Ultramarathon Man

by Dean Karnazes

  The next two hours were run solo; I didn’t see another human. As the late-afternoon sun turned the tree-tops gold, I felt alone in the wilderness. Vulnerable. There were frequent mountain lion sightings around here, and earlier this year a runner had been attacked, dragged down a hill, and killed while training on the Western States trail.

  I was in no condition to fend off a predator. My neck hurt, my shoulders hurt, my back hurt, my hips hurt, my knees hurt, my feet hurt, even the tip of my nose radiated pain. Every step hurt more than the last. At times like these you ask yourself the hard questions: How committed am I? How far am I willing to go?

  There were only two people manning the next aid station at Ford’s Bar. They had hiked in a considerable distance, carrying many of the supplies on their backs. Amazingly, they had hauled in a small camping table and had placed some chopped fruit and energy bars on it.

  I sat in the dirt on the side of the trail. “Boy, am I glad to see you guys,” I said in a scratchy voice.

  One of the guys had long, straight black hair and chiseled features, like an old painting of a Native American. When the Indian spoke, his words were clear and deliberate.

  “This is a difficult part of the journey,” he said, finishing his sentence by gazing up to the sky. A hawk screeched off in the distance, and its cry resonated up the valley. It was like a scene from an old John Wayne Western, only with a runner lying in the dirt.

  “Have you done this run before?” I asked.

  He turned his gaze back down to me. “Oh, yes, my friend.” He nodded very slowly and went back to watching the sky.

  “Do you know what mileage it is at this point?”

  “This is mile seventy-three,” the other guy said. “The river’s five miles down the valley.” The next checkpoint was at the Rucky Chucky River Crossing. “How are you feeling?”

  “I was doing okay up to Foresthill, but I’ve entered a world of hurt since. The pain is getting intense,” I said.

  There was a long moment of silence, and then the Indian chief began to speak. “That is to be expected,” he said, continuing to scan the sky. “Pain is the body’s way of ridding itself of weakness.”

  In my semiconscious and half-delirious state, it took a few moments to register. Even when I made partial sense of his words, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them. Wait a minute, I thought. What was it that Coach McTavish had said? “If it feels good, you’re doing something wrong. It’s supposed to hurt like hell.” Perhaps I was doing something right here. Perhaps I was actually purging my body of weakness. Instead of trying to suppress it, maybe I should relish the pain, celebrate it. Maybe I like pain . . .

  They peeled me up from the trail and, grudgingly, I readied myself to carry on. Shuffling out of the small area, the chief had one last pearl of wisdom, “You can do it.”

  I looked back at him. “Thanks,” I said, “I’m certainly going to try.”

  Ford’s Bar to the Rucky Chucky River Crossing Miles 73 to 78

  It seemed the sun would not set today. Nearing 8:30 P.M., it was perfectly framed in the bed of the valley, and I was running directly toward it, squinting to protect my eyes.

  Pary loved the sunset. She would stare out of our kitchen window, which overlooked the Pacific, and watch it, transfixed. Sometimes she would run and find me, “Quick . . . quick, we’re going to miss it!” and we’d race for the binoculars trying to get the best view of the “green flash”—that elusive, magical moment when the sun temporarily appears green just before disappearing below the horizon. “That was a good one,” she would say. “The best one yet.”

  Near the bottom of the valley, the trail ran parallel to the American River. Off in the distance, I could see a couple of runners making their way toward the river crossing in front of me. They looked to be about a mile away. My progress seemed slow and labored, so it surprised me when I caught up to them so quickly.

  Behold, it was my two friends from the “special” military.

  All along I had known they were somewhere ahead of me, but I hadn’t expected to catch them, especially both of them at the same time. It’s highly unusual for two runners to maintain the same pace for 75 miles.

  As slowly as I was running, they were moving even more sluggishly. The shorter of the two was hunched over so severely that his chin rested on his chest. His muscular arms swayed randomly back and forth like a gorilla as he moved.

