Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  Hours passed. The bliss faded. I could remember the fun of the early miles in the way that I could remember that Ulaanbaatar was the capital of Mongolia. The end seemed to extend to an infinite horizon that I would never be able to reach. I screened the idea of finishing from my awareness, until its elimination even as a conceivable future intensified my distress. I climbed higher in the heat of the day, feeling more depleted and despairing with each step, my mind circling between two ideas of myself: finisher and loser. Around noon I reached a tent stationed at the halfway point, close to a road. I sat down in the shade, relieved to be done. I drank a cup of soda and ate. I guess I’ve reached my limit. I guess this is all I’ve got. I was dumb to think a loser like me could do this. What did I expect?

  I started walking along the path that led to the road from where I hoped to hitch a ride. The road lay about a hundred feet up the path. Halfway to the road, the path joined another trail at a right angle. This other trail was marked with a ribbon that signified the start of the second half of the course. I stopped at the trail junction. I took another step forward. And another. A hundred feet along the trail, I started jogging. Half a mile farther, I was running again. A hundred yards below the summit, a boy scout ran to greet me. “Hello, Jason,” he said, identifying me by the race number pinned to my shorts. “What do you need?” I needed more soda and cookies. I filled up on cookies and soda. I bent forward and touched my toes to ease the stiffness in my lower back and hamstrings. It was hard to get up again. “You got this,” a volunteer said. “It’s all downhill from here.” The final seven miles would take another eternity, around an hour of thigh-punishing descent on a steep, rocky trail about a thousand feet down to the tree line and then several more hours winding down switchbacks through the forest to the finish at Spooner Lake, but knowing the end was at last close changed the sense of effort involved. After eight hours of sweat and hard effort, the fixtures of the past or uncertain future identity slipped away. At sunset I reached the highest point of the course, Snow Valley Peak, at an oxygen-starved altitude of 9,214 feet, from which a stunning panorama of lakes and mountains stretched seemingly to infinity in every direction. Before the final climb, I followed a trail through a meadow full of wildflowers. In his poem “A Great Wagon,” Rumi wrote: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, / there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”13 I felt like Rumi’s field was a physical one and I was in it.

  I descended a rocky trail down to the tree line and into the forest, winding back and forth on a route through the trees toward the finish line, knowing Miriam and our baby daughter were waiting there, knowing that I was a father and a husband and an ultrarunner.

  Something like this experience is the origin story of many an ultrarunner. You start out thinking a regular marathon sounds pretty far enough. There is an infamous low point around mile 18 when you get low on glycogen and feel like you can’t keep going: the so-called wall. But eat something, drink something, and you keep going. You hit another wall, like I did at the midpoint of that fifty-mile race. You eat something, drink something. You keep going. You can keep on going on like that for a really, really long time.

  Knowing this has an amazing effect on what seems possible not just in running but in the rest of your life. I’m going to do it. I can do things. It was a stunning revelation back then, the state I was in, to discover this. It’s one thing to understand the arithmetic that a fifty-mile run is in reality a bunch of one-mile runs, stacked end to end, and another thing altogether to screen out all the messages that say that something like this is impossible. To shift your focus from if you can do it to how. I’d had that confidence, when I was little. But it had gotten lost along the way. To get it back I had needed proof of the most tangible kind there is: Moving. Going forward. Choosing a direction, and discovering that my choice meant something, so long as I kept on choosing it, one step at a time. Those steps took me to where I’m standing now, back on Snow Valley Peak, gazing at this incredible panorama of the lake thousands of feet below and the mountains in the distance. It’s so majestic, there’s a feeling of everything else falling away. No past. No future. Just the boundless now. Perhaps I’ve always been here.

  Running from Birth and Death

  I rode my bike up the hill from my apartment to the hospital. It was a steep climb that left me sweaty and panting by the time I got to the top. I locked my bike outside the hospital and went to a little coffee cart and bought a latte and a muffin. I went inside the hospital and took the elevator to the fourth floor. Down the corridor from the locked ward was a room with a circle of chairs. The official name was the Partial Hospitalization Program. Everyone called it Partial. The word felt apt. Everything in my life was partial. I was partially better, a partial human.

