It took fifteen hours of active running to log the requisite seventy miles on that first day. My nerves had finally settled down by the time we’d goofed around on that bridge, and not long after that we’d finished our first marathon, stretched, and then cruised by the beautiful countryside of Napa Valley, stopping for the night in Fairfield a few hours after marathon number two. Heather and I bedded down in the RV with our friend and RV driver, Roger Kaufhold, and everyone else—the rest of my crew, Charlie, his crew, and the documentary team—drove many miles away to stay in the nearest Super 8 hotel, so I didn’t get to hear about how he was doing, but my group felt good about the day’s effort, with growing confidence that I could do this. I was tired, but not that tired. I was sore, but not that sore.
The next morning, Charlie started a few miles behind me, having staked out his finish short of the full seventy miles on day one, but I didn’t know if he was already having trouble or just being smart. My own legs felt heavy as I started off again on day two, a familiar feeling for any ultrarunner. My world was narrowing, too, another usual effect of long distances. The day before, I’d been keenly aware of the details of the landscape through the Bay Area, in particular certain smells that had marked our progress: first the urban aromas at City Hall, then the salty-fishy air of the wharf and the eucalyptus as we approached the Golden Gate Bridge, and then the distinctive fumes of the oil refineries as we headed out of town. But now I was less alert, not so attuned to whatever existed outside the five-foot bubble in which I was running. Like a horse with blinders on, most of my attention was on the terrain under my feet. Still, I heard the wind generators south of Highway 12 at the early-morning start, and although it was pitch-dark as I ran by them, I felt their huge mechanical presence dwarfing me and the nearby cattle, which I could faintly make out as they calmly grazed below the massive, whirring blades.
Once the sun came up, the pastureland surrounding Rio Vista showed itself, golden with the fading grasses of early fall. As the sun rose higher in the sky, I felt the temperature rising, climbing to about ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit, and my crew brought me a short-sleeved shirt. Continuing on, I breathed in the dust kicked up by a dry crosswind, and with essentially no shoulder to run on, I’d flinch as the trucks whizzed by, creating vortexes of dirt and hot air that regularly ripped my hat off my head and occasionally threatened to pull me into their path. Any kind of traffic was a menace, and it became clear that one of the major dangers during this race would be the chance of getting hit. We needed to run on the highways—they were legal routes and most often the shortest distance between two points—but on them I felt vulnerable to the elements and the environment. Doubt made itself at home in my psyche. More than once, I wondered, What the hell am I doing? The thought would surface, I’d let it go, and then I’d drift back into my “road trance.”
When a harbor seal swam by in the Sacramento River upstream from the Bay, a solitary figure cutting through the water about ninety miles inland, I felt a certain kinship with him. Some part of my brain was always looking for something to relate to—a seal, a tree, a rattlesnake, a rock. It lifted the burden somehow, knowing that others had been out of their element and suffered a private hardship, too. Yet I was hardly alone. Heather was somewhere nearby, now completely in my corner. I didn’t know exactly how she’d convinced herself, but she was one hundred percent on board, working with the crew and taking shifts in the van, which always stayed within a mile of me to make sure I had everything I needed to keep going. She’d also station herself in the RV, our rolling headquarters, at mealtime and physical therapy time and bedtime, because she knew how much it meant to me just to see her face, touch her hand, lie down with her if only for a quick break.
She was indispensable to me, even though we had an all-star crew. How lucky we were to have found such experienced and expert people who were willing to take a pittance in pay and time off from their regular lives to assist me: Jesse Riley, a friend who’d run across the United States in 1997 and Australia in 1998, and directed the Trans Am ’92, was a key resource to me, providing crucial insight and counseling, as he understood these megadistances. Our neighbor, Roger Kaufhold, who at the tender age of sixty-seven had climbed Kilimanjaro with me, would drive the RV and perform other countless K.P. and organizational tasks. He was invaluable not only for his services but also for his unfailingly good company, as Heather and I always felt we could be ourselves and at ease with Roger. Kathleen Kane was our massage therapist, her hands a moving balm to my legs and back. And Dr. Paul Langevin, a Wyoming orthopedist Heather and I had met at an ultrarunning training camp in Switzerland, was our doc on the road. Heather’s job was to act as the “runners’ advocate,” carrying Charlie’s or my requests to the production crew, assisting with communications from the road, and being my chief moral support. She wasn’t technically on my crew, but she was a critical member of this operation.
