The Black Canyon 60k: a point-to-point migration from certainty to bliss
Caminante, no hay camino.
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If you were perhaps a bird flying over the timeline of my existence since the release of my last writing, you would see something like a lit up merry-go-round with a broken “off” switch. A flaming tetherball, spinning one way and then another, in varying degrees of tension and release. The aftermath of an adolescent lightning bug who, after having stumbled blindly into an ayahuasca ceremony, unprepared to see the truth outside of her small self, is left circling around the remnants of her old life, stunned and unblinking.
I’ve been spinning around in a linguistically valid, yet internally destabilizing multi-year revolution against linearity and certainty. Not because I have an unresolved predisposition towards existential BDSM, but because over and over again, around every unanticipated corner, certainty proves to be something radically other than truth. I’ve been reorienting.
Uprooting the perspective of a culturally reinforced head-centric, validation-seeking consumption machine has been, at times, an exercise in internal counterterrorism: a losing, yet stubbornly persistent internal military defense effort to suppress the swelling contagion of this internal wildfire. Even for someone who gets off on blurring the thin line between pleasure and pain, this time period has necessitated a more harmonious, less conflict-based revolution. So, in my most sincere creative response to the invitation of the moment, I’ve begun taking pole dancing classes.
How do you relocate from one perspective and way of seeing the world to one you’ve never inhabited before? How do you find your footing on previously unknown terrain? How do you actually move from point to point?
My way of traveling through this life is slowly and intently, but with my hair on fire. I move at the speed of planetary transits, but I’m lit up like a sparkler. The slowest moving shooting star you can imagine. Without a sense of heaviness, I retain an atmospheric quality, easily jostled by shifting weather patterns. If learning is left to the conceptual realm, unanchored in the repetitive footsteps of physical existence, it remains vacant and useless.
When my friend Hibbs asked me if I wanted to come to Arizona and do the Black Canyon 60k with him, I took one look at the fields of Saguaro cacti featured on the website and was sold. If there’s anything I can relate to, it's the compelling need to remain green amidst a harsh arid backdrop and when necessary, to surround every inch of my watery center with protective spikes. The Black Canyon 60k was also, mercifully, a point-to-point race. On this particular day I would have a single, non-circular direction. And like any sensible winter migratory pattern, it was south.
The day before the race, I drove out to the finish line location to pick up my race packet when I was confronted with a line of cars bringing me to a stop right at the entrance of the off-road portion of the drive. Due to the quantity of rain in the days preceding the event, there was a newly formed river that would have to be forded in order to get to the packets. Since there was no race morning packet pickup, the options became: 1) ford the river in your own car; 2) park your car and ford the river as a passenger in a larger more sturdy vehicle; or 3) don’t race.
As I was driving an SUV and parking your SUV didn’t appear to be one of the socially acceptable options, I was really hoping to acquire one of those small car people into my vehicle in order to have a co-conspirator for this opening trail racing adventure. Serendipitously, I did get one, and her name was Kathryn. When our time came, Kathryn and I surged across the river in an exhilarating anticlimactic style.
On race morning, I awoke to the news that the shuttle buses that were scheduled to take us from parking at the finish location up to the start location would not be fording the river. Instead there would be a new parking location, and therefore a new opportunity for adventure in finding our cars at the culmination of the race.
When we arrived up north to the small town of Mayer, Arizona, the site of the beginning of the Black Canyon 60k, it was some ungodly temperature that I thought for sure I had promised myself I would never feel again.
At some point we all just started running. I didn’t hear any countdowns or announcements about the race starting, and perhaps that would have been superfluous. This was the biggest ultramarathon I’ve participated in thus far, with approximately 400 participants. It’s a special type of freedom to be surrounded by 400 other slow motion shooting stars who would never, in response to one of us revealing that we choose to run 60 kilometers at a time on purpose, ask “why.” It’s a redundant question really. Running 60 kilometers at one time on purpose is simply the nature of this particular configuration of stardust. We do it because we are it.
The beginning of the race sprawled out onto a vast frozen tundra. Courted by spreading stains of lilac and coral across the pre-dawn sky, we eagerly entered through the open mouth portal into the mythic otherworld of race time.
We met a couple of women who had participated in this race last year who gleefully issued us a warning about how the first half of the course lures you in with its sauntering runnable stretches and quick tranquilizing descents. Before you know it, you’re at the halfway point at mile 19 and the course rudely changes its tune.
Before we knew it, we had passed the first aid station around mile 5. I honestly have no memory of that aid station.
Needing to be thoroughly disinfected of the accumulated layers of “real world” baggage in order to find our footing in this otherworld, the next part of the process required us to to be systematically stripped of the uninspiring mediocrity of such infestations as fixed opinions, moral absolutions, undigested fears of not having enough and not being enough, and their related therapy-induced coping mechanisms.
