Thinking for 100km
Last weekend I joined Youzhou100, a 100km race about two and half hours north of Beijing, next to Guanting Lake 官厅湖 in Huailai 怀来 area of Hebei province. The race ended up being called off at about 1.30am on the Sunday (17.5 hours after it began) due dangerous weather conditions (thunder storms and gale force winds). By the time it was called off I was going strong — though somewhat freaked out by experiencing the worst of the storm while on an 800m high plateau — and in 20th position overall. Here’s a few scattered thoughts on moving through the mountains for 100km.
People often ask me what I think about when I’m running — or more accurately moving, given that a lot of every trail run is power hiking — for over 12 hours, or even up to 20 hours. I’m sure other trail runners get that question often too.
More often than not the most honest answer is; not much. Yes, occasionally I might spend time thinking over some personal issue or work issue, and often enough I’ll be thinking to myself “how long to the next water station” or, in shorter races, what position I’m in and how far ahead and behind me the other runners are.
But most of the time my mind just flows wherever it wants to go, often in clipped thoughts that jump around from one to the other with only a loose strand of logic.
Last week I read a book whose narrative style reflects this way of freely, floatingly thinking, and it too is about traveling long distances alone. Of Walking in Ice by Werner Herzog, in which he sets out on foot from Munich to Paris. His almost stream of consciousness writing style jumps from descriptions of the landscape to his inner thoughts to fantastical and bizarre metaphors, the jumps between often marked only by a full stop or comma.
When a rustling came from some flying leaves behind me I knew it was the dog, even though it was chained. All day long the most perfect solitude. A clear wind makes the trees up there rustle, the gaze travels very far. This a season which has nothing to do with this world any more. Big flying reptiles soundlessly leave their vapour trails behind above me, heading directly west, flying via Paris as my thoughts fly with them. So many dogs, from the car one doesn’t notice them that much, the smell of the fires, too, the Sighing Trees. A shaved tree trunk is sweating water, again my shadow cowers far in front of me. ~ Werner Herzog, Of Walking In Ice.
The mind can wander in much more fantastical ways than it does in normal, structured life. When traveling long distances, when alone for long periods of time with little stimulus other than the natural world, this is precisely how my mind, too, runs. Herzog manages to capture it. I mostly do not. I simply come away from 12 hours mostly alone in the mountains with a sense of having let my brain breath, deep breaths, and wander, without constraint.
Does this sound familiar to others? Is this similar to the state that yoga practitioners reach? Or climbers? Or in other forms of exercise and physical practice?
Senses get heightened when outside, pushing the body, for such a long time, alone and with nature. At times I felt like my hearing had sharpened. I was judging distance with the aid of hearing, hearing footsteps behind me, or the rustle of a pheasant down in the valley. Sight sharpens too. I thought I would need my headlamp from 7pm on — roughly when city streetlights come on — but actually I ran through until at least after 8pm, adjusting my eyes to the dwindling evening light and judging space by shadows.
Once I had turned my headlamp on, however, senses began to play tricks. I remember one section of sandy, dusty ground on which tufts of stiff grass were growing. As I tilted my head down to shine a light on where I was placing my feet, I couldn’t tell the grass stems from their shadows. I felt and heard my shoes brush on grass where I thought there were shadows. And my feet floated freely through air where I thought there was grass.
Heightened senses turn inward too. The only way to keep moving for 15+ hours is to listen to and understand the every need of your body. Do I need water? Do I need food? Do I need salt, sugar? Gels or proper food? Am I sweating too much? Am I hot am I cold? the mind continually asks of the body. Though this constant monitoring and assessment of the body is hardly an emptying of the mind, there is something meditative about it. To frame it in dualistic terms, the gap between mind and body shrinks as they strike up these lines of communication, and distractions shrink away, leaving behind a direct and intuitive connection. There is something beautiful about that, even if much of the monitoring sends back messages of discomfort.
