There will be mud
My attempt at running 52 miles through Wyoming’s Big Horn mountains.
I did not expect the mud.
Yes, it rained all night. Yes, it was still raining and barely above freezing at the 5 a.m. start. Call it optimism or, more likely, a dazed pre-race numbness that prohibited logical thought, but I did not imagine the trail would try to pull me under. My shoes and socks, which I had so carefully sheltered from the rain the night before, were damp before the race started and soaked within the first steps. Miles one and two were quick, with just a few plunges into icy puddles. Then came deathly mud. Mud that made me fall, mud on uneven ground concealing sharp rocks, thick mud that sucked my shoe off once. Thin mud on a steep downhill, where I slid down on my side. At first, I trotted daintily around the trail, searching for drier ground but mostly slipping all over myself. Eventually I gave up, trudging straight through the slop in a rhythm that hardly resembled running.
“I’m way out of my element,” my friend Maggie said when she ran past me. “But it’s a fun adventure.” I tried to channel her easy optimism.
My windbreaker was drenched by mile four. I took it off, and wondered if this was what hypothermia felt like. I told myself I’d never complain about anything ever again. I compared myself to Shadow, the old golden retriever stuck helplessly in the bottom of a mud pit in the movie Homeward Bound, and when that became too depressing a metaphor I tried telling myself I was braving the sand traps in The Princess Bride. Grown adults threw temper tantrums in the mud, losing focus and stability and flipping end over end. Once I reached down to pull a gator out of the mud for a shoeless 100-mile runner I was passing, and he shouted at me angrily to leave it. A woman behind me screamed as she went down, her knee landing on the sharp edge of a rock. I stopped and helped her up, grateful for the excuse to stop running. I spent the first four hours just trying to stay on my feet, being passed by nearly everyone I knew.
“This is usually bone dry,” one man I ran with for a while said as we glissaded down a steep stretch. “It’s the hill after mile 18 that’s always muddy. I don’t know how we’ll get up it.” I didn’t know either. Any time I thought about the remaining trail being as muddy as this, I slowed down, numbed by uncertainty and disbelief.
The first 18 miles were the hardest miles of my life. Then there were 34 more to go.
I walked solemnly into the first major aid station. Mile 18. Someone put a bucket of water in front of me and I wrestled my mud-clad shoes off my feet without untying them. Robert from Casper, who I’ve run with on and off for years, settled in nearby, and I was grateful for a friend. As I cracked quarter-sized flakes of mud off my legs, downing pickles and hot tamales, a race official shouted about cut off times. “Forty-five minutes to cut off,” she said. “You have until 3 p.m. to make it to Dry Fork.” What?! Was I really running so slow I could be disqualified?
It was 9 a.m. I had been running for four hours, and I wasn’t running fast enough.
I did not know then that by the end of the day, more than half the runners in my race would drop out. All I knew was my previous mental slumber, the creeping “chill out, bro,” attitude that allowed me to take my sweet time awkwardly descending the 4,000 feet over the past 18 miles wasn’t going to get me to the finish. After the initial panic at the race official’s warning came a flash of desire to let myself slow down, to miss the cut off at mile 34, to be finished and throw up my hands. But I had paid the full entry price, and getting disqualified did not get me a refund. Kicked off the course because of this mud? Hell no. I had to earn the right to suffer through the rest of this race, so earn it I would.
Robert and I ran into Jason, another Casper runner, and we hoofed up the next three-mile incline. Jason told us to slap his butt as we passed. I did not do this. He and I packed together for a while, me asking him, the veteran, if we were moving fast enough; him always saying yes. We dropped then climbed and dropped again, and finally climbed to an aid station I remembered vividly from my shorter, drier race the year before. Last year, men in beards and overalls slapped bacon onto hot grills, then piled the sizzling strips onto plates for oncoming runners. I turned the bacon away that year, thinking it was too early into my 32-mile race and I didn’t want to upset my stomach. This year, though, I had been mentally preparing for miles to eat as much bacon as I could. I wanted all the grease I could get.
My weary eyes scanned the table. I sloppily refilled my water bottles. I still did not see any bacon. There were bearded men, fewer overalls than I expected, and no bacon. “Did I dream there was bacon at this aid station?” I asked to no one in particular. An older man turned to me slowly, his face grave. “We’re out,” he said, looking at me the way my blue heeler looks at me after he pees inside the house.
