Running Home

by Katie Arnold

  There are things I know and don’t know. I’m in the middle, the deep center of running and life. I want to race from this place, between the lows of anxiety and the highs of elation; from the middlemost point of knowing and not knowing, open to whatever happens.

  * * *

  —

  The caldera is the middle. The deep interior of the supervolcano and the halfway point of the race, where you’re equidistant between start and finish and the only way out is forward. I’ve been running all morning, and in the vast, open crater, distances are deceiving. The shag of trees on the far slope looks close, but for a long time it is not getting closer. I’m a dot in the depression, and there are few landmarks to measure my progress: a lone runner up ahead, the white peak of an aid station tent like a distant, happy circus.

  It’s here, crossing the volcano in the full blast of midday, exposed to shrieking wind and sun, that I go out of my mind and into my body, purely animal. And then even my body I leave behind. I’m running with pebbles and grit rubbing blisters inside my shoes; hours later, I’ll take off my socks to find two purplish toenails oozing pus, but for now I’m too entranced to notice.

  In his book Running with the Mind of Meditation, Sakyong Mipham calls this the third phase of running garuda, named for the Buddhist and Hindu mythological man-bird with wings and arms. “This phase of running is ‘outrageous,’ ” Mipham writes, “because we are ready to challenge ourselves to go beyond our comfort zone.” In a state of prolonged effort, garuda runners experience heightened awareness and clarity, a rare presence he calls “mind like sky” that liberates you from the endless striving of ego. “The garuda in particular symbolizes freedom from hope and fear—our hoping that something will happen and being fearful that it will not.”

  After twelve hypnotic miles in the caldera, something does happen. The small orange flags marking the course vanish. I slow to a walk and scour the area for orange course ribbons. They’ve either fallen over in the wind or been trampled. I’m lost.

  Above me on the mountain, the rustling of branches. Something is crashing through the brush. Animal. Mountain lion or bear? I squint through the trees, my scalp tingling. Lanky beige shapes lumber horizontally across the slope. A herd, flashing pale, knobby antlers.

  Elk. They shuffle sideways, hooves stamping the soot-black deadfall less than thirty feet away from me. They move by instinct, not fear, and as I watch them pass, their sureness and beauty calms me.

  A hundred yards below me, two runners are pacing back and forth. They’re lost, too.

  “Do you see the trail?” I yell.

  One of the runners puts his palms up to the sky. Beats me.

  I’m not sure what to do. If I wait for them, I’ll waste precious time and momentum, but I’ll have a better chance of finding the flags. If I don’t, I’ll be lost and alone.

  * * *

  —

  Ultrarunners are predisposed to persevere, no matter how heinous the effort. Within the sport, quitting is called “dropping,” and most runners would rather stagger, bloodied and bruised, to the finish than drop. Running for many hours at a time requires a headstrong faith in your own ability, a fatalistic acceptance that discomfort is unavoidable, and a lunatic conviction that it will all be worth it in the end. At its most elemental, ultrarunning is an exercise in extreme, occasionally foolhardy optimism.

  There’s a tradition among ultrarunners of writing race reports after a particularly long and grueling effort. These are true-life survival stories penned by elite, middle-of-the-pack, and DFL runners (“dead fucking last,” not an insult but a point of pride), as though by trying to recount what happened to them on the trail, it will be possible to make sense of the madness. The reports are peppered with moments of dogged determination, sheer misery, and shimmery glimpses of spiritual awakening—all within the span of a few miles. Reading them is like reading about a disaster narrowly averted: improbable tales by otherwise sane people about dislocating their shoulder, face-planting, getting struck by lightning, going blind in both eyes because the wind blew grit into their corneas—and still not dropping. Most are average runners you might not pick out on the street.

  Despite the physical torment, ultra distances can be surprisingly forgiving. Because you’re out for so long, there are plenty of opportunities to get a second, third, even fourth wind. You may bonk and decide to drop, and someone—a volunteer, another runner, maybe your own loopy brain—will talk you out of it. A few miles later, you’ll be happier than you’ve ever been in your whole life.

