by Katie Arnold
* * *
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The final four weeks before my first fifty-mile race are the big push, the climax of four months of training. Still in disbelief about the distance my legs will have to travel to get to the finish line, I decide to attempt one last long run of thirty-eight miles—my longest day ever. After that, I’ll taper my mileage and rest up for the race.
Coming up with a self-supported thirty-eight-mile route through the backcountry isn’t just a matter of choosing one from a list. You have to look at maps, link up trails, cobble together the distance. You have to be resourceful, figuring out how much food to carry and whether you need to cache extra snacks along the way; how much water to bring and where to resupply. For this reason, many people use 50K races as training for fifty-mile races—someone else handles the logistics. But this is what I love about ultrarunning: the adventure of managing food and gear, accounting for weather and altitude, anticipating unknowns. It’s my own thin edge, a way to be wild and still be home by dark.
I usually try to start planning my Thursday long run on Tuesday. Preparation is everything: I need to know where I’m going before my alarm goes off, and be able to visualize myself actually doing it. My running vest needs to be packed with Gu and snacks—an hour’s more than I think I need, just to be safe—and my electrolyte tablets and reservoir have to be left out on the counter, because no matter how much I love to run, there’s almost always the temptation to bail. Long training runs are daunting, and there are so many other things I should be doing instead.
“How do you do it all?” my friends ask. Like most people, they assume that you have to be hyper-organized and responsible to juggle ultrarunning, work, and family life. I am proof that this is a fallacy. I don’t keep spreadsheets or weekly menu plans or a digital calendar. I write appointments and activities on scraps of paper that invariably end up wadded at the bottom of the ratty nylon backpack I carry everywhere. I forget a lot of stuff. I always miss items on the grocery list. I’m a piler, not a filer. Bills stack up beside the telephone and on the stairs to my loft, laundry topples in the laundry room. Multitasking is the biggest scam of motherhood. It doesn’t make me more efficient, smarter, or more productive. It just makes me more distracted. I put empty tea boxes back into the cupboard and forget to close the drain when I’m drawing the girls’ bath, and Steve scolds me, as if I meant to.
I only have one real system, and it’s this: If I can do something only at a certain time or under certain circumstances, I do it then. I can’t run trails alone when it’s dark outside, but I can write at night, so I write at night and run during the day. I can tidy up when the girls are underfoot, but it’s much harder to write coherently when they are, so I pile the plates in the sink until after school and write instead.
I tell myself I’m not taking up family time with my running, but that’s not completely true. I’m taking up my time with Steve, just the two of us. Gone are the evenings we lie head to feet on the couch, reading. Lots of nights, after the girls go to bed, we hardly talk at all; Steve’s compiling invoices in his office and I’m writing at the kitchen table. In the mornings, we sit across from each other at the same table in the sunshine, hands cupping our coffee mugs while the girls play Going to Texas on an Airplane, packing their imaginary bags. Monumental issues are not discussed.
Some mornings, when I forget to bring the carrot sticks to preschool for class snack, I look enviably at other mothers who have it together. Then I remember that no one has it together, really. We’re all just holding on by our fingernails. So I guess this is how you do it all: by being deliberate and disciplined even when you are obsessive, absentminded, and easily distracted, and also by not doing it all, not even close.
* * *
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On the morning of my big run, I’m at the kitchen sink, filling my pack with water, when Steve walks in.
“God, you’re always running,” he groans, reaching for the coffee maker.
“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” I say, mostly meaning it. When the seventy-ounce reservoir is nearly full, I slide the plastic seal across the top to close it and turn it upside down, blowing through the bite valve into the tube so that the remaining space fills with air. Then I suck all the air back out so the water won’t slosh like a bathtub on my back when I run.
I turn my back to him to nuke a sweet potato in the microwave. I’ve gotten so sick of gels that I’ve started bringing real food on my long runs. I stick the steaming potato into a ziplock, sprinkle liberally with salt and a dash of cinnamon, and shove it into my pack.
When I look up, Steve’s frowning.
“How much longer are you going to keep doing this?”
He doesn’t mean the sweet potatoes.
“I don’t know,” I sigh. “I wish I did. But I know it’s not just about running.”
He huffs a little, spooning oatmeal into bowls. “Well, I’d sure love to spend all day on the trails.” His bitterness is a hard edge he doesn’t try to hide. Steve’s right, of course. He has clients with leaky irrigation systems and plant problems, and a dozen employees, and they all need to be able to reach him on the phone. Only seldom does someone need to reach me.
Running may be making me stronger, but it’s pushing the thin edge of our marriage. Steve’s resentment is growing with my mileage, a rift widening between us. We’ve always given each other our freedom, but the reality is, I’m so much freer now than he is. His business keeps our family afloat; my freelance income barely covers childcare. I’m neurotic and I’m never home. In a perfect world, the latter would cancel out the former, but I know in our case it doesn’t. It compounds it.
Now he sighs. “You’d better hurry up and write that bestseller.” This is our inside joke, that someday I am going to liberate him from the backbreaking bondage of landscaping, only it doesn’t seem so funny anymore. The Florida novel has been dead in my drawer for years.
