by Katie Arnold
On the steep climb up the Dipsea Steps—wooden ladder-like stairs hammered into the ground—a half-remembered line from the Gettysburg Address begins spinning through my brain: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war…” I am at war with the trail, and the trail is at war with my body. I think about quitting, but when you’re at war, quitting is pretty much the same as dying. I am delirious. I keep going.
Things get murky for a long while after that. My only goal is not to drop. I walk for long stretches. I curse silently and try not to cry. I cry. The scenery is absurdly beautiful—dappled eucalyptus forests and enormous stands of redwoods, dainty coastal inns, high meadows with views to the blue sea—but in my agony the whole world has narrowed down to a pinprick, and I see none of it.
Keep it together, keep it together.
* * *
—
I truck into the mile 44 aid station on cement legs. Meg is going to pace me for the last six miles, and my stepsister, Amy, and her six-year-old daughter, who live nearby, have come to surprise me. I get teary when I see them, but Meg must sense how perilously close to complete emotional meltdown I am, because she grabs my arm and shouts, “Let’s go!” I shove a few gels from Amy’s outstretched arms into my sticky, bloated elephant paws and we set off on a two-mile climb up a fire road.
After her high school hurdling career, Meg stopped running. She married at twenty-six and had two kids by the time she was in her early thirties. She was either working or taking care of her family, and anything extraneous fell by the wayside. But after Dad died and she got divorced, she started running again. Now she races half marathons.
She jogs beside me, just off my right elbow. Something about this scenario is familiar—prehistorically familiar. I tug at the memory: our first Fodderstack, Meg with the long-legged ease, me scrawny and beaten, eyes glazed with confusion and fatigue, trying to keep up.
In my delirium, I imagine that Dad is here, too, just out in front, running backwards in a low crouch, holding his camera between his knees, pressing the shutter in rapid-fire clicks like a sports photographer. “Okay, okay, one more, just one more!” he’s calling.
I know that Meg feels him, too, because she says, “Wouldn’t Dad get such a kick out of this?”
And I say yes, I think that he would (while trying to keep the bristle out of my voice; I am not getting a kick out of this), because I am definitely, without question, one hundred percent cured of ultrarunning forever. When I say this out loud, Meg nods gravely, as if she’s been wondering when I’ll snap to my senses.
“I want this to be fucking done,” I plead, feeling a pathetic sniffle creep into my voice. “Pleeeeease. Are we at the top, do you think?”
A runner we’re overtaking raises his head and hisses evilly, “Don’t count on it.”
The next moment is one I’ll never forget: Meg growls at him, the throaty snarl of a wild animal protecting its dead, mangled prey. Then she turns to me and says, in a completely different voice, a bright and hopeful voice that sounds awfully chipper, possibly too chipper, bordering on satanic, “We’re getting there!” I recognize this voice, and it almost stops me cold. It’s our mother’s.
Mom’s here, too, because I’m here. I’m my mother. Mom may not understand my running, but she made me a runner as much as Dad did. Her unsurpassable stamina, her indomitable optimism, sometimes so cheerful it makes you want to scream. Her sunny-side-up, glass-half-full positivity—she gave this to me, and even in my darkest moments, when I’m tormented by ear crickets or an imminent heart attack or swelling in my calf that Google says has all the signs of deep vein thrombosis, I believe this. We are getting there. And we will get there, wherever there is, and it will be okay. It will be better than okay: It will be good, and we will keep going. Of this I’ve never really had any doubt.
Suddenly I pump my fist in the air and scream diabolically, “I GOT this!”
Meg looks at me like I’ve gone beserk, but all around us runners shriek and fist-pump in agreement, our hollers rippling in unison down the hillside. Galvanized, I crest the top, swoop down the other side. My legs aren’t wobbly anymore, just deeply pained. My fingers have thawed but still look mildly deformed. I see the finish tent and aim straight for it.
“Go, Katie! Go, Katie!” Meg yells behind me.
