Running on Empty (11 page)

10. Quitting is not an option.

All ten of these commandments were in play as I was enduring my own version of Hell Week in the desert along California Highway 88. Sure, I would think about stopping all the time, but I kept a lid on it. I never allowed myself to actually
consider
stopping, but instead let the thought enter my mind and then drift away, like a child fantasizing about living on the moon.
Yep, that would be nice, but...
Decades of training and confidence-building helped me surrender and accept the suffering. After years and years of thinking about it, I believe that such suffering offers a unique gift, allowing me to profoundly appreciate living, to pay attention to the little things, like the comfort of sitting in a chair or enjoying a meal on a plate with a fork and a spoon. These simple pleasures become infused with quiet joy, and the deeper things in life—love, compassion, connection—become supremely meaningful in the present moment.

Still, I asked myself, over and over again, why promote this madness in my life? Is it about me or about those who surround me, supporting me and loving me? As I headed down the road, there was plenty of time to contemplate this, and I hoped that I'd discover the true answer before land's end.

 

 

 

We'd come up out of the desert, but only for as long as we'd be in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. In cross section, the shape of the Sierras evokes a trapdoor, an apt metaphor for us as we began our ascent. Who knew what waited for us on the other side? The first two days had been predictably grueling—we didn't stop for anything but sleep and the occasional massage; we even ate on the go—but we had no idea how long we could continue at this pace, how long our bodies would allow it or how long we could hang on mentally. I'd been through extreme tests before and lost it, falling into a hallucinatory fog or having my body overcome my mind's ability to keep going. In 2003, I'd been nailed on are ankle by a rattler during a Primal Quest adventure race, which left me flat on my back and experiencing some entertaining hallucinations. (After a few hours, I recovered and continued with my team without telling anyone what had happened.) There had been a few other occasions when the physical simply overpowered the mental, usually due to injury or extreme fatigue and the delirium that accompanies it. It had happened only rarely, but it did happen, and I felt it could happen again, anytime.

For the moment, though, I felt “refreshed,” if you can call it that. As we came into Jackson, California, elevation 1,240 feet, the increasing altitude suited me despite the taxing climb. We would continue up, reaching our peak at just over 8,500 feet. (You can equate each thousand feet of altitude gain with running about one more mile on the flat, so on the day we went up the Sierras, I effectively ran about eighty miles.) Ground and air temperatures were still hot, measuring into the eighties even at higher altitudes, so I needed electrolytes to help me retain water and reduce cramping. By this time, I was also depending on my LEKI trekking poles to move at a fairly brisk pace, averaging about four miles per hour, swinging them beside me and planting them a little ahead of each foot before it struck the ground. You use them similar to cross-country skiing poles as an aid for stability and engaging arm strength to help propel you forward, which also unloads weight from your quadriceps and hamstrings, and allows you to roll your hips, using different muscle groups to keep you moving while the ones you usually recruit for running can rest a bit. Charlie had overtaken me during my lunch break at about five thousand feet, and now he was way out front—I thought I wouldn't see him again until we got to New York, as he seemed to be moving well.

However, I caught Charlie at a higher elevation, around eight thousand feet, and he unceremoniously dropped his shorts to reveal some angry red welts between his butt cheeks. He seemed intent on showing me what was slowing him down and insisted I take a good look. I'd experienced that painful chafing (and seen worse) in the past, so I felt for him, but to be honest, I didn't really want to be inspecting his bare ass on this lonely stretch over the Sierra Nevadas. Or anywhere, I suppose. I averted my eyes and tried to sympathize.

“Man, that looks bad . . . um, real bad
,
Charlie.” What I said to myself was less charitable.
That's it? If that's all you've got, my gawd, just shut up and run.

By day four, he could have skipped down the road stark naked and stopped to do a jig in front of me, and I probably wouldn't have reacted. On the third night, I'd finished my seventy miles again, then taken Ambien to help me sleep, and I'd spent the night with my legs up in the air, propped against the wall in an effort to drain some of the lactic acid, but that hadn't helped much.

After letting me sink into four hours of drug-induced doze, Heather had roused me to get going again, and I'd gone out that fourth morning, groggy and tired, my legs swollen, my calf muscles tight, and generally feeling like an old man with creaky joints and aching bones. I'd become increasingly sore, and I knew that my body was undergoing a tough transformation: slowly, painfully morphing into a running machine. It would probably take another week or more of this torture before I'd settle in and the aches and pains would subside some.

 

My predictions were proving dead-on. This was, bar none, the toughest thing I'd ever attempted. Even a hard day of climbing Mount Everest didn't compare with these seventy-mile days.