  My initial thought was to blow right by them without saying anything, but that didn’t seem like the decent thing to do. Instead, I pulled up alongside the pair and said hello. Surprisingly, they exchanged greetings this time and seemed almost happy to see me. The stout one was really suffering. It was clear he had been sick at least once; dried vomit covered his chin, and his legs were swollen and knotted. It appeared that there was blood coming out of his ear, though I tried not to stare for too long.

  The taller guy looked entirely together—almost fresh, in fact. His eyes were clear and bright, and he still had a lot of spring in his stride. He looked like he could have been running much faster.

  “I thought we might see you somewhere along the trail,” he said.

  That’s funny, I thought, I didn’t even think you knew I existed.

  We kept motoring along together for a little while. The short one was doing everything in his power to keep up with us, but I could tell it was taking a whole lot out of him to hold a steady pace without stopping. At one point he kicked a big rock in the trail and let out a bellowing groan.

  “Listen,” his partner said, “why don’t you keep powering along and we’ll catch up with you later?”

  “Ah, sure,” I replied. “I’ll see you guys in a little while, at the river crossing or something.”

  It seemed clear, though, that the way things were going, we probably wouldn’t be seeing each other again in this race. The short one croaked, “Keep it tight, brother. You’re lookin’ solid.”

  With seventy-five miles of torture to whittle away the defenses, they were revealed to be good guys at the core.

  The sun had fallen below the horizon when I pulled up behind another runner some 45 minutes later.

  “Hey, what up?” he said, without looking back.

  “Not much. Just trying to make it to the river.”

  “Yeah, me too,” he puffed. “I’ve got some tightness in my groin and I started pissing blood a few miles back. I don’t know what the hell’s going wrong. Guess I shouldn’t be complaining, though. You see that poor bastard behind us?”

  “You mean those two guys? It’s kind of strange they’re running together.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “those Rangers are pretty fucked up, ain’t they?”

  Now I was totally confused. “I’m not sure I follow,” I said. “Are they in the Forest Service?”

  “No, they ain’t no forest rangers,” he said. “They’re Army Rangers.”

  The picture was becoming clearer now.

  “They’re trained not to leave their partner,” he went on, “so they do everything together. The guy who looks fresh won’t leave his partner for nothin’, even if it means dropping out of the race himself. They’ll either finish the race together or drop out together. So if one of them goes down, they’re both out. I used to train with an ex-Ranger. Those guys are pretty fuckin’ psycho if you ask me.” He burst into a wry cackle.

  As psycho as I was beginning to think this guy was, he was pretty engaging, and the distraction of running with him served me well. We ran together for the next couple of miles and he kept up a constant chatter.

  We parted company at the Rucky Chucky checkpoint, where he was rushed to the hospital with acute renal failure. I guess having blood in your urine isn’t a good sign.

  A volunteer escorted me from the checkpoint down to the river crossing. He carried a pitcher of water and kept filling my bottles, urging me to keep drinking even though the sun had gone down. Just before crossing the river, I asked him if he had any last bits of advice.

&n
bsp; “Yeah,” he said with a strange conviction. “Don’t stop, come hell or high water. And it looks like you’ve got both in front of you.”

  The dark, icy-cold river came up over my waist as I struggled across, trying not to slip on the rocky bottom and get swept downstream. Through the turbulence, I carefully plodded, step by awkward step, clumsily fighting to remain balanced and upright in the swift current. As I reached the distant shore, drenched from my chest down, I found that a rope had been attached to a tree on the hillside above. I used it to hoist myself wearily up the muddy embankment.

  On the far side of the river crossing was an aid station staffed with students and professors from the University of California School of Podiatry. Many of the athletes were in dire need of foot repair by this point. I sat in a rickety lounge chair, and a podiatry student immediately knelt in front of me.

  “I think there’s a clam shell or something in my left shoe,” I told him.

