Running Home

by Katie Arnold

  Above Tonto, the trail climbs maniacally through a dozen switchbacks to gain another steep wall. I alternate between running at a plodding pace and power hiking—a staccato tempo that usually annoys me but now feels like all I can manage. I know I’ve been running fast and well and toward a good time, and I want to finish strong. For the first time all day, I’m aware of the clock and the familiar pang of time slipping away too quickly.

  Through a narrow squeeze in the trail, around a few more hairpin turns, and up the final rise to the South Rim. There’s the wooden sign, the South Kaibab Trailhead, the place where we stood this morning, double-knotting our shoelaces. It’s disorienting in the daylight, swarming with tourists waiting for the shuttle bus, different somehow. But maybe it’s me. I’m different. I’ve climbed out from the bottom of the world. My phone reads 3:20 p.m.: nine hours and fifteen minutes since I last stood on this spot.

  Staring out across the rift, I can see the South Kaibab Trail scissoring four thousand feet down its escarpment, past all the sharp drop-offs we navigated in the dark. Below that, the glinting river and the green smudges of trees where Phantom Ranch is tucked into its side canyon. I let my eyes follow the canyon through the jagged, narrow cut in the earth, past Cottonwood to where the trail heaves left and up to the tall ponderosas on the North Rim. I can’t believe I crossed such vast time and space and came back again. It’s as though I was transported.

  I ran forty-two miles today. In three days I will turn forty-two. My legs are scratched from rocks and brambles and red with canyon dust. I’m salty and disheveled, but I’ve never felt more like myself—who I am in this moment and who I’ve always been. I didn’t try to run fast, but I did, an hour off the record pace. Strength and stamina, will and wonder—and a little bit of luck—aligned. The magic was in not trying, in running strong from my heart and bones straight into the heart of the world.

  24

  Continue Under All Circumstances

  PHOTO: STEVE BARRETT

  Atalaya Mountain, 2013

  “You look like you’re seven years old,” Natalie tells me a few days after I get home from the Grand Canyon.

  I think she must be talking about my scabby shins and sunburned nose and chapped lips, my hair pulled back into a messy knot. Possibly this is her way of gently suggesting I ought to clean up and grow up, once and for all.

  “I mean that as a compliment,” she says, reading my mind. “You seem so young, so full of life.”

  Seven. The year I ran the Fodderstack and my balloon sailed off and came back and I wore lavender overalls and had Dorothy Hamill hair and rode my bike all over town. Before I cared what anyone thought. Nat’s right: I haven’t felt so young since I was young. I feel as if I’m aging backwards, running stronger and faster than I ever have.

  On the surface, my success doesn’t make sense. Statistically I’m middle-aged. I don’t have a coach or a training plan. Is it just a fluke, or have I stumbled into a magical state that enables me to turn running into flying?

  In the early 1990s, the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” to describe an “almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness.” When we’re immersed in flow, cognitive thoughts drop away, creativity surges, and time becomes fluid. Hours may pass in what feels like a minute, or a minute might stretch for hours. Circumstances seem to fall into place, aligning at the right time, and coincidences abound, a phenomenon Carl Jung called “synchronicity.” In sports, flow is often called “the zone,” a state of consciousness where the body and mind move in harmony and we achieve greatness with less perceived effort.

  Csikszentmihalyi discovered that people who are in flow become so engrossed in the activity that they don’t notice distractions and they forget to feel self-conscious. “We might even feel that we have stepped out of the boundaries of the ego and have become part, at least temporarily, of a larger entity,” he writes in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. “At this point the activity becomes autotelic, which is Greek for something that is an end in itself.”

  Natalie once told me about a sect of Buddhist monks in Japan who run for a thousand days over the course of seven years as part of their journey to spiritual enlightenment. The so-called marathon monks run all night in straw sandals, training their minds and bodies to tolerate pain, boredom, and fear. I liked to imagine their monastery, cantilevered into the side of its mountain, with paths spiraling outward for miles through the thick trees to gain high, open ridges. I felt peaceful picturing the monks spread out on the trails, running alone and in silence, at their deliberate, monkish pace, knowing that the only thing required of them was to get up the next day and do it again. Some days I longed to live that way, too.

  By the final year, when the monks run fifty miles a day for a hundred days in a row, they’ve entered a perpetual flow state. “At the end, the marathon monk has become one with the mountain,” writes John Stevens in his book The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei. “He can predict the week’s weather by the shape of the clouds, the direction of the wind, and the smell of the air.”

  Dean Potter’s version of flow wasn’t all that different. “It’s an enhancement of all your senses,” he told me in Yosemite in 2007. This was the high he chased until his death in a BASE jumping accident in the park in 2015. “Your vision gets better, you’re more sensitive to sounds. The light on the rock is that much more beautiful, the sounds of nature are much sharper. Your mind is firing that much faster and all your thoughts are coming more clearly and precisely. When I’m on the highline, I feel like I’m almost liquid.”

