Running on Empty

by Marshall Ulrich

  The next afternoon, I found out that Charlie was laid up in Fallon, Nevada, which I’d passed through earlier. I felt bad for him and worried that I’d had a hand in his demise. My stubbornness in sticking to that seventy-mile-a-day promise was surely screwing us both into the ground. We’d both been having major trouble with our Achilles tendons, and the heat from the pavement radiated up through the soles of our shoes and climbed our legs like a forest fire licking tree trunks. I’d cut a 3/4-inch notch in the back of my shoe and recommended that Charlie do the same to accommodate his inflamed tendons, but I didn’t have any remedies for the hot pavement except to keep pressing forward. Whenever Charlie didn’t make his mileage for the day, I’d just put my head down and pull out farther in front of him, driving both of us on. In turn, he’d been pushing me along from the rear, and that combined with my competitive nature had certainly helped keep me focused.

  What would I do if I had to go it alone? The idea terrified me.

  The night ended with a spectacular display of stars, interrupted only by a few trucks that struggled up Sand Springs Pass beside me, breaking the quiet and the darkness. The elevation gain wasn’t much, maybe a thousand feet; still, it took a lot of energy to get over it. When I ran down the other side of the pass, I was thirty-nine miles beyond Fallon, but my mind was back there with Charlie, fretting over the prospect of his injuries keeping him from going any farther.

  Now the doubt that had been with me from the beginning began to overtake me, as I felt I was rapidly reaching the point of diminishing returns.

  How could I keep this up?

  Surely my support team was wondering the same thing, not only about me but also about themselves. They were putting in long hours of their own. Roger, Kathleen, and Heather had each logged about nineteen hours on duty that day alone. Heather’s role had transformed into full-time crew member as soon as Jesse’s energy had flagged; now he was also back in Fallon, sick with bronchitis. Dr. Paul was in Fallon, too, to treat Charlie and to work with his crew to ensure that they were taking care of him properly.

  Every day, Roger was driving the RV, cooking, shopping, cleaning, running laundry, and doing other errands. Before we got going each morning, he’d create a daily planner for me, a crucial mental aid that gave me some sense of where I was headed, what I could expect, and for how long. Otherwise, I felt completely out of touch, just a pair of legs moving through the desert, a shadow flickering across the sand. Sometimes, he also pitched in to help the team with directly supporting me on the road. Heather was constantly torn between being there for me and completing any other tasks she had, like coordinating the crew schedule, doing the shopping with Roger for all the food and my supplies, desperately searching small-town stores for decent socks for me (I hadn’t packed enough), working with the production crew to ensure that I was running through especially scenic areas during “magic hour” (that time of day when the light is just right for gorgeous cinematography), and trying to work within tight budget constraints. Kathleen was constantly on duty, bringing me food, fluids, and electrolyte tablets, giving me massages, stretching me, helping Roger with cooking breakfast and cleaning the RV, consulting with Dr. Paul about my condition and possible ways to help, and generally trying to keep the peace. This race was tough on me, but it was no holiday for them, either. It was far more than any of us had bargained for.

  For me, life had become incredibly simple, as it consisted of running a mile to reach the crew van, getting a few mouthfuls of food as I slowed for a minute or two, picking up the pace again until the next crew stop, and doing it all over again and again. I drank constantly, relieved myself when necessary. At the end of the day, I slept, and in the morning, I got up to run some more. That simplicity was beautiful, clearing my mind, putting me in touch with primitive instincts. It made me realize how perfectly humans were built to hunt and gather, and it was easy for me to imagine that I was no different from the ancients who’d inhabited the area, simply surviving and not thinking about the next step. My crew took care of everything, so all I had to do was take care of myself by obliging them. Nothing else mattered, and there was no reason to care about anything but breathing and running . . . down the road, up the hills, concentrating on forward movement. Paradoxically, I took comfort in it, a sublime effort that involved nothing more than running.

