Running on Empty

by Marshall Ulrich

  Leaving the RV on a high, I set out with Mace, his son, and one of his daughters to pace me, and we ended the night at the intersection of Colorado Highway 14 and Interstate 25, a major north-south highway. Well over a decade ago, I’d run the length of the state on I-25; everything around me was familiar that night, and I reveled in it. We staked out my finish and then drove to a nearby Super 8 for rest. In the van on the way to the hotel, I thought about how, for the next three days, we’d be on routes I’d driven many times back when I was behind the wheel of the rendering truck even before Elaine was born. Tomorrow, Taylor and Ali would join us. I’d be surrounded by the land and the people I love most.

  The Colorado landscape features rugged beauty; it’s a hardy and magnificent place. The mountains jut into the sky, rising from the plains that flow endlessly, undulating toward the horizon. Exquisite wildflowers—blue and red columbine, white prickly poppy, yellow alpine avens—defy the harsh, wind-driven winters and come back to bloom again each year in the warmer months. Our lower-lying agricultural fields, wedged beyond the rocky hillsides, remind me of Australia’s Queensland, where Mace and I once climbed up the rugged Mount Bartle Frere for an Eco-Challenge adventure race. We’d jumar, using mechanical devices with “gripping cams” that lock on to and slide up a rope, to help us ascend underneath a five-hundred-foot waterfall into a thick, leech-infested jungle (not that we have those in Colorado), and then drop thousands of feet into massive sugarcane fields that looked like corn stalks from home, as harvesters mowed through the fields in the dead of night. In a sleep-deprived state, Mace and I had thought they looked like alien spaceships hovering overhead.

  Many of the traits I most admire about my home state and the untamed environments of adventure racing reflect the values I’ve tried to pass on to my children, and I thought about this as Mace and I ran on the asphalt of Highway 14, talking a lot but staying silent every now and then. Strength. Resilience. Discipline. Follow-through. Responsibility. Honesty. Perhaps most intently, independence and self-reliance. Both native to and cultivated in me, these things grew even more important in my life after Jean’s death. The kids learned to not be clingy, to have strength and rely upon themselves and their own good judgment, and this has been a double-edged sword: Surely they’ve developed strong wills and stubbornness, but in fostering their independence, we sacrificed some interdependence, some connectedness, some closeness.

  Like most parents, I can say I succeeded some of the time, and . . . well, I’m just waiting to see how a few things turn out before I decide to put certain events and actions in the win or loss column. Some of what I admire about my kids came naturally to them, like Ali’s big heart or Taylor’s ability to stay with something until it’s finished. When he was just four and weighed maybe forty pounds, I brought a cord of wood to the house and started to stack it outside. Of course, Taylor wanted to “help.” So I humored him: He’d wrestle with a piece of wood and throw it on the stack in the time it took me to get a few armfuls from the truck. Soon, though, a Broncos game started, and I told him to c’mon. Take a break. Let’s go in and watch this on TV together, and then we’ll go back out and finish.

  Nope, he wanted to stay outside and stack.

  Suit yourself, kiddo.

  I figured he’d get bored and come inside in a few minutes.

  An hour later, I went out to check on him, expecting that he’d wandered off to collect bugs or something, but there he was, finishing the job, having stacked nearly an entire cord of wood by himself. Holy cow, some of those split logs were as big as he was! We high fived, and I congratulated him heartily, man to man.

  You’d think Taylor and I would have had an easy time of it, father and son, clearly a lot alike from the very beginning. But it wasn’t easy, not for him or me, in part because we’re so alike. Taylor, too, has always seemed determined to learn things in his own time, in his own way, by trial and error. Like me, he’s learned from his failures just as much as his successes. That’s brought him some hard knocks and a few false starts, but I think he’s on the other side of that now, and I’m proud of him for having persevered.

  Despite the fact that I love him so much and Taylor can be hilarious—he’s got a sharp, irreverent sense of humor—our relationship has always been something like a bull elk with his offspring: serious, territorial, somewhat adversarial. So I was curious to see how it would be to have him with me and his sisters for this part of the run.