That was true even considering the worst conditions on the great mountain, which Tibetans call Chomolungma (“saint mother”): the sudden storms, the jagged crevasses and roaring glacial streams, the cutting winds up to 125 miles per hour, temps dipping to forty below, and oxygen deprivation. In high-altitude mountaineering, there's a saying about getting overzealous and doing too much under these extreme conditions, “Don't let your brain go to your feet,” and by necessity, our pace on Everest was slow. So often, I found myself feeling as if I ought to be doing something more, but the altitude dictated plenty of downtime. As I ran across California, I never once read a newspaper or even sat in a chair, but at base camp, I'd sat and listened to a short-wave radio, tinkered with the generator to make sure it was in good shape (my experience with farm machinery got me the job as camp mechanic), shot the breeze and played card games with some of the other people on the expedition. Nearly every day during the couple of months in Tibet, I'd written about my thoughts and experiences there. I'd been fortunate not to suffer from most of the common effects of altitude (headaches, nausea, double vision, hallucinations), so my impulse was always to push harder, but it was tempered by the knowledge that reaching the summit of the tallest mountain on earth required that I slowly acclimatize, expending just enough energy, but not too much, at increasing altitudes. Pushing yourself too hard at such heights becomes idiocy: Muscles waste away with what I'd consider moderate use at nineteen thousand feet and above. Keeping weight on becomes a concern as you ascend; at common elevations, you'd need to run about fifty miles to burn a pound of fat, but in the “death zone” over twenty-five thousand feet, your body feeds off muscle even when you're sleeping—it's the fuel of choice at extreme altitude. When I came down off Everest, I'd lost fifteen pounds, most of it muscle; my spare tire still circled my midsection, though. Heather called me “the crooked man” because my hips canted to the left, no doubt because I'd lost core muscle strength.

Running, I felt isolated, alone. On Everest, I'd been constantly surrounded by people, some of them highly entertaining. Our Russian guide, Alex Abramov, was a real character and a confidence-inspiring leader. He stands about six feet, with hunched shoulders, and you'd never guess by looking at him that he's a world-class climber. In the sport of mountaineering, though, appearances don't mean anything; so much of success in climbing depends on weather, adaptability to altitude, genetics, experience, common sense, and luck. People you'd never expect will do extraordinary things, and ones who are “buffed out” can have the hardest of times, or fail.

The Russians had brought copious amounts of their favorite beverages, rum and vodka, and they were generous with them at dinnertime, toasting round after round until everyone was shit-faced. They'd also brought a fifty-five-gallon drum of cabbage to make borscht, and loved to snack on salted fish and smoked pig fat cut into strips and eaten off the knife (like I'm accustomed to carving off a piece of cheese) or dropped into a vat, of fat and fried: full of calories and flavor. The team had spared no expense with the equipment and tents, making for quite a comfortable experience, save the harsh winds and temperatures, the trouble sleeping, and the suffocatingly thin air as we got closer to the top.

So we were in capable hands with Alex, and he had a great sense of adventure and an even better sense of humor. He's renowned for his skill and for being a bit of a wild card. One morning, I asked him over breakfast about something crazy I'd heard he'd done: made an expedition with a Land Rover to the top of Mount Elbrus. All true, he told me. They'd set a world record for vehicular-assisted mountain climb (18,510 feet), and then took off to sun themselves at the Russian Riviera, along the Black Sea. A few months later when they returned to fetch the Rover from the top of the mountain, he said, it was colder and dangerously icy, so he and the climbers went to get some chains and left the driver up top with the Rover. Impatient and foolhardy, Alex's driver decided he'd handle it alone. Of course, the descent got out of control, and he had to bail out—just in time, too, before the vehicle started tumbling down the mountain and crashed into some rocks, knocking a tire loose that shot down toward the climbers bringing the chains, nearly killing them all. But the driver and the team survived, and the Rover remains “parked” there on Elbrus.

No matter what you wanted, it seemed Alex could make it happen. While we were at advanced base camp one night, I overheard him talking to the cook about some meat Alex had ordered, but it hadn't arrived by porter yet. I couldn't see either of them, so I was picturing Alex glaring and growling at the cook, his bushy eyebrows knitted and his teeth bared. A guy who could survive a hurtling tire on Elbrus wasn't going to be denied his meat.

“What you think, we vegetarians?!”

Then he calmly got on the radio and called down to base camp, several thousand feet lower on the mountain, and menaced the cook there: “If you no bring meat up tomorrow, I come down there and
kill
you.”

Of course, he was joking, and with his accent it sounded like something out of
The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
I must have laughed for five minutes afterward. But true to form, Alex came through: The next night we had meat on the table.

Just once that I can recall things didn't swing Alex's way. Before leaving Katmandu, I'd negotiated with the local dealer to buy our generator and come back with what I thought was a good price. Alex and I went to buy the thing, and he insisted on trying to get an even better deal—if Alex is any indication, Russians are
really
into dickering. He haggled, he argued, he pestered, and the dealer got so fed up with the intense bargaining, he didn't want to sell the generator to us at all. We finally settled on a price that was higher than the one I'd negotiated.

Yet Alex has my enduring respect. Russian climbers are considered the Michael Jordans of the sport, and he introduced me to the best of the best in his country, the Russian National Climbing Team—the best in the world, in my opinion. They had set up base camp a month earlier than us, and our group spent a lot of time socializing with the national team. They were setting a never-done-before North Face route
without
oxygen. They didn't use Sherpas but would do very heavy equipment carry-ins to their high camp at the base of Everest below the North Face, with half the group alternating weeks on and off, going up to set hardware and rope. Incidentally, the last three thousand feet of the North Face is vertical rock—unbelievably tough! These guys are hard-asses.

One of their new members was a man in his mid-twenties who had proven himself worthy prior to Everest, a real stud by anyone's account. I'd talk with him whenever he was in camp, and then one day he stumbled by me, looking dejected. When I asked what had happened, he said that he'd gotten kicked off the team because, when he was up around twenty-seven thousand feet, he'd griped about his hands being cold. With stares icier than the glacial wall they were scaling, his teammates told him to climb down and go back to base camp. He was done. That's it: He was finished. The Russians don't stand for any whining, no matter how justified.