Running on Empty

by Marshall Ulrich

  Still, I asked myself, over and over again, why promote this madness in my life? Is it about me or about those who surround me, supporting me and loving me? As I headed down the road, there was plenty of time to contemplate this, and I hoped that I’d discover the true answer before land’s end.

  5.

  Running Machine

  Days 3—12

  We’d come up out of the desert, but only for as long as we’d be in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. In cross section, the shape of the Sierras evokes a trapdoor, an apt metaphor for us as we began our ascent. Who knew what waited for us on the other side? The first two days had been predictably grueling—we didn’t stop for anything but sleep and the occasional massage; we even ate on the go—but we had no idea how long we could continue at this pace, how long our bodies would allow it or how long we could hang on mentally. I’d been through extreme tests before and lost it, falling into a hallucinatory fog or having my body overcome my mind’s ability to keep going. In 2003, I’d been nailed on are ankle by a rattler during a Primal Quest adventure race, which left me flat on my back and experiencing some entertaining hallucinations. (After a few hours, I recovered and continued with my team without telling anyone what had happened.) There had been a few other occasions when the physical simply overpowered the mental, usually due to injury or extreme fatigue and the delirium that accompanies it. It had happened only rarely, but it did happen, and I felt it could happen again, anytime.

  For the moment, though, I felt “refreshed,” if you can call it that. As we came into Jackson, California, elevation 1,240 feet, the increasing altitude suited me despite the taxing climb. We would continue up, reaching our peak at just over 8,500 feet. (You can equate each thousand feet of altitude gain with running about one more mile on the flat, so on the day we went up the Sierras, I effectively ran about eighty miles.) Ground and air temperatures were still hot, measuring into the eighties even at higher altitudes, so I needed electrolytes to help me retain water and reduce cramping. By this time, I was also depending on my LEKI trekking poles to move at a fairly brisk pace, averaging about four miles per hour, swinging them beside me and planting them a little ahead of each foot before it struck the ground. You use them similar to cross-country skiing poles as an aid for stability and engaging arm strength to help propel you forward, which also unloads weight from your quadriceps and hamstrings, and allows you to roll your hips, using different muscle groups to keep you moving while the ones you usually recruit for running can rest a bit. Charlie had overtaken me during my lunch break at about five thousand feet, and now he was way out front—I thought I wouldn’t see him again until we got to New York, as he seemed to be moving well.

  However, I caught Charlie at a higher elevation, around eight thousand feet, and he unceremoniously dropped his shorts to reveal some angry red welts between his butt cheeks. He seemed intent on showing me what was slowing him down and insisted I take a good look. I’d experienced that painful chafing (and seen worse) in the past, so I felt for him, but to be honest, I didn’t really want to be inspecting his bare ass on this lonely stretch over the Sierra Nevadas. Or anywhere, I suppose. I averted my eyes and tried to sympathize.

  “Man, that looks bad . . . um, real bad, Charlie.” What I said to myself was less charitable. That’s it? If that’s all you’ve got, my gawd, just shut up and run.

  By day four, he could have skipped down the road stark naked and stopped to do a jig in front of me, and I probably wouldn’t have reacted. On the third night, I’d finished my seventy miles again, then taken Ambien to help me sleep, and I’d spent the night with my legs up in the air, propped against the wall in an effort to drain some of the lactic acid, but that hadn’t helped much.

  After letting me sink into four hours of drug-induced doze, Heather had roused me to get going again, and I’d gone out that fourth morning, groggy and tired, my legs swollen, my calf muscles tight, and generally feeling like an old man with creaky joints and aching bones. I’d become increasingly sore, and I knew that my body was undergoing a tough transformation: slowly, painfully morphing into a running machine. It would probably take another week or more of this torture before I’d settle in and the aches and pains would subside some.

  My predictions were proving dead-on. This was, bar none, the toughest thing I’d ever attempted. Even a hard day of climbing Mount Everest didn’t compare with these seventy-mile days.

