Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness (2 page)

Ultrarunners take off at sunrise and continue through sunset, moonrise, and another sunrise, sunset, and moonrise. Sometimes we stumble from exhaustion and double over with pain, while other times we effortlessly float over rocky trails and hammer up a 3,000-foot climb after accessing an unknown source of strength. We run with bruised bones and scraped skin. It’s a hard, simple calculus: Run until you can’t run anymore. Then run some more. Find a new source of energy and will. Then run even faster.

Other sports take safety precautions, but in ultramarathons, we have death-avoiding precautions baked into the enterprise. Most ultras are dotted with aid stations, where runners are tracked, sometimes weighed, and provided with snacks, shade, and medical checkups. The majority of races also include pacers, who are allowed to accompany runners in latter sections of the course (but only for advice and to keep them from getting lost, not for carrying food or water). Ultrarunners can—much of the time—bring support crews, men and women who provide food, water, updates on competitors, and reassurance that you can, in fact, continue when you are sure you will collapse.

Nearly all ultras are run continuously, meaning that there is no point at which the clock stops and everyone gets to retire for a large plate of pasta and a well-deserved night’s sleep, like competitors in the Tour de France do. That’s part of the challenge and appeal of the event. You keep going in situations where most people stop. You keep running while other people rest.

But that was my problem—it was other people who stopped to rest. Not me. But now it
was
me. I simply couldn’t go on.

My buddy and support crew member Rick was telling me he knew I could do it. He was mistaken. What had I done wrong? Was it my training and lack of recovery? Was it my race schedule? Had my mental approach been wrong? Was it what I had been eating? Was I thinking too much?

Ultramarathons give you plenty of time to think—that is, when you’re not watching out for mountain lions, avoiding sheer drops, or responding to grinning rocks and gibbering trees (which your mind can’t believe are mere phantasms). Stopping in an ultra, quitting, gives you even more time to ponder. But perhaps I wanted time to stop. Maybe I was meant to lie here on my back in the desert to question why I was running through an oven. Why was I subjecting myself to this torture?

I started running for reasons I had only just begun to understand. As a child, I ran in the woods and around my house for fun. As a teen, I ran to get my body in better shape. Later, I ran to find peace. I ran, and kept running, because I had learned that once you started something you didn’t quit, because in life, much like in an ultramarathon, you have to keep pressing forward. Eventually I ran because I turned into a runner, and my sport brought me physical pleasure and spirited me away from debt and disease, from the niggling worries of everyday existence. I ran because I grew to love other runners. I ran because I loved challenges and because there is no better feeling than arriving at the finish line or completing a difficult training run. And because, as an accomplished runner, I could tell others how rewarding it was to live healthily, to move my body every day, to get through difficulties, to eat with consciousness, that what mattered wasn’t how much money you made or where you lived, it was
how
you lived. I ran because overcoming the difficulties of an ultramarathon reminded me that I could overcome the difficulties of life, that overcoming difficulties
was
life.

Could I quit and not
be
a quitter?

“You’ve done it before,” Rick said. “You can do it again.”

I appreciated the optimism. I also appreciated its idiocy.

At another time, on another summer night, in another race, I might have gazed in wonder at the stars glittering against the velvety black night. I might have swiveled my head to peer at the snowy Sierra Nevada peaks looming like grouchy sentries on the edge of the endless desert and seen, not scowling defeat, but majesty. I would have moved toward the mountains’ dark, disapproving bulk until it had transformed to welcome.

“My stomach,” I moaned. “My stomach.” A couple of my crew members suggested I should crawl into the coffin-sized, ice-filled cooler they had lugged up the road to get my core temperature down, but I had tried that already. Rick told me to put my feet in the air— that might help me feel better. He told me I should do it on the side away from the road so the other crews wouldn’t be able to see me, because their reports would only embolden their runners. Didn’t he realize that the other runners didn’t need emboldening? The guy with the reputation wasn’t going anywhere.

Not moving was actually pleasant. It wasn’t nearly as shameful as I had imagined. It allowed me to ponder my hubris.

