Running on Empty (16 page)

“You look good, Dad.”

We continued down Poudre Canyon as the crew leapfrogged the van ahead of us, and Heather took Elaine's car to Fort Collins to shop and call my mother to wish her a happy birthday. While Elaine and I walked, we caught each other up, fell back into our easy way of chatting and discussing, even though our views on so many things, from politics to parenting, lay at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Walking with my daughter, my heart settled, my mind calmed, and my mood lifted.

 

“How could you even think about doing this?”

A few years earlier, Elaine had been dead set against me climbing Mount Everest, and she'd been completely unambiguous with me about her feelings: It was selfish. Reckless. Simply the wrong thing to do when my youngest, Ali, was a teenager and depended on me. “You've been away from the family enough, Dad. Even when you were home, you were often far away. Dad! The death rate on Everest is ten percent. One in every ten people who reach the summit of Everest
don't come home.
”

She was right, and I still question my decision to go. My rationalizations: a wealth of experience with extreme sports, including the Raid Gauloises in Nepal, when I'd reached more than seventeen thousand feet and dropped to a frighteningly low oxygen saturation of 70 percent at altitude, which blurred my vision and left me barely able to move. Right after that brush with blindness and paralysis, I'd thought maybe Everest was out of the question, but later, after I summited Denali, Aconcagua, and Kilimanjaro with no ill effects from altitude, I came to believe that it was still worth trying. Many of the people who'd died on the Great Mountain, I believed, had been ignorant of or ignored their limits, but I'd learned not to push too hard at altitude. Through years of ultrarunning and adventure racing, I'd learned how to take care of myself, including hydration, electrolytes, and nutrition. I knew my own limits well enough to pull the plug if things got out of hand.

When the time came to summit, I was okay: As I climbed to the top, I felt well within myself, talking, gathering rocks, taking pictures, checking off everything on my Everest summit to-do list, and even helping Alex with a few things on his. He'd remembered to take a plastic troll and place it on the top but had forgotten to take a rock in its place—something he'd promised to do. So I supplied him with one. On my mental checklist: Take photos of Pemba Sherpa and another climber who'd summited with me, have someone take a full-body picture of me, take a picture of myself close up without the oxygen mask on, take a surround video from the summit, gather rocks from the top, and leave a card that Heather had made with a prayer on one side and pictures of her and the kids on the other, with the caption, “We love you. Get to the top . . . then come home to us.” I'd called Heather on the satellite phone to tell her that I'd made it, and afterward, she remarked that I'd sounded surprisingly compos mentis.

Still, there were moments completely out of my control, including my nearly fatal fall into a glacial stream when I was on my own one day. By wrapping my arms around a large boulder, I was able, eventually, to pull myself to shore and safety.
Holy crap! I almost just became the first person to drown on Everest!
Shaking more from fear than from the cold, for the next few miles, I climbed briskly, generating enough body heat to survive as I made my way up to advanced base camp and the warmth of my tent.

So I remain unresolved about the wisdom of my decision to go. In hindsight, I can say it was a good experience, an important one, and I returned to my family alive. That doesn't change the fact that Elaine was right, too. No matter how I spin it or justify it, the bottom line is that I chose to risk it, and I didn't put my family first. I prioritized my own dreams, and I didn't let anyone else's concerns sway me. Bring me to tears, yes, but I went anyway.

No doubt Elaine believed this run across America was ill-advised, too, but I think she was assured, at least, that it wouldn't kill me.

One of my closest friends, Mark Macy, and I have talked often about how our athletic careers affect our families. He's an ultrarunner, one of the all-stars of the Alaskan hundred-mile Iditafoot, and my teammate during all but one of the nine Eco-Challenges. We've spent countless hours and miles together in locations like British Columbia, Australia, Patagonia, Morocco, Borneo, Fiji, and New Zealand, most of the time cussing and laughing our way through some pretty hairy situations.

We agree that we're two selfish sons of bitches.

Still, Mace has done a better job with balancing the needs of his family and his own aspirations than I have. I continue to learn from him, including how positive relationships and great athletic achievement can actually complement one another, building courage, confidence, and perseverance for both. Even though he's a couple years younger than I am, he's a mentor to me, showing me how a man can both honor his family and follow his dreams, how he can be emotionally open and still a fierce competitor in the field—a temperance and temperament I have yet to master. His wife and children
always
come first. Whenever we entertain the idea of doing anything together, he thinks about how it will affect Pam and their three kids before he signs on. Would he have gone up Everest if he'd had the chance? I don't know. Maybe. But I know he would have consulted the family about the decision, not just announced it, like I've made a habit of doing.

 

In the evening after Elaine's arrival, I stopped at the RV to find a whole party of folks who'd just arrived, including Mace and two of his kids, and Theresa, the friend who'd introduced Heather and me years ago. Standing there with so many people to support me, I couldn't believe my good fortune: Heather and Elaine would crew together that day, and Mace said he and his kids would be going out to run with me as soon as I was ready. It was like a big reunion, and we joked and laughed, talking about everything but running, and before we knew it, it was time to get going again.

Leaving the RV on a high, I set out with Mace, his son, and one of his daughters to pace me, and we ended the night at the intersection of Colorado Highway 14 and Interstate 25, a major north-south highway. Well over a decade ago, I'd run the length of the state on I-25; everything around me was familiar that night, and I reveled in it. We staked out my finish and then drove to a nearby Super 8 for rest. In the van on the way to the hotel, I thought about how, for the next three days, we'd be on routes I'd driven many times back when I was behind the wheel of the rendering truck even before Elaine was born. Tomorrow, Taylor and Ali would join us. I'd be surrounded by the land and the people I love most.