  For as long as I could remember, Dad had abhorred quitting. The summer I was eighteen, I took a job teaching sailing on Deer Isle, Maine. My college friend Susie and I arrived in late May. The ocean was colder and choppier than any water I’d seen, and we slept in a trailer that reeked of sour milk and hamburger meat that had been left to spoil in the mini-fridge all winter. I called home, both my homes, to tell my parents I wanted to leave.

  “It’s okay, come home,” Mom said soothingly.

  But Dad was unhappy, urging me in grave tones to “stick with it.” I could picture him on the other end of the line, lips pressed severely together, frowning. I could tell he was worried that this might be the decision that revealed my true nature, the one that tipped the balance from she’s-going-to-make-something-of-herself to maybe-she’ll-spend-her-life-working-in-restaurants. Quitting felt awful, but I knew I was going to do it anyway. I drove south on I-95 and cut west to the Adirondacks, where I moved in with my boyfriend and got a job in a restaurant.

  Dad never said another word about Maine. There was no need. Busing dishes all day on tired feet, I knew I’d bungled a good thing and hadn’t tried hard enough to make it work. From then on, giving up would be a last resort.

  * * *

  —

  I pace across the hillside, waiting for the two runners to climb up to where I last saw the flags. I don’t know where I am in the pack, but I think I’m among the top two or three females. The only other woman I’ve seen all day was charging up the trail about a quarter mile ahead of me just before dawn. Then she disappeared around a switchback. It had to be Diana Finkel, who’s about my age and is one of the best ultrarunners in the country. Finkel set the women’s course record at the Jemez 50 Mile and finished second overall at the Hardrock 100 in 2010; she led the whole pack for more than eighty miles, until fatigue and debilitating leg cramps forced her to walk. Two days after the race, she went into kidney failure and had to be airlifted to a Denver hospital. She’d developed rhabdomyolysis, a dangerous buildup of toxins and shredded muscle tissue in her blood. She spent sixteen days in the hospital. A year later, she returned to Hardrock and won the women’s race for the second year in a row.

  The two guys and I spread out across the hillside, scouring the grass and branches for the course markers. Talking takes too much energy, so we communicate by pantomiming. We’re on the west side of Pajarito Mountain Ski Area, and I know the course climbs a couple thousand feet to the radio towers on the summit. But the mountain is wide enough that accidentally straying too far one way or the other will put us out of position once we reach the top. This might add miles to our race or, worse, shorten it, which is grounds for disqualification.

  I tell myself there’s no reason to panic. We know exactly where we are, but not where we need to go. My brain snaps to attention: Think, look. After ten minutes, one of the runners hollers something and we hustle over to see. A single orange ribbon dangles from a branch.

  We separate, retreating again into our private worlds, each of us picking a different line up the slope. Just like my acquaintance Jacob had warned me before the race, it’s hands-on-knees, clawing-at-tree-branches steep. I bend into the nightmarish pitch, my heart hammering, trying to coax my thighs into as fast a hike as possible. I’ve lost twenty minutes to being lost. Now there’s nothing to do but get out on my own.

  Our
friends who are taking care of Pippa and Maisy for the day offered to bring them up to watch the end of the race. The plan is to meet at the ski lodge aid station, at about mile 36. Just thinking about seeing their sweet faces makes me want to cry. I’ve been out here by myself for so long, and I still have so far to go. But this is its own kind of pleasure—the wild emotional swings, so much joy and pain you can’t possibly keep it in.

  The whole way down the mountain, I’m running back to them, and they’re pulling me forward, my desire and theirs two equal forces. I round a switchback and see a posse of kids far below, cheering and waving handmade signs. They are blond and jumping straight up and down, like deranged pogo-stickers. I’d recognize my girls’ ferocious energy from a mile away.

  Then they’re upon me, wriggling bodies and hands reaching up for me and saying “Mama!” over and over. There’s a poster with my name on it being waved about in the air, and there are my friends and their kids cheering me, but I have only a few seconds for hugs and kisses, because I still have fourteen miles to go.

