Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness (28 page)

I was the same person, mildly dehydrated, hobbled with a broken toe, hot, fatigued, with quads and calves that felt as if they had been beaten by baseball bats. But I was a different person.

I picked up my pace. Nunes and Thalmann had fallen behind, and the Polish guy was in front. An inexperienced runner who took the lead in a race like this after 10 miles was self-destructive. One in front after 25 miles was self-destructive but very, very determined. The same man leading after 50 miles was insane—or he wasn’t as inexperienced as I had thought. Either way, he was dangerous.

I ran through more vineyards, but I knew Korylo was still leading. He was so far ahead I couldn’t see him.

I had to beat him, but I couldn’t obsess about him. In the same way, I had to claw my way to the finish line with everything I had, but I couldn’t think too much about that line. When I got to the 50-mile mark I couldn’t think that I had 100 miles to go. I had to remember and forget. We move forward, but we must stay in the present. I tried to do so by breaking races into small, digestible parts. Sometimes I focused on the next aid station, three miles ahead. Sometimes I pictured the next shady spot down the road, or the next step.

Did “
Sometimes you just do things”
really mean
“Try not to think about consequences, just trust in your body and yourself and the universe
”? Was my dad not just a hardass Minnesotan but a mystic? It made me smile to think so. At 70 miles, Nunes pulled up to me and I gestured toward the front, raised my shoulders. Who
was
that buggy-pusher?

Nunes didn’t speak much English and I didn’t speak any Portuguese, but he said, “Scotch, you strong,” and took a few steps in front of me, waving with me to keep up. We ran together for 30 miles, chasing the Polish guy. We ran over dry, baked earth and past ruins and through dusty villages where little kids materialized from dark passages and ancient doors and ran after us, shouting and laughing. I didn’t know if they were making fun of us or exhorting us to go faster. I thought of my days on that dead-end dirt road and wondered what I would have done if a bunch of men ran past my house. I wondered if any of these Greek children climbed the hills nearby and wondered why things were.

At 100 miles, a man gave me a flower. He was crying as he handed it to me. Almost every person I met in Greece seemed to radiate a passion for life. I think it was inextricably linked to the land, the water, and the plants. There’s a myth that when Athens was founded, the gods argued over who would get to be the patron of the beautiful new city. It came down to Athena, goddess of wisdom, and Poseidon, god of the sea. Zeus declared that the two should each create a gift to give to the mortals of the city, and whoever gave the better gift would be its patron. Poseidon made water gush out of the Acropolis, but it was salty and so not of much use. Athena invented the olive tree, which could give the people fruit, oil, and wood. As a plant-based athlete, it was moving to see a culture where plants retain symbolic power and where people still use herbs to heal. It’s in their history, after all. Greece was the homeland of Hippocrates, the founder of modern medicine, who singled out diet and exercise as important components of health and wrote “let food be thy medicine.” In
On Ancient Medicine,
he wrote: “It appears to me necessary to every physician to be skilled in the ways of nature, and strive to know, if he would wish to perform his duties, what man is in relation to the articles of food and drink . . . And it is not enough to know simply that cheese is a bad article of food, as disagreeing with whoever eats to satiety. One must know what sort of disturbance it creates, and why, and with what principle in man it disagrees.” To be fair, Hippocrates wasn’t advocating giving up cheese entirely; he goes on to say that some people tolerate it better than others. Maybe he knew about lactose intolerance.

In Greece, I filled up on pomegranates and figs, wild greens from the mountains called
horta,
and lots of olives. It was a foraging paradise. On almost every training run I passed through vineyards of grapes and almond and citrus and quince trees (often grabbing fruit and eating it as I went). The Greeks had a simple diet—and an exceedingly healthy one.

At 107 miles, I churned over the pass where Pheidippides saw an apparition. Scientists today might say it was a hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation and fatigue, but there was something haunted about the rocky mountaintop. Bonfires glowed at the pass, and dozens of villagers cheered as I crested the top and descended to the town below. I had a little less than 50 miles to go. I had never felt better.

