Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  I worked hard and rose to the top of my class. As I walked across the stage at the start of the next school year to receive my class award and a hardback copy of Oliver Twist, I felt a great swell of pride. This nice feeling comes from being the best at something, I thought. I must finish first. Then I’ll win prizes. Maybe one day I’ll get into Oxford.

  Oxford: how I yearned to take up residence in this City of Knowledge! Achieve acceptance from this hallowed institution and I would be Someone. The significance of the place first hit me when Mum, Dad, Sebastian, and I visited the city a couple of years before. We walked through Radcliffe Square, a cobblestoned street surrounded by ancient gray stone buildings, in the center of which stood a domed structure, the Radcliffe Camera. We settled beneath a large tree in Christchurch Meadow to enjoy a picnic lunch. I lay down on the grass and stared at the leaves dancing in the wind. I felt the warmth of the sun on my face. A calm and peaceful feeling soaked through my body. If it were possible, I would have remained suspended in that state of reverie forever. It seemed to me that the calm feeling bore some relation to the antiquity of the buildings I had seen and the ancient knowledge in them. Oxford was a mystical place. It was here, among these medieval spires, I understood that some of the greatest minds in history—Erasmus, John Donne, Stephen Hawking—had thought their brilliant thoughts. Percy Shelley and Oscar Wilde had written masterpieces here. I had a feeling of awe that reminded me of how I felt looking at the images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary in the stained-glass windows in church when I was a little boy and still believed in God. Literature had become my religion. I didn’t pray to Conrad or Dostoevsky or Milton, but the absorption I felt when reading books seemed to replicate the experience of contacting an intelligence beyond myself that kept me company and guided me.

  I stopped making any kind of effort in PE. What was the point in running? My brain would get me prizes. My body was just the lump of flesh that carried my brain from PE to Chemistry and English, from Physics to Math and Music, from History to French to Latin. The following year some of the other boys started overtaking me in Science and Math. I’m ordinary. Nobody. I focused all my effort on the one class where I sensed no one else could touch me: English. By the time I was thirteen I must have read half the books on the living room shelves at home. When I was reading Oliver Twist, I felt like I was really inside Oliver’s mind. Reading was magic. Read a book, and I got to know another human being on the inside, in the intimate way that I knew myself, but combined with a clearer sense of meaning, because in my own life things didn’t always make sense in the moment, because I hadn’t lived my whole life yet, only the little part that was now, and to really understand a story I had to see the whole—to know how everything turns out in the end when I looked back at how I got there from the beginning. In a book, I could see how a whole story fit together, from start to finish: how Oliver was born an orphan, for instance, and became a thief under the dubious care of the Artful Dodger, but then met the benefactor who adopted him and took him to a happy life in the countryside where he lived out the rest of his days.

  The same year I started the school for clever boys, my mother finished her degree and got a teaching credential and started work at a nearby high school. She didn’t last long in the job. She got a job in a different school. Then she changed jobs again. The job changes seemed innocuous at the time. Sometimes I felt sad or scared or lonely, but I saw no link between these feelings and the beginnings of more perplexing behavior in my mother, or the strange rules that applied in our home that I knew didn’t apply in the homes of other boys. Sebastian once wrote up a list of guests for his forthcoming birthday party. He was turning ten or thereabouts. My mother crossed off the names of all the girls. “Why can’t they come?” said Sebastian. “I don’t want them to,” said Mum. And that was that.

  I had strange worries. One time I left my hockey stick on the train home. The prospect of telling my mother that I had lost the hockey stick was frightening. At the end of my second year I won the school poetry-writing prize. “My mother is dead,” I wrote. “My father is dead. I will climb in my hole.”

  In the depths of the winter the school held an annual cross-country run. I changed into my shorts and shirt and rugby boots and followed the boys and the teachers past the school gates and down the street to a park called the Common, so called because it was designated public land in the thirteenth century. The path went through the gate of the Common, past the lichen-encrusted gravestones of young men who had died in the wars and whole families who had drowned on the Titanic, and onward to the big tree by the pond that served as the start line.

  I could feel the pain in my chest get worse, and the thought of wanting to stop became so insistent it took all my focus to ignore it and keep my feet hammering the ground. I followed a path that wound through the hedges and brambles deep in the woods. Entering the wood, I came to a narrow trail down which boys lurched single file through knee-deep mud so thick and sticky it swallowed a boot from my foot, stopping me in my tracks to kneel and dig for it. I continued to follow the route through the dense trees. Parts of the trail were overgrown with thorny bushes that formed a corridor of foliage through which I ran as if into a separate world, a wild and primal place of brambles and wet, brown leaves. My legs got scratched and bloody against the thorns. There was no way of knowing how much farther I had to go. I felt my cheeks flush with heat and the sting of the bloody scratches.

