The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (45 page)

I did manage to reach Garside's former manager, Mike Soulsby, who earlier had vouched for the runner, but then said he found himself starting to believe the flood of “evidence” against his infamous client. But time had given Soulsby more objective distance from the issue, and he supplied what may be the definitive statement on Garside, absent one from Garside himself: “I think Robert was sometimes his own worst enemy. He would boast about achievements, but couldn't back them up. I think he was talking himself up as a way to motivate himself, and sometimes it went too far.”

And the run itself? “The answer is yes,” Soulsby told me.

“Yes,” I asked, “meaning Robert Garside ran around the world?” Soulsby then told me—just so I knew—that he had no financial stake in Garside, and that in fact, the runner still owed him money. “I was pissed off at him,” Soulsby says. But that didn't make a difference, Soulsby continued: “Robert Garside ran around the world. He did it. And that's amazing.”

For nearly a decade now, two cartons of Garside-related material have sat in my office, right next to my desk. During that time, I've moved, married, and become a father. All that time and obsession, the damage to my mind and body, makes me ask the second question: was it worth it? The answer to that is easier: it doesn't matter. I had no choice.

I've given myself permission to throw everything onto the fire—a hellacious, raging bonfire. It isn't that I wouldn't mind really talking to Garside. I gather, from our brief exchange, that he's happy. And I hope, and I guess, that when he reads this, he'll see that I was, perhaps, even crazier than him.

After all, my obsession with Robert Garside has lasted longer than his entire run around the world. That's long enough.

CINTHIA RITCHIE

FROM SPORT LITERATE

 

I
T'S PAST MIDNIGHT
and I'm running down Flattop Mountain, the air milky gray with the Alaska twilight, the moon fat and full and hanging in the sky like something ripe. I leap over rocks, hurl myself down small ridges. All around is silence, an immense and penetrating silence that fills my chest and hums my veins until I can taste it in my mouth, linger it against my tongue.

Once I saw a wolf up here, late at night, the dog and I running in the green darkness, and we froze, all three of us. I grabbed the dog's collar, held tight. The wolf lifted its head and loped off through the brush, its stride smooth and achingly graceful. I wanted to follow, wanted to feel my own stride even out until it became lush and primal, until I lost all sense of time and logic, until wildness wept through my veins.

On the way down, I tore up the mountain, scree and mud flying as I ran, my hands clenched, tiny cries escaping my throat and lifting up in pure and terrible glory.

 

Growing up on a farm in northwestern Pennsylvania, I ran through the fields and pastures, down the hilly dirt roads, across the marsh and through the narrow, cold creek. Arms outstretched, eyes slit against the sun's glare. I ran in cheap Kmart sneakers, kicking them off in midstride, the grass warm and dry against my bare heels, callused tough and hard as an animal's. Sun hot, air smelling of hay and dust and sweet cow manure. I ran because I loved the feel of wind on my shoulders, loved my hair scattering my face, loved the wisdom of my knees instinctively bending to absorb the shock of rocks and hard, narrow gullies.

I ran because my father was dead, my mother was angry, and there was a new man in the house, his ugly, scarred hands pressing against me at night. But mostly I ran because the sun was wide, the corn was high, and the mud in the creek was cool and forgiving on my hot, scratched feet. Each afternoon as the shadows stretched and the poplar trees darkened and the air stiffened with pollen, I sat on the bank and offered my feet to the water. When the coolness hit my skin I arched my neck and stared up at the cruel, blank sky. I didn't yet understand how pleasure or pain could overpower and transform you before wearing you back down to your own small self. But I knew that Jesus washed the feet of beggars, that God was dead, that the words the priest spoke each Sunday cut against the round, female heat of my own body. I knew how to make myself small, how to stay quiet and look the other way, how to be a girl, yes. But mostly, I knew how to run.

I am afraid of so many things yet when I run I am fearless, gutsy; determined. I wind through trails covered in bear scat, my bear bell clinking against my water belt. I love being out in the woods and mountains, love the solitude, the birch trees glowing like milk in the twilight. Often, I see foxes and wolves, loons and eagles, moose and lynx and bears. Each time I suck in my breath, slow my pace, that childlike wonder, that thump of wildness inside my chest.

