Running on Empty

by Marshall Ulrich

  It took me realizing that it was okay to lose the battle so I could come back to win the war. I could be kind to myself about a temporary “failure” to complete, and it served to save me, psychologically, for the times when it would be really important to continue no matter what.

  Ultimately, the start-date delays allowed me to train hard and taper several times before we got to the starting line in San Francisco. During this time, I also devoted an hour or two each week to phone sessions with a friend and mentor for toughening up and steeling myself never to quit during the transcon. We’d talk about the upcoming race. We’d talk about Ted Corbitt and the bunioneers. We’d talk about heroes and history, about myth and mystery, about the rigors of the road and what it would take to march my body across the entire United States. These conversations were designed to prepare me mentally, just as Ray’s training plan was designed to prepare me physically, for the upcoming ordeal, to give me the strength and stamina to deal with whatever might happen once we were under way.

  Yet all during that training period, from October 2007 to September 2008, Heather and I had more immediate hardships to confront. There was her resistance, and my insistence. There was also a string of personal tragedies that pushed us both to the outer edges of loss and sorrow, as well as some moments of brilliance and hope and inspiration. All of this, too, may have been preparation for what was to come.

  “The best I can figure is that we’ve been told too many times that adventure just isn’t in the cards for everyday folk like you and me. It’s reserved for the people we read about in books and magazines, not mere mortals like us. Well, I’m not buying it.”

  Chris Douglass was always saying things like that, getting himself and other people inspired to do what’s out of the ordinary. He’d competed in marathons and an ultramarathon, struck out on wild adventures he called “small world treks,” written charming vignettes about the people he’d met and the places he’d seen in the world, and recently embarked on a new interest, short films.

  That’s why he called me in May 2008, four months before the start of my run across America, to introduce himself and request an interview. He told me that he admired me, that he was preparing for his own cross-country trip (walking from Colorado to Maine), and that he wanted to talk with me, get to know me, pick up a few of my “secrets,” and put together a promotional clip I could use, gratis. At twenty-eight, he came across as incredibly warm, friendly, and enthusiastic about this project and the kind of life he’d carved out for himself. I could tell, already, that Chris was my kind of guy, a kindred spirit, and I wanted to meet him, too.

  “Sure, come on over to the house and we’ll interview each other.” I thought it would be fun if he asked me whatever questions he had, and then we’d flip the camera around and I’d return the favor.

  After a lively afternoon together, filming mostly on my back deck in Idaho Springs, Colorado, we said our good-byes and Chris promised to send me a finished clip in a couple of days. When he left, Heather turned to me, an odd look on her face. “My god, Marshall. That was what I imagine it would have been like if I’d met you twenty years ago. Those intense blue eyes. His build. His dreams and energy.”

  To tell the truth, the similarities were eerie, except Chris exuded positivity in a way I never had. That’s not to say he was some airheaded Pollyanna. He had a way of sharing his ideas and experiences, displaying a groundedness that was invigorating and reassuring at the same time.

  What a breath of fresh air! Heather and I had been through the wringer ever since I’d decided to do the transcontinental run, and meeting him gave us a lift we desperately needed. For months, we’d faced some agonizing twists and turns. Heather had continued to worry that I was going to permanently damage myself physically or psychologically in attempting this feat, and I’d had a hard time envisioning such a journey without her support. I’m not sure she was able even to consider giving it to me, however. In the spring of 2007, her father had been diagnosed with stage-IV kidney cancer, and she’d made him her first priority. We’d fully expected him to be gone within a few months, but we’d gotten lucky, and Rory was given more time than that.

  Even as Heather was being frustrated in her attempts to talk me out of running across America, Rory was cheering me on. “Tell me what you’re doing again?”

  Despite his own suffering, he wanted to hear about my training regimen, which I’d begun that fall over Heather’s protests. We always called Rory my biggest fan, because he made sure I knew how proud he was of me, and not just for the athletic achievements, but also for my character. The feeling was mutual. I admired his intellect, valued his opinions, and connected with this respected biologist’s affection for the outdoors. In short, I loved Rory. We were friends, and at only ten years older, he was basically a contemporary of mine. I remember him telling me when we met that it was okay for me to date his daughter “as long as you don’t call me ‘Dad’ and I don’t have to call you ‘son.’”

  Deal. We understood each other. Still, when he became so ill, I couldn’t help feeling as if I was losing a father figure. Nor did it keep me from resenting the time Heather was spending away from home to care for him. As much as I loved Rory, I wanted to be her first priority, and this was, understandably, the cause of even more friction between us. Somebody once said that adversity doesn’t build character, it reveals it, and that’s certainly been true for me, for better and worse.

  When winter of 2007 came, we heard that Ted Corbitt had died of complications from prostate and colon cancer. It struck me not just as a personal loss, but also a calamity for our sport. My grief was intensified by a feeling that we were burying an icon, a standard bearer. He stood for a kind of sportsmanship that seemed to be waning, one marked by ethics, doing what you say you’ll do, and setting an example for the up-and-comers. With Ted gone, it felt as if the torch of the elder American ultrarunners had been passed to me, and just two months into my training for running across America, I made a silent promise that I’d hold that torch high in his honor.

