tell you, though, sometimes it never goes away.”
For a few minutes—the length of time it takes me to grab my bag and walk to my car—I am filled with the most delicious relief. My breath swoops all the way down to my feet and back, washing me with beneficence and hope. It’s the way I feel after a long run. I’m strong! I’m still alive! But by the time I get home, I know with certainty that it won’t last. There’s no way a doctor’s diagnosis will hold up to my anxiety’s demented, tyrannical authority. Fear is opportunistic, and it will come roaring back like the ringing in my ear, screeching and unstoppable.
* * *
—
On a snowy Friday in February, I pull up in front of an adobe house. A shepherd mix barks from behind the wall. Inside the sliding glass door, coats are slung over benches, a wooden cane lies at a careless angle, sneakers with the heels pushed down are askew on the floor. The chiropractor shows me in, sticks out his hand. “Call me Dr. Seth,” he says. He has bedhead and wears baggy, wide-wale corduroys and sheepskin slippers. On the phone he told me that he’s had some luck curing tinnitus with chiropractic adjustments.
“Which ear?” he asks.
“My left one,” I say.
There are three massage tables, all in a row. Dr. Seth motions for me to lie facedown on the middle one and looks at my chart. “So you’re a Scorpio. Me, too.” He takes my neck in both hands and twists, yanks with a terrifying pop.
“Ooh, that was scary!” I squeal, petrified that he’ll do it again.
He does. Both hands into the hollow of my high back, pushing.
“Have you ever—” I start. “Never mind.” Better not to know.
“What? Broken someone’s neck? Not in twenty-one years, not even close.”
I can relax now, sort of, except that I want to cry. He’s adjusting the part of my spinal column, the C1, that does all the work, that holds up my head.
“It’s named for the Greek god Atlas,” he tells me.
I think, Dear Atlas, my spine, what a responsibility you have! You hold up the whole world. The thought of this is almost more than I can bear. I stifle tears, then giddy, terrified peals of laughter. Seth could hurt me, kill me even, as I lie docilely under his scratchy Guatemalan blanket. And yet I like him, unaccountably.
By the time I leave, I’m so concerned about my neck that I’ve forgotten all about my ear. “Try not to worry,” Seth says as he ushers me out. “Sometimes it takes a few sessions.”
When I go back the next week, Dr. Seth greets me at the door. “Still ringing?” he asks.
“Yes, but I’m not noticing it as much.”
I get on my table and he cradles my neck in his hands and twists, cracks. The word Mommy actually forms on my lips, but I catch myself and giggle instead. The scraping of footsteps, people shuffling in, climbing silently onto their own tables. It sounds like a small army; at most there are two. “Breathe normally, just like your body wants to,” Seth instructs them, moving between them like he’s the boss of his own private torture chamber, leaving in his wake a nauseating explosion of popping and snapping. I’m wearing a silk eye mask, but what I need is noise-canceling headphones. Next to me, someone coos softly, in pleasure or maybe pain.
Now I feel hysterical laughter welling up, and I reach for it. I could laugh for hours, entire days, staring up at the bumpy stucco ceiling as one by one Seth cracks our joints and puts them back together.
ThereisnothingsofunnyNOTHINGsofunny as the chiropractor’s office.
Seth’s voice floats down from on high. “Laughter is the best release.”
I’m laughing so hard I’m crying, and then I’m just…crying. I’ve put the laughter back inside, stuffed next to the choking sorrow and the fear and anger, deep down where I need a pickax to chip away all the layers and no one can see it.
* * *
—
By mid-February I’m up to fifteen miles. By March, nineteen. Once a week or so, I use an app on my phone to time my runs. I’m curious about my pace. Unlike in road running, per-mile times for ultrarunners are considerably slower and vary greatly based on altitude, distance, and terrain. I won the women’s race at Jemez averaging eleven-minute miles on mountainous trails above nine thousand feet. At Mount Taylor, I bettered my pace to 10:30 per mile. This wouldn’t win me any awards on the road, but on technical terrain at high altitude, it’s solid. At this rate, it will take me ten or eleven hours to run fifty miles.
