by Katie Arnold
When I come through the aid station for the last time, Pippa and Maisy are waving signs: GO MOMMY! KATIE, KATIE! and below that my age, with an extra zero: 402. I laugh weakly through my fatigue. Eleven hours into the race, with six miles still to go, I feel that ancient.
I’ve been maintaining a moderate tempo all day, consciously holding back to make sure I have enough energy for the end. Nothing hurts all that much, but I’m just really, really tired.
“I’m so ready to be done,” I whimper to Steve, who’s pacing me the last twelve miles while Anna, who drove up from Santa Fe, stays with the girls.
“Do you want to walk?” he asks.
For the first time all day, I start running flat out, my legs turning as though it’s mile 1, not 61, racing through the final turns on the dirt road, then onto pavement. The finish line is nearly abandoned. No music pumping through the loudspeaker, no runners eating hamburgers or swilling beer, just a handful of volunteers settling in for the long haul. The 50K and fifty-mile races have been over for hours; the hundred-mile runners still have ten hours or more to go. I’m the first runner across the line in the 100K. I’ve won it outright, in 12:14.
I’d stepped out of my own way, one foot in front of the other, for many miles and many hours. I didn’t have the transcendent highs, but nor did I have the wrecking lows. In this way it wasn’t a spectacular race, which made it, in its own way, sort of spectacular.
I’d always hoped that running would make me a better mother, but now I know that being a mother makes me a better runner. I wasn’t running from nothingness after all, but fullness, where all possibilities exist equally—winning, losing, hurting, dropping; being strong, being a mother, being alone; being scared—yet I wasn’t attached to any one them. So empty of wanting one specific thing, I was full of everything.
26
Belonging
PHOTO COURTESY OF RAVEN EYE PHOTOGRAPHY
On the CDT, near Leadville, Colorado, August 2014
For the first fifty miles of the Angel Fire 100K, my predominant thought was Thank God I am not running the hundred-mile race. I saw the hundred-mile runners, with their blue race bibs, and I saw how much more slowly they were running than even I, who was trying to spread out my energy throughout the whole day, and I saw by the way they bent solemnly into the slopes that they knew what they were up against and that they would be running into the night and possibly all night, and were approaching it with enormous seriousness. The words Thank God played through my head, even when I was at my happiest and strongest, hoofing it fast down the back side of the mountain, whooping to other runners, or watching the bear mow the field. Never before had a race delighted me as much as this one had—the knowledge that my daughters were frolicking somewhere nearby; the kind volunteers, sponging my neck with ice water; the emerald valleys far below. I loved this race, and yet I did not want to run one inch farther than I had to.
But somewhere during the final ten miles, another thought began to weasel its way into my head. Okay, thirty-eight miles more. That’s not SO much. Yeah…a hundred miles…I could do that. I hadn’t even crossed the finish line and already I was dreaming of the next big thing.
* * *
—
Six weeks later, in August 2014, I drive north out of Santa Fe, bound for the TransRockies Run, a multiday stage race through the Collegiate Peaks of Colorado. The three-day race that I’ve signed up for is “only” fifty-eight miles and ten thousand vertical feet over three days. Whenever I do the math, I always come out ahead. It’s shorter than Angel Fire, my longest single-day race, and because runners camp en masse near the starting line each day, the race is known for its festive atmosphere, challenging yet fun, competitive without being cutthroat. I tell myself I don’t have big ambitions. I just want to run someplace beautiful, reacclimatize to high altitude after a month at Stony Lake, and get ready for what I secretly hope will be an FKT attempt in the Grand Canyon in October.
Road trips always make me wistful. I think of Dad, rambling around in his green VW bus, to the Midwest for college reunions and to see Uncle Phil; to the Great Plains to see no one, to go where he wanted when he wanted and take pictures if he felt like it. He liked seeing where he ended up and what he found when he got there.