Sometimes as I'm running I thank the bears and moose for allowing me to run through their territory. I devise little songs I sing and these soothe me, keep me company, because it's easy to fall to fear. Once, I encountered a sow with two cubs and my dog took off after them as I helplessly shouted for her to return. Then a growl like I'd never heard, a fierce and wild cry as the sow charged my dog. It was a fake charge and my dog held her ground as I stood paralyzed by fright, my bladder releasing, the bear turning and heading back toward the woods with her cubs. I collapsed on the trail in the mud, sobbing, the dog whimpering, both of us scared yet strangely exhilarated. Because to see such fierceness, such wildness. To see it, feel it! To be there!

Mostly, though, I see bears as they slip off into the woods, I see the backs of their haunches or the jut of their snouts as they peer out from the trees as if wondering who I am and why I run through their trails without ever once stopping to snack on grass and berries. A few years ago, running in Kincaid Park before dark, I heard a rustle, glanced over and in the woods parallel to me a sow and a cub ran, all three of us loping along, lost in our own world, our own thoughts. I don't know if that bear saw me. Her gait never altered and for a few seconds I ran along with her, hundreds of yards separating us yet it was as if we were running together. I quickly veered off on a side trail, picked up my pace and put as much distance as possible between us. Sometimes when I can't sleep, when I'm restless and worried, I remember running in the same direction as that bear and I feel a twinge inside my chest, a thump that is as fierce and persistent as hunger.

 

There were years in my adolescence when I didn't run, years when I was too depressed or angry to run; years when I thought I didn't deserve to run and instead I walked, a moody, introverted girl with sun-bleached hair, cut-off denim shorts, and bare feet. I rode my horse deep into the woods, sat against an oak tree and read books about sex and dying, the only subjects that interested me. Sometimes I smoked the cigarette stubs I picked up from ashtrays around the house but most of the time I chewed on my hair, that grainy, horsey taste, and how it filled me up.

That's a lie, nothing filled me those years. I starved myself down past 80 pounds and when that didn't work, swallowed a bottle of pills, crept behind my bed, and waited to die. I sought nothingness, blackness. I wanted to escape from my body, that burdensome shell that locked me inside of my life. I don't know how many pills I swallowed before the colors began, but they came and flashed inside my eyelids until my hands felt calm and blue and real.

The next thing I remember is a cold, white light in my eyes and a doctor's breath in my face as he forced the tube down my throat to pump my stomach. Imagine the violation, the taste of rubber, the choke of it against the larynx, the sudden ugliness of consciousness returning, along with the flawed hands, the insubstantial chest. The body is puny but it wants to live, will fight to live. It is fierce and animal; it has little sympathy for the mind. I tried to kill my body and it called my bluff, called me a liar, and I was. I never wanted to die. What I wanted, what I needed and longed and wished for was someone to show me the beauty of my own body, the wonder of my own strength.

As soon as I got out of the hospital, I started to run. It was winter and cold and dark, and I had never run seriously before. This was back before the running movement, before you saw people out jogging, before there were stores devoted solely to running shoes and gear. Still, I must have known or sensed that I needed to move, that motion would keep me safe. Each night I laced up my cheap sneakers and headed down to the basement with a portable radio and, with the Top-40 station blaring, I ran around that concrete floor, in that dusty and mildewy basement, running around the pool table and the Ping-Pong table, past the workbench, the shelves of canned goods, the old couch in front of the fireplace and then back to the pool table, over and over, 40 and 50 and 60 times, until my mind cleared and my breath burned and I felt, I thought:
Yes, now I can make it through another day
.

 

What I love best is distance running, 15 or 20 or 25 miles. I love the challenge and the pain, love the fight between the body and mind, love the various moods that flood my head. I can be young again, wearing a plaid dress on my first day of school. I can be old and dying. I can be fighting my way through childbirth and that helplessness that leads to giving in, to letting the body open up and show the way.