  * * *

  —

  You don’t have to risk death or run all day to find flow. Dad found his daydreaming. Once, when Steve and I were visiting Huntly shortly after Pippa was born, I found him sprawled out on his back on the shag carpet in the living room. His eyes were closed and his shoes were off, his feet splayed in his ragg socks, his hands clasped across his stomach. He looked so serene, I was sure he was asleep. But then he raised a hand and opened his eyes. He didn’t lift his head; he just turned to look up at me, smiling slightly.

  “Oh, sorry, Dad,” I said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “I wasn’t asleep,” he answered. “I was daydreaming. It’s different than napping. It’s a chance for my brain’s alpha waves to recalibrate. Sometimes I get answers to problems with my pictures I didn’t know I had. I always get up feeling refreshed.”

  This was what happened when I ran. Running was like putting lettuce in a bowl and tossing it with salad dressing, jiggling loose my ideas, so that by the time I finished, everything was coated and interconnected. I saw links I’d missed, and I knew what to do and how to go forward.

  Dad motioned for me to come closer. “Want to try?”

  “Sure,” I said. I took off my shoes and lay down next to him, closing my eyes. The backs of my legs pressed into the carpet, my elbow grazed Dad’s. I was aware of each body part as distinct—my fingers raking the pile rug, my feet flopping to the side—but as I lay still, everything began to merge hazily in my mind. I could no longer feel my legs as separate from each other. I could not have lifted a hand if I wanted to. I was uncertain where I stopped and something, or someone, else began. My mind was aware of sensations and sounds, but they receded into the background and I drifted off into dream thoughts and then beyond them.

  After a little while, I felt Dad stir beside me. He creaked onto one knee and stood up. I got up, too, blinked my eyes, looked around. Maybe fifteen minutes had passed. He didn’t tell me what he’d been daydreaming, and I didn’t ask. His eyes were alight, rested but not groggy. Awake.

  * * *

  —

  All my life, without knowing it, I’ve been chasing flow. I felt it at nine, shooting baskets in the backyard, and years later, writing stories in my head on my way up
the mountain and drifting down a desert river with Steve and our girls. And lying beside Dad on the night he died—in a strange way, even then.

  For me, flow has never been only about running. It’s about paying attention. After Dad died and anxiety reached out its slippery grip and dragged me under, my world shrank. I stopped noticing. But running up Mount Taylor and out of the Valles Caldera and across the Grand Canyon, I found it again. Practice brought me back: skimming through the easy days and putting my head down through the tiresome, fearful ones.

  When I began writing my poems, I had the idea of taping them to the walls of my writing loft. I could see it in my mind: the entire room covered in words. Two years later, though, the poems sit in piles on my desk, scattered on various hard drives. It doesn’t matter if I hang them; my mind hums with them. Sometimes I skip a day or two or three in a row; someday I’ll stop altogether. That’s okay. I’ve learned what the poems wanted to teach me. They live inside of me now.

  Little by little, I’m learning the difference between intuition and obsession. Obsession whips and spins and says should and What if? and worries endlessly and grips hard onto things that are known, visible, and unbearably precious. Intuition is the voice that says try and It’s okay to let go.

  In the desert Southwest, erosion creates tall rock hoodoos, boulders balanced upon boulders. These natural towers are both fixed and fragile. You could sit beside them until the end of your life and they would never budge. Yet they exist in a state of constant unrest, as incremental and microscopic as particles of sand. “Geologic time includes now,” Steve says when we’re deep in the canyons, admiring the cliff bands, rocks the size of small houses arrested mid-crash. What force stopped their forward propulsion, stalled them on their slopes for thousands of years, poised precisely at the angle of repose?

  This is what intuition feels like: solid at the core, but agile, too, always shifting. To hear it is to stay open to all possibilities, to accept that the scenarios I’m most worried about won’t come to pass and the ones I haven’t anticipated might. And either way, if I’m paying attention, I’ll learn something.

  How long will it last? I want to hold on, but I know I shouldn’t. Because that’s the conundrum: The more you clutch, the less you flow.

  * * *

  —

  In early December, the top ultrarunners in the country and the world converge in Northern California for the North Face Endurance Challenge, arguably the fastest, most competitive fifty-mile trail race in the country. It’s also one of only a handful of ultramarathons to offer a prize purse to the top male and female finishers—$10,000 for first place, $4,000 for second, and $1,000 for third. When I show up at the starting line, in the Marin Headlands, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, I have no illusions about winning money, but I am curious about how I’ll fare against a stacked field of female pros.

  At 4 a.m., the coastal hills are shrouded in darkness and the grassy field is damp with a heavy dew and trampled by runners milling around, waiting. Steve stayed home in Santa Fe with the girls, so I’m alone. Because of my estimated pace, I’ve been assigned to the first wave of elite runners, a designation that both secretly thrills me and makes me so nervous I want to puke. I recognize some of the runners around me, pros who’ve won big races and others who’ve made the covers of running magazines.

  Run your own race, I remind myself sternly. Don’t get caught up.

  Sometimes ultrarunning feels as effortless as floating. Other times, it’s as agonizing as giving birth. When you charge off into the chilly twilight, you know you have long hours of hard physical labor ahead of you. Many people will try to help you, but some of them will irk you for no good reason, and you will not be entirely in control of your faculties, and you will most certainly act like a maniac and say things you will later regret. You will vacillate between the black pit of dejection and blinding euphoria, and at some point your only goal will be to make it to the finish line without anyone getting hurt.

