Running on Empty (12 page)

The team was successful, and three men made it to the top from the North Face and without the use of supplementary oxygen, completing what's possibly one of the hardest-core climbing feats in high-altitude mountaineering.

No doubt there's a Russian word for “macho,” and they were defining it: to tough it out, never to complain, always to rely upon themselves first. But, sincerely, they would risk their lives for one another and anyone else on the mountain.

As I ran in the midday heat of the much smaller mountain range of the Sierra Nevadas, I thought about the cold and the camaraderie of my Everest adventure, and I wondered how this endeavor would ultimately stack up against it. So far, Everest was hands down the more pleasant experience.

 

A recurring nightmare had begun: Impending execution haunted my nights in the RV. Sometimes it was ambiguous like that, where I didn't know if I was headed for the electric chair or the gas chamber or lethal injection. Other times, I was standing in front of a firing squad. Regardless, just over two hundred miles along our route, a fear of death now dominated my dreams, torturing me in my sleep. My best guess was that my subconscious mind was trying to send a message:
You're killing yourself.

The wry, sad look Heather gave me when I confessed this to her told me she and my subconscious were in agreement
.

 

When we came down out of the mountains and reentered the arid, inhospitable desert dotted with sagebrush, I did my best to rest under the occasional shade tree and to stay out of the sun whenever there was a chance, but relief was rare. Although my crew was doing a great job of keeping me supplied with electrolytes and fluids, the heat was problematic. I was slowing down and feeling demoralized as we crossed the state line into Nevada.

Given all that, the sight of Carson City, the state capital just thirty miles across the border, was a relief. We'd find freshly cooked food there for dinner—at this point, I was living for the occasional milk shake or root beer float, and fried chicken or pork tacos, anything that didn't come in a sealed wrapper from a convenience store—and I liked imagining the people of the town, both in the present and the past. It is named after the frontier hero “Kit” Carson, and its downtown evinces the American Old West, but the historic trading post is now updated, more sophisticated than it must have been back in the 1860s when gold and silver miners, ranchers, millers, and gamblers first made their homes there. Thinking about all this as we entered the area, it was one of the few times that day when I dwelled on anything other than taking the next breath, the next step, and then the next, and the next, and the next on this road that seemed to push out to eternity, straight as an arrow.

The capitol dome loomed above the city, and it seemed hours before I finally passed the structure at the center of town, squared off in a post-and-lintel construction to support its six-sided cupola. Funny, if it weren't for the arches that held it high and the shine on its silver surface, that dome could have topped any one of the silver-and-brown-planked barns I'd passed along the road earlier that day. Once we were into the city, I got a close look at the capitol, as well as the massive buildings that lined the road where I ran, slightly north and midway through town. The traditional brick construction had been popular in the late 1800s, and it must have been enormously challenging to build, given that buildings were erected manually. At one point, I passed a modern casino, a stark contrast to the old structures, and its neon signs lit the way as I turned to head east. As always, I was relieved when we moved more directly toward New York, pointed straight to my goal just as a steeple on one huge church I saw pointed to the heavens.

As I ran into and through Carson City, I was feeling all right, comforted by being in a place where people live and work and lead normal lives. I ate with gusto, crunching my tacos and spooning a root beer float into my mouth while on the move. Later, leaving the area might have been a letdown—I always felt low just after a lift—except that a group of middle school kids who were playing soccer in a park had come out to cheer me on, and they cheered me up as I headed out of town. The documentary film crew had alerted the teams that we were on our way from San Francisco to New York, and they'd enthusiastically run out to the path alongside the park.

As I passed through, everyone chanted my name, “Marshall! Marshall! Marshall!” They ran with me for a couple of blocks, kicking up a big ruckus.

Who cares if it was contrived? Or that it was so quick that they were gone and I was on my own again in a matter of minutes? That small celebration gave me a big charge and kept me going. We exchanged plenty of high fives, and for a brief time, I forgot how tired I was.

Giving me yet another boost, some clouds rolled in to shelter me from the heat, and within thirty minutes of the lower temperature, I was feeling damn good and wanted to increase my lead. When I picked up the pace, my crew announced that I was running eight- to ten-minute miles, as good as or better than I'd run on day one—and it felt great to go faster. What a treat to let out my stride! I ran at this pace for another three hours. Game on!

When darkness dropped across the high desert, I could see little except what was directly ahead and illuminated by a headlamp I carried in my hand. Once again, fatigue took hold, I slowed down, and I resigned myself to running in this tunnel of light, blackness all around me. A passing truck's tailwind ripped my light away from me and sent it sailing out onto the highway, where the semi's wheels crushed it to bits. It snapped me out of my stupor, both frightening me and striking me as funny: Now I really was in the dark.

Dr. Paul fetched me a replacement, and the crew seemed to drift in and out as they stopped for me every mile, offering food and fluids. I moved through the night in a daze.

 

The next afternoon, I found out that Charlie was laid up in Fallon, Nevada, which I'd passed through earlier. I felt bad for him and worried that I'd had a hand in his demise. My stubbornness in sticking to that seventy-mile-a-day promise was surely screwing us both into the ground. We'd both been having major trouble with our Achilles tendons, and the heat from the pavement radiated up through the soles of our shoes and climbed our legs like a forest fire licking tree trunks. I'd cut a 3/4-inch notch in the back of my shoe and recommended that Charlie do the same to accommodate his inflamed tendons, but I didn't have any remedies for the hot pavement except to keep pressing forward. Whenever Charlie didn't make his mileage for the day, I'd just put my head down and pull out farther in front of him, driving both of us on. In turn, he'd been pushing me along from the rear, and that combined with my competitive nature had certainly helped keep me focused.