  Branches and thorny bushes hung low over parts of the trail. Like the telephone box that transported Doctor Who in his journeys through space and time, the woods were larger on the inside than the outside. All I could see ahead of me was a few feet of muddy trail and overgrown plants. I knew I had been here before, in the woods on the Common, though the details of the route in my prior two annual cross-country runs had altogether faded from my mind. After a long time in the thicket, the path would lead out of the woods and back onto the open grass, where I would see the big tree by the pond again. But that was far off in the future. Now all that existed were the brambles slashing my legs and the fear of slowing down and falling back into the mass of boys that huffed behind me.

  Rain lashed my face and soaked me to the skin, and soon I was freezing cold and cursing a helpless God who failed to shelter me from the stormy blasts. What this ritual of sadism and soggy stumbling through the mud accomplished I did not know. How pointless everything seemed. Before long I knew that I would finish the loop in the woods and return to the pavilion for a compulsory shower. Mr. Martin, the assistant PE master, would be standing on guard. He used to be in the army. He would stand there, watching, until every last one of us had stripped off our sodden kit and tiptoed shivering underneath the lukewarm water. I would have to stand there among the taller boys with their chest hair and muscles and manly organs, my tiny growth of fledgling pubes and puny chicken legs visible for everyone to see. Then the cross-country run would be over for the year. But then I would face more ordeals. I would finish the third form and then the fourth and fifth form and then the sixth form and then go to university and then get a job like Dad and go to an office every day until I got old and died, following the path into the dismal prison of adult life that our parents and teachers had laid out in front of us, a mindless rush along the course of human existence, which, like the route from the big tree into the cold dark of the woods, I hadn’t chosen myself and so wasn’t enjoying at all.

  But then the path at last led out of the woods, and I could see the big tree by the pond, and I was no longer aware of the cold. I could feel the bloody scratches on my filthy legs and my sodden clothes sticking to my skin and the hard wind blowing in my face and the splashing sound of my rugby boots in the mire and the rhythm of my breathing and moving, no longer urgent and painful but now steady and sustained, as I plodded through the muck and brambles somewhere in the line of boys, some in front and others behind, but feeling indifferent now to where I stood in relation to them, caring only that I was moving and breathing and alive.


  Love

  The trail leads down to the lake. I follow the course markers along the street to the Tahoe City aid station. I say, “108,” announcing my bib number to a race official with a clipboard marking down the runners entering the aid station. No sign of Miriam or the kids. No worries. I’ll see them soon, for sure. “There’s a guy about a mile back with a broken rib,” I tell the official, and give her the runner’s bib number. “And another guy maybe five miles back was really frying in the heat. He’s moving, but he’s going to need some taking care of when he gets here. They both are.”

  I grab the canvas bag with “108” written on it in black Sharpie pen, which the race organizers have ferried from Homewood along with a pile of similar assorted sacks and totes laid out in a neat rectangular array in numeric order on a tarp next to the food table. Drop bags, they’re called. You put bits of kit in them that you don’t want to carry with you the whole way but need at certain times, like a jacket and a headlamp for the night. In each bag I’ve packed socks, shoes, spare clothes, a little first-aid kit for blisters, spare contact lenses, contact lens solution, a toothbrush, and a miniature tube of toothpaste. I’ve also packed a huge quantity of identical lemon energy bars. When I think of the massive distance still ahead of me, all that seems assured is a certain amount of chaos. To cope with chaos, I have learned to seek comfort in anything constant. I lean my trekking poles against one of the camping chairs beside the table and push my drop bag under the chair. I pick up a paper plate from the end of the table and load it with food, fill a big plastic cup with ice and ginger ale, and sit down. Leaning back in the chair with the canvas material supporting me, I feel an instant relief in my sacrum and the whole way up my spine, the relaxation of all the core muscles after their hard day’s labor keeping me upright, marching up thousands of feet and then flying back down the mountain, a radiant sensation of relaxing and opening so lovely it makes me wonder who invented this amazing gizmo, the chair.