  I sat down on one of the chairs and filled out my worksheet for the day, sipping my coffee. I wrote my name at the top and my number of days in Partial and what sort of mood I was in.

  Day 11 . . . Glad to be here in Partial. I always feel a bit better after biking and drinking coffee. Still worried about Miriam and work. I don’t think someone like me should be a parent. But I don’t think I could handle being alone. I can’t decide . . .

  Around a quarter till nine the other patients drifted in and took their seats. Mike arrived. He was the director of the program. He was a clean-shaven man with neat dark hair and wearing slacks and a smart cotton sweater over a button-down shirt. He had kind eyes and the sort of New York accent that told the world he brooked no bullshit.

  “The car exploded, and everyone burned to death,” said a woman whose face was frozen like a ghost mask. Ten medications trials. “One word goes around in my head. From the autopsy. For the cause of death, I mean. Incinerated. The family was incinerated—I just can’t get over how unbelievably horrific that sounds.”

  Mike invited each of us to speak. The group divided up in recognizable classes. Some of us were loudmouths and others were shy and still others altogether mute. Mike labored with great skill to cajole the loudmouths into listeners and persuade the mutes to speak. One time I was droning on about something or other when he interrupted me and asked me who I was talking to, and I said, “What are you talking about?” and he told me I was in my head, and I wondered where else I was supposed to be. I met a girl who looked nineteen or maybe twenty with bandages on both forearms from all the times she’d cut herself. I met a middle-aged man whose partner had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and who whenever he found himself within a five-mile radius of where his partner had died would drive there and walk to the spot on the bridge where his partner had climbed over the barrier and leapt into space, and he would look down at the dark water hundreds of feet below and contemplate whether to join him. He couldn’t help it, he said, going back there. It was the same with almost everything he did, he said. “Totally OCD.” He would get into something, and the next thing he knew, it had taken over his life. In a previous lifetime, before his boyfriend died, he was an endurance athlete. He raced Ironman triathlons and had spreadsheets tracking every mile and workout and his maximum aerobic capacity measured in cubic milliliters of oxygen. Then he gave all that up and got into coffee. He soon ramped up to twenty-five cups every day. I met a large man who had recently declared bankruptcy and who talked a lot more than the rest of us combined. I thought he was totally full of himself until one time I was talking about how terrified I was of becoming a father because babies need love and I didn’t have any love to give, and he said, “When that baby comes out, something happens—soon as you see it, you’ll feel love, I guarantee it.”

  After group, Mike or one of his colleagues assigned us some homework. The curriculum diverged from the list of ancient Greek verbs and chemical formulae and poetry quotations I had been required to memorize at King Edward’s and at college in England. It involved lessons about how to live. Apparently it was possible to feel horrible and think, Fuck this. I’m leaving the country or jumping in front of a train, but without actually doing either of those
things. Suppose you hate the color purple, said the psychologist in the video we watched. Her name was Marsha Linehan. Your house is being painted. You come home—guess what color it is. But what are you going to do? Now you have a purple house. Suck it up, buttercup. Accept it. That doesn’t mean you have to like it. But there it was. You remember your old house, before it was purple. You picture the new house, the way you wanted it to be. But no amount of remembering or wishing would ever turn the ruined house in the present into the nonexistent house you yearned to live in.

  SATURN IS THE GOD of time. I once saw an article in a running magazine that defined a speedy so-and-so’s accomplishments with the statement that he “owned” a certain time in the marathon. It struck me as an odd expression. A person can own many things, but time is not among them. Even Bezos couldn’t buy it. Nobody owns time—time owns us. It would be hard to imagine colonizing something so elusive to articulation. As Saint Augustine wrote in his Confessions: “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.”