  Around nine o’clock in the morning, we approached Ault, a little Colorado town about ten miles north of where I was born in Greeley. There, we met up with everyone: Taylor and Ali had arrived, and my mom, sister, and brother were with them, too, along with my aunt, nieces and nephew, some friends, a few local reporters, and representatives from the United Way. Such a homecoming!

  Never had so much family come out to see me go. Here were three generations of the Ulrich clan all gathered, Mom the matriarch of the bunch at eighty-five years old. There was something overwhelming about it, to see her there with all my children, both my siblings, and Heather, along with some of my dearest friends. I couldn’t help missing Dad, yet the scene felt right, just as it should be. Everyone there was happy, proud, and loving. I was at peace, if just for a few minutes, as we stood near a farmstead that resembled the eighty acres where Mom and Dad had raised our family.

  After the intense loneliness of the last three weeks, this was something else. Friends continued to show up, come with me for a while or stop and talk by the side of the road, and I was hungry for the distraction. Everyone’s company was uplifting, deeply satisfying social nourishment, feeding my heart and my soul.

  Because of this, I was running faster than I should have, juiced on the excitement. Later that night, after the visitors were gone, I was still high from all the human contact. Maybe it wasn’t just that, though, because I found out later that Taylor and one of our new crew, an upbeat college kid from Texas whom Charlie had brought, had been having a lot of fun working together and even spiked some of my drinks with shots of beer. Reportedly, I’d picked up the pace again.

  For the next couple of days, my kids stayed on, nicknaming themselves the MKC, “Marshall Kid Crew.” It was comforting to watch them fall into old family patterns, poke fun, get on each other’s nerves, and also pitch in together. As usual, Elaine would play “mother” and peacekeeper, trying to appease the bickering between Taylor and Ali, who tend to butt heads. (Ali usually appreciates this refereeing; Taylor, not so much, as he doesn’t care for being told what to do/how to behave by anyone, including his big sister.) Family dynamics aside, they got the job done, and they were a delight to have around: There was Ali mixing drinks and fixing food in the van’s “kitchen” (the backseat), Taylor taking the driver’s seat (our “wheelman”), and Elaine acting as “the gimp,” a name we gave to the person running food and drink out to me. They were a godsend, all acting like my kids but also keenly aware that their job was to support me instead of the other way around. It was a welcome role reversal to feel their care for me. They made my world, as small as it was, big with their love.

  We were coming into the Great Plains, the expansive western prairie on the eastern side of the Rockies that reaches into the heartland of America. I’d be running the territory of the old bison hunters, among them the tribes of Blackfoot, Cheyenne, and Comanche, and later, Buffalo Bill and others of his ilk. We’d be in the Great Plains for the next six hundred miles, probably ten days, until we reached the Nebraska–Iowa border.

  Having my children with me just as this run was becoming tolerable, even fun sometimes, made me wonder if their presence was making everything better or if the contrast helped me appreciate them even more than usual. They’d arrived right as we’d left the dry heat and harsh conditions that had persisted through California, Nevada, and Utah, which seemed fitting. Each of the kids, too, had taken me through a kind of parenting desert, the years when they’d been typical teenagers, resenting authority, thinking I couldn’t relate to their
young lives, believing I was too strict, or too stupid, or just plain wrong. Like most kids, they’d been right, up to a point. And, like most kids, they’d seen my actions only through the prism of their inexperience and justifiably self-centered youth. But now, they were showing me how mature they’d become. I treasured every minute with the MKC, looked forward to hearing Taylor joshing with his sisters and the crew, Ali tending to business and finding ways to be useful, and Elaine trying to set a good example. It felt like being at home, and took me back to having them all within reach, where I could overhear them laughing and crying together, but mostly championing each other’s causes.

  On the morning of day twenty-three, we expected to pass through Sterling, Colorado, but as soon as I woke up, I knew something was wrong. The plantar fasciitis was a familiar, now manageable pain, yet this was something new, excruciating and distinct. Elaine and Heather were on duty in the crew van, and they noticed how slowly I was going, especially compared with the few days before, so we switched out my shoes and Dr. Paul stretched me. Then he focused his attention on the foot, breaking up some old adhesions, making me wince and producing loud, popping noises. About two hours into the morning’s run, I stopped for a fifteen-minute nap and to rest the foot again.