If it had been a movie, this was the place where I would close my eyes and hear the faint, strangled voice of my bedridden mother, telling me she loved me and that she knew I could do whatever I wanted, and I would have flushed with shame, and then I would have heard the authoritative voice of my father, telling me, “Sometimes you just do things!” I would have risen to my elbows, shut my eyes, and pictured all the middle school kids who had called me Pee-Wee, and they would have melted into all the naysayers who had questioned me at the beginning of my career, who said that I was nothing to worry about, I was nothing but a flatlander. In that movie I would have risen to my knees and suddenly remembered who I was—I was a runner!—and I would have pulled myself up, stood tall, and started walking, then loping, into the thick desert night, chasing down the two seasoned veterans in front of me as a wolf chases doomed field mice.

I tried to puke some more, but it was all dry heaving, the type that is excruciating with every empty pump of the stomach.

My crew and close friends told me to close my eyes and relax. Instead, I stared at the stars. Everyone and the desert disappeared. Loss of peripheral vision was one manifestation of dehydration and passing out. Was that what was happening? It was as if I was looking through a tunnel at a small circle in an infinite, glittery sky.

My crew told me to take some little sips of water, but I couldn’t. I was thinking, “I don’t think this is gonna happen,” and then I heard a noise, and it was my voice saying what I was thinking: “I don’t think this is gonna happen.”

The stars didn’t care. That’s another pleasure of running an ultra: the absolute and soothing indifference of the land and the sky. So I made a mistake? It wasn’t the worst thing in the world; the constellations weren’t gossiping about me. Maybe this would help me with humility. Maybe dropping out and being defeated would renew my spirit. Maybe cutting one race short was a good thing.

If only I could have made myself believe that.

Should I have listened to the trainers and doctors who said that athletes needed to fill their bodies with animal protein? Should I have trained less? I had thought I was invincible. I closed my eyes.

I had been schooled by nuns, raised by a mother who had been sprinkled with holy water from Lourdes, hoping it would help her rise from her wheelchair. Now it was me who couldn’t rise.

I hadn’t always been the fastest runner, but I had always considered myself one of the toughest. Maybe acceptance of my limits was the toughest thing of all. Maybe staying where I was wasn’t weak but strong. Maybe accepting my limits meant it was time to stop being a runner, to start being something else. But what? If I wasn’t a runner, who was I?

I looked again at the stars. They had no opinion on the matter.

Then, from the desert, a voice, an old familiar voice.

“You’re not gonna win this fucking race lying down in the dirt. C’mon, Jurker, get the fuck up.”

It was my old friend Dusty. That made me smile. He almost always made me smile, even when everyone around him was cringing.

“Get the fuck up!” Dusty yelled, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.

“Sweeney is out there dying, and you’re gonna take that dude. We’re gonna take that dude!”

I looked at my friend. Couldn’t he see that I wasn’t going to take anyone?

He squatted, folded himself until our faces were inches apart. He looked into my eyes.

“Do you wanna be somebody, Jurker? Do you wanna
be
somebody?”

Rice Balls (Onigiri)

I first saw these seaweed-wrapped rice packets when I asked a Japanese runner to show me what was in his race pack. I’m grateful I did, because white rice is a great food for cooling your body, especially in hot climates like Death Valley. It’s packed with carbohydrates, it’s not too sweet, and it’s soft and easy to digest. A great source for electrolytes and salt (via the seaweed), rice balls have always been a portable pick-me-up in Japan. These days, you can even find them at convenience stores in Asia. For a soy-free variation, substitute pickled ginger or umeboshi paste for the miso.

Cook the rice in the water on the stovetop or using a rice cooker. Set aside to cool. Fill a small bowl with water and wet both hands so the rice does not stick. Using your hands, form ¼ cup rice into a triangle. Spread ¼ teaspoon miso evenly on one side of the triangle. Cover with another ¼ cup rice. Shape into one triangle, making sure the miso is covered with rice. Fold the nori sheets in half and then tear them apart. Using half of one sheet, wrap the rice triangle in nori, making sure to completely cover the rice. Repeat using the remaining rice, miso, and nori.