  And you will promise yourself that you will never, ever do that again.

  As soon as the gun goes off, I know I’m in trouble, swept up in a tide of runners gunning not only for the finish line but for money. The fire road is smooth and rolling and dangerously fast. For the first five miles, I keep up with a group of three or four elite women who are, by the looks of it, at least ten years younger than me, with burly thighs and the almost certain ability to crush me. They run shoulder to shoulder but are deathly silent. One of them dashes off course to pee standing up and catches back up to us less than thirty seconds later. Ahead of us, a long string of headlamps weaves up a hill. I figure that somewhere in the front pack are the rest of the top females, including Rory Bosio, who shattered the women’s course record at the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, Europe’s Super Bowl of ultrarunning.

  Run faster, I chide myself. Keep up.

  * * *

  —

  The week before I flew to San Francisco, I thought about my race strategy. Plan A, which I didn’t dare say aloud, was a top-ten finish, an ambitious though potentially achievable goal. Plan B was to finish in less than nine hours; and plan C, my old standby: finish without doing irreparable harm to my body. I was losing my mind a little in the way I always do before a race, worried that racing was corrupting my running, turning something private and pure into a measure of self-worth, ruining the thing I love most.

  For days, Steve watched me yo-yo between excitement and dread, an existential crisis in puny proportions, saying nothing. The night before I left, he took pity on me. We were outside soaking in the hot tub and I had my calves jammed up against one of the jets, trying to maximize the water’s therapeutic benefits.

  “Okay, so do you want my race advice?” Steve asked. I could tell by his faintly exasperated tone that he’d been holding out on me until he couldn’t take it anymore. I switched off the jets so I could hear him better.

  “This is what you have to do,” he continued. “You have to go a little crazy out there. Leave it all on the trail.”

  I smiled in the dark. He could really nail it when he needed to.

  I realize now, of course, that he was talking about the end of the race—the last third, when it’s time to put the hammer down and go for it. Not necessarily the first half. And definitely not the first ten miles.

  I cruise into the mile 8 aid station in just over an hour. My pace is unsustainable for fifty miles. The four pro women I was running with pulled ahead on an eight-hundred-foot climb and are now out of sight. My legs are pudding, whether from the cold air, for which I am shamefully ill-prepared in my thin nylon running skirt, or from dehydration. I gulp down two cups of electrolyte drink, eat a gel, and plod four miles up and over the bluff, high above Pirate’s Cove to Muir Beach. Dawn is only just beginning to break, and from these grassy heights it looks like I could dive straight into the Pacific Ocean. If only.

  Somewhere above the crashing surf, my wool ankle sock wads up, hot and bothered, under the ball of my left foot. Same old shoes, same old socks (cardinal ultra rule: Never try new gear on race day), but if I don’t stop to smooth out the lumps, my foot will be mangled before I even make it to Muir Beach. When I pull over onto the side of the trail, a woman passes on my right, and I recognize her face from the cover of UltraRunning magazine: Leadville Trail 100 champion Ashley Arnold (no relation). I’ve been ahead of her for eleven miles? No wonder I feel like I might die.

  I’m not a feather today. I’m a fully loaded eighteen-wheeler lumbering up the hills with my hazards on—all weight and no grace, pure mindless momentum, praying I don’t jackknife. Someone has taken my legs and replaced them with concrete blocks. The wind is gusting to twenty miles an hour, and I stupidly left my gloves in my hotel room. Halfway up the long, switchbacking climb to Cardiac Hill (the race’s high point, at 1,370 feet), a tall woman with a brown ponytail scampers past me: Rory Bosio. At the aid stati
on on the summit, my hands are so cold they’ve turned into hooves and I have to ask a volunteer to rip open my energy blocks for me.

  It’s funny—sad funny, not funny funny—how fast your priorities can change. By mile 15, a top-ten finish is out of the question. On a short three-mile section where the course doubles back on itself, I count the women ahead of me: ten, eleven, twelve. All looking so sprightly. If I hold on, I can still make top twenty. Keep it together, I think, steeling myself. It’s still early. Anything can happen. You can turn this around. I can see now that I grossly overestimated the physiological benefits of training at altitude and grossly underestimated the size of the hills. They’re much lower than our mountains in New Mexico, but they’re just as steep. There’s hardly half a mile of flat ground on the entire course.

  Lesley has flown out to stay with Meg at her house in Davis for the weekend, and together they drove down to crew for me. On the descent to the mile 27 aid station, I pass Rory, who’s doubled over, running and throwing up at the same time. Meg and Lesley are waiting for me at Stinson Beach, huddled in down jackets, gloves, ear warmers. I’m nearly hypothermic; they’re dressed for the Arctic. They hand me a hot Starbucks mocha, of which I take one sip while trying not to look at my hands so I won’t see how grotesquely swollen from dehydration they are. My knuckles have disappeared, and I’m having a hard time bending my wrists. I’ve dug myself into a deep, deep hole and I still have twenty-three miles to go.