Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness (15 page)

“How do your feet feel? How are your legs? Are you still drinking?”

It was Ian, behind me, checking, worrying, doing what pacers often do.

I had to think for a second. How did my feet feel? Now that he mentioned it, they hurt. I had a few blisters. My legs? Yeah, come to think of it, they were kind of shot through with invisible knives.

“Fine,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Are you drinking?”

I hadn’t been, but I did now, drank till a bottle was drained and kept running.

We ran for a few minutes, and Ian didn’t say much. Finally, after a twisty descent, there was a climb. It felt good. I felt good. I checked my left forearm. We were way behind on the record splits, but we were still leading. I was doing what I had dreamed and visualized on those snowmobile trails in northern Minnesota and on the mossy trails of the Cascade foothills.

“How we doing?”

We were doing fine, I thought. We were doing great.

Then I felt the weight of my full water bottle. It felt like a particularly heavy cookie I had snuck out of a cookie jar. Ian saw me glance down.

“I want that entire bottle gone by the time we reach the next station.”

I chugged it down. We had crested the hill, rounded a bend, and there in front of us was a wooden platform no bigger than 10 by 10 feet, built into the side of a hill. There were three people under an awning—volunteers—and they stared at us.

“Who’s this guy?” one of them asked, and before I could say anything, Ian said, “This is the guy who’s going to win the race.”

We filled our empty bottles, and Ian handed me an inch-long transparent electrolyte capsule with salt crystals inside, which I swallowed. And just as we were bounding away it hit me. Uh-oh, my stomach felt funny.

We cruised out of the station, about 100 yards through that fine red cake powder, around a bend. That’s when I started spewing.

First came liquid, and there—still intact—the electrolyte capsule. Then more liquid. And then—when it started coming out my nose—more liquid. Some chunks of banana. Some green, stinging bile. Just when I thought there couldn’t be another wave, there was.

My body was fighting a battle on two fronts: inside, against the heat generated by my muscular exertion, and outside, against the sun-baked canyon air. A rise of more than 4 degrees in core temperature would cause my body systems to begin to malfunction. Fortunately, the last week of training in the heat had helped my cooling systems adapt. The increased blood flow in the surface of my body was allowing extra heat to escape through my skin. I had started sweating earlier and would keep sweating longer and with less sodium (or electrolytes) in my sweat than non–heat acclimatized runners.

The increased perspiration had its downside, though: dehydration. Depending on my pace, I was losing about a liter of water every hour along with a half-teaspoon of salt. My hypothalamus was pumping out antidiuretic hormones, which told my kidneys to mitigate fluid loss by concentrating my urine. Still, even with my body performing its miraculous adjustments, without enough water, dehydration would thicken my blood, increasing the workload of my already-taxed heart. That’s what Ian was worried about. That’s why he was pushing the water.

He was also worried about another danger: hyponatremia, in which overdrinking, combined with the kidneys’ failure to compensate, leads to plummeting blood sodium levels. Runners with hyponatremia will actually gain weight over the course of a race, as the cells in their body swell with retained fluid. Temporary swelling in the extremities isn’t so bad, but when brain cells swell, they press against the skull, causing disorientation and confusion. In severe cases, hyponatremia can even be fatal. Hence Ian’s pushing the salt.

Making sure you take in enough water and salt during a long period of intense effort sounds simple. Tell that to your stomach. A race is a “fight or flight” situation, so my sympathetic nervous system was fired up, shunting blood away from my digestive organs and toward the muscles, lungs, heart, and brain. The pounding of my feet against the ground raised the pressure in my abdomen to two to three times its normal level. Under those conditions, it’s hard to keep anything down. Some runners take Prilosec before a race to avoid the inevitable gastric upset, but if I was committing to plant-based, non-processed foods, I wasn’t about to do that.

I aimed the puke into the grass off the trail.

Ian patted me on the back. He told me it would be okay, that I would be okay, I would feel better in a minute. I thought he was lying or delusional. Neither option seemed attractive.

I had never thrown up in a race before. Whether it was my cast-iron stomach or because I’d eaten well and taken care of my body, I didn’t know. But now, at what should have been one of the crowning points of my life, I was bent over, head turned to the right so I would puke into the grassy hill rather than the other direction, which might alert any competitors who happened upon us and, worse, might lead me to fall down a steep embankment.

Was it the vegan diet? I totaled up my intake since the race began. A bowl of thick rolled oats with banana, walnuts, soy yogurt, energy gel as sweetener, a plum, an apricot, and kiwi. I had awakened at 3
A.M.
to eat it so it would have two hours to digest. Two slices of sprouted-grain bread with almond butter. A bean burrito (with rice) at 42 miles. Bananas and cooked potatoes dipped in salt along the way. Clif Shot energy gels, electrolyte drink, and an occasional Clif Bar. I’d been consuming about 300 calories an hour.

Other ultrarunners I had seen gorged on pizza and cookies, bagels and candy. As late as 1999, a lot of conventional thinking in the ultra community was that it didn’t really matter what you ate as long as you got lots of carbs and sugar. I was sure my vegan diet was better. I had been sure it was going to help me.

Had it been a mistake? Were Twietmeyer and the others right? Had I let my ego and my wounded pride get the best of me? Or was it simply too much water too fast?

I wasn’t just worrying about my mistakes. I was worried what would happen if I kept puking. I knew the horror stories. Some runners get dehydrated, and they puke, and that gets them more dehydrated, which causes more nausea, and then they can’t drink or eat anything, and that’s when you’re in trouble, when you’re up the creek without a paddle. Because that’s when the medical personnel at one of the stations will make you take an IV. And once you get an IV, you’re out. Disqualified.

