Run or Die (16 page)

She listened silently, taking in the story I was recounting so dramatically, and smiled at me from her place beneath the quilt. When I had finished my lengthy tale, I asked how
her
outing had gone.

“Fine,” she said simply.

“What do you mean, ‘fine’?” I asked, somewhat surprised. “You must have something to tell me after such a wonderful day! How
did it go? What did you see?” I insisted, and she replied, in that self-assured way of hers, “You can tell your story and people will see it through your eyes. You can take photos and they can hear the birds singing and the snow moving the branches on the trees. You can write it down so they can feel the wind on their faces or smell the wet earth. But you can never get them to truly feel the excitement you felt when you were there. You can’t make them cry as you cried or make their hearts beat as fast as yours did.”

Then she smiled, turned away, and quickly fell asleep, leaving me crestfallen.

Alba was very strong. Maybe too strong. I craved finding something worthwhile in the things I did, and I couldn’t do them and then feel gratified only within myself. I needed someone else to value what I had done. I needed to be told I had just been on an incredible hike. To be congratulated when I had won a race. I needed only a gesture, a look of approval, to give me some self-satisfaction and motivate me to train the next morning. I needed the people who loved me to feel proud and celebrate my good results, for my friends and acquaintances to acknowledge and remember what I had done so that I could feel sure of myself and more at peace. More simply, I needed to create a past so that I knew where I was coming from and could continue to move forward.

Alba needed none of this. She was able to feel self-confident and fulfilled simply by the emotion she experienced in the moment, a moment that she then forgot when her body could no longer feel it, and so she’d seek out another. I don’t mean by this that she lived only for the moment or aimlessly. On the contrary, she was able to trace out a path in life without needing herself or others to create a past. On the one hand, I admired her and marveled at her inner strength; on the other, she made me feel inferior. I couldn’t act like that, however much I might have wanted to. I felt the need
to communicate what I had done, seen, or felt. Consequently, mostly to annoy her, I would say she was selfish, that she saw and felt incredible things and shouldn’t keep them to herself, that she should share them with other people.

“Why?” she would reply. “What’s the point of telling others about things that they couldn’t have seen, that they will possibly never see, about feeling things that others haven’t felt? Just so you can feel you are superior? To make it obvious you have something they don’t? That you have experienced much more in life?”

I told her it was exactly the opposite: that it was so that people would keep on searching until they saw and felt it themselves. But our argument was never-ending.

I haven’t seen her in a long time. The memory occasionally plays tricks on us. We eliminate what’s painful and only remember the moments of euphoria. This happens with training sessions, too; from one year to the next, you only remember that day when you managed a series of impressive feats and felt good, or the week when you were able to sustain a very fast pace for six hours a day. You never recall the days when you struggled and were longing to get home, jump into bed, and forget your training. Rather, you always think that you were much better last year and that this season you’ve been laboring under pressure, exhausted by effort expended on previous days or by bad planning. You are always worrying why you aren’t feeling as good as last year. That was what happened when Alba and I stopped seeing each other. But on her parting shot before she shut the door, my memory is clear: “Where are your posters of Daehlie and Brosse? Where have you put your myths? When did you change your idols?”

Now, in their place, photos of my victories and trophies of every size and shape fill my walls and closets. The moment you surpass the people you idolized and become your own idol, the magic of
sport is lost. Idols are reference points that act to mark out a path, to help you know what you have to work at and fight for so that you can emulate what they have done. And when you have succeeded, when there is only one person you can surpass, and that person is yourself, it means you have understood nothing.

Alba’s departure forced me to think a lot about what I meant to myself. If I was the person I wanted to imitate, I couldn’t see ways to improve, had entered an impasse, and couldn’t gaze humbly at those my idol was surpassing.

When you lose your way, when the train you’re on stops because it has crossed all the boundaries it wanted to cross, you realize you have crossed none, that no goal is real, that no victory is valid anywhere else but within yourself.