  That was true even considering the worst conditions on the great mountain, which Tibetans call Chomolungma (“saint mother”): the sudden storms, the jagged crevasses and roaring glacial streams, the cutting winds up to 125 miles per hour, temps dipping to forty below, and oxygen deprivation. In high-altitude mountaineering, there’s a saying about getting overzealous and doing too much under these extreme conditions, “Don’t let your brain go to your feet,” and by necessity, our pace on Everest was slow. So often, I found myself feeling as if I ought to be doing something more, but the altitude dictated plenty of downtime. As I ran across California, I never once read a newspaper or even sat in a chair, but at base camp, I’d sat and listened to a short-wave radio, tinkered with the generator to make sure it was in good shape (my experience with farm machinery got me the job as camp mechanic), shot the breeze and played card games with some of the other people on the expedition. Nearly every day during the couple of months in Tibet, I’d written about my thoughts and experiences there. I’d been fortunate not to suffer from most of the common effects of altitude (headaches, nausea, double vision, hallucinations), so my impulse was always to push harder, but it was tempered by the knowledge that reaching the summit of the tallest mountain on earth required that I slowly acclimatize, expending just enough energy, but not too much, at increasing altitudes. Pushing yourself too hard at such heights becomes idiocy: Muscles waste away with what I’d consider moderate use at nineteen thousand feet and above. Keeping weight on becomes a concern as you ascend; at common elevations, you’d need to run about fifty miles to burn a pound of fat, but in the “death zone” over twenty-five thousand feet, your body feeds off muscle even when you’re sleeping—it’s the fuel of choice at extreme altitude. When I came down off Everest, I’d lost fifteen pounds, most of it muscle; my spare tire still circled my midsection, though. Heather called me “the crooked man” because my hips canted to the left, no doubt because I’d lost core muscle strength.

  Running, I felt isolated, alone. On Everest, I’d been constantly surrounded by people, some of them highly entertaining. Our Russian guide, Alex Abramov, was a real character and a confidence-inspiring leader. He stands about six feet, with hunched shoulders, and you’d never guess by looking at him that he’s a world-class climber. In the sport of mountaineering, though, appearances don’t mean anything; so much of success in climbing depends on weather, adaptability to altitude, genetics, experience, common sense, and luck. People you’d never expect will do extraordinary things, and ones who are “buffed out” can have the hardest of times, or fail.

  The Russians had brought copious amounts of their favorite beverages, rum and vodka, and they were generous with them at dinnertime, toasting round after round until everyone was shit-faced. They’d also brought a fifty-five-gallon drum of cabbage to make borscht, and loved to snack on salted fish and smoked pig fat cut into strips and eaten off the knife (like I’m accustomed to carving off a piece of cheese) or dropped into a vat, of fat and fried: full of calories and flavor. The team had spared no expense with the equipment and tents, making for quite a comfortable experience, save the harsh winds and temperatures, the trouble sleeping, and the suffocatingly thin air as we got closer to the top.

  So we were in capable hands with Alex, and he had a great sense of adventure and an even better sense of humor. He’s renowned for his skill and for being a bit of a wild card. One morning, I asked him over breakfast about something crazy I’d heard he’d done: made an expedition with a Land Rover to the top of Mount Elbrus. All true, he told me. They’d set a world record for ve
hicular-assisted mountain climb (18,510 feet), and then took off to sun themselves at the Russian Riviera, along the Black Sea. A few months later when they returned to fetch the Rover from the top of the mountain, he said, it was colder and dangerously icy, so he and the climbers went to get some chains and left the driver up top with the Rover. Impatient and foolhardy, Alex’s driver decided he’d handle it alone. Of course, the descent got out of control, and he had to bail out—just in time, too, before the vehicle started tumbling down the mountain and crashed into some rocks, knocking a tire loose that shot down toward the climbers bringing the chains, nearly killing them all. But the driver and the team survived, and the Rover remains “parked” there on Elbrus.