Five people to support me. It’s one of the aspects of ultrarunning that goes against my nature, but I’d learned to accept (up to a point) that if I was going to cover the miles, I’d need help. Anytime you’re going as far as we planned to go, at the pace we intended to keep, you don’t just throw on a pair of shoes and head out the door. A group of people like this makes all the difference: people who understand an athlete’s needs, and can anticipate them and satisfy them even before the runner recognizes there’s any need at all.
Here, Marsh, take a drink of this milk shake. Turn here, Marsh, and head that way for about fifty miles. Come over here and lie down, Marsh, and I’ll stretch your legs for you. Here are your meds and lip stuff, Marsh.
(All right, we actually called it “lipshit,” rhymes with dipshit. We had silly names for everything, including my “murse” (man purse) and the RV that I nicknamed “The Starship” at the same time I dubbed Roger “Captain Kirk.”)
Besides, as we got closer to Nevada, I was losing my ability to make good decisions for myself. Given the seventy-mile-a-day gambit, I was catching at most five hours of sleep a night. We were on the road eighteen to twenty-three hours, so Heather and I slept in the RV to save us the time of driving to a hotel, as did most of our crew, once they realized they could get more sleep this way. (Charlie and his crew were willing to continue making the trade-off and slept in hotels fairly often.) That meant no showering, no laundry facilities, and most of the time in bed was miserable for both of us. Just imagine what it was like for Heather, to have her husband climb in next to her each night, sweaty, smelly, and desperately needing her touch to feel at all human. Even in my intense tiredness, I craved physical intimacy with her more than sleep. My sex drive was greater than I’d ever experienced, even in my late teens. (Viagra, move over! Just run until you feel like you’re going to die, and your libido will kick into overdrive.) It was almost uncontrollable for me, as if Heather was my last shot at procreation, the object of an overpowering survival instinct. And when I finally did drop off, I tossed and turned and moaned, keeping her awake the better part of the night. Filthy and exhausted, even in my dreams I was restless and still running.
Somewhere in California, Charlie colorfully summed up one of my core racing strategies: “For an old fucker, he sure can move.”
It’s funny but true: I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, millions of times. I may not be the fastest runner, but I am one of the most obstinate. It’s one of my trademarks, my stubbornness and single-mindedness.
Practically since the beginning of our run, I’d held steady out front, but at this early stage, my lead meant nothing, except that my running mate, a resolute competitor, didn’t like being behind me even temporarily. We both knew we’d be trading places many times in the coming weeks, and that would work to our advantage. We’d feed off each other, both of us working to gain an edge. There’d be mind games and jockeying, with whoever was ahead running faster to keep the other guy from catching him, and whoever was behind pushing himself to gain the lead.
The psychological carrot a
nd stick would help us both keep going with our race plan, a scheme I thought was nuts before we started. Charlie had announced to the press, our sponsors, and the film crew who’d signed on to make a documentary of the whole thing that we’d cover seventy miles every day and complete the entire 3,063-mile route in just forty-four days, two days faster than Frank Giannino had done it in 1980. It was madness from the word go. Here we were, a forty-some hotshot and the old guy nearing sixty, attempting to break a record set by a man half my age by outdistancing him every day of the run.
