Running on Empty

by Marshall Ulrich

  The bunioneers’ route (rough as it was) had been scouted, a race doc was on hand, and Charley had also hired a cobbler to fix runners’ shoes when they fell apart, but their accommodations were nowhere near as fine as mine. What I had—occasional access to a toilet, a warm bed every night (even if it was most times in an RV that Heather and I shared with three other people), regular showers, clean clothes, gear and gizmos from sponsors to boost my performance and relieve my pain, Dr. Paul to “fix” me and Kathleen to massage me when I needed it, my wife to care for and comfort me, and about eight thousand to ten thousand calories a day—would have seemed like royal treatment to the men who ran in the Bunion Derby. Contrast these things with the bunioneers’ sketchy lodgings, the nearly complete lack of facilities for personal hygiene, and the unappetizing fare. Sometimes they slept in barns, or on the floors in post offices and jails—and those were some of the better accommodations. More than a few of these men fueled their efforts with a single pot of beans every day. Then consider that the black men in the race were harangued, especially in the segregated South. In Texas, by law, blacks weren’t allowed to share quarters with whites, so they bedded down wherever they could—but not in hotels, because none would take them in even if Charley had offered to pay.

  One of the most promising athletes in the race, Edward “The Sheik” Gardner, was also one of only five African-Americans in the competition. In McLean, Texas, a white mob surrounded his tent and threatened to burn it. They also threatened to burn his trainer’s car because George Curtis was black too, and when they heard a rumor that Eddie was going to push the pace through their town, they threatened violence if he finished the local stage ahead of a white man. But the harassment wasn’t limited to Texas. The winner of the race, Andy Payne, later remarked that he thought Eddie could easily have won if he hadn’t been slowed by onlookers. Indeed, in Andy’s home state of Oklahoma, for an entire day Eddie was stalked by a farmer with a shotgun who threatened to shoot him if he pulled ahead of any white runners.

  Though it was probably worst for the black bunioneers, all of the men suffered. Sure, a great deal of what they went through was self-inflicted or just part of the endeavor: Many hadn’t trained for the event, many twisted their ankles and sustained injuries, and then there was the inevitable heat, wind, and cold that sapped their strength. Still, it’s the small comforts that can make an effort like this bearable, and most of the bunioneers didn’t have even the most basic amenities. Their story makes what I was doing seem plush by comparison, which provides a great example of how perspective—your mind-set and your relative experience—colors your perception and your ability to persevere.

  People often ask me how I can endure what I do. How do I take the pain? It all comes down to focus, not a very sexy answer, but I think it’s accurate.

  Someone once dubbed me the “Zen master of extremes,” referring to my exploits in Death Valley—the solo crossing and the Badwater Quad—which they imagined were possible only in some kind of meditative state. That’s valid, but I think they also hit upon a deeper truth. My approach to the inevitable suffering of ultrarunning (and life) aligns with Zen’s emphasis on experiential wisdom. This Buddhist prayer sums it up:Let us rise up and be thankful,

  for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little,

  and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick,

  and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us be thankful.

  One way I deal with the pain is to embrace it, to realize that it also presents a gift: profound appreciation for whatever small thing comforts me, brings me pleasure, makes me laugh, satisfies my hunger, lightens my mood. Yes, at least I didn’t die. In other words, if something hurts, I focus on what doesn’t. The mind will naturally fixate on any irritation, but you can redirect it, make yourself look away or at least occupy yourself with something else for a while. For me, the most intense test of this came during the Badwater Quad, and what made it almost unbearable was that I allowed myself to focus on the misery of my tendonitis for more than two hundred miles. Thinking about my legs constantly, my only saving grace was that I had something else to consider: the charity that would benefit from the fund-raising associated with my effort, the Religious Teachers Filippini. More specifically, I pictured the war-widowed women and starving children who would receive food, water, and education because of the $70,000 I’d succeed in raising when I finished. I told myself that my suffering was no greater than theirs, that mine would end soon enough, that theirs could stretch on for years, that what I was enduring was nothing like the pain of losing your spouse, or your parent, or your child, and then having to struggle simply to survive. The contrast lent purpose to every agonizing step.

  All pain is relative.

  When I had my toenails removed back in the early nineties, I did it mainly to eliminate one of the inconveniences and irritations that had become routine in every adventure race or ultramarathon I undertook. Yes, I knew the procedure would involve cutting around the perimeters of the entire nail, practically to the bone, cauterizing the veins, and then applying acid to the nailbed to keep it from regenerating. The aftermath was supposed to be bad, but it seemed like it would be worth it: My toes were a mess from all the pounding against the front of my shoes, I’d become especially susceptible to “black toe,” and I’d have to stop during every race to puncture blisters under my nails. It was a nuisance and a time waster. Besides, a couple of the nails were so misshapen that they kept poking holes in the tops of my shoes. In short, the temporary discomfort associated with the surgery would be considerably less than the problems I’d have if I let my toenails keep getting battered and blackened, falling off and growing back in all kinds of funky configurations.

