Running on Empty (21 page)

Remember the wizard Merlyn turned King Arthur into a badger so he could learn a few things, finish his education. Hear this, from
The Once and Future King:

The stories she told me stayed with me. When we faced difficulties with logistics or other issues during the early stages of getting the run's start date secured, did I style myself after Julius Caesar to move the battle plan forward? No, but I drew something from the legacy of his strength. When I came up with plantar fasciitis and tendonitis, did I imagine myself an injured god? No, of course not, but the story was there somewhere in my mind, making me believe on some level that I was still invincible. And when Charlie angered me to the point of rage, did I rain down black death like Apollo? Or poison him with the ichor of my blood? I suppose I did, a little. But only once, and I'm getting ahead of myself now. Many emotional ups and downs had to happen before I completely lost it with him.

 

In McCook, the headwinds had come up again, and the hills had started to roll, both of which slowed me down, although I was pressing myself to maintain elite status. (Defining that status as sixty miles a day, a slightly adjusted “world-class” distance, was overly strict, but that's what I had in my head, nonetheless. Usually, this standard is set on a sheltered, flat track or field, not out in the elements, on the road, with unpredictable elevation changes and traffic. So I'd taken the usual number, one hundred kilometers/sixty-two miles, and done this calculation—
let's see, every thousand feet of altitude gain is equal to an extra mile
—to come up with my goal of a minimum of sixty miles per day, cutting myself a whopping two miles a day in slack.) Having run over sixty miles the second day after my MRI and pretty much maintained that mileage since then, I was compensating, setting second-tier goals since I had to make my peace with not breaking Frank Giannino's overall world record. It was beyond my reach now: We'd figured that setting a new record would require covering seventy-seven miles a day from this point forward, nearly the same mileage that we'd done at the beginning of the race, before my injuries. Realistically, that wasn't going to happen.

Just as we were admitting that we'd have to lower our sights, I could smell the humidity in the air and knew rain was coming.

On day twenty-nine, near Hastings, the wet began and didn't let up for five days, which seemed apropos, as a new depression was setting in. The act of saying, out loud, that the record was gone made my defeat all too real. Sure, the new goal of sixty miles per day would keep me in the running for the grand masters and possibly the masters records, but I thought I wouldn't be able to maintain what I considered a world-class pace. The overcast weather suited my mood, and the rain fell like tears, slowly turning the dirt under my feet to sticky mud that threatened to tear my shoes off or, at the very least, weigh me down.

There were bright spots, though. My foot was actually improving, which baffled me. How was this possible? Perhaps it was because I was no longer running on radiant heat; day temperatures were pleasant, and the ground no longer sent fire up my legs. Perhaps it was because my body had become so efficient, with my metabolism revved up and certain systems shut down to preserve energy (my hair and nails had almost stopped growing), that healing was prioritized and sped up. Perhaps it was because I could, occasionally, get off the pavement and onto softer ground.

As the rain kept coming, some of the back roads became impassable for the van and RV, which meant that we had to either reroute or split up. On day thirty-one, we opted to go our separate ways, with me taking a direct route through a valley and saving four miles, and the vehicles following an alternate route and meeting me on the other side. For me, this turned out to be a wonderful solution: I had a good ol' time dashing through the mud, slipping and sliding over the uneven terrain. I covered only about two miles in an hour, but I enjoyed every minute. It reminded me of adventure racing, being on the loose and off-road. I'd started across the pastureland and then the trail had disappeared completely, but I just kept following a direct line eastward. When I reached a creek where a bridge was supposed to be, I wound up dropping down about thirty feet to reach the riverbed, hopping across, then scrambling back up the bank. Sure enough, someone had erected a bridge there, but it had long since fallen down. Built of old timbers and square-headed bolts with large cast-iron washers, the bridge looked to have been from the 1920s. Judging from the thirty-foot trees that grew on the old roadbed on the other side, and the erosion of the roadbed, it looked to me as if this bridge hadn't been used for forty or fifty years.

When I finally reached the crew again, I was in good spirits—better than I had been in some time—and Heather was glad to see it. While I animatedly talked to her about the bridge I'd found (I love old structures), I could see her eyes narrowing, but she just kept smiling, as I'm sure she was relieved to see me so excited about something. Only later did I find out that navigating had been the source of friction between her and Kate O'Neil, the producer in charge of the route, who'd kept insisting that, first, my crew
could
follow me on my way as planned and, second, if the roads were so bad that they really couldn't go with me, then it should be a simple thing to detour and find their way, as the area's roads were supposed to be laid out on a grid. But what Kate didn't know, and what Heather couldn't convince her of, was that out in the country, when it rains like this and roads get washed out, there's nothing easy about navigating on the fly, and, besides, what you see on your sophisticated mapping software isn't always what you get in the real world. So I'm sure Heather felt at least a little vindicated, not only because the old bridge, supposedly still viable for crossing the creek, was down and had been for a long time, but also because Kate's production group had gotten stuck in the mud for a couple of hours. Heather good-naturedly wrote it all off as the ignorance of city folk and said nothing about it to Kate, except, “Yes, it can be difficult to get through out here.” We were lucky that the obvious problems with our route had detoured our vehicles elsewhere, and that our crew was skilled at dealing with bad road conditions, as the whole thing had turned out to be no inconvenience to me. That bit of cross-country was probably the best fun I'd had yet, even if I did wind up with about three pounds of mud on each foot.

We'd gotten into the routine of changing clothes and shoes fairly frequently, as the rain kept soaking through anything I had. No matter what they say about waterproof, breathable rain gear, it doesn't work. Good old fleece is the best as long as it isn't a complete downpour. So I made another costume change and got back out on the road after my adventure, feeling a little better about things, but it didn't take long for my mind to spiral back down into the vague malaise that had become my default mental state.