  Yet the distances were taking their toll. The tendons in my upper and lower legs had begun to throb constantly, as if someone had cracked them both with a hammer. My muscles were so tight that they felt like guitar strings strung over the bridge of my aching bones. My Achilles tendon was giving me no relief, and my bones and joints hurt from the incessant pounding. I’d felt something like all this before—long adventure races would leave me with throbbing knees and aching legs—but this was different. The pavement was unyielding and unforgiving. Everything hurt now, even my arms and head from holding them upright. Surely, something would have to give.

  Most of the time now, I was running in a trance, my mind focused far from the stress on my body and instead lingering on thoughts of my family, how much I missed Heather, how much I wanted to be with her. Whenever I saw my wife, it was usually for just a minute or two during a crew stop, when she’d bring me food or some other thing I needed, and we talked almost exclusively about the run: what I needed next, where we were headed, who was crewing, how it was going. I longed for the leisure to genuinely connect with her, and I spent a fair amount of time mooning, wishing for a cup of coffee and quiet conversation on our back deck at home. Occasionally, I’d be pulled out of my daydreams by something strange or beautiful in the immediate environment.

  Outside Middlegate, for example, I saw a tree with something dangling from it—lots of somethings. It looked like one of the “sausage trees” I’d seen in Africa, huge kigelias hung with tubelike fruit. But when I was close enough, I could see that this was completely different: an old cottonwood festooned with thousands of shoes. Still, it sent me into a reverie, vivid memories carrying me away to a safari on the Serengeti Plain and then to the climbs up Kilimanjaro with Heather and Roger. I couldn’t help thinking, too, about how much Heather’s dad, Rory, would have delighted in this tree: quirky yet somehow artful, expansive and strange and right there in the middle of . . . nothing.

  These “shoe trees” bloom on various roadsides of America. Some individual, in a fit of whimsy or irritation or rebellion, tosses a pair of shoes into a tree until the laces catch over a branch. Others follow suit, and soon enough, you have a tree laden with footwear. In keeping with tradition, Roger attempted to pitch a pair of my worn-out shoes into the tree and failed, the bright blue Pearl Izumis falling through the branches and into a massive pile at the base. Later, though, I was thrilled to hear that someone from Charlie’s crew had come by with the camera guys and recognized my road-worn shoes by their color—especially easy to spot with the toe box cut out—retrieved them from the pile, and pitched them high into the tree, where I expect they still hang. I liked that we were all working together; this echoed the spirit of the run. Indeed, that tree was something to behold, out in the middle of nowhere, not another tree in sight, a testament to all the feet that had passed that way before mine.

  Middlegate itself seemed emblematic. On the door to the little café/ bar/motel there, a sign reads: MIDDLEGATE: HALFWAY BETWEEN HERE AND THERE. Boy, that’s about right: halfway between heaven and hell, no man’s land. Congratulations, traveler! You’ve reached nowhere.

  Yet one of the great things about being “nowhere” is that you’re able to see the incredible beauty of the stars undiminished by city glare. In the desert after dark, the Milky Way provided a stunning shimmer of light. And the flashers of the van, always just a mile ahead, pulled me along like a tractor beam. As my night of running came to an end, I could see the “Starship” parked a ways up the road, where Roger had found a good camping place and left the RV’s parking lights on to guide me in. That night, like many others in the desert, it looked as if a path of stars
led to our traveling home, where I would find solace and a place to rest in Heather’s arms.

  The next day, as I ran down the main street of Austin, Nevada, two shop owners came out to see what was happening, which wasn’t much, just the van passing through and me plodding along. One emerged from a gas station, a transplant from Mexico, I think, not saying a word but steadily looking at me from across the street. The other was a sun-baked woman wearing a flower-print working dress and standing near a store that sold snacks. She looked as if she had done this many times before over her fifty-something years. She calmly swiped a single wave, keeping an expressionless face as if my presence was an everyday occurrence and she fully expected me to be there.