  I’d considered getting rid of them before, but one night when I was at a party with a surgeon friend, I’d had a few, and he said he’d do it cheap: He’d remove the toenails and perform a vasectomy at the same time, saving me some money by charging me for only one office visit. Always the penny-pincher, I laughed at him even while I was seriously considering his offer.

  “Hey, I’ve got this fatty nodule on the back of my leg I’ve been thinking about having excised, too . . .”

  He said he’d throw that in for free, so the next Wednesday, I went to the doctor’s office and had all three outpatient procedures done, and then went back to the house. Danette was surprised—I hadn’t told her what I was doing that day, and she couldn’t believe I would just show up and announce it after the fact. (Hi, honey, I’m home! I don’t have those pesky toenails anymore, and I’m shooting blanks now. What’s for dinner?) But not too long before, she’d made some offhand remark about how I should get a vasectomy, so in my mind that meant we’d discussed it. Just goes to show you how in tune I was with the importance of communication.

  The toes hurt a lot more than the testicles, for sure. Which brings me to the point of this story: Because my feet felt like someone had blowtorched them, I didn’t even think about the tenderness in my undercarriage, and the incision on my leg could have been a mosquito bite. The whole thing was quite manageable, and in fact, I was back out running two days after the surgeries. All pain, from an itch to intense discomfort, is relative, and can be perceived as better or worse in comparison with something else, either your own experience or someone else’s.

  So, yes, I suppose I’ve become a so-called master of physical pain—bulling through it, finding something good in it, keeping my mouth shut about it unless talking means learning from it or laughing about it. I’m skilled at compartmentalizing pain, detaching and observing it without becoming its slave.

  There is one man, however, who has taken this to another level. Undoubtedly the greatest ultrarunner alive, Yiannis Kouros stands unmatched, both in terms of his accomplishments and in his awareness of what happens when we run. At this writing, he holds 134 world records, and in his early fifties, he’s still out there showing younger athletes how to get it done. He’s also
a musician and poet, as well as a student of literature, and he says that these pursuits inspire him when he’s running.

  When I had the chance to talk with Yiannis some time ago, I confessed that I’d once had a strange experience and wanted to know his thoughts about it. About thirty-five miles into the Badwater Ultramarathon one year, I saw the sun setting in front of me, and then had the oddest sensation, as if I was floating over my body and watching myself run. It was over in the blink of an eye, but when I regained normal consciousness, the sun was rising behind me and I was down the road fifty miles. It made me think of the Native Americans, the drifting spirits. I didn’t want to make it sound too weird, but it was weird.

  Yiannis was matter-of-fact. “Oh, that happens all the time to me.”

  Excellent! I wanted to know how I could make it happen again, too. Yiannis explained that this altered state is predictably accessible when you reach the limits of your physical capacity, your tolerance for pain, and your mental ability to carry on. It happens when you literally run out of anywhere else to be: The body is no longer habitable, and so the mind or the spirit or what have you slips out to another place, and the body moves down the road and beyond its pain on its own. For Yiannis, ultrarunning is about transcendence, transformation, new spiritual dimensions.

  As for me, I’ve never been able to enter that intensely altered state again.

  It’s not that I’ve never reached into the void again, never been so wrung out that it would have been great to hover overhead instead of slogging it out in my body. Believe me, I’ve tried, but getting back to that state completely eludes me. I wonder if this experience is the enlightenment Buddhists strive to achieve. Is it the place where suffering ends? Nirvana?

  I don’t know. It’s possible. I would have liked to find that place many times during the transcon, but it never happened; perhaps I’ve never achieved that escape again because I’m so intensely focused on moving forward, or because I’m usually blasting away the pain with loud music, or because my mental makeup is so stubborn and resolute that I prevent myself from slipping away. But I do have other ways of shifting my awareness, of dealing with the pain.

  The morning after my MRI in Colorado, I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at my fat foot, so swollen it felt alien to me. There it was: The least pressure would stab my sole and shoot the agony up my leg into the pain sensors of my brain. It was as if someone had pounded sixpenny nails into the arch and side of my foot.

  After we’d left the hospital the day before, Heather and I had attended a meeting with the documentary’s director and line producer, as well as Charlie, his crew chief, and management personnel from the production company in New York, who participated by phone. Charlie was still encouraging everyone that the record was within reach for me, but I had my doubts. Once that was over with, starting around two in the afternoon, I walked and ran into the night, covering 32 miles. It had actually gone pretty well, but by morning the foot was so sensitive that I could hardly stand. We were already doing everything we could for it, so I was going to have to do something more, by myself, if I was going to keep on. We needed a mental trick; I’d have to pull a rabbit out of my shoe. What could I do?

  Turning to Heather, I disowned my foot. Instead of embracing the pain, I rejected it completely.

  “This foot doesn’t belong to me anymore. It doesn’t fit in with who I am, what I’m trying to do, or where I’m going. This is not my foot.”