With so much time alone, sometimes conversation is needed. I made a point of saying hi to the animals I ran past — sheep, horses, donkeys and dogs. I remember in particular a tethered white horse standing proud above the trail on a ledge of Loess yellow earth. He didn’t look down at us as we ran past, but rather stared fixedly straight ahead, toward the next ridge of barren mountains. He was like a statue at the centre of an amphitheatre. At that moment he was the axis around which the grand geology of the mountains pivoted.
I also greeted and praised some of the trees that marked the path through the valleys and gorges between high mountain tops. Mostly stunted and gnarled, battered by winter winds, ice and drought, one broad and tall silver birch stood out as a beauty. Its silvery smooth bark, peeling in the way birches do, and translucent lime-green spring leaves made me stop in my tracks, for just a few seconds, to stop and admire.
It’s summer now, the growing season. I hope he does well this year.
Something about space captivates me, has always fascinated me. Not outer space. I mean the space all around us, distance and time. I spent much of my childhood reading maps. I read maps more than I read stories. I absorbed their knowledge and their stories, reading contour lines, pathways, wind patterns and geological jigsaws just as anyone would read text. I developed a keen sense for direction, the lay of the land, and an endless love of both absorbing myself in maps’ representation of space and in its reality.
Traveling long distances across complicated terrain that wells up like blisters and bubbles is the ultimate absorption. Me and the earth, the rocks, the soil. Geological time written in detail over 100km, and me like an ant on the page, scaling contour lines one by one, up and down, rung by rung.
Imagine being one of the birds flying overhead, on their way to Siberian summer feeding grounds. Imagine looking down from their soaring perspective at the runners scaling up and down, bound to the contours of the map, like trams must stick to their track, trains to their rails.
So if it is maps that so fascinate me, let’s map it out. Here is the route I just traversed, from afar to give a perspective of the space covered, and a few close ups to show the contours and bulges in all their glory. (Map porn alert)
Here’s the course map from a different angle, the jagged altitude map.
And here, to get an idea of the distance, is 100k mapped in a straight line across home:
I see only a path forwards, extending 20 metres into the dark spaces underneath the forest canopy. Fresh spring leaves, though delicate and translucent during the daytime sunlight, now stubbornly block the fading light of the evening sky. An about face. They’ve turned sinister. Beyond the 20 metres I know there is another 20 metres, and beyond that a further 20 metres. At some point we will descend, deeper into the forest, into the valley where the trees grow taller, broader and stronger. From there we’ll cross the stream, scale the goat paths meandering up the gorge, out onto exposed scrub land, to scree, to the top of the next peak and then down again, crossing contours like a child’s scribble on a map. Birds glide in swooping lines overhead.
In the end, what came after hours of scaling contours was an enormous storm, which struck at 1 in the morning. The kind of storm in which every single rain drop is enough to drench you. With gale force winds and explosive lightening as partners too. When the storm hit I was just reaching the top of a long climb up to an 800m high plateau. The top of that path was probably one of the most exposed areas on the whole 100km route and the storm hit with all its force. I found other runners there too, trying to seek shelter from the horizontal rain behind a stunted pine tree, to little avail. To stop moving up there was an invitation for the wind and rain to cut their cold into your bones, but in the dense rain in the middle of the night, visibility had been reduced to no more than a dozen metres. We couldn’t find the path markers which would lead us off the plateau and back down to the comparative shelter of the valley. Only when flashes of lightening struck through the sky could we see where we were, high and exposed. The split second of clarity lit up 360 degrees of sharp mountains, but was not enough time to spot the red path markers.
Soon more people reached the plateau. We split into groups to investigate the different path options and check for markers. It must have taken us about half an hour to find the path down. A long half an hour which left most of us shivering with cold, teeth chattering. It was dangerous. Mountains are powerful and dangerous. Never forget.
We scrambled down the path, by that time practically a river, and after 2km arrived at the next (and final) check point at km 92. A single room concrete hut, when we entered the volunteers informed us we were not allowed to continue. The race had been called off. Ahead of us was one more 800m mountain. The paths were too dangerous, they said. And we knew.
That’s how this race finished, at the whim of the mountains. We sheltered for warmth and, without a word of discussion, respected the message the mountains had sent us.