Experience told me that a better strategy would have been to start with fewer miles per day and then ramp up after our bodies had settled in. That’s how Frank had done it. His race plan: Average sixty miles a day from San Francisco to Fort Collins, Colorado, then increase to an average of seventy miles a day. He’d run 2.5 miles at a ten-to-twelve-minute-per-mile pace, walk some, run 2.5 miles again, and repeat up to twenty miles, then break for breakfast; run/walk another twenty miles and break an hour for lunch; then run as many miles as possible into the night. It didn’t work out exactly as planned, though. Frank’s progress across California was slower than expected due to traffic and the crew (his family) going out of the way to reach a KOA campground for a few comforts at night, such as showers. So they were averaging only about fifty miles a day until they established a new routine after Fort Collins: The crew would get up before sunrise, about three in the morning, and Frank would run twenty-five miles, then break for breakfast; he’d run another twenty-five miles before breaking for lunch; and then he’d go as far as possible by dark. They reached the seventy-mile goal almost every day and finished in 46 days, 8 hours, and 36 minutes.
That so-called slow start may have felt like a hindrance—falling short of his initial goal—but my gut said that it may have been the smartest way to begin. Then again, when I’d asked Frank for his opinion of running seventy miles a day out the gate, he’d said he thought it was possible. In fact, this was the first time he’d considered that his record might fall. He was impressed by our reputations, he’d said, and he’d encouraged me, much to his credit.
Like Frank, I believed it was possible to achieve—I’d approached running one hundred miles per day in multiday events in the past, such as when I’d run across Ohio and Colorado years ago—but I knew I’d suffer more now, as I didn’t have the speed of my youth. Instead of averaging five or six miles per hour, I’d likely average four or five miles per hour, and this meant I’d have to stay out on the road longer to meet the seventy-mile-per-day goal. There was just no denying it: This was an improbable, punishing pace, something we should have made a private goal, but once Charlie had made a public declaration, I felt we had to do what he’d said we would. So I intended to go for it and hold his feet to the fire, too: seventy miles a day, come what may.
Numerous books have been written about how to run. Let my experience in the early days of this journey be a lesson in how not to do it: Go farther than your known breakdown point, deprive yourself of rest and recovery time, don’t bathe, and wear the same dirty clothes day in and day out. Torture yourself. Hate it. Pray for something, someone else, to make it stop.
True, every runner wants to quit sometimes. By any definition, becoming a successful athlete requires conquering those psychological barriers, whether you’re sucking air during your first jog or gutting it out in the final four miles of a marathon, axiomatically the toughest. When you push beyond the marathon, new obstacles arise, and the necessary mental toughness comes from raising your pain threshold. All endurance sports are about continuing when it feels as if you have nothing left, when everything aches, when you feel done—but you’re not. You have to get beyond the numbers that, like certain birthdays for some people, just seem intrinsically daunting: fifty miles, one hundred miles, one thousand miles, two thousand miles, and random points in between. At such distances, the sport becomes every bit as much mental as physical. More so.
These high mile markers feel like rites of passage, similar to altitude records in mountain climbing. Yet there’s a difference: In mountaineering, Everest is the pinnacle—you can’t get any higher than that. But with ultrarunning, there’s no limit.
The next mileage hurdle is daunting, no matter what the distance and the difference from your last accomplishment. Whether you’re increasing from a 5K to a 10K, or a half-marathon to a marathon, or from the marathon to an ultrarun, there’s a similar rush of exhilaration in breaking the barrier; it’s a badge of honor. But after the line is crossed, there’s a breakdown or depression, sort of like going from a sugar high to a depletion of energy in both body and soul. Writer and runner Haruki Murakami has described this effect, known as “runner’s blues,” although he admits it would be better called “runner’s whites.” It feels like an opaque, viscous film, a malaise that slows you down and saps whatever enthusiasm you once had for the sport. I expect these dips and know how to deal with them, have experience with running through them, and can even relate them to my personal life and the feelings I had as Jean dealt with her cancer. There was elation as she went into remission (a milestone), but then came a feeling of defeat and a guilt-ridden acknowledgment that death was just waiting on her, not dismissed. The realities of a short time to live or a long way to go don’t signal you to stop moving forward. It means you have to dig deep and keep on going. After the self-congratulation and the inevitable crash, the focus must return along with the relentless forward movement—there can be nothing else.