  Aristotle said he knew. For Aristotle, time was change. You see green leaves go brown in the autumn and infer that time has passed. But what is it in this that has passed? And if time is change, then does time itself change, or is time timeless? Early Christian writers conceived of a timeless order independent of change: the Kingdom of God. The Christian notion of a timeless order was the philosophical background that inspired Isaac Newton’s definition of time in the 1600s as an absolute uniform dimension, divisible in linear terms like space. For Newton, time was Out There: the past had a street address. But then along came Einstein, who proved that time isn’t absolute—and neither, indeed, is space. Both are relative to the position of an observer. More recent cosmology suggests that the kind of time we talk about when we split things up into past, present, and future bears no relation at all to the reality of the universe. Time—of the subjective passing variety—doesn’t match what’s really Out There. Even a moment of the most cursory introspection illuminates the truth that no entity resembling absolute time exists in our experience either.

  At the level of ultimate cosmic reality, then, time might be an illusion. But it is an enduring one. In almost all societies throughout history, humanity has understood time in a tripartite division between past, present, and future. We talk about time in terms of space. The past is behind us. The future is ahead. Under ordinary circumstances, that’s how it feels. Memories of events that occurred a long time ago feel like they’ve receded to a vanishing point in the rearview mirror of the mind.

  But trauma sabotages the normal experience of a moment’s gradual recession into what feels past. Evolution has hardwired the brain and nervous system to privilege the mechanisms that enable us to survive threats that either are happening in the immediate present or are imminent. The unconscious tells the traumatized person: Get ready. The disaster might happen again. It might still be happening. If the trauma feels behind us at all, it’s lurking right over our shoulder, ready to pounce. When the normal, neat division of past, present, and future gets messed with like this, what’s past can feel like it’s present, and feelings connected to recent events can retroactively shape the recollection of earlier ones. Trauma sends shock waves back into the remembered past. Life collapses into a single ongoing emergency: the time it’s always been.

  * * *

  I drove down the snowy road. I couldn’t see the white lines on the tarmac. It was hard to know where I was supposed to go. “You’re driving on the wrong side,” said Sebastian. I was glad he had come to visit. I could always count on Sebastian. A ski trip had been Sebastian’s idea. Or maybe it was Mike’s. “If he gets stuck in his head, throw him in the snow,” Mike had said. We had driven to Lake Tahoe and checked into a motel. The weather was so bad we couldn’t see the lake or the mountains surrounding it. Everything was snowy and misty.

  When we got up that morning, I went to the closet to grab the ski clothes I’d dumped in a pile on the floor on one side. I looked at Sebastian’s clothes, which he’d hung in neat rows on the other side.

  My thoughts drifted to a family ski trip decades earlier. In my mind’s eye, I could recall the moment when a colossal landscape loomed into view, resplendent in the dawn sun, of snowy mountains extending in every direction to a far horizon. None of us, except Sebastian—who had taken lessons on a dry slope—had put on skis before, and we struggled to put our boots into the ski bindings. I remembered becoming sweaty and overheated with the effort while wearing ski clothes in the mild sunny weather, and an irritable exchange of words then occurring—I forget the details—between my mother and me. “Right, that’s it,” she said. “No more skiing.” It was incomprehensible: We’d bought ski clothes, flown from Heathrow to Germany, driven by bus through a blizzard to the Austrian Alps, rented skis and boots, gotten weeklong lift passes and ski lessons—it must have cost thousands—but dawn on day one and Mum was calling the whole thing off?

