The Empathy Exams (15 page)

I realize Laz and I will have many hours to spend in each other’s company. The runners are out on their loops anywhere from eight to thirty-two hours. Between loops, if they’re continuing, they stop at camp for a few moments of food and rest. This is both succor and sadism; the oasis offers respite and temptation at once. It’s the Lotus Eater’s dilemma: hard to leave a good thing behind.

I use these hours without the runners to ask Laz everything I can about the race. I start with the start: how does he choose the time? He laughs uneasily. I backtrack, apologizing: would it ruin the mystery to tell me?

“One time I started at three,” he says, as if in answer. “That was fun.”

“Last year you started at noon, right? I heard the runners got a little restless.”

“Sure did.” He shakes his head, smiling at the memory. “Folks were just standing around getting antsy.”

“Was it fun watching them agonize?” I ask.

“Little bit frightening, actually,” he says. “Like watching a mob turn ugly.”

As we speak, he mentions sections of the course—Dave’s Danger Climb, Raw Dog Falls, Pussy Ridge—as if I’d know them by heart. I ask whether Rat Jaw is called that because the briars are like a bunch of little rodent teeth. He says no, it has to do with the topographic profile on a map: it reminded him of—well, of a rat jaw. I think to myself:
a lot of things might remind you of a rat jaw.
The briar scratches are known as rat bites. Laz once claimed that the briars wouldn’t give you scratches any worse than the ones you’d get from baptizing a cat.

I ask about Meth Lab Hill, wondering what its topographic profile could possibly resemble.

“That’s easy,” he says. “First time we ran it we saw a meth lab.”

“Still operating?”

“Yep,” he laughs. “Those suckers thought they’d never get found. Bet they were thinking: who the
fuck
would possibly come over this hill?”

I begin to see why Laz has been so vocal about his new sections: the difficulty of The Bad Thing, the novelty of the prison tunnel. They mark his power over the terrain.

Laz has endured quite a bit of friction with park officials over the years. The race was nearly shut down for good by a man named Jim Fyke, who was upset about erosion and endangered plants. Laz simply rerouted the course around protected areas and called the detour “Fyke’s Folly.”

I can sense Laz’s nostalgia for wilder days—when Frozen Head was still dense with the ghosts of fled felons and outlaws, thick with undiscovered junkies and their squirreled-away cold medicine. Times are different now, tamer. Just last year the Rangers cut the briars on Rat Jaw a week before the race. Laz was pissed. This year, he made them promise to wait until April.

His greatest desire seems to be to devise an unrunnable race, to sustain the immortal horizon of an unbeatable challenge with contours fresh and unknowable. After the first year, when no one even came close to finishing, Laz wrote an article headlined: “The ‘Trail’ Wins the Barkley Marathons.” It’s not hard to imagine how Laz, reclining on his lawn chair, might consider the course itself his avatar: his race is a competitor strong enough to triumph, even when he can barely stand.

He used to run this race, in days of better health, but never managed to finish it. Instead, he’s managed to garner respect as a man of principle—a man so committed to the notion of pain that he’s willing to rally men in its pursuit.

There are only two public trails that intersect the course: Lookout Tower, at the end of South Mac Trail, and Chimney Top. Laz discourages meeting runners while they’re running. “Even just the sight of other human beings is a kind of aid,” he explains. “We want them to feel the full weight of their aloneness.”

That said, a woman named Cathie—who looks like an ordinary housewife but is also one of a handful of veteran female “loopers”—recommends Chimney Top for a hike.

“I broke my arm there in January,” she says, “but it’s pretty.”

“Sounds fun,” I say.

“Was it that old log over the stream?” Laz asks wistfully, as if remembering an old friend.

She shakes her head.

He asks: “Was Raw Dog with you when you did it?”

“Yep.”

“Was he laughing?”

A man who appears to be her husband, presumably “Raw Dog,” pipes in: “Her arm was in an S-shape, Laz. I wasn’t laughing.”

Laz considers this for a moment. Then he asks her: “Did it hurt?”

“Think I blocked it out,” she laughs. “But I heard I was cussing the whole way down the mountain.”