MAKES
8
ONIGIRI

2. “Sometimes You Just Do Things”

PROCTOR, MINNESOTA, 1980

The only line that is true is the line you’re from.

—ISRAEL NEBEKER OF BLIND PILOT

I sat on a stool in our kitchen. My mother thrust a rough wooden spoon at me and told me to stir, but the batter was too thick. She told me to use both hands, but still I couldn’t move the spoon. Suddenly it moved and kept moving. She had put her hands around mine. We made spirals of pale yellow out of sugar and butter, and I pretended I was doing it all by myself. It’s one of my earliest memories.

I thought my mom was famous. She worked for the Litton Microwave company, showing women how to cook bacon and make chocolate cake with the new invention. The Minnesota Egg Council hired her to go on the radio to talk about eggs and that led to television commercials and that led to her own cable cooking show. Her motto (which I still believe): “You don’t have to be a chef to cook great food.” For her family she roasted pork, baked chicken, broiled steak, and whipped up mashed potatoes from scratch. In the childhood of my memory, there was always a pie cooling on the kitchen windowsill, the scent of pastry and fruit stealing into our kitchen, enveloping my mother and me in its thick embrace.

I don’t remember anyone talking about a primal connection to food, or how by eating the vegetables we grew we were connecting ourselves to the place where we lived and each other. I don’t remember anyone remarking that the act of catching and cleaning and frying and eating walleye together was akin to a family sacrament. At my mother’s insistence, we did sit down together for a full hour at dinner. If someone had praised her for baking cookies from scratch rather than using a mix, she would have thought they were nuts. I didn’t know it, but I was learning a lot about food and its connection to love. When we cooked together, she told me stories about when she was in college, and said she knew I would go to college, too. When my dad wasn’t around, she would ask me to grab my baseball bat, and she’d take me into the backyard, next to the garden, and she’d pitch underhand to me. She told me she was proud of what a hard worker I was and not to let Dad’s grouchiness bother me. He just worried a lot.

My father wasn’t the only disciplinarian in the family. When I misbehaved, my mom would spank me—with the same wooden spoon with which we stirred batter. She was the one who limited my television watching to 5 hours a week. If I wanted to watch a football game, she made me choose between the first or second half. I always chose the second half.

I can’t remember the first time I saw her drop a jar. I must have been about nine. After a while, it was hard to remember when she didn’t drop things. Knives trembled in her once-sure fingers. Sometimes, just standing by the counter, she would wince. If she saw me watching, she’d wink and smile.

Here’s another memory: When I was six, stacking firewood outside, a car pulled up to our house. I knew it wasn’t a neighbor; we lived on a dead-end road at the edge of a woods, 5 miles from Proctor, Minnesota, which was another 150 miles from Minneapolis. I knew all the cars on our road, who was driving, and which brothers and sisters were probably sitting in the back seat punching one another. This car belonged to a friend from Proctor. His mom had driven him out to play with me. I yelped and ran toward the car, but a stern voice stopped me.

“You can play when we’re finished stacking wood. From the looks of it, we’ve got two more hours to go.”

It was Dad, and I knew better than to argue. So I whispered the news to my friend and he told his mom. She gave me a look, then gave my dad a look, and then they drove off. I went back to stacking wood.

When I was done with chores, on rare occasions my dad would take me for a walk in the woods. Once, when I was seven and my mom was taking a nap—she had been getting tired a lot—he picked up a handful of dirt and let it trickle through his thick fingers. He told me about the day that two of the smartest scientists in the world were walking in the woods—maybe woods just like these, right here in Minnesota—and God strolled up, right out of the trees. And God said, “If you guys are so smart, can you make dirt out of thin air, like I can?” I remember my dad smiling when he told me that story, but it was a sad smile. I think he was trying to tell me that no matter how hard a man thought or worked, some things in life would remain unknowable, and we had to accept that.