  Then, in April 2008, while we were at Rory’s house with Heather’s mom, taking care of him after a serious setback in his declining health, I got a call from my own mother.

  Your dad’s not doing well, son. He’s in intensive care at the hospital.

  What? This was too much. “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  My father had prostate cancer, had had it for thirteen years and told no one except my mom, who alone looked after him, though he wasn’t exactly giving in to the disease. She’d even had to trick him into going to the hospital when he clearly needed emergency care. (She’d pretended to be driving him to work.) Assured that Rory was stable enough for us to leave him, Heather and I both went to see my dad at the Northern Colorado Medical Center, where he faced death like the old soldier he was. Compared with the horrors he’d observed during World War II, our life—by no means luxurious—must have seemed like a dream to him, and Dad knew how to appreciate it. So when he passed away, at age eighty-five, he had no regrets. I know because my daughter Ali, then eighteen, had offered to go out and do anything that her grandpa felt he’d left undone, and he’d patted her hand and told her no, there wasn’t a thing. My dad died at peace with what he’d accomplished in his life.

  There were things Dad never told us and that we discovered only after his passing. We knew that he’d risked his own life to carry a wounded soldier off the battlefield, not because my dad talked about it, but because the man he’d pulled to safety kept in contact with our family for the rest of his life. But it turns out that Elmer Ulrich had also participated in the liberation of survivors from the Buchenwald concentration camp. He never spoke of it. My cousin had found out only because she’d recently interviewed Dad for a school project and asked pointed questions.

  I talked about this, and the father I knew, when I delivered his eulogy on a wind-whipped spring day.

  We returned to Winona, Minnesota, to help Heather’s mom, Janis, care for Rory, and just thre
e weeks later, on May 10, he died, tearing Heather’s world apart. I found myself reverting to an old role, trying to stay strong and positive in the face of what was becoming an avalanche of loss.

  That’s the emotional landscape onto which Chris had walked, and we drank in his youthful exuberance like two thirsty travelers who’ve finally wandered out of the desert and found water.

  The short film he made about me was posted on You Tube within a few days, just as he’d promised. (You can watch the clip, and others he made, at http://www.youtube.com/user/ChristopherEDouglass.) We were so impressed with what he’d done that we showed it, like proud parents, to lots of our friends, including one who did not disperse praise liberally. Someone who was more likely to designate something as “complete shit” than a treasure, she loved what Chris had produced, thought it was fantastic, and wanted to be introduced to him right away so she could discuss some projects they could do together.

  On May 28, Chris called us from his car while he was driving to the start of his Colorado-to-Maine adventure, just to let us know how thrilled he was to have met us, how flattered he was that my friend liked his short film, and how he looked forward to working with her as soon as he got home. He was sure life couldn’t get any better than this.

  Thirty minutes later, Chris was dead, killed in a car accident.

  His mother called to tell us what had happened, and a few days later, shocked and further numbed by our compounding grief, Heather and I traveled to Maine to attend our third funeral in two months. Although I’d known Chris for only a short time, his parents told me that I probably understood him better than anyone else, that Chris had called me his hero, and they asked me to deliver Chris’s eulogy. While we were there in his hometown, we stayed in his room, slept in his bed.

  I quoted Chris during that eulogy, repeated his rejection of the idea that adventure wasn’t in the cards for ordinary folk. Chris had embodied a philosophy the two of us shared: that living life to its fullest is what it’s all about. Yes, there may be suffering—in fact, it’s certain there will be—but it serves to heighten our joy. It makes us grateful to be alive.

  Without question, I was grateful to have met and known Chris, if only for a few weeks. Although his death pained me, I felt something extraordinary had transpired between us, and I cherished it. His vibrancy of spirit, like that of the other men who’d recently passed into memory, redoubled my commitment to carry out the transcontinental adventure. I was determined to go.

  We were at it again, arguing about the impending run, which was now only a few weeks away.

  Why? Heather was asking me for the who-knows-how-many-eth time. With all we’d been through, with all I was sure to go through, why? Why? Why? Worn down from more than a year of this, I said the only thing that made sense to me anymore.

  “It’s just who I am.”

  It’s also just what I needed: to get outdoors, to clear my head, to allow myself the time to think about what I’d experienced and then think about something else for a long, long time. I needed to run, to empty out the accumulated emotion, to strip myself of comfort and grieve the loss of these four men at my own pace, in my old, familiar fashion. As with Jean’s death, running would provide a way for me to both deal with and avoid the emotional pain.

  “Well, finally.” Heather took a deep breath. “The truth.”

  My simple declaration had hit a nerve, and she knew that we’d reached the bottom of my particular mystery. All the other reasons I’d given her were versions of the truth, but this was new, truth with a capital T. It was then I began to see some kind of acceptance. She was going to give me her blessing; she knew that taking on these extreme tests of endurance, ones that demand not just athletic rigor but a unique brand of mental toughness, had become woven into the fabric of my being.