There are equally predictable, analogous physiological factors. Those last four miles of a marathon are especially hard because the body typically switches from burning carbohydrates to burning fat as an additional source of energy somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two miles. This conversion is called “bonking” or “hitting the wall” when it results in a depletion of glycogen stores in the liver and muscle. You can feel especially tired and find yourself dragging to the finish if you don’t attend to it, eat some simple sugars, and maybe even walk for a bit. Marathoners avoid bonking by doing long slow distance (LSD) training to teach the body how to switch over to burning fat from carbs without inducing severe hypoglycemia. The more you train the body to make this switch, the more efficient it becomes at the conversion. The mental aspect gets fine-tuned by LSD training, too, building confidence that’s crucial especially during this phase: You come to accept this conversion as necessary, and no longer let it catch you off guard.
For me, the transition from carb burning to fat burning is barely noticeable except for a slight dip in energy, a little tug of fatigue. Once I’m in fat-burning mode, though, I always feel as if I’m walking a tightrope—if I don’t pay close attention to the need for calories, I can quickly slip into a tailspin. During the run across America, I bonked only once, and it was because I was alone on the road without food or drink for too long, but that was quickly remedied with a handful of Snickers bars, and I was on the fly again within twenty minutes. The fact that this happened only once is a testament to the discipline and expertise of my crew. Plus, I know my body. One of the greatest benefits of reaching the breakdown point over and over again is precise knowledge of exactly what your body can take, what it needs, and how to react accordingly. The same is true for mental strength—you become intimately familiar with your breaking points and learn how to do whatever’s necessary to deal with them.
A few years before I began the transcon, I was asked to counsel potential Navy SEAL recruits and give them some pointers on getting through their infamous training camp. The whole point of Hell Week is to demonstrate absolutely that the human body can endure more than the mind commonly believes it can, and the people who participate are put to a harsh test: Trainees are exposed to the elements—cold, rain, mud, sand, and more—and allowed a total of about four hours of sleep during the entire training week. They perform 132 hours of physical labor while an instructor constantly reminds them that they can drop out anytime, echoing that voice in their heads that says, I don’t have
to do this. I can stop. About 70 percent of the trainees give up, signifying surrender by ringing a shiny brass bell hung prominently on the training grounds. When they do that, they publicly declare they’re done. For good.
The key battle: Shut that voice up. Don’t ring the bell.
To give the trainees some clear principles, I put together the “Ten Commandments of Endurance,” based on my own experiences of grappling with that voice. A friend of mine likes to call this list “Marshall Law.”
1. Expect a journey and a battle.
2. Focus on the present and set intermediate goals.
3. Don’t dwell on the negative.
4. Transcend the physical.
5. Accept your fate.
6. Have confidence that you will succeed.
7. Know that there will be an end.
8. Suffering is okay.
9. Be kind to yourself.
10. Quitting is not an option.
All ten of these commandments were in play as I was enduring my own version of Hell Week in the desert along California Highway 88. Sure, I would think about stopping all the time, but I kept a lid on it. I never allowed myself to actually consider stopping, but instead let the thought enter my mind and then drift away, like a child fantasizing about living on the moon. Yep, that would be nice, but... Decades of training and confidence-building helped me surrender and accept the suffering. After years and years of thinking about it, I believe that such suffering offers a unique gift, allowing me to profoundly appreciate living, to pay attention to the little things, like the comfort of sitting in a chair or enjoying a meal on a plate with a fork and a spoon. These simple pleasures become infused with quiet joy, and the deeper things in life—love, compassion, connection—become supremely meaningful in the present moment.
Running on Empty Page 7