  I take a slurp of iced ginger ale and then chow down. I’ve been running for nine hours. I must have burned thousands of calories, and I’ve covered just 30 miles; 175 to go. In ultras, an upside-down set of rules comes into play: the trail is Wonderland and you are Alice, learning to do the opposite of whatever it makes sense to do in reality. Gluttony is good—a requirement, even. As I heard one wag once observe, all things being equal, an ultramarathon is essentially an eating contest. Over thirty or forty or ninety hours of running, the body burns way more fuel than you could possibly ingest, so it becomes imperative to be as piggy as possible to make up for an energy deficit that widens by the mile and the hour. If there was an ultrarunning rule book, instruction number one would say: “Stuff your face at every opportunity.” My plate contains a quesadilla, some salty boiled potatoes and a smattering of chips, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches cut in these darling quarters, piled on with watermelon chunks, mini pretzels, a scattering of chocolate candies, and just a soupçon of pickled gherkin, all washed down with a pint of soda—a fine pairing, I must say. Compliments to the chef. Consider launching your own show: Salt, Fat, Oreos, Soda, perhaps. What my dinner lacks in culinary elegance it gains in caloric abundance and in containing enough salt, sugar, starch, and fat in a single meal to induce a coronary in a sedentary citizen but which will sustain my body’s chemical needs during my next unknowably long slog of mountain marching until I can chow down again.

  A loud belch erupts from all the fizzy drink in my belly. “Excuse me,” I say. No one notices or even seems to care. I open my drop bag. I take out a clean pair of socks and a fresh pair of shoes. You wouldn’t believe how drenched and filthy shoes get after a day on a mountain trail. Your feet have been stuck in there for hours, cramped and sweaty, as you pound them tens of thousands of times on the dusty, rocky ground. You can do your best to keep all the little bits of grit and twigs and sand from getting in: tie your laces snug, cover your shoes with gaiters. But beyond a certain point you’re fighting the basic laws of physics. You can build barriers against nature for a little while, but in the end the dirt gets in. The outside becomes inside.

  I clean my feet, put on my fresh socks and shoes and a fresh shirt, then stash the dirty socks, shoes, and shirt in my bag. The old shirt is drenched in sweat and smeared with sunscreen mixed with dirt. I fill both my water bottles, take some candies in a little plastic bag to munch on the trail. I touch my toes to stretch out the backs of my legs and circle my hips to loosen them up. I’m just about ready to leave when my dog, Mochi, comes bounding toward me and leaps up to lick my face. A couple of feet behind Mochi there’s Miriam, and my son and daughter, big smiles on all their faces. We hug. Now that Miriam and our kids are here, along with all the junk food and soda, I’m full to the brim with love. Soaking up that much love, I could run forever. I kiss everyone goodbye and run down the trail. Ahead of me I face a two-thousand-foot slog back up a mountain. Make good time and I’ll see the view from the high country at sunset.

  IV

  Earth

  The Mourner

  It’s around six in the evening. The sun’s going down. The faraway mountains are bathed in a golden light. The air feels cool. I am listening to a runner tell me how and why she started running. I have no idea how we got into this conversation. On the trail there’s this way you just fall into random chats with people you’ve only just met but end up having the deepest conversations of your whole life with. You’re in the waking dreamworld, the high country of the mind, everything flowing on the inside and the outside, when along comes another dreamer, and two dreams turn into one. What started off with some comment about the view or our favored brand of trail shoe sent us down a path that’s spiraled into our deepest wounds and grief. It must be something about the way everything is moving. You float down the trail. You know where you’re going—straight ahead—so there’s nothing much you need to think about. It frees up a lot of space for your mind to wander. There’s this feeling of your thoughts flowing from one place to the next, and just letting them take you places. Then you end up next to someone else, likely feeling pretty much the same way, and as your feet match each other step for step, your two minds start running together, like intersecting trails.

  It reminds me of how Sigmund Freud described free association, only instead of lying down on a couch, observing your thoughts pass by like “a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway carriage,”10 on the trail you get a nicer view than some old psychoanalyst’s office ceiling. The view is not merely interior. You see day change to night and a forest trail leading back up to the high country, and you find yourself remembering another kind of nighttime. “Everyone was dying,” she says. “First my best friend dies in a climbing accident. Then it turns out my dad has cancer. There was just this horrible feeling I started to have that death was around every corner. I guess I must’ve run a bit before in college or whatever. But something took me out to the trail. It felt so good. Even when it was bad, it was good. I heard this runner on a podcast once saying there are two types of fun. Type-one fun is sex and ice cream: you like it when it’s happening. Type-two fun you like looking back on. It’s the feeling of mile eighty-six, raining cats and dogs, and you’re soaked and freezing and giving God the middle finger, stumbling up some endless hill in the dark with bloody urine and chafing in your asshole, and being back at work five days later, thinking, That was awesome! All the bad patches fade away, and all you can remember is the blissed-out bits at the start and what a relief it was to finish and how even the parts that sucked in the middle didn’t really suck because it was getting through them that let you know in your bones at the end that you’d really done something. And so pretty soon I was hooked. I had to run. It was either that or totally fall apart. Every day just sucked. But I knew I had this one thing in my life that didn’t suck. Running.”