In mid-April, on what would have been my grandfather Harold’s 102nd birthday I run up the Winsor Trail. The pine needles are sugared with snowflakes, dropped overnight in a spring storm, and I chase mice tracks, small, skittering footprints the size of Q-tips in zigzag lines as though they were dragging their tails. The mice carry on for a quarter mile—an ultramarathon for mice—but then I lose their trail in the big, muscular prints of something else. Two coyotes lope out of the bushes ahead of me and turn to stare at me, then trot uphill. I follow them, pouring my love for my grandfather and my sorrow for my friend Margaret, who has died, into my legs. For once I’m not afraid: We move in the animals’ shadows. This is their world.
Back at my car, twenty miles later, I feel stronger, more hopeful than I have since I started my training. I pull out my phone to check my stats and do a double take: nine-minute miles.
* * *
—
A weird thing happens. The faster I run, the more I want to slow down. It’s a sharp, visceral need, a physical sensation a few degrees shy of panic. Everything is winging by at warp speed: the girls getting older, all of us busier. It’s not like I haven’t been warned. “Enjoy it—it goes by so fast,” everyone tells you when you have kids. This is the single, unifying summation of parenthood. The same exchange is probably happening right this very second in a felt yurt in farthest, deepest Mongolia.
But until recently, I never really believed it. There were those long, foggy days with newborns, days when you held your breath, talking through clenched teeth, admonishing the two-year-old for the third time that day, “DO NOT BITE YOUR SISTER,” when they screech like fat, rabid possums because they don’t have words for “Please.” Wasn’t that just yesterday? But there are also the nights camping beside the river, dark and slippery and gurgling below a billion stars, whole other worlds beaming down on you, when you look at the sky and realize that everything you’re seeing has already changed forever.
Sometimes the very thought of putting on sneakers and running seems like the most tedious endeavor ever invented. These are the days I have to trick myself. I run the same trails, but in the opposite direction. I leave straight from our house, without a plan, just wandering through the neighborhoods, following my feet. I ride my bike to the mountain and run up it. I tuck a thin yoga mat into my backpack and jog a mile to the top of Sun Mountain, where I take off my sneakers and tip forward into downward dog. Suddenly everything is topsy-turvy: The mountains are inverted, pressing down into the watery sky like the points of a crown. Seeing the world this way, I feel something shift inside of me. I don’t have to be a hostage to my own ambitions and habits. I can break my own routines anytime I want, turn them inside out, upside down. Boredom, like anxiety, is just another form of resistance.
One morning along the Winsor Trail, I stop and sit for a long time. There’s a log in a meadow where lavender shooting stars grow wild along the creek, drooping their necks as though embarrassed by their inappropriate splendor, blooming fervently in a hundred-year drought. I’m resting here one morning when, twenty feet away from me, a flash of something long and thick catches my eye. It’s a gray fox, slinking away under a willow. It turns its coal eyes to me, its tail ballooned up like Peacock on display, and creeps out of sight. I feel as though I’ve stumbled upon a r
iddle with no answer: How can I learn to slow down while training to run fast?
* * *
—
In late April, I finally do it. I sign up for a meditation class. It meets once a week after dinner, in a room in a church with stacking metal chairs. Even here, in a space dedicated to silence and stillness, I feel overwhelmed by the crash of time. I raced out of the door after dinner, leaving Steve to put the girls to bed; I’m out of breath and I have black beans smeared on my shirt.
“Meditation is a place of rest,” the teacher tells us. His name is John, and he explains that he used to be a hard-charging businessman; now he trains people how to sit. “We are enslaved by our minds, in bondage to our thoughts. Sitting is a way to detach from our thinking mind and to free ourselves from suffering.”
I think that if he replaced “sitting” with “running,” we would be speaking the same language.
He rings the bell for a ten-minute meditation. I close my eyes, steel myself for the ardor ahead. We sit and sit and sit longer. My legs fall asleep. My eyes droop. I try to count my breaths to ten and then start over at zero, as he suggested. One, two…Is Steve remembering to give the girls a bath? Three…Is he watching them in the bath right now?…Five…The doctor was wrong; the ringing in my ear must be a sign of…Eleven? Oh, right, back to zero. I’m waiting for my thoughts to drift away like clouds and not come back, but as soon as one passes, another one darkens the horizon.
When John rings the bell to signal the end, I want to tear out of the room, but instead I bow my head gravely and make little prayer hands, like the people around me are doing. I swear he is looking straight at me when he says, “The answer to any problem with meditation is ‘More sitting is required.’ ”