the Black Mountain 50k, why I left NYX, & what I’ve been up to
“If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to change your life, run a marathon. If you want to talk to god, run an ultra.”
Dean Karnazes
I can’t remember how many years ago it was when I first heard this quote. I’m still not completely comfortable with the word “god,” and I was even less so back then. Nonetheless, these words took up residence inside my body and I knew I’d find my way here eventually.
My relationship to the idea of god is similar to my relationship with the idea of time. I am less interested in whether or not they are real, and more concerned with disentangling myself from linguistic limitations, abstract divisions, and impotent imaginations of a culture afraid of living.
One thing I’ve noticed is that I seem to have a series of internal alarm clocks, each pertaining to a specific part of my life. There’s the grocery store clock, which runs on a notoriously short timer and has, on more than one occasion, counted all the way down to zero before I have everything I need. In these situations, I pay for what I have, chalk it up as a loss, and resolve to do better next time. The shopping mall clock is even shorter and has such a piercing alarm that I am obliged to set down any unpurchased items and flee to the nearest exit as quickly as possible.
In some cases, I’m aware of how this system works and I can prepare for it. But sometimes it just hits me, like 2 years ago when my time for living in Colorado was up, or last year when my time of racing and training for triathlons ran out, or this year, when it was time to leave NYX, the endurance coaching company that I co-founded a couple years ago.
I was still petting my dogs on race morning this past Saturday when the group countdown to the start of the Black Mountain 50k commenced. Consistent with the casual nature of ultramarathons, this was a much less distressing countdown than my internal ones. As the countdown got to 3, then 2, then 1, we had mostly meandered over to the start line and began to slowly trot across it.
I completed my 1st ultramarathon a few months ago with the intention of getting to know the distance and letting the race come to me. Giving myself that experience was an important stepping stone (click here for the race report from my 1st ultra). And, because I didn’t extend myself beyond my willful ability to propel myself forward, it reminded me of what I’ve been missing: that very particular unnamable reason why I’m drawn to these types of challenges in the first place.
I started the race on Saturday with goals in mind. They were 1) don’t get lost; 2) push myself a little bit harder than last time; and 3) make a friend. In the first few miles, I met a fellow racer named Brian, who seemed to be somewhere in his mid twenties and had plans to propose to his girlfriend later that evening. The combination of Brian’s pre-proposal enthusiasm and his 20 year old gusto made him a perfect running companion to kick off the race with. I hitched myself right into that 20 year old energy and let it carry me through about mile 6-7ish where Brian inevitably dropped me.
The course had about 5500 ft of elevation gain so there weren’t many sections that one might categorize as “flat” but the descent down to the first aid station at mile 7 was so steep and covered in loose rocks that I had to slow way down and grab onto bushes in an attempt to avoid wiping out.
Trail running requires almost constant attention to my footsteps, the surfaces being rocky, sandy, endlessly varied, covered in the compost of all the living world, and turning, sometimes without notice. I am frequently feverish with longing to look up and out, with only short intervals to remember the sky. Because in both trail running and life, my longing maintains the upper hand in driving my behavior, I often come home from long training days with bloody knees and gravel lodged into my hands and elbows. On this day, I gritted my teeth and held my focus to the bottom, where I was greeted by Ryan and my dogs at the aid station.
It started getting hot around mile 9, along with the first waves of those familiar thoughts: “why the fuck do I do this to myself again?” Despite the implied blame, repetition of “F” words, and questioning of my sanity, these are not negative thoughts; they’re just waves I run through. And ever since moving to California, I’ve been learning how to surf.
From my perspective, the flow at NYX had been disjointed for a while. At the beginning, I was so creatively inspired, building a brand that was meaningful to me and engaging with a passionate community. Then when the tide shifted, I got so caught up in trying to figure out why. I kept asking myself what I was doing wrong, how I might not be communicating effectively, and what I was doing to contribute to the lack of flow. To a certain extent, and for a certain amount of undisclosed clock-time, this questioning was valid and appropriate, and assisted me in directing some internal shifts to be more in alignment with my values. The most important thing I learned through this process of self reflection is how much I value partnership.
The clock struck zero when my internal shifts were no longer congruent with my external reality. Having gained clarity around my values, I left gracefully and full of gratitude for the experience I got to have.
Before the letting go, there has always been an internal struggle between the part of me that’s scared of losing something and the part of me that knows that there is so much more to experience. But I’ve realized that the problem isn’t around being a multifaceted human with seemingly contrary needs. The problem has only ever been the struggle.
