Running on Empty (30 page)

When Heather and I walked back down the City Hall steps, Frank and I shook hands and hugged. I felt honored to be in his presence.

Later, Heather held me up as she had done so often in the last fifty-two days, and helped me off the grounds of City Hall. I looked in her eyes and remembered the many times she'd cupped my face in her hands, telling me, “You can do this. I have faith in you.”

In that moment, at the end of this journey, I could think about only one thing: how lucky I was to have her by my side.

Somewhere along a road in Indiana, I'd found a teddy bear with stuffing poking through its torn back and leg. Just as I'd done with the license plate and the horseshoe, I'd picked it up, taking a token of my run along that stretch, a mascot for the miles ahead. We'd perched him on the dashboard of the crew van along with the rest of my collection, and he'd accompanied us all the way to New York. Much later, after Heather and I returned to our home in Colorado, I'd given “Indy” a bath and repaired him with black thread, making a path of careful crisscross stitches through his pale pink fuzz.

Now, whenever I talk in front of a group about my run across the United States, I take Indy with me and show him to the crowd, noting that his little X's mark the spots of my own injuries. As we explore the meaning of this effort, the determination that secured the finish, the pain endured to get there, the kindness and encouragement that aided my every step, that small, soft toy serves as a reminder. This endeavor wasn't only about toughness and grit, but also about tenderness and grace. We found joy along the way, appreciated small comforts, turned to each other over and over again.

Heather and I required more of the same once the run was over: some tender care, some cosseting, some time to hold each other and enjoy a bit of ease before we could resume a sense of normalcy.

When we left City Hall, we stayed in Manhattan for several days, getting babied and catered to like we've rarely experienced. Everyone else went home, and we rested in the comfort of a friend's care, feeling rooted and safe. This was the same friend, my mentor and my muse, really, who'd introduced me to Ted Corbitt and sat with us in her living room as we talked about the history of ultrarunning, our admiration for the bunioneers, and our aspirations to finish a transcon ourselves. She was the one who'd called me with the news of Ted's death, and she was the one who'd admired Chris Douglass's work and mourned with us when he died so soon after we met him. She'd offered her money to finance the run; in the year leading up to it, she'd coached me and talked with me about myth, mystery, and the mastery of running, and her words had echoed in my mind all the way across the United States. She'd met us at the finish line with T-shirts honoring Ted's memory, and then she'd brought us home with her to begin the process of recovering from our ordeal. The only reason I haven't mentioned her by name is that she's an intensely private person who prefers to remain anonymous. Her interest has always been in the sheer athleticism of this event, and all the rest of it—the personal dramas and whatever notoriety might be gained—are of no consequence to her. It's one of the things I love about our friend, her dedication to running as an art form, an expression of who we are, boiling life down to its most basic stuff. Her love of the sport is pure, and we both have a commitment to honoring its past while looking to the future with dignity and grace.

When we left her home in early November, we drove the rented crew van back to Colorado in a state of disbelief, unable to imagine how we'd ever gotten across the United States. That's not to say we were impressed with ourselves; I mean, literally, that we couldn't get our minds around it. It was as if the 52½ days had disappeared from our memory banks, as if we'd stood in San Francisco one morning, and then
poof!
We'd magically appeared in New York City on Election Day.

It took a while for reality to dawn. In the first week at home, I felt the oddest sensation, or lack of sensation, related to time. Twenty-four hours seemed to stretch into forty-eight, time spooling out in a way that was disorienting at first. It felt so good to sleep that I spent about half my time in bed for nearly two months, sleeping upward of twelve hours a night. And I was constantly hungry, having become used to eating a few mouthfuls of food at least four times an hour, so I was snacking all day and then sitting at our table for three full meals, savoring every bite, chewing slowly, and eating until I was stuffed—I gained about fifteen pounds within a couple of weeks of coming home. It took longer, some months, before my body stopped hurting all the time. Not until close to a year later could I finally get back to my normal routine of running about sixty miles a week without feeling like hell, which it just now occurs to me is the same distance I covered nearly every day during the transcontinental run.

The first time I spoke publicly about this journey, a few months after we'd returned home, I hardly knew how to talk about it. There were parts of my experience that still made no sense to me, stuff I still needed to sort out. But I showed my photos and my mementos, and I told my surreal story. After that speech, to my chagrin, I cried during the airplane flight home. There was still a great deal that I didn't understand.

Now, though, it all just strikes me as the hardest thing I've ever done.

In April 2009, Heather and I returned to our route, driving this time. We retraced all 3,063 miles, still having a hard time comprehending the distance. We revisited the desert along Highway 50 from California to Utah, went up and over the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, traveled by seemingly infinite cornfields as we covered the expanse of the Midwest, crossed the great Mississippi River, and went on through the northeast to arrive, once again, in New York City. That car trip was about remembering and finding some semblance of closure. We both wrote journals in our hotel rooms at night, jotting down our memories of each day's route, reliving a lot of the emotions, including the highs and the lows. We stopped together to admire some of the sights we'd passed, often separately, during the run: the diverse natural landscapes, the small towns, the landmarks. We also stayed at places we'd wished we could have, ate in restaurants we should have, and checked out the chambers of commerce and local museums. We studied maps. We talked with people who'd seen the small commotion we'd caused the first time we'd come through—shop owners and townspeople, farmers and other local folks with an impressive knowledge of the history of their hometowns. We ate steak with Mitch and Blaine in McCook, Nebraska, and we spent some extended time with the Beiler family in Milheim, Pennsylvania.