  No matter what you wanted, it seemed Alex could make it happen. While we were at advanced base camp one night, I overheard him talking to the cook about some meat Alex had ordered, but it hadn’t arrived by porter yet. I couldn’t see either of them, so I was picturing Alex glaring and growling at the cook, his bushy eyebrows knitted and his teeth bared. A guy who could survive a hurtling tire on Elbrus wasn’t going to be denied his meat.

  “What you think, we vegetarians?!”

  Then he calmly got on the radio and called down to base camp, several thousand feet lower on the mountain, and menaced the cook there: “If you no bring meat up tomorrow, I come down there and kill you.”

  Of course, he was joking, and with his accent it sounded like something out of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. I must have laughed for five minutes afterward. But true to form, Alex came through: The next night we had meat on the table.

  Just once that I can recall things didn’t swing Alex’s way. Before leaving Katmandu, I’d negotiated with the local dealer to buy our generator and come back with what I thought was a good price. Alex and I went to buy the thing, and he insisted on trying to get an even better deal—if Alex is any indication, Russians are really into dickering. He haggled, he argued, he pestered, and the dealer got so fed up with the intense bargaining, he didn’t want to sell the generator to us at all. We finally settled on a price that was higher than the one I’d negotiated.

  Yet Alex has my enduring respect. Russian climbers are considered the Michael Jordans of the sport, and he introduced me to the best of the best in his country, the Russian National Climbing Team—the best in the world, in my opinion. They had set up base camp a month earlier than us, and our group spent a lot of time socializing with the national team. They were setting a never-done-before North Face route without oxygen. They didn’t use Sherpas but would do very heavy equipment carry-ins to their high camp at the base of Everest below the North Face, with half the group alternating weeks on and off, going up to set hardware and rope. Incidentally, the last three thousand feet of the North Face is vertical rock—unbelievably tough! These guys are hard-asses.

  One of their new members was a man in his mid-twenties who had proven himself worthy prior to Everest, a real stud by anyone’s account. I’d talk with him whenever he was in camp, and then one day he stumbled by me, looking dejected. When I asked what had happened, he said that he’d gotten kicked off the team because, when he was up around twenty-seven thousand feet, he’d griped about his hands being cold. With stares icier than the glacial wall they were scaling, his teammates told him to climb down and go back to base camp. He was done. That’s it: He was finished. The Russians don’t stand for any whining, no matter how justified.

  The team was successful, and three men made it to the top from the North Face and without the use of supplementary oxygen, completing what’s possibly one of the hardest-core climbing feats in high-altitude mountaineering.

  No doubt there’s a Russian word for “macho,” and they were defining it: to tough it out, never to complain, always to rely upon themselves first. But, sincerely, they would risk their lives for one another and anyone else on the mountain.

  As I ran in the midday heat of the much smaller mountain range of the Sierra Nevadas, I thought about the cold and the camaraderie of my Everest adventure, and I wondered how this endeavor would ultimately stack up against it. So far, Everest was hands down the more pleasant experience.

  Despondent, sitting on a prison bench with my head in my hands, I awaited the inevitable. It was coming soon, the ultimate punishment for an unexplained crime. The walls seemed to close in on me, the bars at the front of my cell making silent, steely condemnations. No escape.

  A recurring nightmare had begun: Impending execution haunted my nights in the RV. Sometimes it was ambiguous like that, where I didn’t know if I was headed for the electric chair or the gas chamber or lethal injection. Other times, I was standing in front of a firing squad. Regardless, just over two hundred miles along our route, a fear of death now dominated my dreams, torturing me in my sleep. My best guess was that my subconscious mind was trying to send a message: You’re killing yourself.

  The wry, sad look Heather gave me when I confessed this to her told me she and my subconscious were in agreement.