I had just about finished surfing the heat wave of “why the fuck do I do this to myself again” when it got cut off abruptly by the energy of the volunteers at the mile 12 aid station. I don’t remember exactly how it happened but it seemed as though I was temporarily floating on a cloud while being gently fanned and hand fed grapes until it was time to start running again. By the time I emerged back onto the trail, it was apparent that I had entered a portal onto a new timeline. My hydration pack had been filled, there was either a real or placebo injection of caffeine into my bloodstream, and someone had slipped me one of those cookies that Alice ate that caused her to shrink to a fraction of her normal size as Wonderland grew large around her.
I ran through a field of tall green stalks, which must have been the size of uncondensed humans, each wearing a single purple flower like a crown. I glided along the rolling hills which were rising and receding like the breathing unbroken waves in the deep ocean.
From this point on, there was a new stream of energy flowing through me. You could say I was pushing myself harder than in my last race but it wasn’t by means of willful effort. It was more primal than that.
That very particular unnamable reason why I’m drawn to these types of challenges in the first place usually comes when I have exhausted myself so entirely that I no longer have access to willpower to propel me forward. Historically, the method I’ve employed to get there has been to fire myself out of the gate, guns blazing, armed with optimistic aspirations and borderline unrealistic expectations that would require a heroic, yet not entirely impossible amount of force and willpower to achieve. This was the perfect recipe to land myself right into the trap where I hog-tied my ego into a dizzying trance of extreme fatigue. In those late miles, all that was left was mindless surrender to the immediacy of the experience.
Though it does produce the desired effect, this kind of thing requires an unnecessary amount of effort. Combined with my addictive tendencies, it was also a certain path to burnout. But what is this trance, and why am I so compelled by it? In his book, “Start with Why”, Simon Sinek explains that the part of our brain that is connected to our “why” does not have the capacity for language. I think this explanation about brain function is too often used as an excuse for not pursuing this why, fiercely and instinctively.
The window of knowing through feeling is no less valid than the window of knowing through thought and logic, we just have to learn how to work with it. There’s a process for ushering a vision down from the dream world and into this manifest one. I believe that we all have a connection to something akin to a why or a dream, regardless of the intensity to which we feel compelled by it. I tend to coach people who feel it intensely.
Justifying our feelings with brain chemistry is also a diversion that can lead us to conclude this is all about us, alone on an internal mental battlefield, endlessly circling around why everything is so hard and why we are solely responsible for fixing all of our problems and saving the world.
Being compelled by a dream is not the same as finding your purpose, which implies a narrow singularity. We are far too multidimensional for that. It is undeniably satisfying to feel purposeful. And it is equally satisfying to be the lucky recipients, collaborators and shareholders of the purposes of other people, not to mention the purposes of the more-than-human world.
At the aid stations, I gorged myself on watermelon slices as if it were the first and last time I’d ever tasted this sweet hydrating elixir. I dated my high school boyfriend for 2 years, all the while knowing it could never last because he didn’t like watermelon. I couldn’t wrap my head around planning a future with someone with such a massive discrepancy in our value systems.
Around mile 19, my nose started bleeding. There was nothing to do about that so I just kept running, letting each experience mutate into the next one.
Around mile 25, I hit that terrible steep descent again. My quads were on fire and it felt like it took more strength than I had available to be able to control my footsteps. I started crying, which made me laugh, so I laugh-cried all the way down to the aid station at the bottom. After stopping briefly to empty my shoes of the small rock garden that had been carefully assembled there, I made a few unexpected grunting sounds in order to get myself moving again. My body kept finding new ways to release energy in order to continue to move with time, whether that was through crying, laughing, grunting, or bleeding. I marveled at the freedom that flowed through me.
I’ve always been very self aware, which is another way to say that I’ve always been self conscious. Of course I have my insecurities just like everyone else, but that’s not what I’m referring to. This characteristic has led me through an abundance of beautiful and challenging growth opportunities, especially when paired with an intention to increase my capacity to love by extricating myself from the mental and emotional baggage that accumulates through any human lifetime. But to be perpetually aware of myself is also a trauma-response, informing all of my responses to the world through ceaseless, even if well-intentioned, editing. Self consciousness has been and will likely continue to be a necessary step on my evolutionary path, but maybe not the ultimate destination.