  He removed my shoe and sock and shook a lot of sand and small rocks out, but no clam shell. Reaching inside the sock, he pulled something out and flashed his penlight on it.

  “Is it a shell?” I asked.

  “Uh, no.” He held the object up. “That,” he grinned, “would be your big toenail.”

  I was mortified, then amused. How could I lose a toenail without knowing?

  “It’s okay,” I said to him calmly. “I wasn’t that attached to it anyway.”

  He laughed and asked if he could keep it. I guess that’s the kind of trophy a podiatry student keeps around the dorm.

  We decided not to mess a whole lot with my feet. There wasn’t much that could be done, really. From this point forward, it was principally a matter of damage control.

  The Rucky Chucky River Crossing

  Darkness had taken over, so I strapped on a headlamp and switched on my handheld flashlight. Twenty-two miles separated me from the finish line. I had successfully navigated the high water; now would come the hell.

  The Rucky Chucky River Crossing to Auburn Lakes Trail Miles 78 to 85.2

  People say the real race begins after crossing the river. My watch read 9:51 P.M., which was, miraculously, a full hour ahead of a projected twenty-four-hour finishing pace. As I started down the trail, a man recording checkout times enthusiastically informed me that I was in 20th place.

  “Geez,” I said with some surprise, “I’m just happy to be alive.”

  It’s hard to judge distances when running at night, especially on narrow trails. Your world is confined to the reach of your flashlight beam, and beyond that is just darkness. Detecting the contour of the terrain becomes impossible at times, and you’re left running on little more than instinct. The climb from the river stretched out for 2 miles, and then the trail became a narrow tunnel through tall, heavy brush that smelt of dampness and earth. The brush was so overgrown that I often hacked along with my arms. Through the constant buzzing of crickets and croaking frogs, I’d periodically hear louder noises crashing through the brush and hope it was just a deer and not a cougar or bear.

  Running with just the power of my headlamp and flashlight, I was again feeling very isolated. Mostly I liked the solitude of long-distance trail running, but in this weakened state I longed for the camaraderie of another runner. There were no other athletes in sight, no checkpoints, not even a jet in the sky. Was I still on the right trail? Not only was my body on the brink of collapse, I was now becoming apprehensive, seriously questioning what the hell I was doing out here. There was something deep and primitive about the experience, no doubt, but right now I didn’t want an encounter that meaningful. Enough punishment already . . . Uncle! I longed to be sitting at home in my easy chair, beer in one hand and remote in the other, surfing mindlessly through repeats of Seinfeld and Baywatch.

  And then, to make matters worse, both my headlight and flashlight dimmed unaccountably. I carried extra batteries in my pack, so I stopped and changed them. But the lights for some reason remained dim. Could the new batteries be just as weak? Or was it the bulbs?

  There was nothing to do but keep running. The trail before me was almost completely black. Branches and tree limbs appeared to jump out at me from nowhere. I could now barely detect the tip of my outstretched hand. And then, strangely, I began seeing outlines of green around everything, as though I were looking through night-vision goggles. The trail and foliage around me started to glow like a film negative. What was going on?

  I looked up at the sky. There were no stars to be seen. No Milky Way, no Big Dipper. It was a cloudless night in the mountains—there should be a thousand twinkling stars. Yet all I saw was darkness.

  That’s when I knew I was going blind.

  It’s called nyctalopia, or night blindness. It can be caused by lowered blood pressure or exposure to bright light during the day. The body’s capacity to produce a chemical compound called rhodopsin, or visual purple, which is necessary for the perception of objects in dim light, is temporarily impaired.

  The blisters had been uncomfortable, the muscle spasms agonizing, but going blind really presented an obstacle. I could only see a foot or two in front of me. I walked very slowly with my flashlight held out in front. The Auburn Lakes aid station at mile 85 was relatively close, and voices, or music, resonated off in the distance. Even while I plodded along at this painfully slow rate, my muscles and joints radiated pain every time my foot hit the ground. I found myself pausing slightly after each step, and it took tremendous concentration to move forward in a straight line without wavering back and forth across the trail. Finally I decided to just sit down and gather myself. Moving at a snail’s pace was demoralizing.