Alba disappeared from my life, but her leaving taught me that victories are what you as an individual decide they are, and that however many victories you achieve, in the end they will be of worth only to you. Everyone can be king of his own castle, but outside he is vulnerable and can lose his way. This did not discourage me at all; in fact, it gave me the strength to seek out new idols—the ones within each person. It motivated me to find strength and inspiration from those around me, because the winner isn’t the strongest, but rather the one who truly enjoys what he is doing.

I managed to reach that state of pleasant equilibrium I had so admired in Alba, not by drawing on moments spent alone, but rather by delving deeper into the lifestyles of others, which inspired me to discover new paths to explore.

Mountains give us the time and space to rediscover ourselves, but we also use them to share everything and create cast-iron links to other people. I’ve never been able to decide whether what I practice is a solitary or team sport. The food supplies, pacers, and
group runs surely make it seem like a team sport. But independent of all that, the question I continually ask myself when I run is “Who am I running for?” On the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, when I am climbing the Grand Col Ferret and haven’t seen anyone for seven hours and can’t see any runners behind me, why do I keep on running? Whom do I keep running for? Am I running for myself? If that were the case, when I was tired, I would stop to rest, would sleep and admire the scenery, which is what I like doing and what my body wants me to do. But, in fact, am I running for others? I know I no longer run simply for myself: I run in order not to disappoint my partner and the friends who urged me on before I ever arrived in Chamonix. For family and the people who came out and helped during the race and who expect me to succeed. Or at least this is what I tell myself. I think I tell myself that I do it for them, at least in part, so that the whole weight of my decisions doesn’t fall on me. However, when I don’t stop and I keep on running, I do so mostly because I want to prove to myself that I can do it; it’s not the others, but my own self who compels me to keep going.

At 6 p.m., the Place Balmat in Chamonix is packed. It is impossible to walk down the streets, and people stick their heads out of windows and jam into doorways and come out onto their balconies. I try to pass through the crowd unnoticed by the photographers and fans who have come to see the most prestigious, legendary ultra-trail race on the planet, the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc. Some people ask me for an autograph or want their photograph taken with me; everyone congratulates me and wishes me well in the next 20 hours.
Why are they congratulating me if we’ve not even begun the
run?
I wonder. As I said, there is no difference among us on the starting line. You can’t tell one individual from another based on what they have achieved in the past, but only by what they can demonstrate now. And we haven’t begun yet.

I slowly approach the starting area and leap over the barriers. I look around. I am surrounded by great runners, and the mere sound of their names fills me with awe because they have etched lines of gold in the history of this sport. I anticipate a long, hard battle against all these faces made famous by sports magazines and against other elite runners who compete far and wide to get into these same pages as well. I look behind me, where thousand of runners are also waiting for the starting gun, waving their arms in the air. Like me, they’ve come to fight extremely hard, but it’s not a battle in which they try to eliminate their rivals, but rather a battle among colleagues, where the struggle is internal and the rivals are the reasons to keep going. I am in the first row and don’t like that; I move back to the fifth. I prefer to leave discreetly, and I believe the race will put each runner in his place.

While runners engage in animated conversation, the start gets kicked off with music by Vangelis, which grows louder and louder until the shouting is silenced by “The Conquest of Paradise.” The emotion is visible on the runners’ faces: tears, smiles, and sober expressions. Each of us feels excitement at embarking on one of the most incredible adventures in a lifetime, but we also feel fear, not knowing whether we can make it through to the end. Will our bodies and minds resist?

People charge off at top speed, maybe to reduce the number of miles as quickly as possible or because they’re just letting themselves be swept along by the cheering crowd that is boisterously urging them on. I advance through the group, and as we leave Chamonix I am leading the race. I like to run a race from this
position: feeling in control, as though no movement can escape you and you know what state every runner is in.