The ultimate destination is less a fixed landmark and more a quality of timelessness. Although language is a feature of the manifest world, and is therefore necessarily ill equipped to represent the vastness of this one, this place is what I can best describe as self-forgetting. It’s where I let go of all of my fixed ideas about who I am and where I’m going and how this is all supposed to work.
What if you’re supposed to be a painter? What if you’re supposed to love someone or something that you’ve either talked yourself out of or that you haven’t even heard of yet? What unremembered skills, talents, or relational dynamics are lying latent behind the smokescreen of you and your individual brain chemistry? How will you ever know a future unconditioned by the past unless you forget, just for a second, who you are right now: a person with an entire identity centered around not being a painter?
Self forgetting is the only place I know where I am free to be met by the endlessly surprising and unfolding world. And now that I am prepared to let go of the struggle, I arrive there not by doing something, but by letting go.
I don’t consider myself a triathlon coach anymore. I can no longer refer to the people I work with as “my athletes” and for a little while, I wasn’t even sure “coach” was still the right way to talk about my role.
I heard somewhere that there is a Native American tribe that doesn’t have a word for “art” because they believe that art is synonymous with living. Robert Henri says, “The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state that makes art inevitable.” For now, these are the closest ways I have of describing the work I do with people.
I see art as the process of translating a dream into reality, through the vessel of the human body, with the abundant raw materials of our lives. Although I now work with a broader range of people than athletes and the way I travel with people on these journeys is alongside rather than in front of, I still decided to keep the name “Coach.” For one reason, I was inspired by the character “Coach” on “New Girl” who uses the word “coach” as a name rather than a title. Also, I estimated that calling myself something like “Underworld Guide” or “Ego-Death Consultant” would be an ineffective marketing strategy.
I do still coach endurance athletes. Some of the people that have continued to work with me through this transition are still passionate about exploring the conversation between the micro experiences of flow states within endurance pursuits and the macro experiences of flow states more broadly available in the trajectory of our lives. Others have ridden various waves into entirely new endeavors. No one has become a painter yet, but I haven’t given up hope.
Regardless, the term “athlete” is out, and all of these vibrant fireworks of human beings are too dynamic to be referred to as clients. So at least for now, I’m going to use the term “collaborators,” as a nod to the value and clarity I gained from my time at NYX.
My collaborators tend to find me at a time of transition in their lives, whether that transition was chosen or not. Whenever one of those life-shifting countdowns reaches zero, it initiates another form of self forgetting, different in scale to the acute micro experience that can be articulated through a triathlon or an ultramarathon. I’m not the same person I was when I lived in Colorado, when I was a triathlete, when I was a co-owner of an endurance coaching company, or yesterday. Our planet is whirling through space, spiraling around a mediocre star, a coconspirator of an elaborate rhythmic interplay between planets and galaxies, and so many other configurations of light and dark.
Despite the deep unsettling turmoil of transitions, the fear of loss is only an illusion. We remain comprised of the same basic elements, moving in an elaborate rhythmic interplay with all of the whirling elements around us, seen and unseen. The problem is only that this grandeur is impossible to capture with the limited faculties of our individual brains. Our brains were never meant for this task.
Miles 26 through 29 were a relentless climb to the summit of Black Mountain, under the direct exposure of a SoCal sun. Something in me was fighting its way up that hill. I’m not sure exactly what it was but I can tell you that it wasn’t my leg strength. Once I reached the top and turned around to head downhill to the finish line, that pulsing rocket fuel was gone. As soon as the idea of an ending enters my consciousness, it collapses the wave function of the flow state. All I could think about in those last 2 downhill miles were my quads ripping to shreds.
As soon as I crossed the finish line I was in an exorbitant amount of pain, which caused me to collapse onto the ground and start laughing as a desperate means of energy release. Without an editor to step in and interrupt me, this strange behavior went on for a few ecstatic minutes.
Self forgetting, though it may seem treacherous in the initial approach, is euphoric.
That’s the thing about those countdowns. They were not only the endings to living in Colorado, to racing and training for triathlons, or to saying goodbye to the company I co-founded; they were also the beginnings of living in California, to starting my new business, and of forgetting all of my discordant and unremarkable ideas of how this is all supposed to work so that I can rest into the timeless fluid realm where talking to god is a state of mind.
If you’re interested in learning more about working with me, check out my website and schedule a free consult:
Or if you’d like to reach out for any old reason at all, I’d love to hear from you:
laura@lauramarcouxcoaching.com
Ego Death Consultant... that had me chuckling...