I watch Laz shift modes fluidly between calloused
maestro
and den father. “After nightfall,” he assures Doc Joe, “there
will
be carnage,” but then he bends down to pet his pirate dog. “You hungry, Little?” he asks. “You might have got a lot of love today, but you still need to eat.” Whenever I see him around camp, he says: “You think Julian is having fun out there?” and I finally say: “I fucking hope not!” and he smiles:
This girl gets it.

But I can’t help thinking his question dissolves precisely the kind of loneliness he seems so interested in producing, and his runners so interested in courting. The idea that when you are alone out there, someone back at camp is
thinking of you alone out there
, is—of course—just another kind of connection. Which is part of the point of this, right? That the hardship facilitates a shared solitude, an utter isolation that has been experienced before, by others, and will be experienced again, that these others are present in spirit even if the wilds have tamed or aged or brutalized or otherwise removed their bodies.

When Julian comes in from his first loop, it’s almost dark. He’s been out for twelve hours. I feel like I’m sharing this moment of triumph with Laz, in some sense, though I also know he’s promiscuous in this sort of sharing. There’s a place in his heart for everyone who runs his gauntlet, and everyone silly enough to spend days in the woods just to watch someone touch a yellow gate.

Julian is in good spirits. He turns over his pages to be counted. He’s got ten 61s, including one from
The Power of Positive Thinking
, which came early in the course, and one from an account of teenage alcoholism called
The Late Great Me
, which came near the end. I notice the duct tape has been ripped from his pants. “You took it off?” I ask.

“Nope,” he says. “Course took it off.”

In camp he eats hummus sandwiches and Girl Scout cookies, barely manages to gulp down a Butter Pecan Ensure. He is debating another loop. “I’m sure I won’t finish,” he says. “I’ll probably just go out for hours and then drop and have to find my way back in the dark.”

Julian pauses. I take one of his cookies.

He says: “I guess I’ll do it.”

He takes the last cookie before I can grab it. He takes another bib number, for his second round of pages, and Laz and I send him into the woods. His rain jacket glows silver in the darkness: brother robot, off for another spin.

Julian has completed five hundred-mile races so far, as well as countless “short” ones, and I once asked him why he does it. He explained it like this: he wants to achieve a completely insular system of accountability, one that doesn’t depend on external feedback. He wants to run a hundred miles when no one knows he’s running, so that the desire to impress people, or the shame of quitting, won’t constitute his sources of motivation. Perhaps this kind of thinking is what got him his PhD at the age of twenty-five. It’s hard to say. Barkley doesn’t offer a pure form of this isolated drive, but it comes pretty close: when it’s midnight and it’s raining and you’re on the steepest hill you’ve ever climbed and you’re bleeding from briars and you’re alone and you’ve been alone for hours, it’s only
you
around to witness yourself quit or continue.

At four in the morning, the fire is bustling. A few frontrunners are in camp preparing to head onto their third loops, gulping coffee or taking fifteen-minute naps in their tents. It’s as if the thought of the “full weight of loneliness” has inspired an urge toward companionship back here, the same way Julian’s hunger—when he stops for aid—makes me feel hungry, though I have done little to earn it. Another person’s pain registers as an experience in the perceiver: empathy as forced symmetry, a bodily echo.

“Just think,” Laz tells me. “Julian’s
out there
somewhere.”

Out there
is a phrase that comes up frequently around camp. So frequently, in fact, that one of the regular racers—a wiry old man named “Frozen Ed” Furtaw (like Frozen Head, get it?), who runs in sunset-orange camo tights—has self-published a book called
Tales from
Out There:
The Barkley Marathons.
The book details each year’s comet trail of DNFs and includes an elaborate appendix listing other atrociously difficult trail races and explaining why they’re not as hard.

“I was proud of Julian,” I tell Laz. “It was dark and cold and he could barely swallow his can of Ensure and he just put his head in his hands and said:
Here I go.
”

Laz laughs. “How do you think he feels about that decision now?”