When we were finally purified enough to be able to see clearly and therefore appreciate the constant flux of beauty and unity of all things, the trail tilted back her head and swallowed, sending us ecstatically careening down her singletrack esophagus. This process took approximately 7 miles, and before we knew it we were at the next aid station at mile 12.5.
It was here that we first stepped into our feet and rubbed our newly opened eyes to notice that we were in fact participating in an ultramarathon, signaled by the newly realized mildly unpleasant sensations in our legs. It’s actually a sort of wonderful thing when the race-beginning enthusiasm wears off and you begin to feel heavy for the first time. The relief of residing undeniably with your feet on the ground instead of the maddening flagellation of a primarily head-centric occupation, far outweighs the occasional discomfort of inhabiting an entropic and vulnerable meat suit. When the race begins to slow down and settle its weight into your muscles and tendons, it only seems like it’s because of the accumulated difficulty of the endeavor. But in fact, it’s simply a perceptual response to fully inhabiting each aching moment. It’s one of those carnal pleasures that’s worth every ounce of the cost of admission.
One of the features of doing a race with 400 people is that we were almost always running in a type of procession; a poorly orchestrated, musically disinclined conga line winding through the desert. Hibbs and I met all kinds of other radiantly streaming celestial bodies, hurling through the desert dreamscape at a blazing average speed of 13 minutes per mile.
I believe it was also around this time that the Saguaros began popping up more and more frequently. These giant spiky pickles, the keynotes of the desert and one of the primary reasons why I was here racing at all, did not disappoint. Deserts - we were reminded as the arctic frigidity was slowly giving way to midday heat - are a landscape of extremes. To survive here, the flora and fauna are necessarily resilient and adaptable. Large as Saguaros can be, due to their shallow root system, they can be readily transported to a new location and easily survive a point-to-point transition.
The resilience prerequisite weeds out many thirstier, more colorfully expressive varieties of plants, limiting the desert palette to more subdued tones. After hours of traversing through the hypnotic hues of warm terra cotta, tuscan tans, and yawning yellows, it becomes easy to find yourself sweetly guided into a rhythmic desert trance.
It was out of one such trance that we awoke, suddenly, into a startling dream called “Bumble Bee Ranch,” the halfway point, drop-bag location, burrito station, coffee bar, and live music concert site. I began curiously pulling items from my drop bag, slightly unsure about how to use my hands in this dream world, and pulled out a sandwich and a bag of chips, handing the rest of my carefully planned nutrition to the volunteer, who I assumed knew what to do with it. Fortunately another volunteer noticed my wandering eyes and offered to fill up my bottles for me while I stood there blankly holding my sandwich. Since I wasn’t entirely sure that the band or the burrito station were real, I took pictures of them and we made our way back onto the trail where everything made sense.
The climbing began immediately out of the aid station and it was a delightfully relieving orientation. Upwards tends to feel like a much safer direction. At this point though, those mildly unpleasant sensations in our legs had metastasized into incontrovertibly unpleasant sensations, engulfing more than just our legs. Correspondingly, one of us would voice a thing about what we were struggling with in life. But due to the nature of our forward motion, the thing was already literally behind us before the other person had a chance to respond. We kept on running like this, leaving salty struggles and disenchanted narratives to compost back into something useful and life-giving.
I’ve never really seen perseverance as something noteworthy or uncommon. It seems to be an endowed feature of being alive, sweetened or not by our varying levels of adaptability or resistance to resonating with the invitation of each unfolding season. So long as we’re alive, the wheels keep turning, try as we might to control them, pin them down, or convince ourselves that we can know something for sure. I might be mentally flailing about or temporarily emotionally unavailable to the moment, but when I look down at my legs, they’re always still running, or walking, or doing some in between thing one might refer to as a slog or a wobble. At one point Hibbs suggested that we might even engage “strutting,” at an upcoming juncture! Our particular expression of strutting didn’t end up looking as you might expect, but what mattered was that the moment had called for it, and we had obliged with our most sincere creative response.
Within a predetermined direction, as may be outlined by a race, a planetary orbit, or an evolutionary trajectory, each individual life expression may engage whichever style of perseverance best suits their nature, but the movement is non negotiable. Even the phases that feel or appear as stagnation are often just a temporary contraction or expansion of time; or when viewed from a two dimensional perspective: a dip.
It was at one such dip in the elevation profile that we came upon a river crossing. At mile 29, this was the first time all day that the trail had differentiated into anything other than meandering arid invariability. We stopped and looked around to see if there were any stone paths to cross, when we noticed that the runner in front of us (Ben) had sat right down into it. We were too discombobulated to join Ben in his mid race waterlogged tea party, but we were inspired to begin walking across and indulging in the soul replenishing nourishment of this mother fluid.