  Soon after that, Ali and Taylor joined Elaine, and the MKC took over the crew van, although Heather and Dr. Paul stayed close. Both of them were concerned when I told them that I wanted to keep moving.

  “Okay, Marsh,” Dr. Paul had agreed. “You go ahead and let me know when you’ve had enough.”

  Within twenty minutes, Heather and Dr. Paul drove up in a car (the crew van was still a half-mile off), and I admitted that things weren’t going well. At the rate I was moving, it made no sense to keep on. They picked me up and drove me forward to the Sterling emergency room, and everyone else headed to a hotel.

  Because the MRI was scheduled for the next morning, I thought I should try to get a few miles in before then, but Heather insisted that if there was a fracture, running on it could cause permanent damage, and if it was another soft-tissue injury, ice and rest made a lot more sense than going out and beating up my foot, only to gain very little distance. In other words, she was trying to reason with me; she and Dr. Paul had made a secret pact to stick together and convince me. Quickly, it was obvious that she was right. We went to the hotel, too, for rest, ice, and a good meal. Who knew what tomorrow would bring?

  It had been days since we’d heard anything about Charlie, but we did know that he’d set out to ride the course on a mountain bike. NEHST would continue filming his progress, and now he’d help them interview folks. Fair enough, I thought; this would allow Charlie to stay in the game to some extent—I understood his inability to give that up—but I also wondered what had happened to our gentleman’s agreement about helping the other guy if one of us dropped out. Heather and I both had a hard time seeing how Charlie’s new plan fit in with an attempt to break the transcontinental running record, or a documentary called Running America, but that wasn’t our concern.

  He should be catching up to me any minute, I thought, as he was now able to travel three or four times faster than I could, and with me laid up overnight, his progress would be even more accelerated. My drive to stay ahead of him was thwarted by both my injury and his newly acquired speed, and I chafed under the realization that, even if I could still run, he’d always be ahead of me.

  In the hotel, though, all of that seemed unimportant as I savored the time with family and the luxury of eating while sitting down. Propped up in a comfortable bed, my meal on a real, honest-to-God plate, and surrounded by family and friends, I felt like a king holding court.

  Most everyone would be going home that night, so we took our time saying our good-byes. Our visit together had been so unusual, something like a breakthrough. I felt that my family really saw me, that even if they didn’t understand what I was doing, they supported me in it unconditionally. Even my brother, Steve, who’d long ago written off running (and me, to some extent—it seemed we were constantly disagreeing about something), had come out to see us in Ault. Heather confided, too, that when she’d called my mother on her birthday, Mom had told her, “I love you,” which had brought Heather to tears. It was an unprecedented declaration, as Mom had never said that to Heather before and had even stopped saying it to me long ago. (Why? I’m not sure, maybe something to do with my stubbornness, or my own reserve. I think both of us had forgotten that staying connected was more important than anything else.) It signaled a significant change, and Heather and I held each other, crying with joy. At the time, I had a hard time taking it all in, but I felt incredibly grateful for every subtle and positive transformation.

  Once everyone left the room, I showered and tucked in for the night while Heather got up every two hours to ice my injuries. When I awoke the next morning, I was pretty well rested, although Heather was now fatigued from many, many days of interrupted, short sleep. In the waiting room at the hospital, I grabbed a newspaper, another simple pleasure to enjoy. This was the first thing I’d read, other than food wrappers, in three weeks. The October 6, 2008, morning headlines clued me in, for the first time, about how the U.S. presidential race was shaping up (“Palin Accuses Obama of ‘Palling Around’ with Terrorists”), and how serious the financial crisis had become (“Dow Jones Industrial Average in Freefall”). It made me glad I hadn’t been paying any attention to the nasty politics or depressing national news, and my only indicators of what was happening in the “real world” had been the fluctuations I’d seen on the gas station price signs. This week, I’d noticed, you could fill up for about $3.50 a gallon, down about 10 cents from the week before and almost a buck and a half cheaper than it had been in California at the start of our run.

