Running on Empty (20 page)

Ray Zahab is fond of saying that the challenge of ultrarunning is 90 percent mental, and the other 10 percent is all in our heads. He's got it right: Beyond the marathon, the primary test becomes entirely psychological. If you can run twenty-six miles, then your body can surely carry you even farther (barring calamitous injury), and the only question is whether your mind can go the distance, too. As you push the body beyond its limits, running hundreds of miles a week for weeks on end, the physical challenges are predictable, with injuries and ailments nearly inevitable, and the mind can either help you or it can destroy you and diminish your chances of completing the task you've set for yourself. The difference involves certain skills and the ability to use the mind's tricks to your advantage.

Take hallucinations, for example. They're common during adventure races when a team goes beyond extreme fatigue, and they can range from mildly interesting to horrifying. During an Eco-Challenge in the northeastern United States, our group was sleeping about fifteen minutes a day for six days, and as we were paddling on the ocean near the beach in Newport, Rhode Island, all five of us started envisioning other people in the boats, some familiar to us and some not. I'd look at a teammate and see someone else instead. In my delusion, Alfred E. Newman from
Mad
magazine was aboard, for example. We also all started to think we were on a huge spillway, ready to plunge over the falls, because we could hear the waves crashing on the beach. The group paranoia got so intense that we paddled as hard as we could to reach the shore—and as we got closer, the sound of the waves grew louder, of course, making us even more frightened—which we could still recognize as our refuge, at least. By coming ashore there, we'd abandoned our original plan to go around the peninsula, so we wound up beaching our kayaks and portaging our boats through the city, right through downtown. We were lost for hours, struggling to find our way back to the beach on the other side of Newport, where the race finished. All of us walked away from that escapade with at most 20 percent of our faculties functioning; in fact, one of our teammates was hallucinating so badly that he didn't even recognize his significant other until after he'd slept for six hours. The race doctors had wondered if he'd ever regain thoughts of reality. We were all lucky that sleep brought him to his senses.

That was a dangerous situation, but there have been entertaining hallucinations, too: The wingless 747 that pulled up next to me during my solo crossing of Death Valley, people inside the plane waving at me and cheering me on. Or the silver bikini–clad woman on roller skates who glided in front of me, her lithe figure swaying side to side for about ten minutes. I hung onto that one for while, as I've learned the art of perpetuating the illusions that suit me as well as the skill of putting the nightmarish ones out of my head.

Was the out-of-body experience about which I asked Yiannis another form of hallucination? It's possible that they're on some kind of continuum, that hallucination holds a glimmer of the transcendence I felt just one time, and that Yiannis experiences all the time, but no. To say it was like a grand hallucination would be like saying that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is a really nice doodle. Nonsense, not even close.

During the run across America, I didn't hallucinate, although that would have been okay by me. It's a compelling dichotomy: Running takes discipline and focus. What makes it tolerable, though, is letting the mind drift, checking out of “real life,” where the legs keep moving as the world keeps turning, but the mind focuses elsewhere and notices, for example, the beauty of a bristlecone pine, bent and twisted by the wind.

A sports psychologist friend of mine, Dr. Murray Griffin, evaluated me in 2002, as he was interested in discovering what unique psychological traits athletes bring to their pursuits. My only off-the-charts mental skill, as it turns out, is my imagination. In fact, he says, what's most remarkable about my psychological profile is how “normal” it is. He observed:

Yes, I am great at fantasizing! The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. My aunt once told me a story about my father, how he'd come home from school with all the buttons ripped off his shirt. Seems his first-grade teacher was so frustrated with him that she'd grabbed him and popped them all off trying to get him to pay attention. Ultimately, he repeated that grade. My own mother used to tell me, all the time, to get my head out of the clouds, as I was a daydreamer. But she didn't fully discourage me: Mom, like my dad's mother, understood that her boy was bound for some version of greatness. Notably, my grandmother didn't say much about the button incident, either to Dad or his teacher. She just sewed the buttons back on his shirt. Dad went on to be extremely successful in business, due in large part to him being such a visionary.

Whenever I run through wilderness areas, I see myself embedded in the landscape, one of the trees, part of the wildlife. I think about how long the rocks have rested in a place, the swelling and drying up of the rivers over eras of rainfall and drought, the lives of the land's first people or of those who eventually developed the area. In my mind's eye, I picture a small settlement, or hunters moving across the plains, or a railroad or granary or industrial plant being built. When I cross paths with an animal, it stokes my imagination. What does the coyote think of me as I run past it? Where does the rattlesnake sleep? What did the falcon have for breakfast? What are the last thoughts of prey? What would it be like to make my home in a grove of Aspen trees, burrow under the leaves on the ground, catch my food with my bare hands?