  “See you at the finish!” I yell over my shoulder, knowing it will be more than two hours before I do.

  Steve’s waiting for me on the deck of the ski lodge. Instead of racing, he’s volunteered to be my crew. A crew’s job is to meet you at the aid stations and help you get whatever you need to keep going—food, drink, tough love, forced cheer, and bald-faced lies. You’re allowed to bark at them, demanding salt tabs when you are dehydrated. You’re allowed to guilt them into bringing you a grande Frappuccino and drink exactly one sip and hand it back because you have to keep running. Your job is not dropping. Their job is indulging your absurd requests to make sure you don’t.

  I’m glad to see Steve—not because I love him, though of course I do, but because he has things I need. All the way down the mountain, I’ve been compiling a list in my head, and now I order it all like I’m phoning in takeout from a Chinese restaurant. Salt pill because I’m dehydrated, a few more energy gels to stick in my pocket. Water and electrolyte tablets in my hydration bladder, please. While Steve’s restocking my pack, I sprint to the bathroom to pee. Lowering myself onto the toilet is torture on my quads. Urine: murky yellow—dehydrated. Outside, I swallow the salt pill and take two extras and shove them into my pack’s tiny magnetic pocket, where before dawn I stashed a handful of dark-chocolate-covered espresso beans. I pop a few, half-melted from my body heat, into my mouth, smearing chocolate on my already filthy fingers.

  Steve tells me I’m in second place, behind Diana. Then he buckles his own pack and we take off. I’ve been in the aid station maybe three minutes.

  Steve is running the last fourteen miles with me as my pacer. Pacers aren’t registered competitors but crew who run portions of the race with you. “Pacing” is a bit of a misnomer. Often it’s not the pacers who are setting the pace, but you, the beleaguered runner. Your pacer’s main job is to keep you company, hound you to eat and drink, make sure you don’t get lost, and goad, shame, threaten, and cheer you into maintaining forward progress. Late in the race, your pacer might not be running as much as jogging, hiking, or walking quickly beside you. Nothing that pacers do or say should ever suggest that you are running interminably slowly, so slowly, in fact, that the pacer could stroll casually without breaking a sweat and still keep up.

  Now Steve tells me that Diana came through the ski lodge aid station at least forty-five minutes ahead of me, maybe more. Barring some serious mishap on her part, there’s little chance I will catch her. My legs are heavy but still moving, and I’m just happy to be with Steve. He runs in front and does most of the talking, rattling off his usual barrage of mind-numbing, esoteric horticultural and geological facts that I instantaneously tune out; I can’t be bothered to take my earbuds out, and my iPod keeps cycling through the playlist I made for the race: “Girl on Fire,” Gary Clark’s “The Life,” the same songs, the same lines—this is the life, the life, the life, the life, the life—over and over until I start to believe them, until I tune them out, too.

  At aid stations, Steve raids the buffet for orange slices and peanut butter sandwich squares and hands them to me. (He’s not allowed to carry any of my food or gear—that’s called “muling,” and it’s against race rules.) Some I eat, others I squirrel away in my fists or pockets because I can’t stomach more calories and I don’t want to let Steve down. Suddenly I’m overcome by love. He’s so cheerful and kind, my husband! He’s doing what he does best, the things for which I have always loved him most: He’s talking to me, naming plants, making me laugh.

  We pass through the chalky white moonscape left over from the old burn and into the steep canyon, where we begin to catch up to other runners up ahead, the tail end of the 50K pack. While we’re still out of earshot, Steve barks in a menacing mobster voice, imitating the woman who screamed at me from the sidewalk during the half marathon years ago. “They’re hurting. Take them DOWN! Crush them!”

  If I had any air left in my lungs, I would have laughed until I peed my shorts, but I don’t, and my lips are so gummy with Gu that all I can do is snort, which only makes me laugh-snort harder. This goes on for five or six runners, none of whom I have any desire or need to crush. They’re not even in my race. Like me, they’re just trying to make it to the finish.