  After a short time in the waiting room, a nurse came to prep me for the MRI, and the whole procedure was over quickly. The day before, I’d told Heather that if the doctors found soft tissue injuries, I’d be continuing. If they found a stress fracture, I insisted, I’d get a walking cast and still keep going. Either way, I wasn’t stopping. But Dr. Paul and Heather had other ideas, which they’d discussed privately and didn’t share with me: They simply wouldn’t support me going forward with a broken bone, risking permanent damage that would prevent me from ever running or mountaineering again. Although they were able to look at the big picture, think ahead to the future, I was not: My world was this run, right now. They were doing their job, looking out for my long-term interests, and I was doing my job, focusing on finishing this race, no matter what. We’d know soon if our interests would collide.

  The doctor reported that I had muscle strain and tendonitis, including micro tears in the muscles of my foot and a longitudinal tear within the tendon of the outside of my right foot. There was no evidence of a stress fracture.

  Would the pain eventually abate if I continued running?

  The doctor assured me that, no, it wouldn’t. So I asked what he recommended for treatment, and he suggested the usual runner’s remedy: rest, ice, and elevation, plus an anti-inflammatory, like ibuprofen, to help with the swelling.

  Rest? The last three I could definitely do (sometimes), but how would I manage that first one and still run the remaining 1,700 miles?

  After a long pause, I quipped my counteroffer: If I ran only forty miles a day, instead of sixty, would that constitute rest?

  The look on his face was priceless. At first, he laughed, but then his smile collapsed as he recognized that although I thought I was being funny, I was also totally serious about the mileage. He must have thought I was nuts. Heather has remarked since that his reaction was a second dose of reality; we’d been so cocooned in our own world that not only were we unaware of our country’s current events, but we’d forgotten how crazy our own situation sounded.

  I’m running across the United States, see, and I’ve already come over thirteen hundred miles, you know, and even though Charlie dropped out (he’s bicycling now), somebody’s got to keep running to th
e finish, and I don’t give up when I’ve said I’m going to do something. I’ve been dreaming of doing this for years, and so even though this is going to be incredibly painful to run on these injuries, I want to keep going, so can I just cut back to forty miles a day—would that be all right?

  Yeah, I’m pretty sure he thought I was nuts.

  7.

  This Is Not My Foot

  Days 25—26

  In 1928, when the bunioneers ran the first organized footrace across the United States, they’d been promised a winner’s purse of $25,000, big money in those days—and no small sum for two months of work, even by today’s standards. The race’s founder, Charles C. Pyle, could be called the Depression-era Don King, the top sports promoter in his time. He’d dangled the money to lure big-name athletes, and offered decent, free food and lodging to all comers, which pulled another pool of men who hadn’t yet claimed either fame or fortune, who either aspired to greatness, craved adventure, or needed a roof over their heads. They ran most of the way on Route 66, the Mother Road that stretched from Los Angeles to Chicago, most of which was still unpaved after two years under construction.

  Good ol’ Charley didn’t exactly come through. Sure, a few days after the end of the race, he awarded the prize money to twenty-year-old Andy Payne, who came in first with an average pace of ten minutes per mile and completed the 3,400 miles from California to New York in 573 hours: he finished 84 stages, averaging forty miles per day.

  But along the way, conditions were deplorable. Charley provided cold showers, scant food, and drafty quarters . . . some of the time. Men of means supplemented what they were given, but those who didn’t have the money to buy extra food or other necessities made do with the meager provisions as best they could. It’s possible that Charley (also nicknamed C. C. for “Cash and Carry”) had always meant to skimp, but it’s more likely that he just didn’t understand what it would take to properly care for his runners as they raced across the country. Logistically, ultrarunning is like a cross between orienteering, camping, and a military march. Unless you’ve done it before, there’s no way you can know what will be required, from how much food you’ll need to where your runners will relieve themselves. Not only do you have to deal with the anticipated requirements to keep everyone on the move, but you also have to contend with the unanticipated, whatever special circumstances come up and demand that you forget your plans and wing it. From what I know of the Bunion Derbies, neither the expected nor the unexpected was handled very well.