Distance flattens me out. It wears away my ego. Usually I run alone. I prefer it that way. I love the solitude, the miles stretching out ahead of me. I love the way my head locks tight within itself and how for the next two or three or five hours, there will be nothing between me and my mind. What I love most is the moment of holy terror, when things fall apart and my chest aches and my legs stiffen and my mind becomes a dark space without shadow, and I struggle and fight until I want to quit more than anything in the world.

But I don't. My pace remains even, though effort increases. And right when I'm sure that I can't go on, that I must (I must!) stop, my mind unfolds, it's like magic, my mind opens and I'm somewhere new, somewhere deep and wordless and primitive, someplace where I'm totally and purely myself, in that space before language or time. It's like sex, when it goes on and on and on. It's like the color green, the smell of rain, the way a lover's fingers curl inside your mouth. It's like licking the moon.

 

In high school and college, I ran competitively, training each morning over dark country roads where no cars passed and my breath rose white in the air until I understood the true meaning of loneliness. Back then, I felt no love for running. I ran because it was something I excelled at, something that came with little effort. I was fast, yes, but mostly I had endurance. I could start off a pace and hang on, no matter what. I wasn't smart or kind or particularly good-looking, but I could run. I had the body for it, and the feet. It was how I identified myself, and all my friends were runners; it was my whole world.

That came crashing down the end of my sophomore year in college, when I hurt my knee. At first the team coach shot me up with cortisone and I ran regardless of the inflammation, regardless of the pain. Each meet I gritted my teeth and raced, my knee hot and fiery so that it was as if I were on fire, and sometimes deep in a race, as I flailed and fought, I imagined flames blazing up my leg. Finally my knee gave out in the middle of a meet, and I lay on that track staring up at the sky, my eyes blurred with pain. I was sure my life was over.

 

There are places along the Lost Lake Trail down in Seward that are haunted by voices, places haunted by the past and the rain and the steady sound of my breath as I run through. I hear these whispers each time I run the Winter-Summer Loop, two miles straight up the mountain, followed by a mile through the valley and four glorious miles of downhill. The trail is so wet and muddy that I often lose my shoes, and as I lean down to pull them out, I smell the ground, old and pungent and alive; when I lick my hands the mud tastes slightly salty, like blood. The climb is rough and arduous, and no matter the weather, I strip down to a sports bra, the cold air soothing my hot, damp shoulders.

The voices come to me halfway up, teasing my ears like wings, like the flutter of moths. As I run higher and higher, they follow until I feel companionable and safe, as if someone is running behind me, though there is no one around but the dog. Sometimes I even imagine these people, a woman dressed in clothes from the 1920s and a man holding a hat in his hands, his forehead slick with sweat as he tries to explain something to me, but I'm too far in the future to hear. These voices or people or ghosts follow until I reach the creek before the first clearing, and as soon as I clear the water, there is only me and the dog and the mountain, and if I turn, a far-off view of the small town of Seward, the bay stretching out in silver-blue shadows. The voices never follow up the next brutal hill or through the small strand of spruce or along the final hill. I don't know where they go or why, I only know that they leave as I near the top, wind hitting my face and the sky opening up.

When I reach the forest service cabin, I stop and eat a sports gel, sip from my water pack, pet the dog, and then I'm winding through a valley so perfect and still and immense that always it stuns me, and always I feel tears in my eyes and always, I reach down and grab a leaf, a piece of bark, a small stone, and place it in my mouth, a rough and gritty communion. I lodge that bark or pebble against my cheek, where it is moist and dark and secretive, and I keep going.

 

For years after I had my son, I didn't run. I worked out at the gym. I swam. I biked. Sometimes, rollerblading around the inlet in the summer twilight, I'd pass a runner, watch his or her legs and think:
Why run when you can roll?
I'd feel haughty and self-important and I'd go too fast down the next hill, as if to challenge myself. Yet later that night, I'd feel loss rising up from my stomach, and after my son went to bed I'd sit in the quiet living room with the dog and cats and stare at my legs. Some mornings I'd even decide to run again, and I'd tie on my shoes and take off but I could never find a rhythm or joy because, face it, beginnings are tough and I was impatient and life was hard enough without struggling through three or five miles of pain.