“It’ll be fine,” Ian said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

Later in my career I would depend more on a growing knowledge of race strategy and tactics to guide me. I would eat and drink at the exact places where my body demanded, because I would become an expert at reading every twitch and cramp and surge of energy. I would know when to rest and when to go. But doubled over at that first Western States, I didn’t depend on strategy or knowledge. I couldn’t. I was twenty-five, a young buck determined to become king of the mountain. I wanted something, so I moved. Simple. It’s something we all have inside us. My body wasn’t ready to go, but it didn’t matter. That’s the moment I learned the power of will. That’s the instant I found what I had been looking for.

I straightened up, and Ian removed his hand. I looked at him.

“Good to go,” I said, and we went.

I had 32 miles to go—6 miles longer than a marathon. Ian tried to scare me a few times. “Tim is right behind you,” he shouted whenever I slowed, “and he’s laughing at you.” If I dared to hike—rather than run—up a hill, Ian would crack, “Tim isn’t walking up this little hill right now, he’s running.”

Twietmeyer was 20 minutes behind when we crossed the American River, and as we climbed the 3 miles to the Green Gate aid station, we heard cheering.
“Twietmeyer is closing, the Minnesota dude is about to bonk, Twietmeyer is a real champion.”
Neither one of us said anything, but we picked up the pace. We looked at each other, and Ian said, “This is our chance to say to all of them, ‘Go screw yourselves.’”

I didn’t need any extra motivation. The last 10 miles we ran at an 8:30 pace. The people watching—the Californians, the fans who knew what “real” mountain racing was all about—weren’t saying anything, they were just looking. And Ian was cursing the naysayers, saying, “Fuck them.” I was angry, too.

The bushido code as I understood it espoused serenity, even in the midst of slaying one’s enemies. But I made no attempt to empty my mind of rage. I used it. Maybe it wasn’t bushido, but it felt good. I could aspire to peace in the next race. I crossed the finish line at 10:34
P.M.
, not a record, but 27 minutes faster than Twietmeyer, who came in second. I led the race from start to finish. When I neared the end, I rolled across the finish line in honor of Dust Ball (he liked to crawl and roll across finish lines when he won), and I yelled, “Minnesota!”

I had focused so completely on winning that I’d neglected a few other details—such as where I would stay afterward. I couldn’t afford a hotel room, and by the time I realized I might need a place to stay when I was done, they were all booked, anyway. I figured I’d lay my sleeping bag right by the finish line.

Even though I set up there out of economic necessity, I stayed—that night and the next morning and many others—because of something deeper. Camping out at a finish line gave me a chance to cheer on my buddies and to make new friends. More important, it gave me a chance to acknowledge what every single person who completed the race had endured. I had lived in my in-laws’ basement, trained when I wanted to sleep, puked, moved numerous times, and gone into debt. The other runners must have endured privations, too. Every single one of us possesses the strength to attempt something he isn’t sure he can accomplish. It can be running a mile, or a 10K race, or 100 miles. It can be changing a career, losing 5 pounds, or telling someone you love her (or him). I can guarantee that no one at the Western States
knew
they were going to finish, much less win (including me). A lot of people never do something great with their lives. A lot of people never attempt it. Everyone here had done both. Staying at the finish line and greeting those runners, I could pay tribute to the pain and doubt, fatigue and hopelessness, that I imagined they had pushed through. Staying there allowed me to acknowledge the strength they had needed to summon, to congratulate them on setting their sights on an important goal and achieving it. I didn’t realize it till later, but it allowed me to give back something to the sport that had already given me purpose and a measure of peace, that had granted me some answers—however fleeting and ephemeral—to the question why.

I lay down on my sleeping bag and got up to cheer whenever a runner finished. I fell asleep at 1
A.M.,
and I’m sure I missed a few (I’d been up for 22 hours), but I tried not to. In the morning I got a lift to Latitudes, in Auburn, for some mushroom and sunflower seed tacos and then returned. I stayed there till 11
A.M.
, the official cutoff time. A lot of the top finishers stayed around for a while, because in those days, while there was certainly a hierarchy among runners, the only place it mattered was on the course. If you were an ultrarunner, you were an ultrarunner. In that moniker everyone was on the same level. We paid the same price and garnered the same joy. And staying at the finish line, I got to remind myself of our collective struggle, to experience that joy over and over again.

COUNTING CALORIES

My biggest challenge in plant-based eating isn’t taking in enough protein but taking in enough calories to replace those I burn on my training runs. I make a big effort to include enough calorie-dense foods in my diet—nuts and nut butters, seeds, avocados, starchy root vegetables, coconut milk, and oils such as olive oil, coconut oil, flaxseed oil, and sesame oil. When you’re eliminating so many foods in your diet, you need to be careful to include enough new ones to compensate. If you’re new to plant-based eating, that’s my biggest piece of advice for you: Think about what high-quality foods you can bring into your diet to replace the calories from animal products you’re excluding. And make sure you get enough.

Western States Trail “Cheese” Spread

When I drove to Auburn every summer, I would leave the blender at home, so I’d make this side dish before I left. Spread on Ezekiel 4:9 Bread (made with sprouted grains and no yeast), it provides a great source of carbohydrates and protein. Tahini gives the “cheese” a bite, as well as providing beneficial fatty acids.

Place all the ingredients in a blender or food processor and process for 2 to 3 minutes, until a smooth consistency is reached. Spread a layer on whole grain bread (my favorite is Ezekiel 4:9 sprouted) with sliced tomato and lettuce for a “cheese” sandwich, or serve with crackers or raw veggies to dip. Keeps about a week in the refrigerator or freeze for up to 2 months.

MAKES
3
CUPS,
10–12
SERVINGS

NOTE
: If using a low-powered blender, silken tofu provides better results. Be sure to drain the water first.