  When we came down out of the mountains and reentered the arid, inhospitable desert dotted with sagebrush, I did my best to rest under the occasional shade tree and to stay out of the sun whenever there was a chance, but relief was rare. Although my crew was doing a great job of keeping me supplied with electrolytes and fluids, the heat was problematic. I was slowing down and feeling demoralized as we crossed the state line into Nevada.

  Welcome to Nevada!

  “The Silver State”

  Arrival date: 9/16/08 (Day 4)

  Arrival time: 9:45 a.m.

  Miles covered: 230.5

  Miles to go: 2,832.7

  Given all that, the sight of Carson City, the state capital just thirty miles across the border, was a relief. We’d find freshly cooked food there for dinner—at this point, I was living for the occasional milk shake or root beer float, and fried chicken or pork tacos, anything that didn’t come in a sealed wrapper from a convenience store—and I liked imagining the people of the town, both in the present and the past. It is named after the frontier hero “Kit” Carson, and its downtown evinces the American Old West, but the historic trading post is now updated, more sophisticated than it must have been back in the 1860s when gold and silver miners, ranchers, millers, and gamblers first made their homes there. Thinking about all this as we entered the area, it was one of the few times that day when I dwelled on anything other than taking the next breath, the next step, and then the next, and the next, and the next on this road that seemed to push out to eternity, straight as an arrow.

  The capitol dome loomed above the city, and it seemed hours before I finally passed the structure at the center of town, squared off in a post-and-lintel construction to support its six-sided cupola. Funny, if it weren’t for the arches that held it high and the shine on its silver surface, that dome could have topped any one of the silver-and-brown-planked barns I’d passed along the road earlier that day. Once we were into the city, I got a close look at the capitol, as well as the massive buildings that lined the road where I ran, slightly north and midway through town. The traditional brick construction had been popular in the late 1800s, and it must have been enormously challenging to build, given that buildings were erected manually. At one point, I passed a modern casino, a stark contrast to the old structures, and its neon signs lit the way as I turned to head east. As always, I was relieved when we moved more directly toward New York, pointed straight to my goal just as a steeple on one huge church I saw pointed to the heavens.

  As I ran into and through Carson City, I was feeling all right, comforted by being in a place where people live and work and lead normal lives. I ate with gusto, crunching my tacos and spooning a root beer float into my mouth while on the move. Later, leaving the area might have been a letdown—I always felt low just after a lift—except that a group of middle school kids who were playing soccer in a park had come out to cheer me on, and they cheered me up as I headed out of town. The documentary film crew had alerted the teams that we were on our w
ay from San Francisco to New York, and they’d enthusiastically run out to the path alongside the park.

  As I passed through, everyone chanted my name, “Marshall! Marshall! Marshall!” They ran with me for a couple of blocks, kicking up a big ruckus.

  Who cares if it was contrived? Or that it was so quick that they were gone and I was on my own again in a matter of minutes? That small celebration gave me a big charge and kept me going. We exchanged plenty of high fives, and for a brief time, I forgot how tired I was.

  Giving me yet another boost, some clouds rolled in to shelter me from the heat, and within thirty minutes of the lower temperature, I was feeling damn good and wanted to increase my lead. When I picked up the pace, my crew announced that I was running eight- to ten-minute miles, as good as or better than I’d run on day one—and it felt great to go faster. What a treat to let out my stride! I ran at this pace for another three hours. Game on!

  When darkness dropped across the high desert, I could see little except what was directly ahead and illuminated by a headlamp I carried in my hand. Once again, fatigue took hold, I slowed down, and I resigned myself to running in this tunnel of light, blackness all around me. A passing truck’s tailwind ripped my light away from me and sent it sailing out onto the highway, where the semi’s wheels crushed it to bits. It snapped me out of my stupor, both frightening me and striking me as funny: Now I really was in the dark.

  Dr. Paul fetched me a replacement, and the crew seemed to drift in and out as they stopped for me every mile, offering food and fluids. I moved through the night in a daze.