After Dad died, I went looking for his bus. I didn’t want a bus like Dad’s; I wanted Dad’s bus, our bus, with the puckered white vinyl interior and the sliding side door out of which he let us dangle our feet on the way up the driveway at Huntly. I pictured Steve and the girls and me driving it around the West, waking up in ski resort parking lots on powder days, taking it to races. I knew it was a long shot, but I called the public radio station in Washington anyway. The man who answered the phone found the record immediately. “It was sold to or through a company in Brooklyn in November 2010,” he told me.
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Meg and me in Dad’s bus, summer 1978
I scrolled through the picture reel in my mind. That was the month that Maisy learned to roll over. Dad was still alive, shuffling in his plaid bathrobe from bed to bathroom while the bare-boned maples bristled on the far ridge and the stinkbugs crept silently through the house, claiming it as theirs. I thought of Maisy now, learning to ski and ride her bike. Dad would always be dead the same number of years as she’s been alive. It had been foolish to think I might get his bus back. Time just kept moving. It made no sense, and it made perfect sense.
“I’m sorry, I don’t have any more information,” the man said apologetically, and I thanked him and hung up.
Now I fumble for my phone and call Steve. I just want to hear his voice. “Don’t worry, everything’s fine here,” he says, without a trace of bitterness. “You’ll do great.”
Once, I might have wanted him to say more, to pump up my ego or stay on the phone, reassuring me until I drove out of cell range. I would have wanted him to love and support my running as much as he loves and supports me. But slowly I’m learning these are two different things, as they should be. It’s not that we’ve finally found a magical balance between my running and our life. We’re still just making it up as we go. It depends on the weather, the season, our bank account, our moods and the girls’. Some days, my running is fast and free, and our life feels infinite, open-ended. Other days, the two sides stick and catch, like snags on a thread, threatening to pull the fabric apart. It will always be a give-and-take, a thin line between what’s good for me and what’s good for our family. All we can do is stay on it.
“I love you,” I tell Steve before we hang up.
I call Natalie next. “I’m lonely,” I tell her. “I want to go home.”
“I know,” she says. “It’s good you’re feeling this. Keep going.”
* * *
—
Runners come from all over the country to the TransRockies, either solo or as part of a two-person team. It has a jovial feel, like summer camp for adults. Runners are having birthdays, celebrating anniversaries, getting engaged. One morning in the dining tent, I eat scrambled eggs next to a man in his mid-forties named Frank, who tells me that in the nine months since he started running he’s lost 150 pounds. His first race was a 50K. This is his second.
(Pause for a moment of awe.)
“I know nothing!” Frank proclaims eagerly. “I’m just here to learn as much as I can. I’m asking so many questions, I think I must be annoying people!”
Though the daily mileages in stage races are shorter than traditional ultramarathons, the wear and tear on your body and psyche is just as intense, if not more so. You have to run smart, but recover even smarter. Unlike in most ultra races, the real work begins after you cross the finish line.
Every afternoon, I take an ice bath—in the Arkansas River, murky irrigation ditches, brisk alpine lakes. I stretch and use a foam roller and lather myself in arnica gel. Runners are
deeply superstitious: If a strategy worked once, it must be hewed to with ceremonial precision until the end of time. What I do each night in the dining tent feels less like eating and more like force-feeding: second helpings of beets and greens, salad heaped with beans and nuts, brown rice, and any protein I can get my hands on. After the second stage, I eat a whole pizza for an afternoon snack and then conk out in my tent, pitched along with four hundred others in the Leadville high school baseball diamond. Each morning, I wake before sunrise, wiggle my legs in my sleeping bag to see what hurts, and get up and start all over again. The routine burns off my nerves. I’m not just running the race, I’m living in it.