  Her decision was incontestable. I appealed to Dad—any sane person would surely recognize the folly of squandering such a precious chance in the mountains—but he appeared powerless to countermand or even question her. I couldn’t remember how we filled the empty days that followed. I could remember gazing at the mountains and daydreaming of an older version of myself holding hands with my imaginary girlfriend, the two of us frolicking in the snow like George Michael and the pretty girl in the “Last Christmas” video. “Tell me, baby, do you recognize me? Well, it’s been a year, it doesn’t surprise me . . .” Sebastian and I spent some time admiring ski equipment in the village shop windows and chatting about which brand looked the coolest, Atomic or Rossignol or Dynastar. Then we followed Mum and Dad into a fancy clothing store, where Sebastian and I were allowed to pick something expensive—designer jeans, perhaps—as if we were clinging to the pretense of a family enjoying a holiday together, engaged in a shopping trip after a day on the slopes. As the week’s end drew near, my dismay drifted into resignation. On New Year’s Eve my mother drank a whole bottle of wine at dinner, and I was woken later that night by the sound of her vomiting, and 1987 began with the sight of Mum asleep on the bathroom floor, curled around the toilet. Later that morning I saw a poster in the village advertising a pig-catching competition and its presumed favorite, a champion in prior years—a pig called Clifford Oily—and a picture of Clifford and some burly men in lederhosen attempting to catch him formed in my mind with such vivid detail that as I recalled that champion pig in Austria standing in a Tahoe motel room decades later, I wasn’t sure if the pig-catching competition had existed in reality or only my imagination, so when I remembered the Austrian Alps, I couldn’t help but picture greased pigs slipping through the hands of men tumbling over in the snow in an effort to capture them, and the comfort I felt in mentally conjuring this absurd scene while Sebastian and my father and I followed our mother into the frozen darkness.

  Sebastian and I reached the ski slopes. Ahead of us was the task of renting skis and boots and poles and buying lift tickets and going to the bathroom and getting to the lift and taking it to the top of the mountain. Was it tickets first and skis second, or bathroom, skis, tickets? . . . I might as well have been a medieval farmer made to take a college math exam. “I can’t remember the order,” I said. “Do we get the skis or . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence. “Let’s get the tickets, then the skis and boots,” said Sebastian. Who is this Einstein?

  We got up the mountain. I turned my skis to face downhill. I gathered speed. I lost control, and as I tumbled into the deep, powdery snow, my skis detached from their bindings. “Need any help?” said Sebastian. “No,” I said. I put my skis back on and pushed off with my poles, and soon I was flying downhill with the icy wind in my face. I can remember this used to be fun. But now I can’t feel anything. Nothing at all. Something must really have broken inside of me. Now I’m thinking again. Stop it. Don’t think. Don’t think about how if you feel numb here, you’ll feel numb everywhere.
Stop it. . . . That was a thought. The thought about thinking that you’re not supposed to be thinking about how you’re thinking how you’re not supposed to be thinking.

  That night we went to the movies. In the middle of some action flick in which the hero was dying, my head spun into a loop about which was better, staying alive in my horrible state or not being here anymore, until the thoughts were so loud in my head I couldn’t bear the noise and I ran out of the movie and went to watch another one on the next screen over in the multiplex, something schmaltzy with violin music, but then it got to this part with a little baby, and seeing the baby, my head spun in a different loop about being a dad and how impossible that was for a broken man like me, so I ran out of that movie too and into the one on the other side of the corridor, and then back and forth, between every screen in the theater, but all of the movies were the same: there was no running away from birth and death.

  * * *

  I didn’t know what to expect from the meeting with my father. I didn’t know why I had asked for it. The words had just tumbled out of my mouth one morning after group. “My father’s in town—would you like to meet him?” After he heard the story from Miriam about the knife and the pills and the bloody wound on my leg, it took him a couple of weeks to get on a plane to California. Miriam was less than pleased. “There’s no way I can come now,” Dad had apparently told her. “I’d be useless.” I understood. Yeah, that’s right, you’d be useless. I couldn’t imagine him being useful. When he did show up, Miriam didn’t bend over backward to disguise her displeasure. “It must remind him of what he went through when he was my age, back in Cannon Road,” I said. Miriam would have none of it. “He’s your father! He’s supposed to be here!”

  Dad strolled into Mike’s office and sat down. Mike shook his hand. Dad told him about the hard times in Cannon Road and how they all began, he now realized, when Granddad died and Gran sold the house by the mountain and he lost any semblance of connection to his childhood home in Ireland, like a tree uprooted from the particular soil that had nourished it and shoved into the ground somewhere far away. Perhaps this was my problem too, said Dad, uprooting myself from England and the entire life I had known.