  Sitting on the trailside, I had a sickening sense that my journey had come to an abrupt end. I was bruised and bloodied and in no shape to contend with the beating for another sixteen miles to the finish line. Plus, I couldn’t see. Maybe I should just be thankful to have made it this far. I’d covered nearly 85 miles along one of the most extreme trails in the world, displaying strength and resolve along the way, breaking through one barrier after the next, a respectable accomplishment. Still, I wasn’t satisfied.

  Most dreams die a slow death. They’re conceived in a moment of passion, with the prospect of endless possibility, but often languish and are not pursued with the same heartfelt intensity as when first born. Slowly, subtly, a dream becomes elusive and ephemeral. People who’ve let their own dreams die become pessimists and cynics. They feel that the time and devotion spent on chasing their dreams were wasted. The emotional scars last forever. “It can’t be done,” they’ll say, when you describe your dream. “It’ll never happen.”

  My dream was dying. I didn’t want to give up, but I seemed powerless to do anything about it. My decision was to wait for the next runner and ask him to send back help from the Auburn Lakes aid station, which was probably less than a mile ahead. I lay down in the dirt to wait—and promptly nodded off.

  I awoke in confusion, not being able to place my whereabouts for a second. I could only have dozed for a few minutes, but it must have been a very deep slumber and it left me in a daze. When I finally gathered my senses, I recognized something odd and beautiful: the sky was again filled with shining stars. My vision had partially come back.

  Suddenly I was infused with a renewed sense of hope. If I could see, I could move forward, and if I could move forward, I could continue chasing my dream. It might be slow going, but it certainly beat being carried out on a stretcher.

  I sat up and turned on my flashlight and headlamp. The light they put out appeared weak and diffused, but it would do. It would have to do; I wasn’t stopping.

  The first few steps were like running on legs of marble. Pain shot from my foot to my pelvis like lightning bolts. Limping onward, I could now clearly hear rock music nearby. The checkpoint had to be within half a mile.

  Then my eyesight began dimming again; the miraculous reprieve had been short-lived.

  The aid station was so close that I could now detect lyrics t
o the songs and clearly hear laughter echoing off the hills. I marched blindly onward. Then there were lights, but they cast a weird rainbow glow, perhaps some new effect of the night blindness. I shook my head to clear my vision, but the colors remained steadfast.

  I plodded toward them . . . and discovered that the colors were real. Someone had strung hundreds of Christmas lights throughout the forest. Just to screw with me, I’m sure.

  At the station I was guided into a chair. People were asking me questions. The music was a Stones song: “When the whip comes downnn . . . yeah, when the whip comes down! ” Another fitting choice for the day’s sound track. More questions were thrown at me out of the shadows.

  “I’m all right, I suppose,” I managed to tell them. “But I kind of had a meltdown a few miles back. I’m having a hard time seeing.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” came an enthusiastic reply. “We can fix that . . . Hey, Bob, bring over that yellow tackle box with all the batteries in it. This guy’s flashlight is going dead.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not the batteries.”

  “That’s okay, too,” he chirped. “We got extra bulbs as well.”

  “It’s not the batteries or the bulbs . . . it’s me. Something’s going wrong with my vision.”

  There were several gasps in the crowd, and the guy helping me sputtered, “Oh, Jesus!”

  Now there was a buzz of people all around me. They turned down the music, and I could hear lots of whispering. Someone moved behind my chair and began massaging my shoulders and neck.

  “You still look pretty good,” that person said. “It’s too bad about your eyes.”

  There was some rustling and footsteps, and one of the other volunteers spoke. He cleared his voice a couple of times like the beginning of a town hall meeting.