Not too long ago, Elaine sent me an essay by Annie Dillard, “Living Like Weasels,” which hit me right between the eyes. It seems Ms. Dillard and I share a common train of thought, an appreciation for what nature can teach us about ourselves:

If you pursue it long enough, running can certainly teach you about mindlessness and, perhaps, give you a sense of being “open to time and death painlessly.” It takes you down deep and shows you the beauty of pursuing a “single necessity.” Even without intending to, by training the body to accept long distances, you train the mind what
not
to think about, such as how much long-distance running hurts and how slowly the time passes. Surrender—an acceptance of the fate you've chosen—provides you with the ability to endure more suffering, and the more times you do it, the higher the pain threshold rises and the more finely tuned your ability to endure becomes. Owning responsibility for what you're doing, whatever that may be, empowers.

Combating boredom requires more than flights of fancy, although they certainly help. Music helps, too, something I've been slow to adopt compared with most other runners. The bulky old players were cumbersome, and I always thought the music would ruin my concentration. Besides, I'd never had music during physical effort before, so I didn't know any better. Sometime in 2005, though, I finally put on a pair of headphones with a sleek little mp3 player and discovered that, if I like a song, I can listen to it over and over again, sometimes playing it forty or fifty times, falling into a rhythm, waiting with anticipation for a few words or motivating phrases that I especially relate to, applauding when they come. It doesn't mess with my concentration, and has turned out to distract me in a good way. During the transcon, there were about a dozen tunes I gravitated to, among them “Say Hey” by Michael Franti and Spearhead, “The Underdog” by Spoon, “Sing the Changes” by The Paul McCartney Project/The Fireman, “Real Real Gone” by Van Morrison, “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits, and especially “Just Us Kids” by James McMurtry. Hearing the same song over and over operated like white noise, having a calming effect and blotting out everything else, the music fusing with the motion and taking the edge off the physicality of running.

The most effective boredom-beater is something I call “time compression.” The longer you're out there and the more experience you have with the repetition of running, time can speed up. Or, maybe more accurately, time becomes less and less relevant. The miles and the moments melt into one another; as the terrain passes underfoot, the time passes, too. The two become almost indistinguishable.

It's a way of playing mind games with yourself to your own advantage. For example, with a set distance, you can focus on how quickly you'll move as you cover it, and set intermediate goals. It's wise to pay attention to those split times but not to get too hung up on the clock. I do know people who are totally into splits and beat themselves up if they don't reach those smaller, intermediate goals, but I'm more of a run-by-the-seat-of-your-pants guy: if I'm not feeling well, I slow down, and if I'm feeling good, I always try to work hard effectively—I focus on what's happening right now and make the most of it. I've had my best races when I loosely paid attention to my time and was pleasantly surprised by the split and the finish times.

In races where the finish is based on duration (say, twenty-four hours) instead of distance (as in a hundred-mile race), I take a slightly different approach. It's an ambiguous mind-set with the distance to be determined, but I can compare it to my old contests with Steve:
How many bales can I put up in an hour? How many miles can I run in twenty-four hours?
I've seen people who drop out once they meet a mileage goal in such a race, but for me, it's always about upping the ante and achieving a personal best. I go till the clock runs out.

In fact, it was during that first twenty-four-hour race in Buffalo, New York, the one where I wound up winning by running 122 miles in the allotted time, when I'd realized I had a talent for ultra-distances. I owe this, in part, to the advice of a gentleman I met during the race, who suggested that I slow my pace and take my time for the first fourteen to eighteen hours and then, he said, “Look around and you might be surprised to find that you're in the lead.”

His words stayed with me. I thought about him often in the years that followed, especially when I was out there in the void, running. I found out after the race that he'd been diagnosed with cancer not long before we met, and he succumbed to the disease a couple of years later. To my chagrin, I can't remember his name, but his advice was emblazoned in my mind:
Pace yourself. Believe in yourself. Don't sell yourself short. You have to think that you can win.

During my run across America, neither time nor distance could occupy my thoughts. I would run at my own pace; the distance was set and the time it would take to run that distance didn't matter; it was what it would be, and so I could (try to) relax and not think about how long it would take me each day to cover the miles. Sometimes I succeeded in letting this go; sometimes I didn't.

 

Gaius Julius Caesar. King Arthur. The Greek god Apollo.
At one time or another, I imagined that I was one with each of them. At least twice a week for a year in preparation for the transcon, a friend helped me condition my mind for the run this way. We'd discuss my fears, hopes, and goals. She'd tell me about how formidable a warrior Caesar was—ruthless, a master of leadership, beloved and admired by his men. She'd compare me to the heroes of the Greek classics, talk to me about myths and mystery and mastery, and say that when it came to running, I was operating on another plane: No one could touch me.

As I listened, I could feel her brainwashing at work, toughening my mind, impassioning and emboldening me to run. Even when I couldn't buy into it, I just kept my mouth shut. As she talked, I would inevitably feel powerful, like there was nothing that could stop me. I became invincible. Even as my farm-boy humility fought it, some part of my spirit latched onto the grandiosity that she knew I needed to complete this task.

There's an older story, one of the lesser-known chapters of Homer's
Iliad
(which is the story of the Trojan War) about one of the great warriors, Diomedes, who actually wounded several of the gods, including Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, and Ares, god of war. Who knew a god could be wounded, even by such a warrior? Their veins run with ichor, not blood. To taste it is to die . . .