 

The Colorado landscape features rugged beauty; it's a hardy and magnificent place. The mountains jut into the sky, rising from the plains that flow endlessly, undulating toward the horizon. Exquisite wildflowers—blue and red columbine, white prickly poppy, yellow alpine avens—defy the harsh, wind-driven winters and come back to bloom again each year in the warmer months. Our lower-lying agricultural fields, wedged beyond the rocky hillsides, remind me of Australia's Queensland, where Mace and I once climbed up the rugged Mount Bartle Frere for an Eco-Challenge adventure race. We'd jumar, using mechanical devices with “gripping cams” that lock on to and slide up a rope, to help us ascend underneath a five-hundred-foot waterfall into a thick, leech-infested jungle (not that we have
those
in Colorado), and then drop thousands of feet into massive sugarcane fields that looked like corn stalks from home, as harvesters mowed through the fields in the dead of night. In a sleep-deprived state, Mace and I had thought they looked like alien spaceships hovering overhead.

Many of the traits I most admire about my home state and the untamed environments of adventure racing reflect the values I've tried to pass on to my children, and I thought about this as Mace and I ran on the asphalt of Highway 14, talking a lot but staying silent every now and then.
Strength. Resilience. Discipline. Follow-through. Responsibility. Honesty.
Perhaps most intently,
independence
and
self-reliance.
Both native to and cultivated in me, these things grew even more important in my life after Jean's death. The kids learned to not be clingy, to have strength and rely upon themselves and their own good judgment, and this has been a double-edged sword: Surely they've developed strong wills and stubbornness, but in fostering their independence, we sacrificed some interdependence, some connectedness, some closeness.

Like most parents, I can say I succeeded some of the time, and . . . well, I'm just waiting to see how a few things turn out before I decide to put certain events and actions in the win or loss column. Some of what I admire about my kids came naturally to them, like Ali's big heart or Taylor's ability to stay with something until it's finished. When he was just four and weighed maybe forty pounds, I brought a cord of wood to the house and started to stack it outside. Of course, Taylor wanted to “help.” So I humored him: He'd wrestle with a piece of wood and throw it on the stack in the time it took me to get a few armfuls from the truck. Soon, though, a Broncos game started, and I told him to c'mon. Take a break. Let's go in and watch this on TV together, and then we'll go back out and finish.

Nope, he wanted to stay outside and stack.

Suit yourself, kiddo.

I figured he'd get bored and come inside in a few minutes.

An hour later, I went out to check on him, expecting that he'd wandered off to collect bugs or something, but there he was, finishing the job, having stacked nearly an entire cord of wood by himself. Holy cow, some of those split logs were as big as he was! We high fived, and I congratulated him heartily, man to man.

You'd think Taylor and I would have had an easy time of it, father and son, clearly a lot alike from the very beginning. But it wasn't easy, not for him or me, in part
because
we're so alike. Taylor, too, has always seemed determined to learn things in his own time, in his own way, by trial and error. Like me, he's learned from his failures just as much as his successes. That's brought him some hard knocks and a few false starts, but I think he's on the other side of that now, and I'm proud of him for having persevered.

Despite the fact that I love him so much and Taylor can be hilarious—he's got a sharp, irreverent sense of humor—our relationship has always been something like a bull elk with his offspring: serious, territorial, somewhat adversarial. So I was curious to see how it would be to have him with me and his sisters for this part of the run.

Around nine o'clock in the morning, we approached Ault, a little Colorado town about ten miles north of where I was born in Greeley. There, we met up with everyone: Taylor and Ali had arrived, and my mom, sister, and brother were with them, too, along with my aunt, nieces and nephew, some friends, a few local reporters, and representatives from the United Way. Such a homecoming!

Never had so much family come out to see me go. Here were three generations of the Ulrich clan all gathered, Mom the matriarch of the bunch at eighty-five years old. There was something overwhelming about it, to see her there with all my children, both my siblings, and Heather, along with some of my dearest friends. I couldn't help missing Dad, yet the scene felt right, just as it should be. Everyone there was happy, proud, and loving. I was at peace, if just for a few minutes, as we stood near a farmstead that resembled the eighty acres where Mom and Dad had raised our family.

After the intense loneliness of the last three weeks, this was something else. Friends continued to show up, come with me for a while or stop and talk by the side of the road, and I was hungry for the distraction. Everyone's company was uplifting, deeply satisfying social nourishment, feeding my heart and my soul.

Because of this, I was running faster than I should have, juiced on the excitement. Later that night, after the visitors were gone, I was still high from all the human contact. Maybe it wasn't just that, though, because I found out later that Taylor and one of our new crew, an upbeat college kid from Texas whom Charlie had brought, had been having a lot of fun working together and even spiked some of my drinks with shots of beer. Reportedly, I'd picked up the pace again.

For the next couple of days, my kids stayed on, nicknaming themselves the MKC, “Marshall Kid Crew.” It was comforting to watch them fall into old family patterns, poke fun, get on each other's nerves, and also pitch in together. As usual, Elaine would play “mother” and peacekeeper, trying to appease the bickering between Taylor and Ali, who tend to butt heads. (Ali usually appreciates this refereeing; Taylor, not so much, as he doesn't care for being told what to do/how to behave by anyone, including his big sister.) Family dynamics aside, they got the job done, and they were a delight to have around: There was Ali mixing drinks and fixing food in the van's “kitchen” (the backseat), Taylor taking the driver's seat (our “wheelman”), and Elaine acting as “the gimp,” a name we gave to the person running food and drink out to me. They were a godsend, all acting like my kids but also keenly aware that their job was to support me instead of the other way around. It was a welcome role reversal to feel their care for me. They made my world, as small as it was, big with their love.