It is difficult to describe the pure infusion of fountain-like exuberance that began pulsing through our veins. We rose like geysers all the way up the climb from the river, infused with that special invisible force that shoots plants out of seeds and causes dandelions to break through concrete; that thing that makes life want to jump up and live.
At the zenith of the climb, we began to level out. I believe it was around this time that we started burping. And these were not just regular burps, but the kind that echo from the depths, dislodging and escorting ancient relics of inherited karma out from the underworld. Even Ben could be heard from up the trail uprooting generational guttural excretions.
A few weeks before the race, we received an email from the race directors that I only kind of read that said something about a course change. There was a section of a little more than 5 miles that had to be relocated and tacked on to the end of the course for some reason or another, which resulted in the updated course escorting us right by the finish line at mile 33, with still another 5 miles to go.
After the race was over, I would be sitting in the back of a pickup truck with 6 other finishers, one of whom had some affiliation with the race directors. When he told them that he was planning on doing the 60k, they tried to talk him out of it on account of the fact that those last 5 miles “sucked ass.”
The cruel part of this particular setup was not the fact that the last 5 miles were the most challenging 5 miles of the course, seeming to contain more elevation change than the entire rest of the course combined. It was the early awareness of an ending that broke the spell of mythic time and placed us rudely back into the contrasting harshness of linear banality, where pain could suddenly be accumulated due to the now copresent nature of past and future. If you listened closely as you ran by this taunting diversion, you could hear the cackling sound of the trickster spirit of trail racing, echoing in the distance.
Hibbs, ever the Sagittarian, was trying very hard to make us be positive. He insisted on issuing plans about how we were going to start running again, just right around the next corner. Conversely, my own Capricornian ideology does not require me to be positive in order to persevere, and I surrendered to the pulsing contractions and expansions of the trail mother’s final pushing.
I squeezed out resentment and agony and made increasing room for rapture and ravishment. We passed by a wall of shale and I was overcome with the realization of how much I had actually always revered this delicate, readily imprintable sedimentary rock, but I had never before had space to give myself over to residing in its blissful recognition. Somewhere in that section of trail, we even got to see grass for the first time all day! I melted and bathed in its exaltant softness.
There were no volunteers to greet us at the turnaround, only a rather unenthusiastic sign perched in front of a gently flowing river, signaling the final stretch of the day. Hoping for another experience of water inspired volcanic elation, we walked straight past the sign and into the river. Even as we entered the river, we knew that such experiences of grace can never be courted by half-hearted self-referential indignities like hope and expectation. Life has higher standards than that.
The finisher shoot / rainbow bridge / birth canal into the next world was longer than it appeared. Once again, Hibbs had grand ideas about running the whole thing. Have you ever seen a video of one of those baby races that take place during halftime of basketball games, where parents line up on one end of the court and try to coax their toddler to crawl towards them faster than the other toddlers? Some of the babies start off with heads full of steam and then get overwhelmed with the amount of stimulus and start crying. Others turn around halfway and start retreating backwards or find something more interesting to do, as the underdogs slowly realize what’s happening and begin to inch their way into the lead.
Shortly into our final kick, we were passed by another eager overly optimistic baby racer, before he too was humbled by the surprising length of the road and slowed back down to a walk. After our brief walking intermission, we regained our lead and strutted across the finish line, where we continued walking right through to the official “race shuttle” pickup location. From there, we loaded into the back of the aforementioned pickup truck and were unceremoniously ferried across the river. Point to point.
What is required to get from one place and way of perceiving the world to an entirely new one? What ancient relics of inherited karma need to be belched out and left to compost in the belly of the great mother? And why take that journey?
Fortunately, there’s no use in haphazardly circling around these questions, searching for something certain or straightforward. It’s a special kind of freedom to not need to know or even ask why; to be anchored into something heavier and infinitely more strange and serene than certainty. The questions are redundant anyway. We take the journey because such is the nature of this particular configuration of stardust.
Since my style of persevering is a psychically attuned, emotionally heightened interplay between resistance and surrender, I tend to resound in an environment of extremes, necessitating a high level of adaptability and resilience. I spin around, sometimes stunned and unblinking, sometimes in a dimly lit room in stripper heels with my ass out. I grow protective spikes when I need to - anything to remain green and living.
“Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar,” says Antonio Machado. “Wanderer, there is no path. The path is made by walking.” And to that I’d like to add strutting, slogging, wobbling, taking part in a musically disinclined conga line, and spinning *luminously* around any structurally integrated axis you can get your thighs around.
So long as we’re alive, persevering is a given. Let go of flimsy self-aggrandizing coping mechanisms like hope and expectation, and let life move you. It’s happening anyway. I bet you too, whoever you are, would look good in a dimly lit room in stripper heels with your ass out. My advice, for what it’s worth: don’t be a prude.
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