It starts to rain. I make a nest in the back of my car. I type notes for this essay. I watch an episode of
The Real World: Vegas
and then turn it off, just as Steven and Trishelle are about to maybe hook up, to conserve power for the next day and also because I don’t want to watch Steven and Trishelle hook up. I wanted her to hook up with Frank. I try to sleep. I dream about the prison tunnel: it’s flooding, and I’ve just gotten a speeding ticket, and these two things are related in an important way I can’t yet fathom. I’m awoken every once in a while by the mournful call of bugle Taps, like the noises of a wild animal echoing through the night.

Julian arrives back in camp around eight in the morning. He was out for another twelve hours, but he only managed to reach two books. There were a couple of hours lost, another couple spent lying down, in the rain, waiting for first light. He is proud of himself for going out, even though he didn’t think he’d get far, and I am proud of him too.

We join the others under the rain tent. Charlie Engle describes what forced him back during his third loop. “Fell flat on my ass going down Rat Jaw,” he said. “Then I got up and fell again, got up and fell again. That was pretty much it.”

There’s a nicely biblical logic to this story: it’s the third time that really does the trick, seals the deal, breaks the back, what have you.

Laz asks whether Charlie enjoyed the prison section. Laz asks everyone about the prison section, the way you’d ask about your kid’s poem:
Did you like it?

Charlie says he did like it, very much. He says the guards were friendly enough to give him directions. “They were good ol’ Southern boys, those guys,” and I can tell from the way he says it that Charlie considers himself a good ol’ Southern boy as well. “They told us:
Just make yer way up that there holler
… and then those California boys with me, they turn and say:
What the fuck is a holler?
”

“You should have told them,” says Laz, “that in Tennessee a holler is when you want to get out but you can’t.”

“That’s exactly what I said!” Charlie tells us. “I said: when you’re standing barefoot on a red ant hill—that’s a holler. The hill we’re about to climb—that’s a holler.”

The rain is unrelenting. Laz doesn’t think anyone will get the full hundred this year. There were some stellar first laps but no one seems strong enough now. People are speculating about whether anyone will even finish the Fun Run. There are only six runners left with a shot. If anyone can finish, everyone agrees, it will be Blake. Laz has never seen him quit.

Julian and I share a leg of chicken slathered in BBQ sauce. There are only two left on the grill. It’s a miracle the fire hasn’t gone out. The chicken’s good, and cooked as promised, steaming in our mouths against the chilly air.

A guy named Zane, with whom Julian ran much of his first loop, tells us he saw several wild boars on the trails at night. Was he scared? He was. One got close enough to send him scurrying off the edge of a switchback, fighting stick in hand. Would a stick have helped? We all agree, probably not.

A woman clad in what looks like an all-body Windbreaker has packed a plastic bag of clothes. Laz explains that her husband is one of the six runners left. She’s planning to meet him at the Lookout Tower. If he decides to drop, she’ll hand him his dry clothes and escort him down the easy three-mile trail back into camp. If he decides to continue, she’ll wish him luck as he prepares for another uphill climb—soaked in rainwater and pride, unable to take the dry clothes because accepting aid would get him disqualified.

“I hope she shows him the dry clothes
before
he makes up his mind,” says Laz. “Choice is better that way.”

The crowd stirs. There’s a runner coming up the paved hill. Coming from this direction is a bad sign for someone on his third loop—it means he’s dropping rather than finishing. People guess it’s JB or Carl—
must be
JB or Carl, there aren’t many guys still out—but after a moment Laz gasps.

“It’s Blake,” he says. “I recognize his walking poles.”

Blake is soaked and shivering. “I’m close to hypothermia,” he said. “I couldn’t do it.” He says that climbing Rat Jaw was like scrambling up a playground slide in roller skates, but otherwise he doesn’t seem inclined to offer excuses. He says he was running with JB for a while but left him on Rat Jaw. “That’s bad news for JB,” says Laz, shaking his head. “He’ll probably be back here soon.”

Laz hands the bugle over. It’s as if he can’t bear to play Taps for Blake himself. He’s clearly disappointed that Blake is out, but there’s also a note of glee in his voice when he says: “You never know what’ll happen around here.” There’s a thrill in the tension between controlling the race and recognizing it as something that will always disobey him. It approximates the tense pleasure of ultrarunning itself: the simultaneous exertion and ceding of power, controlling the body enough to make it run this thing but ultimately offering it to the uncontrollable vagaries of luck and endurance and conditions.