my 1st ultramarathon

An elliptic investigation into Wayfinding Topic #3

(Listen to the audio version here)

I don’t know exactly which season of life I’m in except that it’s one of simplifying. So many wonderfully superfluous parts of my life and my identity have passed their seasons of fervent blooming and I’ve been wading around in the undertow. I’ve been, as I usually am, impatient with the slow process of narrowing in. I’ve tried to fight it. I’ve tried to impersonate my old self, pumping myself up enough to fill out those old skins so that people could recognize me, and more importantly, so that I could recognize myself. But the air never held for long and I am not altitude trained anymore. 

Whichever season this is, the only navigational tool that works anymore is listening. My tools for understanding, seeing clearly ahead of me, and picking up speed are in the workshop getting repairs and long overdue updates. It's been a while since I’ve traded them in so they require an extended reboot. Meanwhile I’ve been out here foraging. Needing more only of myself, less of everything else. Needing a new way of engaging with endurance that includes little more than the sound of my footsteps and the occasional aid station intervening between me and my entanglement with the natural world.

A few days before my first ultramarathon was set to take place, the race director sent out an email with a few simple instructions including where to park, the approximate locations and contents of the 3 total aid stations, and where to find the french fries after you stumble across the finish line. These details appeared in comical contrast to the 50+ page athlete guide that is sent out approximately 4-6 weeks before an Ironman race and the 26 aid stations you can find on the run course alone.  Although I could still be identified as an endurance athlete, the contrast between my last race, the Ironman World Championship, and my next race, the Red Rocks of Sedona 55k, highlighted radically different flavors of endurance racing. 

Partway down that short list of important race day details was the handy little phrase: “You will NOT find your way on course without navigation.” And this is when I knew that “race” was probably not the right word for the adventure I was about to embark upon.  

Don’t get me wrong, I do know how to navigate in my own way. I know where I am at all times in an esoteric sense. For instance, right now I know that I am here, in my body, on my green couch next to my black lab, Ralph, on a wet Wednesday morning in late March. I know how I got here - how I followed the flow which led me to live near the ocean and craft my life around writing and running and coaching. I also have an idea about where I’m going through the rhythms of various seasonal and cyclical patterns - how I’ve been in this season of narrowing in and recentering my relationship to what is nameless and formless in me, re-establishing my relationship to the ground before reaching back out again. But if you hand me a 2 dimensional map that someone else has made, which represents their subjective determinations about which elements of the landscape to prioritize, I am already and indeterminately lost. 

I pulled up to the start line approximately 15 minutes before the race started, sat in the car with my seat warmer on for 10 minutes, then got out of the car with enough time to stop at the porta potty, then turn on my navigation app for its maiden voyage, and scratch my dogs’ butts before the official race start.  

My race plan was simple. I would run really slowly until I had to walk, and then I would walk for as long as I needed to until I could start running again. Aside from that, I was hoping to stay near other runners in order to avoid getting lost by myself. Right around mile 4, myself and a group of around 6 others ran approximately a mile down the wrong trail before realizing our mistake. Interestingly this was the exact moment in time that I realized I was going to like ultra-running. It wasn’t just me out here trying to assert my competitive advantage and get it right in some abstract way, it was a mismatched group of imperfect humans who have their own various navigational deficiencies, absolutely not getting it right, and rolling on anyway.

A large percentage of the course was unrecognizable as trail. There were sections that crossed expansive rock floors, with no direction looking any more like a race course than any other. There were long patches of traversing up river beds, where I would cross to one side, then the other, trying to keep my feet dry before just giving up and walking straight through the water. There were sections that seemed more like rock climbing than trail running, one part in particular that the runner in front of me, perhaps remembering my uninspiring stature, turned around to grab my hand and pull me up a ledge that I might not have had the length to scale on my own.  And there were a significant amount of stops and starts, looking from map to course and back down again, wondering where the hell we were supposed to go. It felt more like an expedition than a race. We were all a bunch of Lewises and Clarks, exploring new territory as if we were the original explorers discovering a land that definitely no one else had previously inhabited for thousands of years. Sure there were those other people walking around but they were mostly part of the scenery. 

If you’ve never been to Sedona, you may not know about the vortexes that can be found there. A vortex is thought to be a swirling center of energy that is conducive to healing, meditation and self-exploration. These are places where the earth seems especially alive with energy.  They are, I think, the reason I keep finding myself pulled back to this rugged landscape. Or maybe it’s simply the beauty that calls to me, the combination of green vegetation piercing through rusty red and burnt orange amidst a deep blue expanse is more than enough rapture to reinvent me.   

Around mile 15, I had the distinct understanding of exactly all the ways that I did not train thoroughly enough for this endeavor. I did know ahead of time that I did not train thoroughly enough but it was enlightening to be presented with all of the specific details of my unpreparedness so early in the day. I was hoping that my legs would reserve their aching for at least halfway through the course. 