* * *
—
During a nine-hour run, it’s normal to daydream about what you’ll eat when it’s over: pizza, banana splits, chocolate eclairs, dark-chocolate peanut-butter cups by the handful. The fantasies carry you for miles, but they are just that: fantasies. Because the cruel truth is, when you have run fifty miles, when you have punished your body and pulverized your digestive tract with intense aerobic output and a hideous amount of synthetic, sucrose-infused energy food, the last thing your body will want to do is eat.
After the race, Meg and Lesley and I drive back to Meg’s house. I treat us to Thai takeout to thank them for the thankless task of waiting around for me all day in the bitter cold, but I manage only a few bites. Although I’ve burned through several thousand calories today, I can’t stomach a thing.
Later I take an ice bath and lie awake in bed for a long time. My body is too uncomfortable, my muscles too crimped, my adrenaline still revving too high to sleep. Every now and then, my brain tricks me into thinking I’m tripping, my legs spasm, and my heart skids out of my chest. I must doze off eventually, because in the middle of the night I wake up ravenous. I’m in Meg’s guest bedroom on the second floor, and there’s zero chance I’ll be able to make it downstairs to the kitchen. I half roll, half fall out of bed, army-crawl to my suitcase, vandalize the contents until I find half a bag of cashews, and devour them in a ball on the floor.
The next day, I’m crippled. So stiff I have to beg airport security to pull off my boots for me. But once I’m on the plane to Albuquerque, high above the city lights, everything appears small, orderly, in its rightful perspective. The race was just a race: fifty miles. I finished in 8:49, the sixteenth woman; I missed my first goal but hit the other two. I learned that even when the day goes absolutely to shit, when nothing flows, when I’m running from my head, not my heart, I can still hold on by my bitten-down fingernails. In the end, when my legs were wrecked and my spirit crushed, it was my head that talked me through to the finish line. It wasn’t the race I wanted, but maybe it was the one I needed.
As the plane descends over Albuquerque, I can make out the long, dark squiggle of the Rio Grande snaking through the city. The sight of water in the desert fills me with hope. It was just an off day; I missed top ten but still got top twenty. And next time, I console myself, I will definitely wear tights and gloves.
Next time?
Little more than twenty-four hours have passed since I swore off ultrarunning forever, and already the amnesia has set in.
* * *
—
The day after I get home, I drive north into the Rio Grande Gorge, a deep rift in the desert halfway between Santa Fe and Taos. As soon as I see the river, clear and winter green, my breath deepens, as it always does. Bald eagles roost in the cottonwoods along the bank, and the rock walls shoot up three hundred feet on both sides of the river, so steep they routinely send small boulders tumbling into the two-lane highway. Erosion is unstoppable, the mountains shrinking before our eyes, but life teems on anyway, wild and equally determined.
I was here, at the mouth of the gorge, when Dad called me with the news that he had cancer. Now it’s December 9, three years to the night since he died. I pull over and park. The sun has sunk below the rim, and in a small eddy along the bank, the river is skimmed with a brittle film of ice. I pull a votive candle and lighter from the pocket of my down jacket. The wind is gusting, but the flame wavers and holds. Two mallards fly upstream, quacking to the dusk and the gleaming full moon. The eye of Venus beams down like a porthole, a small tear in the black fabric of the sky. To the e
ast rises the sharp point of Quartzite Mountain. Billions of years old, its rock marks another geologic unconformity, a chink in the chronology.
PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD
Steve and Maisy, Rio Grande Gorge, 2011
Around me, the layers of time are closed up tight like an onion. Dad on assignment to New Mexico in the late seventies. Georgia O’Keeffe in her studio, her flat-topped peak, Pedernal, shooting up beyond her window, smoke from the kiva fireplace corkscrewing into the winter sky. Me, at twenty-three, climbing my mountain, electric with possibility.