I laugh unconvincingly. “You could always get up early to run, or go after work,” I say. His answer is always the same: His phone starts ringing at 7:30 each morning, and by the end of the day he’s worn out from lifting flagstone, planting trees, loading and unloading his truck, and driving for hours all over town.
He just shakes his head and turns away. “You go.”
* * *
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I’m becoming eccentric. The weird mother who drops her kids off at school and drives to the trailhead, runs for six hours, and reappears at pickup with dirty ankles, skin like a salt lick, and hair pulled back into a sweaty ponytail. I stash baby wipes and a clean T-shirt in my car, and a cotton skirt to pull on over my shorts so I can go straight on to the next thing and still look presentable. But the truth is, I don’t really give a shit. Appearances no longer bother me. This is good; this is progress. I’ve never not cared, but I’ve always wanted not to care. Now I don’t.
In writing and Zen, Natalie calls this backbone. Not caving under the withering gaze of your critical eye, or anyone else’s. You don’t get backbone by being tough. You get tough by having backbone. It takes practice.
In other words, more running is required.
For my thirty-eight-mile loop through the mountains above town, I’ll need six hours of food and water—too much to carry all in one go. A couple days earlier, I called my friend Erika and arranged for her to hide a cache of Gatorade and pretzels under a tree at a spot where the trail crosses the road.
The first hour, I’m impatient, pushing hard to know how the day will play out. In the middle miles, between ten and thirty, my mind eases. I pass in and out of all the emotions: boredom, elation, excruciating loneliness, yearning, joy, ambivalence. Just as I feel myself becoming attached to the feeling, it changes. This time, my thoughts are like the clouds gathering in the thin wedge of sky visible through the trees. I feel them move through me and I let them go. My legs are the constant, my chugging arms, the rhythmic
in-out of my breath. I’m not running fast, but I’ve found my body’s natural state: to be in motion, flowing up hills and down, not always comfortably or easily, but steadily.
After five hours, I’m descending a dusty trail off the ridge to Little Tesuque Creek when my right calf flexes into a sudden, furious knot. I sit down and massage cold creek water into my leg and then take a few tentative steps. My muscle is kinked as tightly as a coil. At the exact moment that I realize I could probably run through the pain, I know that I shouldn’t.
For a mile or so, I walk, pleading with my calf to let go. Light, loose, love, I say over and over, sending the sensation of the words, with my breath, into my muscle. The world slows with me, and for the first time in months, the race falls away. I pause to admire a tall, lopsided cairn of rocks half-hidden under a ponderosa pine. Someone built it, stacking stone upon stone, and didn’t care if it was ever seen.
Mentally, walking is harder than running; it feels like one step closer to quitting. But it’s actually the opposite—it’s what enables you to run again. Sure enough, twenty minutes later, I ease into a slow jog up the grinding switchbacks to the trailhead. Erika is just getting into her car, about to leave, and I call her name, practically throwing myself into her arms for a hug. My neediness is a little embarrassing, but I’m so starved for company, and for food, that I don’t try to hide it. I stuff my face with the yogurt-covered pretzels and an orange she hid in a bag under a bush. The bottle of grape Gatorade I pound in one frenzied swig.
When I straggle home an hour later, my calf is warm to the touch and slightly swollen. I have three weeks until the race. Plenty of time. Please let it be plenty of time.
* * *
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That weekend, Steve and I clean out our gear shed. It’s exploding with skis and bikes, tents, drybags, life jackets. From the way back of the top shelf, behind a pile of old backpacks, I pull a large unmarked box, the cardboard soggy from being stored too close to the leaky tin roof. I have no idea what’s in it, but whatever it is will almost certainly be ruined.
It’s a plastic grocery bag filled with letters.
The handwriting is miraculously un-smudged. The letters are from 1992, my junior year in college, when I spent a semester in Australia. I’d been fascinated with the country ever since I wrote a report on it in second grade. For the cover, I had traced a National Geographic map, the continent floating alone in the middle of the loneliest ocean in the world, a far-off land full of marvels. Even its craggy shape, with it bulbous unicorn horn poking from the top, looked animalistic, as though it might get up at any moment and lumber away like the strange creatures that inhabited it.
When the emu stands, it is as tall as a man. It has a dull color. A walkabout is when an Aboriginal family goes to hunt for food and look for a camp….They often build a shelter called a wurley. It is made with twigs, branches and bark….The community is changeing [sic] but very very slowly.
In the Australia of my imagination, you would eat yams all the time and travel great distances on foot and the sun would always be shining, not so different from ultrarunning.
The real Australia was so far away, it felt like another planet. WELCOME TO THE FAR NORTH! the sign at the Cairns airport announced. I’d never been so far south in my life. Tropical rain pelted the windows. It was 1992, the last season on earth of letter writing, just before the dawn of email. It took my aerograms a week to cross the ocean, and another week for a reply to come winging back. When I called Mom from a phone booth, she sounded tinny and faint, as though she was at the end of a very long tunnel, the telephone line buried beneath the sea for seven thousand miles. She’d made me promise her I wouldn’t bungee jump or fall in love with an Australian man and never come home. I was so lonely I cried for days.