Since time was of great abundance though, I did not push away this aching leg feeling and try to will my way through it like I would have in the past. I just ran along and listened. The voice that spoke for this pain said things like, “You should have spent more time being serious about your training. Less time daydreaming. Less time pulled over on the side of the trail taking pictures of flowers. There are flowers everywhere…” It trailed off. I started thinking about those flowers, and the leaves, and the way the palm trees cast dancing shadows on the hillside in the late afternoon sunlight. I notice that my legs don’t hurt in this realm of images. I take a deep breath and I realize that my energy actually feels alert and enlivened. It seems I’ve been doing a good job staying on track of my calorie intake and making the appropriate intuitive adjustments to my fluid and electrolyte balance. 

I keep running. I keep listening for what my body needs. I feel so grateful to be here and I remember to look up. My eyes lust for this landscape and I’m enmeshed in this red rock heaven. In this realm, the sensations of my body are a vague and distant memory. My energy is irrelevant. It is swallowed up in a much larger context. Here, I am made of red rocks too. Unfortunately I can’t stay here for long. I’m not entirely sure why - I’m still too attached to my body I suppose. There are too many rocks to trip over that divert my awareness. I dance between the layers. I indulge all of them and give them their fair share of attention. They all have something for me. 

In that first layer, I am inside my skin. As the layer most affected by gravity, here I feel my density. I feel how I belong to the earth. I notice that even though my legs have started aching earlier than anticipated, they do not get worse. There’s a settling in that occurs here. Of course this layer also had more to say about how undisciplined I’ve been lately. And when that tune played itself out, it moved on to saying things like, “Why do you keep putting yourself in these situations anyway? Can’t you just exercise like a normal person?” I smile, and keep running.  

I’ve always been magnetized to the path of surrender. I’ve tried climbing ladders and reaching for the stars but never with any heartfelt enthusiasm. Any real thing I’ve ever felt has come through being brought to my knees. If we were dancing, this life and I, I would be gladly giving over my hand to be led, dipping and twirling and gasping for air in sheer astonishment at how we had been moving in perfect attunement with my own natural rhythm this whole time. I would never and do not grow tired of the way the dance contours around every rock edge and windswept shoreline of my body. I’m never not amazed at how my partner anticipates my every step, senses my cravings and just ahead of time, clears the path before me as clues start to align. 

The part of my plan that involved running really slowly until I had to walk inevitably experiences a conflict with the part of my plan that involved keeping up with other people in order to not get lost. My thoughts wander. The specificity of my unpreparedness starts to catch up with me. I think about quitting and make sure to fully consider it. For the first time in my athletic career, it feels like a worthy and acceptable option. I feel free enough to quit if I had fully experienced what I came here to experience. But I haven’t yet. I keep running.

There were 3 uphill miles to the final aid station at mile 30 and my phone, and therefore my navigation system, was almost out of battery. I had to concede the assurance of being on course for only some of the remaining miles in return for sporadic check-ins for hopefully all of the remaining miles. This concession made my legs hurt more. I had no choice but to look up more frequently in order to discern a path forward, and every time I did, I reintegrated into the sultry sienna and the buoyant blue around me. My legs still ached and my energy continued to wane but I had more vastness with which to hold it. More beauty with which to devour it.

In the end, with all of my wrong turns and redirections, I crafted my own artistic expression of a race course that resulted in an additional 5k, and made for a nice round 60k of an initiatory ultrarunning extravaganza. The finish line was a black blow-up arch in the middle of  a parking lot, with one enthusiastic volunteer ringing a cowbell and a bunch of half-dead finishers sitting behind it in lawn chairs with giant piles of food on their plates. It was everything I dreamed it would be. 

There is no scientific “proof” that a vortex is measurably real. They are not an electric or magnetic phenomena, just a palpable energetic amplification that people have been experiencing for at least as long as those early explorers first discovered Sedona, although artifacts indicating sacred sites allude to a much longer history.  What I know for sure is that I always feel different when I leave. 

Indigenous elder Pat McCabe teaches us that we’re not supposed to be burdened with this life, to feel like we need to make anything or fix anything. We came here to spiral into life. We, like the vortexes, like the central pattern of movement that Charles Darwin discovered through tracking the growth of various plants over time, bend and rotate around in an irregular circle, an elliptic spiraling upward and outward. 

(Reference to Darwin’s experiment and Wayfinding Topic #3 here)

I don’t know exactly which season of life I’ve been in but I can feel my hunger returning after a seemingly endless retreat. Like my tools for seeing, understanding, and picking up speed, this hunger had to be disassembled and rearranged. It had gotten too complicated. Too specific. As I root back down into it, I can feel that its driving force is, as it always has been, for vastness. For inhabiting a spaciousness too wide to hold onto.  Sadguru said that our knowledge, however great it is, compared to this cosmos is miniscule, so if you identify with knowledge you will become miniscule. Ignorance however, is boundless. When we identify with what we do not know, we become boundless too.

Sitting on a meditation cushion and emptying my mind though, has never been enough for me. Though I have always been seduced by surrender, I have never been able to go willingly, always stubbornly attached to some neurotic need to know where I’m going. My body is still cycling through old patterns and worn out ways of being that all the clarity in my head cannot transform. So over and over I descend to the only place I know that my dancing partner waits to greet me: on the ground, lost, with little to no strength of my own to continue. I reach out my hand in devotional ignorance. I remember to look up. I spiral around and entangle myself in the beauty all around me. I begin to dance.