What would I do if I had to go it alone?
The idea terrified me.

The night ended with a spectacular display of stars, interrupted only by a few trucks that struggled up Sand Springs Pass beside me, breaking the quiet and the darkness. The elevation gain wasn't much, maybe a thousand feet; still, it took a lot of energy to get over it. When I ran down the other side of the pass, I was thirty-nine miles beyond Fallon, but my mind was back there with Charlie, fretting over the prospect of his injuries keeping him from going any farther.

Now the doubt that had been with me from the beginning began to overtake me, as I felt I was rapidly reaching the point of diminishing returns.

Surely my support team was wondering the same thing, not only about me but also about themselves. They were putting in long hours of their own. Roger, Kathleen, and Heather had each logged about nineteen hours on duty that day alone. Heather's role had transformed into full-time crew member as soon as Jesse's energy had flagged; now he was also back in Fallon, sick with bronchitis. Dr. Paul was in Fallon, too, to treat Charlie and to work with his crew to ensure that they were taking care of him properly.

Every day, Roger was driving the RV, cooking, shopping, cleaning, running laundry, and doing other errands. Before we got going each morning, he'd create a daily planner for me, a crucial mental aid that gave me some sense of where I was headed, what I could expect, and for how long. Otherwise, I felt completely out of touch, just a pair of legs moving through the desert, a shadow flickering across the sand. Sometimes, he also pitched in to help the team with directly supporting me on the road. Heather was constantly torn between being there for me and completing any other tasks she had, like coordinating the crew schedule, doing the shopping with Roger for all the food and my supplies, desperately searching small-town stores for decent socks for me (I hadn't packed enough), working with the production crew to ensure that I was running through especially scenic areas during “magic hour” (that time of day when the light is just right for gorgeous cinematography), and trying to work within tight budget constraints. Kathleen was constantly on duty, bringing me food, fluids, and electrolyte tablets, giving me massages, stretching me, helping Roger with cooking breakfast and cleaning the RV, consulting with Dr. Paul about my condition and possible ways to help, and generally trying to keep the peace. This race was tough on me, but it was no holiday for them, either. It was far more than any of us had bargained for.

For me, life had become incredibly simple, as it consisted of running a mile to reach the crew van, getting a few mouthfuls of food as I slowed for a minute or two, picking up the pace again until the next crew stop, and doing it all over again and again. I drank constantly, relieved myself when necessary. At the end of the day, I slept, and in the morning, I got up to run some more. That simplicity was beautiful, clearing my mind, putting me in touch with primitive instincts. It made me realize how perfectly humans were built to hunt and gather, and it was easy for me to imagine that I was no different from the ancients who'd inhabited the area, simply surviving and not thinking about the next step. My crew took care of everything, so all I had to do was take care of myself by obliging them. Nothing else mattered, and there was no reason to care about anything but breathing and running . . . down the road, up the hills, concentrating on forward movement. Paradoxically, I took comfort in it, a sublime effort that involved nothing more than running.

Yet the distances were taking their toll. The tendons in my upper and lower legs had begun to throb constantly, as if someone had cracked them both with a hammer. My muscles were so tight that they felt like guitar strings strung over the bridge of my aching bones. My Achilles tendon was giving me no relief, and my bones and joints hurt from the incessant pounding. I'd felt something like all this before—long adventure races would leave me with throbbing knees and aching legs—but this was different. The pavement was unyielding and unforgiving. Everything hurt now, even my arms and head from holding them upright. Surely, something would have to give.

Most of the time now, I was running in a trance, my mind focused far from the stress on my body and instead lingering on thoughts of my family, how much I missed Heather, how much I wanted to be with her. Whenever I saw my wife, it was usually for just a minute or two during a crew stop, when she'd bring me food or some other thing I needed, and we talked almost exclusively about the run: what I needed next, where we were headed, who was crewing, how it was going. I longed for the leisure to genuinely connect with her, and I spent a fair amount of time mooning, wishing for a cup of coffee and quiet conversation on our back deck at home. Occasionally, I'd be pulled out of my daydreams by something strange or beautiful in the immediate environment.

Outside Middlegate, for example, I saw a tree with something dangling from it—lots of somethings. It looked like one of the “sausage trees” I'd seen in Africa, huge kigelias hung with tubelike fruit. But when I was close enough, I could see that this was completely different: an old cottonwood festooned with thousands of shoes. Still, it sent me into a reverie, vivid memories carrying me away to a safari on the Serengeti Plain and then to the climbs up Kilimanjaro with Heather and Roger. I couldn't help thinking, too, about how much Heather's dad, Rory, would have delighted in this tree: quirky yet somehow artful, expansive and strange and right there in the middle of . . . nothing.

These “shoe trees” bloom on various roadsides of America. Some individual, in a fit of whimsy or irritation or rebellion, tosses a pair of shoes into a tree until the laces catch over a branch. Others follow suit, and soon enough, you have a tree laden with footwear. In keeping with tradition, Roger attempted to pitch a pair of my worn-out shoes into the tree and failed, the bright blue Pearl Izumis falling through the branches and into a massive pile at the base. Later, though, I was thrilled to hear that someone from Charlie's crew had come by with the camera guys and recognized my road-worn shoes by their color—especially easy to spot with the toe box cut out—retrieved them from the pile, and pitched them high into the tree, where I expect they still hang. I liked that we were all working together; this echoed the spirit of the run. Indeed, that tree was something to behold, out in the middle of nowhere, not another tree in sight, a testament to all the feet that had passed that way before mine.