A group of six—all among the favorites—is quickly out in front. We talk about our race preparations, congratulate each other on our respective successes, and map out challenges for the future. Even though we have infinite topics of conversation, our words dry up as the pace speeds up and the slope gets steeper.

We reach Saint Gervais, where thousands of spectators are waiting and cheering from behind the barriers. It is all very similar to last year; however, this year I notice that the other runners look at me and talk to me differently. Is it because they see me as a rival now that I have shown my worth rather than simply because I am keeping pace with them? What a person is capable of doing in a race isn’t expressed by past race results, but rather by what he does in this moment and the pace he sets now. Last year I was an unknown quantity, and many people thought that I was a mere sparring partner giving his all but that my bubble would eventually burst; this year they see me as an experienced runner. In the meantime, it is the same Ultra-Trail. What is the difference? What has changed?

Several hours later, I am alone. The lights behind me have disappeared, and there is only the night, the wind, and the path in front of me. I hear my breathing and try to keep it in time with my strides in order to establish a regular rhythm and a reference point to follow. I keep thinking about what lies ahead: In five minutes I will reach the col, in one hour the lake. … I try to find short-term goals to spur on my feet and keep moving forward. However, the hours pass, and in the pitch-black, time vanishes into the white circle of light from my headlamp. I enter a spiral that is difficult to escape, in which all external references disappear and the only thing keeping me in touch with reality is the beam of light illuminating the next
yard of track. I become self-engrossed, and I begin to spin stories in my mind to give meaning to what I am doing. I am a fugitive fleeing the police across the mountains, a medieval knight escaping from the army pursuing him; I am chasing bandits who have set fire to my home. When day breaks, I am so deep into the spiral that I can’t snap out of it and my mind comes back to reality only in occasional, brief moments of lucidity.

It is afternoon when, on my descent back to Chamonix, something pulls me up, brings me back to the world outside the walls of my mind. It is a moment I’d been longing for, because the run down signals the end, a return to reality. I feel the warmth of the sun on my skin and the sweat streaming down my face, hear my noisy breathing. I hear my name broadcast over the loudspeakers as thousands of people start to chant it. I feel the excitement rising. I want to cry and laugh, to shout out in joy, but I’m still not entirely in control of my body; part of me is still seeking a way out of the spiral. I feel dizzy. The light is so bright I can’t see faces; there is so much noise I can hear nothing; there are so many hands touching me that I lose control of my own movements. It’s all been too sudden. In only a few minutes I have tried to move from the utter solitude of my inner being into a world that is exploding outside of me.

I have always thought of myself more as a mountaineer than a runner, and you should climb to the top of a mountain only if you are able to descend afterward. To come down from the top after a race, you must forget yourself and everything around you so that you can organize your emotions after a victory, get back to work, and let go of the past. You can’t prepare another ascent until you’re all the way back down.

On my run today there aren’t thousands of people chanting my name or cameras recording every step I take or my every word. Today I don’t have to make any exceptional effort; nobody knows where I am, and nobody will know how it has gone. I’m skiing up to a needle of a mountain peak whose name I don’t even know. I left home three hours ago with my skis, and after leaping a couple of cols, I found I was confronting a magnificent peak. I don’t know its name or altitude, whether it is easy or difficult, who was the first to climb it or whether anyone ever has. Nevertheless, I can’t take my eyes off this magnificent peak or stop my feet from taking me to its base as I search for the easiest way to the top.

I can see a rocky gully that goes nearly to the top, and it looks feasible. I’m sure it’s not the most sensible thing to climb that gully alone, without informing anyone of where I’ve gone and not knowing how difficult it is or what dangers might lurk there, but I can’t resist the impulse that’s driving me to climb it. Why? Nobody is pushing me, and it’s certainly not the best thing for my training. The only reason I can give is that there is no real reason. I can only follow the powerful urge driving me on toward it, as if it were a pretty girl with bewitching charms. I do it for my own sake because I must, to see if I can.