  “Great job!” I say each time I pass, raising my hand in greeting. “Way to go!”

  “Looking good!” they call. “Awesome!”

  We climb out of the last canyon for the final push toward the finish. Pippa and Maisy are there, screaming my name and waving their sign. The digital clock reads 10:14. I’m the second woman, and eleventh overall.

  I find Diana in the crowd to congratulate her. She’s all smiles and still looks fresh, as if running fifty miles is no big deal when you’ve almost died doing hundreds. Steve brings me a beer, and one for himself, but my stomach’s too bloated to drink anything. I pour a pile of sand and grit from my shoes onto the ground. My big toenail puffs out purple. Tomorrow I will sterilize a needle and lance it along the cuticle to let the pus drain out, but for now I just wiggle my feet in the grass and let it all sink in.

  My calf, the thing that had worried me most about this race, hadn’t hurt. Not once, ever. At all. I think about the energy I spent inventing stories around that injury, stewing over a scenario that never came to pass. How many different possibilities exist in the world, all at once. How much calmer life would be if I could learn to hold them all, at the same time, without getting attached to any of them.

  I hadn’t lost my mind in the caldera after all. I’d found it. All the weather in my brain had blown away and I saw everything—my place in the world, the world itself—with a clarity as wide and sharp as the arc of blue above me. I was simply a speck in space, lost and found, adrift in the enormity of earth and sky.

  23

  Drinking the Wind

  PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD

  South Kaibab Trail, inner gorge of the Grand Canyon, 2013

  After a year and a half of racing, I needed a break. Training and trying to win was wearing me out. I wanted to run just to run, but I also wanted to keep pushing myself. I needed a big objective that was mine alone.

  It was June, and I had slowly recovered from the fifty-mile race and was wondering what was next. I was feeling strong and fast and didn’t want to squander my fitness. Until I figured it out, I would do what I always did: run up Atalaya. Over the course of a few weeks, I kept seeing the same man hiking; he was older, with a peppery mustache and a wide smile, trekking poles, and a couple of dogs, and he always stepped aside to let me pass, cheering me on in his strong European accent. The third or fourth time I passed him, he called out to me, “You’re so fast! You should run the Grand Canyon!”

  His name was Gerd Nunner, and he was a sixty-one-year-old German expat who lived in Santa Fe. He told me he’d hiked from the South Rim to the North Rim and back sixty-nin
e times—more than anyone else in the world. (He would go on to do it more than one hundred times.) After that, whenever I saw Gerd hiking, I would slow to a jog or stop and he would tell me about the Grand Canyon. He knew all about the best months to make the double crossing (spring can still be icy on the North Rim, summer is a furnace, and late fall is just right) and the best ways to avoid the mules that leave the South Rim every morning at 5:30 a.m., carrying supplies to Phantom Ranch, at the bottom of the canyon. This was before I had seriously considered running it, when it still seemed like a fanciful pursuit far in the future, but I liked talking to Gerd, and within a month or two my conversations with him had worked their way into some kind of conscious decision to try.

  It’s forty-two miles to run across the Grand Canyon and back: seven miles from the top of the South Rim down to the Colorado River and then fourteen miles up to the North Rim, and back the way you came, with 10,500 feet of climbing and 10,500 feet of descending. The rim-to-rim-to-rim, or R2R2R for short, isn’t an organized race. It’s a self-supported trail run that you can do anytime, by yourself or with other people. In recent years, it’s become the most popular ultra adventure in the country, famous for its scenery and staggeringly harsh topography.

  I liked the idea of traveling across the Grand Canyon in a single day. Even more, though, I loved that it wasn’t a competition. I wouldn’t have to show up before dawn with a pit in my stomach, wondering how I would fare against other runners. I would just have to show up before dawn with a pit in my stomach from wondering how I would fare. And that distinction eliminated the pit in my stomach. I wouldn’t have to psych myself up for the competition or hold myself back from the competition. I could just run across the most beautiful canyon in the world any way I felt like running.