  The transcontinental run would be about so much more than breaking a record, reliving history, or attempting some kind of extreme sightseeing trip. It would transcend the homage to my predecessors, although they were certainly on my mind. It would be a personal reckoning, an accounting of my character, that was sure to leave me scoured of everything but the essentials. It would mean running through the emptiness, beyond any pain, facing unimagined hardships, and on to . . . what? I didn’t know. But I wanted to find out.

  “You have to come with me.” I’d said this many times before.

  Heather could see how much I wanted her to be a part of this endeavor, to support me in it not just with her words but with her presence. Truly, I didn’t believe I could do it without her, and she knew that. She also knew, without me saying so, how cathartic this could be for me, what an incredible accomplishment it would be if I made it, and what it might cost us as a couple if she denied me.

  She said yes, although she had no idea what she was signing up for.

  Despite my background, neither did I, really. What we did know for certain was that it would be grueling, fraught with harsh realities, and incredibly hard on my fifty-seven-year-old body. And we knew I had to do it.

  4.

  Fool’s Errand

  Days 1—2

  Before the start of the race on September 13, 2008, when Heather and I arrived before dawn at San Francisco City Hall, I felt sick to my stomach whenever I thought about the impending grind. Everyone was making their last-minute preparations, especially confirming the day’s route. (Our plan for leaving City Hall had been worked out the night before, a last-minute scramble caused by miscommunication or a lack of communication or someone dropping the ball, depending on whom you ask about it.) I tried to distract myself by cracking dumb jokes, giving my crew a hard time, and watching Charlie sign shoes and shirts for about a dozen guest runners who’d registered on the Running America website to come out and be a part of the start of this . . . thing.

  Oh, shit. What have I gotten myself into?

  I always say the only limitations are in your mind, and if you don’t buy into those limits, you can do a helluva lot more than you imagine. So I let my mind wander away from my doubts and rest in my immediate surroundings. It wasn’t yet fully light out, there wasn’t much traffic, and the only people nearby were part of our deal. Guest runners stretching and warming up. The film crew getting ready to catch the beginning of what they expected to be an epic story. Charlie’s and my race crews climbing in and out of the RVs and vans, double-checking supplies and reviewing the route.

  With the buzz of all this activity below me, I walked up the broad stairs to the city hall’s main entrance and considered how much this imposing white building, with its enormous dome and soaring pillars, looked like so many other U.S. government centers, not so different from the one in lower Manhattan that would serve as our finish line. This architectural connection struck me as symbolic—another continuity across the vast distance we’d cover—but, to be honest, it didn’t calm my jangling nerves. Trying to stay positive, I reflected on my original concept for the run and how it had all finally materialized with Charlie’s efforts; the support of our sponsors who’d given equipment, gear, and money; and the keen interest of this talented documentary team hired by NEHST. Together, we’d see America one mile at a time, honor the history and diversity of our country, raise money and awareness for the United Way’s campaign against childhood obesity, and literally follow in the footsteps of those who’d done this before. I’d had the lofty idea, too, that we’d somehow reintroduce America to Americans, showing how similar we all are while also celebrating the differences among the people we’d meet and the dramatically changing landscapes we’d traverse.

  Now standing in front of the immense doors of City Hall, I waited for everyone to finish their preparations so we could get moving. This is where it would all begin. You could feel the excitement in the air—and the pity, too.

  Welcome to California!

  “The Golden State”

  Arrival date: 9/13/08 (Day 1)

  Arrival time: 5:03 a.m.

  Miles covered: 0

  Miles to go: 3,063.2r />
  Finally, just after five o’clock in the morning, Charlie and I stepped off the starting point together, chatting about the road ahead. He’s taller than I am, slightly stooped, with broad shoulders and long legs, but I have a huge stride, so I had no trouble going alongside him. We traveled briskly up and down the hills on city streets, remaining intentionally oblivious to what lay beyond the next streetlight illuminating the long road ahead. We both knew this would be an ordeal, yet we felt some security in our partnership. With two runners, we’d increase our chances of at least one man making it into New York City, and if we could go all the way together (even if we finished separately), the ongoing competition would push us to set a new record. If one of us had to drop out, then he’d be there for the other guy, support him the rest of the way by sharing crew, gear, or whatever the remaining runner needed.

  By about mile five, I settled into my own pace and moved away from Charlie and his group. A good friend, Chris Frost, stayed with me, and within hours of leaving City Hall, we’d run along the waterfront and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, where another friend surprised us and ran with Chris and me through Sausalito.

  I had company on and off for the rest of the day, even horsed around with Charlie on the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge, cutting up for the cameras with him while we waited for a prearranged police escort.

  We’d gotten off to a decent start together, despite tension that had developed between us during the months prior to the race. The guy could work a room, for sure, but his braggadocio and craving for the limelight had begun to rub me the wrong way. He’d neglected to include me or even mention my name in most of the pre-race publicity and sponsorships, and he’d made promises he’d failed to keep. Heather and I had begun to joke that I was the “invisible man.” On one hand, his disregard for my part in this event rankled. Yet he’d been instrumental in making it all come together, and once we were under way, I was grateful to him for keeping most of the attention on himself. I had enough to do, just staying focused on the run and not letting my concerns about the mileage get in my way, without having to worry about looking good for cameras or anyone else.