On the surface, nothing has changed. The piñons are still here, weathered trunks with branches outstretched like arms. The rocks lie mostly in the same random jumbles. The dirt is the same, too, clay-brown and damp with patches of snow. Quartzite rears up above the Rio Grande, stones rain down on the road. But what’s underneath is invisible. A lump in the kidney the size of a fist, a secret massing hurt, a game-ender. Fear screaming in my ear. But also love. My daughters’ hearts hidden beneath downy skin. And courage. Things we see, things we cannot see.
One year, three years, ten. There’s no knowing how long grief will last, but tonight it’s almost a joy to allow myself the sorrow. The two are so tightly entwined, the flip sides of love, they’re almost the same.
* * *
—
Natalie’s leading a meditation retreat in Taos, and I’ve decided that if I’m ever going to get serious about sitting still, there’s no better time than now, after a fifty-mile race, when I’m too exhausted to run away. At the old hacienda where arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan used to host D. H. Lawrence and Georgia O’Keeffe, I sit with the other students in an austere room with wood floors and bare walls. After Natalie demonstrates proper zazen posture, she says, “I want you to sit completely still. Keep coming back to the body and the breath. Sit through the pain. Try not to move a muscle.”
I cast my eyes desperately around the room at the other students, but no one’s showing any signs of distress. They adjust themselves on their mats with stick-straight backs and half smiles, the picture of tranquility.
Pros, I think bitterly, closing my eyes.
“Follow your breath all the way in, and all the way out,” Natalie intones.
I screw my mind around a single idea: stillness. A long time passes. So long I stop trying to figure out how much time has passed. So long my butt goes numb and I stop squirming. Each time I’m tempted to shift my hands or jiggle my foot, I breathe instead and stay exactly where I am. My spine is not too crumpled, and I can feel my breath going in and out. I’m alive. That’s what this means. Eventually I find that stillness has become a kind of anchor. Every time my mind strays, dozens of times a minute, I reassure myself that my body is motionless. My thoughts are spinning, but my limbs are composed. There is some small comfort in this.
I’ve resigned myself to sitting here maybe forever when Natalie finally rings the bell. I open my eyes. Her head is bowed, eyes still closed, when she says, “Settle yourself upon yourself.” That’s exactly how I feel: as though my mind is resting on my body, which is anchored to the earth. Solid.
It’s freezing in Taos, the temperature each morning hardly creeping above zero, but gradually my body is coming back to life. In the afternoons, when the sun finally casts a bit of warmth, I walk up a ridge east of town and sit on a rock at the top. Sitting is what I crave most, even more than walking. I’m still restless, but now when Natalie rings the bell, I’m ready to sit through it all—the itchy tremors in my foot and the numbness in my legs and the almost hysterical urge to yell “Sweet Jesus!” and sprint from the room.
Keep it together, I tell myself. Keep it together. Meditation, like running, is an endurance sport.
On the last day, Natalie shoos us back into the world. “What I most want for you is for you to become an animal in your life,” she tells us. It reminds me of Steve’s advice: You have to go a little crazy out there. “When you do this,” Natalie says, “all beings get behind you and you keep going. When you do something seriously, you pass it on and help others.”
25
The Opposite of Emptiness
PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD
Lake Katherine from the summit of Santa Fe Baldy, June 2014
After you’ve been running ultra distances for a while, you will begin to lose perspective. It happens so gradually that you barely notice, until the day when twelve miles seems like a “short” run. When a couple thousand vertical feet of gradual uphill running spread over fifteen miles is “pretty flat.”
It’s human nature to adapt, to keep moving the mark and pushing your own thin edge. Whatever you do regularly becomes routine, no matter how extreme it may appear. Like Dean Potter, highlining without a safety harness. Like my eighty-four-year-old writer friend who wheels her grocery cart full of food a mile down the beach to her cottage on an island off the coast of Maine because there’s no road. If you point out to her that this is remarkable, she flaps her hand dismissively and says, “No, it’s what anyone would do. I go at low tide, when the sand is firm.”
We are the same, this woman and I.