  If I wanted to keep running, I’d have to stop thinking about my foot altogether. I wouldn’t be able to just gut it out as I had before, during the painful few hundred miles to the finish during the Badwater Quad. I still had over fifteen hundred miles to go, close to three weeks before we reached New York if I could keep a reasonable pace, and I knew that if I even acknowledged that the foot was still attached, that the pain had anything to do with me, it would end my run—I’d cry uncle at some point, and I wasn’t willing to do that. So I decided to pretend that my foot, and the pain, weren’t there. If I ever noticed that throbbing at the end of my leg, I’d dismiss it as “not my problem.” I simply wasn’t going to deal with it.

  While I was handling my pain by ignoring it, Heather had her own struggles, which she had no choice but to confront head-on. The documentary production company was beginning to gripe about the budget: Why were we spending so much on food? Did we really need so many people to crew? How often did we plan to stay the night in a hotel from here on out? Why did we leave the van running, wasting gas, at crew stops? She answered their questions evenly: Meal costs were high because we had to buy packaged food for portability and to be able to cook in the RV, and I was eating four times what any other person was eating; yes, we needed every hand we had, although we could perhaps move some people around—didn’t Charlie need fewer crew now that he was cycling? We’d spend nights in a hotel only when we were within a ten-minute drive. We didn’t turn the van on and off because it would kill the battery; this had already happened twice, causing a lot of unnecessary scurrying around, wasting time and energy to get it charged and the vehicle moving again.

  Under normal circumstances, I bet Heather would have been inclined to see these questions merely as a reflection of their lack of experience with crewing for ultrarunners and the realities of keeping a team moving on the road, or as reasonable cost-watching measures, but these weren’t normal circumstances. She was exhausted. She was also consumed with protecting my well-being. Her first and only priority was to see me safely to New York, and when anyone suggested that another concern was more important, it didn’t sit well with her. To be blunt, it pissed her off. Still, she always tried to find a way to work with them, politely, even when she was steaming inside.

  Have you ever heard of “Minnesota nice”? That’s my wife. When the crew shuffle began, Heather made an effort to be accommodating. They wanted to send Kathleen home to save some money, because she was being paid more than some of the other crew. Heather knew that Kathleen needed a break; we had worked her incredibly hard. What’s more, I could see and feel Kathleen’s worry for me every time she touched me, not wanting to hurt me, feeling sorry for me and whatever pain I was enduring. She’s a sympathetic soul, and wasn’t able to keep up even the smallest pretense of bravado. I didn’t want to ask her to fake it, but it was demoralizing for me to be so pitied. Given all the circumstances, Heather agreed to let her go. They’d wanted to send Roger home, too, but Heather dissuaded them; I’d already said no, he was too valuable, he wasn’t burnt out, and he was an important part of my support system. Roger was also the only person on the road with whom Heather would voice her frustrations; purposefully, she didn’t tell me about 99 percent of what was happening behind the scenes. So Charlie would keep Chuck Dale, his crew chief, and Jenny Longpre, another member of his crew, with him. We’d keep Brian Weinberg (the college kid who’d helped my son spike my drinks in Colorado), and continue to integrate Dave Pearson into our group. By now, Dr. Paul was no longer crewing but instead focusing entirely on being our race doc, overseeing Charlie’s and my medical care. At one point, he remarked to me that the number of injuries that Charlie and I had sustained amounted to more than all the injuries he might see among the hundreds of runners at the invitational Western States hundred-miler and Badwater combined. Dr. Paul had his work cut out for him.

  So now our crew consisted of Heather, Roger, Dave, and Brian. The next day, Kira Matukaitis, an ultrarunner some friends of ours had recommended, would join us, and we’d have a full crew again.

  Right around the time we reached Nebraska, I asked Heather to make a sign for the crew van: DR. PAUL’S ROLLING REHAB CLINIC.

  Welcome to Nebraska!

  “The Cornhusker State”

  Arrival date: 10/7/08 (Day 25)

  Arrival time: 8:45 p.m.

  Miles covered: 1,424.1

  Miles to go: 1,639.1

  I was looking for distractions again, trying to make myself and other people laugh at our situation. The truth is that
I was feeling pretty miserable. After my MRI, Dr. Paul and I had agreed that I would run fifty miles, no more, the following day. We both felt that pushing too hard might aggravate my injuries, might cause a blowout that would bring everything to a halt again. Fortunately, we were routed onto a dirt road, and the softer surface was a windfall for my sore foot.

  Not that I was thinking about the foot. Anything but the foot. I was caught up in memories of my childhood, my adventures, raising my kids; in missing Heather, our home in Idaho Springs, and the MKC, who were now back in their own homes. The predictable post-high depression had set in now that my family was gone. The typical symptom: what psychologists call “rumination,” my repetitive thoughts, questioning, sorting out, using the time alone as a way to review my life, my mistakes, my losses, my grief. This sadness, accompanied by busy mental processes, has been described as “exquisitely attentive to pain.” It’s interesting, isn’t it, that at a time when I refused to succumb to the physical pain, my mind got to work on the emotional?