  We’d climbed our way from the desert floor into this town, set among undulating hills that rise gently to the horizon and sometimes break away to steep pitches. The area reminded me of many of the bluffs I’ve seen in Wyoming, and I was starting to notice pines and vegetation that marked an increase in altitude and available water. The brick Catholic church on the hill was in such good condition that it looked as if it had been built yesterday, with its new steel green roof and steeple, topped with the traditional cross. Yet it was the last one standing of the first four Catholic churches built in Nevada, back in 1866. We passed the international café, constructed of barn lumber, its second story set with oversized windows and spilling onto a covered porch held up by rickety posts. On top of the whole thing: a three-foot-diameter star. The signs on the main-street stores and antique shops looked as old as the buildings. It seemed a wonder to me that it had all remained standing, giving a glimpse of how things used to look back in the wild west: simple wooden and brick construction, squared-off buildings with the occasional brick church, one with a steeple that looked like a silver bullet piercing the sky.

  Heading out of Austin and then off Scott’s Pass, I was going downhill, both figuratively and literally. Now wearing a brace off and on to alleviate some of the unrelenting pain in my right knee, I stopped a long time for dinner at the RV and did something new: slept for an hour and a half in the middle of the day. Kathleen massaged my tired muscles, we iced my inflamed joints, and I headed back out, still sleepy. For the most part, the road was vacant and lonely, so I was especially relieved and glad to get some good news: Charlie was on the move again, about seventy miles behind me.

  That night, my seventh on the road since we’d left San Francisco, I broke. At 3:45 in the morning, after running for almost twenty-one hours and now standing ten miles short of our goal, I told my crew I had to stop. Today, we’d have to be satisfied with sixty miles instead of seventy. I wanted to sleep and asked to be driven to a hotel in Eureka for a few hours’ rest and a shower (my second of the run).

  Getting up at seven and still feeling exhausted the next morning, I admitted to myself that this wasn’t the last time I’d fall short of seventy miles. I couldn’t keep it up and neither could my crew. We’d already lost Jesse to illness; he’d gone home the day before, and the remaining crew was feeling the strain of his absence.

  Running all night on day eight sealed it. After sixty-two miles, I was stumbling around and babbling incoherently at 5:30 in the morning when Heather did something she’d never done before: She came out on the road, took me by the collar, and dragged me off the course for some sleep. This was just the kind of thing she’d known would happen, the reason she’d argued with me so strongly the year before we began. But now she was all tenderness as she took me to bed, an angel in the darkness. She took care of me while I slept, icing my legs. In less than five hours, she helped me wake up again and get back up on my feet for another day on the road, still tired but with a bit more of my wits about me.

  Day nine, near Ely, Nevada: Word had it that Charlie was mounting a comeback and closing in on me. In my near-delirium, I couldn’t give it much thought, though I was glad to hear he was running sound again. Despite the expert attentions of my crew, without whom I surely would have been roadkill, my days had become incredibly solitary, and it was heartening to know Charlie would be with me the rest of the way.

  This is a great place for a prison, I thought to myself as we passed the turnoff to the state penitentiary. If someone escaped, they’d have to run an awfully long way to get anywhere.

  No kidding. Those were the sorts of uplifting thoughts that kept me company.

  At about seven o’clock that evening, I crawled into the RV for a nap. This was a horrible stop for both Heather and me, as she knew that I was in agony with every step, frustrated with my slowing pace. There was no way I was going to regain a daily distance of seventy-plus miles, much less do it in just fifteen hours as I had back in San Francisco.

  So Heather consoled me, telling me everything was going to be okay, assuring me how proud she was of me, reminding me of how many miles we’d already come. She urged me to rest—that was the only thing to do now. I closed my eyes until eleven, getting maybe three hours of downtime, and then was off again, running in the dark, leaving Heather to her thoughts. I know now that she’d wanted to beg me to stop, that she’d been heartbroken to see me suffer, that she and the rest of the crew had been exhausted, too, but she’d kept her own counsel.