When the amnesia of your last race has worn off, your thoughts will naturally go to what’s next. Your brain will move through a series of reasonings and justifications, some logical, others magical, possibly maniacal. I’ve built my base fitness; why back off and lose it now? I’ve already run thirty-one miles and it didn’t hurt that much. What’s another nineteen? And so on. As long as you’ve had success in your last race—and by “success” I mean not dying—chances are good that you will want to keep going. There’s always a time to beat. Your own.
* * *
—
I almost don’t want to say “one hundred kilometers” out loud. It sounds absurd, obscene even. But I want so badly to find my flow again, and the best way I know how is to push myself beyond my limits, to burn through my pride and obstinate resistance until there’s nothing left.
In his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, the Japanese novelist and marathoner Haruki Murakami calls the period after a race the “runner’s-blues fog.” Whether you win or drop or finish in the middle or DFL, letdown is inevitable. Runner’s blues is a lot like postpartum blues—after the euphoria, the entropy. The particulars may change, but the pattern is more or less the same: For a short time, the relief and novelty of doing other things, followed by the lethargy and aimless wondering what’s next; then the pathetic, wallowing inertia, the buzzing impatience to resume training. And always the doubt: Will I ever run that way again? Will I ever feel that way again?
In the early months of 2014, my sixteenth-place finish at the North Face 50 Mile lingers in my mouth like a bad aftertaste. I don’t want to run; I’m dying to run. I need to run, and I hate myself for needing to run. I’m in the eddy again, gyrating in a torment of my own making.
I have my own name for it: runner’s block.
“During the outrageous phase we need to be careful about not getting too far out,” Sakyong Mipham writes in Running with the Mind of Meditation. He’s talking about the third evolution of mindfulness, the garuda stage, when it’s common to push too hard or become overly identified with our pursuit. During this phase, we risk becoming unsettled, isolated, injured. Going too far, he cautions, often stems from a “subtle level of pride” that “slowly begins to blow us off course.”
At the North Face 50 Mile, I was running for the wrong reasons, for some crazy fantasy of midlife heroism. I went too far out. I’ve turned what for so long had been my secret happiness into a test of my worth. It’s time to pull back and remember why I run, to become just a spirit running.
* * *
—
I sign up for the Angel Fire Endurance 100K, in late June in northern New Mexico. It’s early February, and I can feel the sun getting stronger, my own self stirring ba
ck to life. The fear is there, but bigger than that is the love: I miss moving. I miss the routine of training, the contentment I feel when I come home filthy and exhausted.
I want to run.
I start, slow and low like always. Eight miles is my long day. Then ten, then twelve. There’s magic to crossing the twenty-mile mark. Under twenty miles, I run from my calculating brain: How fast can I go? How soon can I be done? But once I’m on the other side, the distance teaches me patience. It’s too far and too long to be in a hurry. There are so many uncertainties, so many hours on my feet, I have no choice but to surrender to the run. Maybe my legs will feel like soggy logs; maybe I will be hungry and homesick. Maybe I will fly.
Once I’m on the other side of twenty, my training usually settles into a more peaceful routine. I worry less. I run a little bit faster and a little bit farther each week. The few extra pounds I always gain over the holidays melt away. The calluses on my feet grow thicker. I know there will be off days, but I’m learning to run with all of it: the insane, nagging fears, the egotistical glory dreams, the dull soreness in my left ankle, the hum in my heart, the old nudge of Dad daring me to do the unexpected.
Even though it’s March, the snow is still piling up in the mountains, too deep to run. One day, chasing mile markers south along the Rail Trail, I remember something I heard John, the meditation teacher, say last year. To quiet the mind and become present, he suggested, follow your breath to its furthest point. Picture a door at the end of each inhalation and exhalation. What’s on the other side? Sitting upright on my folding metal chair, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I could see the door exactly: It was small and black and curved on top, like Jerry’s cartoon mouse hole in Tom and Jerry. I wanted to get to it and push it open, but just as I reached for it, my breath swept me away and back, only to begin again. It was soothing, like catching a long, gentle wave all the way into shore, then letting it carry me back into the surf, my mind scrubbed clear, in and out, again and again.