I didn’t notice my broken toe anymore. The rest of my body ached, but I didn’t care. That’s one of the many great pleasures of an ultramarathon. You can hurt more than you ever thought possible, then continue until you discover that hurting isn’t that big a deal. Forget a second wind. In an ultra you can get a third, a fourth, a fifth even. I still had more than 40 miles to go, but that’s a second wonderful thing about 100- (and plus) milers. You can trail, and despair, and screw up, and despair more, and there’s almost always another chance. Salvation is always within reach. You can’t reach it by thinking or by figuring it out.
Sometimes you just do things.

At 120 miles, I passed through Tegea. Someone there said that the Polish guy had left just a minute earlier. I grabbed an energy drink and several Clif Shot energy gels. I saw a pulsing red beam ahead of me. It was the police escort that stays with the leader throughout the race. Salvation smelled like dust and crushed grapes and history. It glowed. I ran toward it. When I passed Korylo, he seemed to barely be moving. I ran as hard as I could.

“Good job,” I said, and tried to run even harder. I couldn’t keep this pace up for long, but I knew how demoralizing it was to be passed by someone moving at a pace you knew you couldn’t match. I was sympathetic to him and admired his courage and tenacity, but when you have a chance to demoralize a competitor, you take it. I took it.

I ran hard for another mile or so and then looked back. Nothing. The escort was with me now. Some 5, 6 miles later, still nothing behind me. Then, from out of nowhere, a headlamp moving fast, swallowing distance. I tried to speed up but couldn’t. I looked back again. I thought,
This guy is tough. I’ve got to put the hammer down, now.
I went all-out, as hard as I could, for 3 miles. I was putting down 7-minute miles. No way anyone could keep up with that. I looked back. The light was closer. I ran harder. I found the inner reserve that most of us never have to look for (another gift of ultramarathons), and I kept pushing until a car pulled up alongside me. It was one of the race officials.

“Scott, do not worry,” he said. “This runner is not to be worried about.”

I was thinking, “
What are you talking about? That guy behind me is one tough Polack.
” I pushed hard for another 2 miles, and the race official drove up again. This time he said, “Scott, do not worry, this runner is not in the race,” and again, my reaction was,
“What do you mean, he’s right there!”

At the next aid station, I learned the truth. The headlamp behind me belonged to a “bandit” runner, a guy who had jumped onto the course at 120 miles. I had just run an intense 15K after 130 miles, and I still had 22 to go. It was time to pull out the four-step checklist. Number one: I was exhausted. I let myself feel that and I acknowledged it. Number two: I took stock. I was slightly pissed off that I had just expended so much energy, all to put distance between myself and someone I needn’t have worried about. And I was still exhausted and upset. But it wasn’t life-threatening. Three: I asked myself what I could do to remedy the situation. I could stop, but that wasn’t an option. The answer: Keep moving. And four: Separate negative thoughts from reality. Don’t dwell on feelings that aren’t going to help. I kept moving.

Was perseverance that simple? Was will that reducible? Certainly I wasn’t the only one with a checklist. What kept me going while others stopped?

Recent research suggests that it’s not just the brain that differentiates those who continue from those who stop. It might be the chemicals released by the brain.

Dr. Andy Morgan at Yale Medical School studied the brain chemistry of soldiers subjected to mock interrogation techniques at Fort Bragg’s Resistance Training Laboratory. As a group, Special Forces soldiers released a greater amount of a chemical called neuropeptide Y (NPY) than did the regular infantrymen. NPY is an amino acid that helps regulate blood pressure, appetite, and memory. It also buffers the effects of adrenaline, preventing high energy from turning into wasted mania.

Not only did the Special Forces soldiers release more NPY during the interrogation, but, twenty-four hours later, their levels had returned to normal, whereas the regular soldiers showed significant depletion.

Other research has shown different, less chemical variation between the hardy and the truly exceptional. In
Surviving the Extremes,
Dr. Kenneth Kamler studied the factors that separate winners from losers in the world’s toughest environments. He examined the cases of Mauro Prosperi, a competitor in the 1994 Marathon des Sables, who survived nine full days in the Sahara, and the Mexican prospector Pablo Valencia, lost for eight days in the Mojave in 1905. When they were found, both Prosperi and Valencia had lost approximately 25 percent of their body weight to dehydration, an amount that would normally prove fatal.