Two separate seasons unfold in the letters: It’s spring in North America and fall in the Southern Hemisphere. Mom is busy doing her clients’ taxes (“The computer makes it so much easier. Now a change can be done in TWO minutes!”) and hanging laundry on the clothesline; she signs every letter with a flurry of X’s and O’s. Meg is moving to California with her boyfriend, who will eventually become her husband. Four L.A. police officers are acquitted in the Rodney King trial. My grandfather turns eighty-one and reassures me that it’s normal to be homesick. Memories flutter like moths from the pages.
Dad isn’t dead yet. He is attending the National Magazine Awards in New York City and winning. He is researching Walt Whitman for a story and mowing the grass, meeting photographers, checking up on me. He writes every Friday from his desk at the Geographic. His letters are the longest and most detailed of all: two or three pages, typed, about kayaking on the Chesapeake Bay and his neighbor who bashed in a rabid fox with a frying pan, about the Australia he remembers from an assignment he took years ago, and about the importance of being brave. Twenty years after he wrote them, his words seem eerily prescient:
Sometimes the things we disliked most or were most uncomfortable with are the things we think back on most fondly, the things we are most grateful to have done. I think we like the things that have tested us, assuming we have passed the test, which is usually the case.
22
Mind Like Sky
PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD
New Mexico, 2013
Thinking about racing an ultra and racing an ultra are two very different things. Before the race, it’s easy to get caught up in abstract thoughts. Will I feel strong? Will I get hurt? Will I set a new personal record? Will I win?
But once the race starts, these become pointless concerns. Anything can and will happen, much of which is impossible to predict. The very scenario you most feared might not come to pass; the thing you least expected might. The best you can do is train well, steady your heart and mind for the long haul, and show up ready for anything.
The week before the Jemez 50 Mile race, I ice my calf three times each day for ten minutes. Before bed each night, I roll my legs with my foam roller. On some days I use a hard wooden rolling pin, kneading out the knots, flattening the lumpy spots, and I feel my muscles clutch the bone like carpet bunching up underfoot. I slather myself in arnica gel, for sore muscles, and swallow handfuls of fish oil and turmeric supplements to reduce inflammation and lie on my friend’s floor while she jabs acupuncture needles into my calf until I feel the twangy spasm of release. Recovery takes just as much time as running, if not more.
Each day brings gradual improvement, but I can’t shake the worry that I pushed too hard and now I’m paying for it. Am I losing fitness? What if I’m not able to finish the race? Should I even start? It seems I’ve traded one dark obsession for another, and the very thing that used to soothe my anxiety is feeding it.
For the first time in months, I sit in front of my running altar. The stones and photograph are felted in a fine layer of dust. The bundle of sage is crumbly and dry but still holds its sweet scent of summertime on the river. Dad’s bemused expression hasn’t changed; he’s ready for the next thing, and seeing his face, I know I am, too. It’s possible, probable even, that I won’t know what this race is teaching me until after I run it. If I can run it. And the only way to find out is to try.
I go downstairs and make my lists: what to bring, what to carry—the unpredictability of ultrarunning tempered momentarily by the illusion of control. I remind myself that by Sunday it will all be over: the anticipation, the months of training, the pain, the race.
And I think: I do not want it to be over.
I make another list, everything I’m afraid of: Fifty miles. The caldera. Pulling my calf, wrecking it for good. Tearing my Achilles, falling, breaking a tooth. Going out too fast, going too slowly, not being able to finish, getting dehydrated, cramping, throwing up, running into a bear, crying, feeling scared, getting lost, getting beaten. Badly. Losing face, discovering I’m a fraud. Dying.
Seeing my own freak show of fears spel
led out in black and white diminishes them somehow. There are so many, and some are so ludicrous and improbable (a tooth?!), that statistically they can’t all happen. So that’s a relief, sort of. Maybe just one or two.
* * *
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Three days before the race, I go walking with Natalie. The mountain pulls me up, the way it sometimes does. I feel as though I’m carrying a plastic jug in each hand. The imaginary pitchers are filled with all my thoughts—to-dos, annoyances, emails to return, mysterious maladies, grocery lists. I’m turning the pitcher over as I walk and pouring them out, not with any rancor or bitterness, but easily, without attachment. I dump one jug and then the other and then it’s time to dump the first one again because they’re bottomless, really, but I don’t care because I’m pouring them out. I don’t need them today.
When I get home, I make another list. This one’s the psych-up, get-your-heart-in-the-game, mad-mojo list of everything I’m excited about. I want to run my own race, to feel proud, to sing out loud to my favorite songs, to finish strong and see Pippa and Maisy waiting for me at the end. To be transformed and believe in myself.
I have so many resources. I have food and electrolytes. I have music to boost me as I cross the caldera. I have my stamina and will, the fierce force of childbirth, my own labors and my mother’s, the determination to be born and to live. I have all the old layers of me: the seven-year-old tomboy who jumped into the creek, the twenty-year-old homesick on the other side of the world, the mother who walked with her newborn into the hills. And I have everyone who showed me I was loved. “We are all with you,” Dad wrote to me in Australia. “There aren’t any limits, you know.”