I win the first stage, then the second. On the third and last day, the course follows the Continental Divide Trail for twenty miles north from Leadville; it’s covered in pine needles, soft and fast. Ten miles in, I round a curve and see a team of two runners ahead of me, weaving through meadows along the base of the big bald peaks. For six miles we run like this, apart but also in unison. They never get any closer or farther away. But I’m not impatient. I’m not trying to catch them. I’m no longer racing against them; I’m running with them. The realization makes me so happy that I start whooping—pure, uncontainable joy escaping my body. An hour goes by like this, but I don’t care who hears me or how far I have to go or when I’ll get there or what will happen when I do. I’m exactly where I want to be.
* * *
—
A few days before I left for Colorado, I went upstairs to my writing loft. I was trying to find the race guide I’d printed out, to study up on the course. My desk and table were stacked with papers: old magazine clippings, bills, and photographs. I justify the disorder by telling myself that things rise to the surface when I need them, but I know this is mostly just an excuse for laziness.
The guide was nowhere in sight, but a manila folder in one of the piles caught my eye. It was one of Dad’s; I’d brought it home from my last visit to Huntly and shoved it there without bothering to look through it; sometimes the volume of Dad’s stuff still overwhelmed me. The first thing I saw when I opened it now was a piece of flimsy fax paper. I recognized the time stamp—AUGUST 12, 1998 OUTSIDE—and my handwritten signature at the bottom, but nothing else. I had no memory of writing it.
Evidently I was interviewing Dad for an article about becoming a photographer, as told from the perspective of a neophyte whose father was a pro. I’d included twelve questions I hoped he’d answer, generic queries about first jobs and inspirations, tips for beginners, and “biggest challenges.” I was still a fact-checker and just starting to write for Outside, and it was the sort of earnest letter I sent to other prospective subjects. My questions were always softballs; I didn’t want to annoy anyone, least of all my father. “Don’t be shy!” I signed off. “It will be worth it, I promise!”
The fax was sent to the Valley View Motel, in Osceola, Wisconsin, where Dad was visiting Uncle Phil. Paper-clipped to the fax was Dad’s nine-page email reply, time-stamped 8/21/1998, taking me through the whole trajectory—his early interest in photography, the thrill of the hunt.
I wanted to capture “life” happening and have no influence on it….I loved the life, loved being able to snoop at it, roaming and capturing, loved the fact that the camera kept me separate and apart and gave me its own needs to answer first.
He published a photography book, got some attention. The head of the Magnum agency suggested they meet; the great Life photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt sent him a congratulatory note.
I never followed up.
This was the one thing about Dad I still didn’t understand, the last thing maybe. I knew why he’d let go of us, but why on earth had he let go of photography?
It was “exciting but stressful,” he went on. He liked to assemble projects, books and stories, rather than be “on-point” all the time. “I guess those are the reasons. Maybe not all, but I can’t figure the rest.”
He must have been wondering, too, though, because a few pages later he circles back:
I couldn’t fathom how to be a photographer (who I thought was required to “practice” all the time) and be a husband. Mom and I never discussed it but I think there was some feeling on my part that devotion to photography would have meant unfaithfulness of a kind to her. With the editing came a kind of “normalcy.” It had a “track” to it; you could go home at night.
Oh, the irony. He didn’t go home at night, not in the end, when he really was unfaithful to Mom.
I looked again at the time stamp. He’d written the letter in 1998, six years before he delivered his big bombshell to me. Either I’d forgotten it completely or he’d never sent it. It no longer mattered. It was here now, like so much of what he’d left behind, popping up like pale mushrooms from damp, dark soil after a rain. A kind of magic.
You can read more when I finish my life-epic (probably five minutes before my last breath!). I still don’t know about the wisdom of leaving active shooting. It’s easy to think I turned away from it too quickly. I kind of wish I’d batted at it a little harder. But you make your choices…
Late that afternoon, the last of my TransRockies race, it begins to drizzle. My time, in just over three hours, is good for first place overall in the women’s solo division. I sit in a muddy pond up to my waist, shouting myself hoarse for the last racers. The digital clock shows an elapsed time of 7:26 as a team of two jogs across the line, soaked but beaming beneath their Gore-Tex hoods. Their finish is no less impressive than the winners’. In fact, it’s more impressive. They’ve been running through the mountains in the cold rain for twice as long. Their stamina is humbling.