Kamler concluded that four factors contributed to these men’s almost inhuman ability to survive: their knowledge; their conditioning, which in effect “inoculated” them against the desert; luck; and—the factor he saw as by far the most important—the will to survive. Prosperi, a highly competitive athlete, had an uncommonly strong survival instinct. Valencia was filled with murderous rage toward his incompetent guide; the intensity of his desire for revenge spurred him on, even through a near-death experience.

I wasn’t that angry at the bandit runner. I wasn’t sure if I was juiced up with unusually high levels of NPY and DHEA. But I had come this far, I was in front, and I aimed to stay there.

The last 30 miles of the race follows a narrow, two-lane highway straight into Sparta. It climbs for half that distance, then plunges downhill into the city. As I climbed, the police escort was behind me, and in front was absolute blackness. Every so often I’d hear a growling and snapping from a dog or feel the hot wind of a diesel as it roared past. I had never felt so tired. Several times I found myself dozing off as I ran uphill. I slapped my face to make sure I stayed awake. Then I saw the photographer, squatting on the double yellow line in the middle of the highway, snapping pictures of me as I approached. It worried me, because semi-trucks were splitting the night more often, and I thought he’d be killed. I waved at him to move, but he kept clicking. I noticed the two cameras hanging around his neck, the long lens on the one that he kept clicking, and even his stubble. The closer I got, the more clearly I saw and the more he clicked until I was upon him, which is when he disappeared. It took me a moment to realize: He had never been there.

When I crossed the finish line at 23:12, the mayor, surrounded by a group of young women, placed a wreath on my head, and someone draped an American flag around my shoulders. I had finished 20 minutes slower than my victory the year before, but still, no one had ever run the course faster except the great Kouros. No other North American had ever won the race. I hung out in the medical tent for a little while, got some sleep, greeted finishers, and then slept some more.

Later, I went over the race in my mind and thought about the things many ultrarunners think about. Chief among them is how to go on when you feel you can’t go on anymore. The Yale study demonstrates that Special Forces soldiers are different than regular ones but not how they got that way. Did they obtain the required stuff of super warriordom through a lucky draw in the genetic lotto, or did it develop through training? Are elite athletes born or can they be made? More to the point: What were my limits? And how could I discover them unless I tried to go beyond them? The last was a question I asked myself each time I ran an ultra. It’s a question that every ultrarunner and anyone lucky enough to reach for something outside her comfort zone can ask—and answer—herself. It was a question I had come close to answering in my second, grueling Spartathlon. I planned to keep asking.

WHEN YOU’RE IN A FUNK

Almost every competitive runner I know goes through a period when he or she feels like quitting. I certainly include myself in that category. What’s ironic is that the tools that help make an elite athlete—focus, effort, attention to the latest technology—definitely do not provide the answer to getting out of a funk. I find the best way to get your running mojo back is to lose the technology, forget results, and run free. And forget that running needs to be painful or that it’s punishment. (Definitely get rid of those echoes of countless coaches ordering you to “take a lap” because you dropped a pass or double-dribbled.) Run for the same reason you ran as a child—for enjoyment. Take your watch off. Run in your jeans. Run with a dog (does he seem worried?). Run with someone older or younger, and you’ll see running, and the world, differently. I know I have.

Run a trail you have never run before. Pick a new goal, race, or a large loop that keeps you motivated to get out on those bad-weather days. Do all and any of these things often enough, and you’ll remember why you started running in the first place—it’s fun.

Kalamata Hummus Trail Wrap

This amazingly simple and portable meal and trail snack combines olives from Greece with Mexican tortillas and Middle Eastern hummus. I learned about hummus when I first started reading vegetarian cookbooks and studying world cuisine, and I started making these wraps for my long training runs in the Cascade Mountains. The sesame butter provides a smooth texture, and combines with the chewy tortilla and salty olives to create a nuanced, multilayered meal from a decidedly multinational but very harmonious dish. If you are making this to eat on the trail, you may wish to omit the garlic.