It was surprising how vividly we could recall details—so many of them that there's a great deal that doesn't appear in the main narrative of this book. I've had to omit a lot, mostly because these details mean more to me than they would to almost anyone else. I don't mind so much that I didn't include the day I ran naked out of the RV, or the crazy Halloween costumes the crew wore to make me laugh hysterically in the middle of an interview with NPR. It does bug me, a little, to leave out some of the details of natural beauty and personal reflection, like the time I ran toward a solitary tree, its bare branches backlit by a full moon after a brilliant sunset. The gnarled old bristlecone pine reminded me of something I'd drawn for an art contest back in high school, a strange coincidence. It also kept me company out there and caused me to wonder what it had endured long before I ran by it. Many minutes—perhaps an hour or more?—passed as I contemplated the various traumas the environment had inflicted, shaping its growth, and the strength of such a tree to withstand them.

However, if I were to try to take you with me, give you an account of my every step, or every mile, or every hour, or even every day, you'd probably be incredibly bored. You'd also be inclined to think I was making a bunch of stuff up. As wild a story as I've told you here, there's more, again, that I haven't included because it's just too petty or too random and, ultimately, means nothing.

Sorting through these details, and also watching the film
Running America,
which captured many elements of the run I didn't know anything about at the time, has given me some new perspectives. What the country was enduring while I was running now evokes my sympathy: During the fall of 2008, the financial tailspin and the cantankerous electioneering put the nation into a strange state of uncertainty, which the documentary captured. It also elicited the fortitude of Americans and reinforced my own conviction that there are certain basics we'd all be wise to embrace again, an emphasis on values, morals, and ethics, which individuals should take the time to consider, to define for themselves, and then put into practice in some meaningful, if highly personal, way. As the mountaineer Lucien Devies once observed, we find ourselves when we've lost everything. That's when we recognize, appreciate, and embody the essentials.

In the aftermath of the run, Heather and I had plenty to address, some rebuilding to do in our own marriage. We'd spent two months intentionally
not
saying the most difficult things—the truth about my pain, our shared desire to quit, and her private anguish and resentment—and when it was over, we needed to start speaking the “unspeakable.” I became even more aware of how emotionally torturous it had been for her not to ask me to stop, to end my pain simply by deciding not to finish. After all, in the previous year, we'd both watched men we loved suffer—men who'd had no choice in the matter: Heather had cared for Rory for months as he fought the cancer that attacked his back and then his brain, taking away his ability to walk, to sign his name, to talk with his family. And then we'd rushed to my father's side even as he struggled against the respirator tube down his throat. Both men died, so soon after Ted's passing, and then Chris was gone, too. It was a helluva thing to ask Heather to do, to come out and watch me suffer, too, to assist me in doing something that probably wouldn't kill me but that, Dr. Paul cautioned her, would age me in ways we wouldn't know until it was over, and would cause damage from which I'd never recover.

She admitted to me that two times, she'd almost broken: when I'd told her I felt like I was killing myself during that first week, and again when we'd waited to find out if I had a soft tissue injury or fracture, and I'd said that I'd continue regardless. On both occasions, she'd nearly given up and given in to her instincts to do whatever it took to get me to quit, whether that meant begging or demanding or threatening me. But she didn't break. Not once.

She put me first.

Talking about all of the most difficult aspects, we also realized how we'd set her up, in some way, to take a fall. By having Heather relay all my requests, we'd played a game of good cop/bad cop: I'd been able to remain gracious and grateful with everyone, and she'd been charged with making sure they gave me exactly what I needed, how I wanted to receive it, down to the smallest detail. To be honest, there's not much wrong with that plan, except that it gave someone something to complain about, and an opportunity to blame Heather for the fatigue or frustration or whatever other unpleasantness they were feeling. It's one of my few regrets: putting her into a position where she was misunderstood and then mistreated.

We both came out of the run somewhat traumatized but stronger, broken but healing. To repair and recover, it's good that we've talked about our hardships, mutual and individual. That was necessary. Throughout my relationship with Heather, I've been learning to be more open, to stop holding back on what I feel, to reveal it to her when I'm hurt or in pain—even when it will be hard for me to say and for her to hear. In our “real life,” we attempt to tackle our issues head-on, to strengthen the bond between us through honest disclosure of our deepest selves, to honor a sacred trust that flourishes only with effective communication. Talking about the run in a way we couldn't have while it was under way has been a purging process, cleaning out the clutter that accumulated while we couldn't allow ourselves to voice all the intense emotions. In the end, what I know for sure is that, despite the difficulties we both faced, she gave it all she had, and so did I. Of that, we can both be proud.

Since completing this run, I've also learned more about what Charlie endured, how from day one he'd been battling illness and injury, pushing through his pain, but then ultimately gave up about a third of the way across America. This defeat surely influenced his behavior and contributed to his rancor. The passage of time has allowed me to get a greater sense of why things went south between us, why we couldn't be friends when it was all over. We could analyze his character and mine, pick apart every action and decision, dissect every conversation, speculate on every motive, but it all boils down to one, essential thing:
the miles.
The miles, ultimately, are what overcame Charlie, what made me feel so fragile, and what made everyone so tired and susceptible to drama.