  It was an unspoken code. She wouldn’t tell me to quit, even if she wanted to yell it at me with all her being. She knew how hard I’d fought for this opportunity, how I’d given it endless hours of training and mental preparation during a year that gave me many excuses to stop. She knew that I wanted to (that I had to) finish this run across America, no matter what. So, unless my life was in immediate danger, she would bite her tongue and, out of love, support me. She knew that my mind was set and my integrity would be compromised if I settled for anything less than finishing.

  Yet, despite her support and that of my crew, I covered just shy of forty-three miles that day, the ninth of the run, and had to stop at three in the morning. Dr. Paul ordered that I not go all night anymore. He said, emphatically, that I had to get more sleep. I couldn’t disagree.

  It continued to be hot, like most of the days before. And like most of the days to come, I imagined. I was moving slowly, dipping to about 3.5 miles per hour, around a seventeen-minute-mile pace, a shuffle barely faster than most people walk. We crossed into Utah close to midnight on day ten, and I went another 11.3 miles into the state, a bit faster now, finishing up my sixty for the day doing about 4.15 miles per hour.

  Welcome to Utah!

  “The Beehive State”

  Arrival date: 9/22/08 (Day 10)

  Arrival time: 11:36 p.m.

  Miles covered: 633.3

  Miles to go: 2,429.7

  When I stopped a little after two in the morning, Roger drove us back to Border Town, where we stayed at what Heather called a dive—and she was right, but it was a palace to me, because I had a shower and fresh sheets for the night. Heather was putting me to bed, gently guiding me from the bathroom to the bedroom, and trying in vain to explain to me what time I’d be getting up in the morning. We’d lost an hour when we’d crossed over into the new time zone, and I just couldn’t get my head around the math and the mechanics of my watch. Physically, I was still able to move, but mentally, I was cooked. Heather gave up trying to help me understand and just allowed me to feel certain in my confusion, taking me by the hand and tucking me into bed like she would a child. She stayed up, as always, to ice my legs while I slept.

  On day ten, I’d gone sixty miles, but I went only a little more than fifty on day eleven. Several days before, I’d acknowledged that my body had started morphing into a running machine, and now I had to acknowledge that the machinery was breaking down. My joints, bones, muscles, and soft tissue all hurt. I couldn’t take a step without being reminded of the 650 miles that had already passed under my feet.

  SEEING AMERICA, ONE MILE AT A TIME

  “The Loneliest Road” U.S. Highway 50 Across Nevada

  Our route from San Francisco to New York City would stick pretty close to the old Lincoln Highway, “the back
bone of America” and the first transcontinental road built for travel by car in the United States. Constructed in the early 1900s, at a time when there were no decent roads, and the ones we did have were disconnected and seemed to go nowhere, it created not only the longest roadway in America, but also a single, uninterrupted, coast-to-coast highway.

  When the road was being planned all those years ago, the designers included one stretch that was well established and frequently traveled, dating back before the Pony Express. Today, that roadway across Nevada covers the entire state from Douglas County through Carson City, on to Fallon, Austin, and Eureka, and leading into Utah through Ely. As I ran it, the distance totaled about four hundred miles.

  The road mostly follows a wagon route originally used in 1859 by Captain James H. Simpson of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. Leading an expedition from Utah to Carson Valley, Nevada, he’d sought the most direct line from east to west, blazing a trail that would get wagons across the state faster than the old, circuitous emigrant path from Elko to Reno. He figured that this new way cut more than two hundred eighty miles from the trip.

  According to Simpson, the Pony Express started using his new route soon after he’d established it because of the abundant water and stock feed, ideal for the fleet of horseriding mail carriers. Although the Pony Express enjoyed its glory days for less than two years (the telegraph and mail going by stagecoach replaced it), during that time, it helped entrench Simpson’s route for swift travel across Nevada. The riders, renowned for their endurance and speed, helped weave the lore of the Great American West.

  That way was all but abandoned for a while after the Central Pacific Railroad was laid in 1869. Rail traffic moved north, and the old Simpson trail became a quiet, less traveled route through the mountains and valleys of the Silver State.