Ultrarunning isn’t a mystery. It’s hard work and human nature. I believe anyone can do it. If it’s in you, if you want it, you can do it. You can run thirty miles, fifty miles, a hundred miles. You don’t have to look like a runner. Anybody can be a runner. You don’t have to be fast. You don’t have to know anything. You just have to start small and break it down. You will be afraid. You will worry about wild animals and strangers and getting injured and losing everything. This is natural. This is resistance. You’re stronger than you think you are. Keep going.
As a competitive runner, I’d always toggled between doubting and striving. Now, though, I’ve finally stopped worrying that I’m less and trying to prove I’m more, and I’m no longer thinking I’m more and trying to prove that, either. For so long, I’ve tried to be different, when what I really wanted was to belong.
* * *
—
In his book, the Buddhist running monk Sakyong Mipham explains that the final phase of mindfulness is “dragon,” named for the creature that “is said to live on the ground, but it also flies high among the clouds.” This is when running expands from something we do for ourselves to something we do for the greater good, for the world. “Our running and our meditation have undergone a great transformation,” he writes. “No longer are these activities solely for our personal benefit.”
Dragon seems very far away, like the hopeful mirage of an aid station winking from a great distance. Am I getting any closer? Maybe only by millimeters. Maybe it is around a hundred bends, and then a hundred more. Maybe it will take me this lifetime and the next. I’m not in a hurry.
The next morning, I pack my gear and head south for home through the San Luis Valley. Sunflowers rage along the roadsides, and the Great Sand Dunes pile up against the folds of the Sangre de Cristo range like a tinselly mirage. As always, I’m torn. The runner in me wishes I could stay, but the mother in me wants to go home. I see that this is how it will always be. Some days my running is fast and free, and I move through the mountains writing stories in my head; other days I fold laundry and wonder if I shouldn’t run less and act more like a normal person. I’m both at the same time, mother and self. Everything’s already here, the joy and madness, beauty, babies, stories, brilliance, luck, and love. All the pi
eces have carried me here and live alongside the anguish and boredom and uncertainty, the days I can’t breathe, the unbearable growing up of my girls. There’s room for it all.
When I get home, I meet Natalie for a hike. On the way down our mountain, she says, “You’re ready. When you called me and told me you were lonely, I could tell.”
“Ready for what?” I ask, but I already know the answer. For this.
27
Lying Down in the Tracks
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Old Saybrook, Connecticut, 1964
It’s been nearly four years since Dad’s diagnosis. September is losing its gloomy grip on me. I’ve stopped rehearsing the order of events in my head as I did in past years, as though by replaying the dates and details of our phone calls and visits, I might be able to change the ending.
The Indian summer days are astonishingly beautiful, but I know they won’t last. The season for river trips and mountain running is winding down. Time to sneak in a few last long runs above twelve thousand feet. Time to think about what’s next: the Grand Canyon, maybe a hundred miles.
One Wednesday in mid-September, I’m on the Rail Trail, daydreaming that I’m running the JFK 50 Mile, in western Maryland, about an hour north of Huntly Stage. I’m winning the race, tearing up the fast, flat course at sea level. I hear the spectators cheering me on. I can already envision the headlines in the local paper. CHILD FODDERSTACK CHAMPION MAKES GOOD!
I’m in Maryland, making Dad proud again—not in New Mexico, not on the Rail Trail, certainly not in my own body—when I hear a Very Disturbing Noise. It comes from my left knee, like paper tearing. It’s so loud, so wrong, I hear it above the din of Rihanna blaring in my earbuds. So loud it sounds like it came from outside of me.