Two things were working on my psyche.

First, I simply could not get my head around the remaining effort, about fourteen hundred miles and too many days to go. Now, I know I shouldn't have even been trying to comprehend it: Thinking about how much more I have to run is a bad idea in any long-distance endeavor, and this was beyond anything I'd attempted before. But I couldn't help it, especially at dusk, when whoever brought me the reflective gear would arrive. Everyone hated that job, because I was predictably uncooperative about putting it on. I'd start thinking about having another night on the road, which meant I had hours to go before sleep, which meant that when I woke up in the morning I'd be tired again, which meant that the first marathon of the day would be another period of “warming up” and “recovery” from the night before, which meant that . . . my mind would just take me out of the present moment and into a future I dreaded. Every day was like the next, so it made the current effort feel pointless, endless, empty.

And second, I was starting to feel helpless, even more dependent on Heather than ever before. Since I was out there on the road alone most of the time, I spent most of it missing her. Sure, I could distract myself with my usual tricks, remembering old Native American legends about the area, admiring a vintage 1950s 8N Ford tractor that reminded me of the one I'd driven as a boy, or just cranking up the music. But it seemed that my mind would always come back and settle in this unsettled place.

I was on a roller coaster of emotion.

Good thing Caleb Beasley caught up with me on a major road later on the same day that I'd gone cross-country, because I really needed another boost. He was someone who'd signed up on the Running America website to be a guest runner, and when he found me, I was delighted to have the company. As we ran, he told me that his wife and their newborn baby were in a car tailing our crew van, and Caleb said he'd be happy to introduce them when he was done running for the night. When we stopped, and his wife brought that little girl out into the darkness, my heart soared! She had the biggest, most beautiful eyes I've seen. As I held her, a wave of hope washed over me.
How precious life is! Oh, this little one has so much to learn, and has such a bright future with these two great parents loving and supporting her.

The rush from that encounter lasted for hours, throughout the rest of the night. It was a strange sensation, to feel so “up” yet melancholy at the same time. Holding that baby had put me in mind of my own children when they were that age, and all the old feelings of new fatherhood warmed me as I continued through the rain, running on Highway 2 and crossing the Missouri River. Not long after that, we arrived in Iowa, and early in the morning, just after 1 a.m., I finished my sixty miles for the day ahead of schedule. Although the weather was slowing me down, the exhilaration of seeing the newly born baby had allowed me to make up the time I'd lost, with very little perceived effort. It was fortunate that I'd had such a good night, because the next day would bring devastation.

 

A couple of days before, Heather had met with Charlie, Chuck, and Kate in Charlie's RV to discuss several crewing and production issues. There were budgetary constraints and the time-line slippage to cover, as we were behind schedule. They were also asking Heather to take a break, step back a bit, and let Chuck take up the slack. Someone had convinced Kate that Heather was overloaded, and supposedly there had been some complaints about my wife's demeanor: She was “too specific” in her instructions and requests; this didn't “empower” others, the mysterious “someone” had said. Charlie made some accusations that were both inaccurate and, frankly, insulting, but Heather kept her mouth shut, even when she was threatened with being sent home if she didn't shape up. (Surely these were empty threats, even if Kate actually believed this crap. Who would send a man's wife away from him when he needs her most?) She felt strange undercurrents in that meeting, as if there were some behind-the-scenes maneuvering, something she couldn't quite put her finger on, but she decided to let it go, not address any of it or mention it to me because it just felt like “drama.” Instead, Heather would get back to work and let her dedication to me speak for itself. While the personal criticisms surely hurt, she set that aside and chose to go with the flow, even though she knew that at least one of the decisions in that meeting would prove to be agonizing for both of us. But she didn't know exactly when the hammer would drop.

 

On day thirty-two, after running with some local schoolkids and their teachers through Riverton, I took my post-marathon nap, visions of Mayberry-style towns dancing in my head. Everywhere we went these days, I expected to see Sherriff Andy, Aunt Bee, Opie, or Deputy Barney Fife . . . We passed barbershops with candy cane poles out front, ran down quaint streets lined with tidy sidewalks and ribbons of flowerbeds, noted the churches with round and square steeples—painted and precisely shingled, occasionally topped with rusted, corrugated tin roofs—admired the squared-off storefronts and brick buildings with their mortar perfectly pointed and maintained. It was Main Street, U.S.A., a throwback to the days some people call innocent. Certainly looked wholesome to me.

Shortly after I woke up and got back on my way, I saw the RV up ahead, which was odd so soon after I'd taken a break. When I got closer, I could see Kate there—also strange because she usually had a lot better things to do than hang out at the Starship. As I approached, she informed me that they'd determined it was time to send Roger home.

Resigned, I told her that I wanted to tell Roger myself. I felt it would be wrong, somehow, to have anyone else break the news.

Heather and I had discussed this before, seen it coming, as production had been pushing to get rid of Roger since Sterling, Colorado. They had their reasons, some budgetary, some procedural—some legit, some complete bullshit—and we'd seen the writing on the wall. The most ludicrous reason to let him go: “All Roger does is drive the RV.” Apparently, no one had noticed that he also prepared the daily planner and did most of the jobs no one else wanted: laundry, cooking, cleaning, and shopping. Although I'd insisted Heather negotiate to keep Roger when Kathleen was sent home, we'd known it was only a matter of time. Roger knew, too, and had told Heather to stop fighting for him; he could see it was a losing battle and it was eating her up. Still, we'd dreaded the possibility of losing our beloved neighbor, Heather's main support system, and an important part of my crew.