Oddly not shaken by this, I hiked on. More hot tamales. My hands stained red.
Miles later, I ran into Jason again, and he was running with someone who more felt familiar than looked it. A name emerged from the murky back of my brain, and I went for it.
“Are you Justin?” I said. “From the Buena Vista race?”
He paused.
“Are you Leah?”
Yeah! We made small talk. We had met on the trail — much like this now grueling incline — at a race in Buena Vista, Colorado, a year earlier. He had gone back to that race this year. I had not. He said it was horrible. I felt vindicated.
We paused.
“You told me after that race you were never going to run anything longer than 25 miles,” he said.
I vividly remembered saying this. We laughed.
The six mile, 2,000 foot hill made more bearable by company, we hiked-ran-trudged up to the next major aid station. Mile 34. Officially now the longest run of my life. Spectators cheered. Teenagers walked around with trays of quesadillas and hot pizza. I ate Oreo’s and chili, and turned down a reheated McDonald’s cheeseburger.
An hour to spare before the last cutoff. No more panic flooded my veins about missing the official time limits; I had made the cut.
But a half mile up the wide dirt trail from that invigorating aid station, a different panic set in, and one that would prove much more problematic.
I could not run.
Leah, I said. I don’t think you can run anymore.
Leah, I said again. I think you’re right.
So I walked, pausing to put my shirt on then take it off and put it on again. I made excuses to stop, stamping my feet on the ground to try to get the mud off. I bent over and picked up a tiny rock to scrape mud out from between the spikes on my shoes.
Somehow, I think as much out of boredom as anything else, I managed an ugly jog. I passed a 100-mile team. The pacer nodded at me. “Nice pace,” she said. I dragged my feet past another runner who was walking alone and checking his cell phone. He looked up. “Running…” he said slowly. “Nice.”
The next 10 miles were an agonizing grandma shuffle, in every way painful and in no way graceful. I was passed constantly by runners who had been running twice as long as me, since 11 a.m. the day before. The downhill ripped at my quads and threatened to sever my knees from the rest of my legs. Until this point, I had been mentally numb; the remaining distance had been too great to register. I had no means of knowing what “30 miles left” meant, and so I couldn’t feel fear. Now, with 13 miles left, I knew exactly how long that was. I knew exactly how bad it would hurt. I could even see the town at the base of the canyon, 3,000 feet below, where the finish line was. And it was far. I had signed up for this race out of curiosity. Could I do this? What would it feel like? Well, Leah. Now you know. This is what it feels like. And it hurts. Are you happy now?
Then came a more interesting question: what will my thoughts do in the face of all this pain? How will my mind try to stop me?
Let me count the ways.
Leah, you can’t run anymore. Leah, you’re right.
I really don’t want to run up this.
You’re too cold.
You didn’t train enough.
You’re not as fit as these other women.
Your knees hurt now? You’ll never be able to run again.
You’re lazy.
Everyone you know is ahead of you. (This was untrue.)
You blazed through this downhill last year! Remember the great yells you let out as you ran, your body flooded with effortless joy? (This, of all the thoughts, was the thought that first made me cry.)
And then this:
You’re not going to break 12 hours. That was your goal, and you’re not going to meet it. And your family came here to watch you. They’re going to know you didn’t meet your goal, and they’re going to judge you for it. They’re going to judge you for spending so much time and energy training for this race and you didn’t even meet your goal. No one else in your family has hobbies this time-consuming and obsessive. Why do you spend so much time on this? Maybe if you had a real job — where does the money come from as a freelance writer anyway? Where’s the job security? Maybe if you had a real job, you wouldn’t have time for this, and you would spend your time on your job and that would be better and more productive and then we would be proud.
Yeah.
So I cried, and the tears blurred the trail ahead. I veered off to pee and almost log-rolled down a shrubby hillside.
But in those moments, my tools returned. Watch the thoughts, I told myself. Quiet the mind, find the breath. Are my face muscles contorted into a grotesque mask? Probably. Relax them. Get rid of tension I don’t need.
And then, somewhere around mile 45, I met Christine.
She had a brace around one knee and I could tell things hadn’t gone as planned for her, either. We made small talk and I learned this was her first 50-mile race, too. Then, as the trail went from a bombing downhill to a rolling, smooth path along a river, we gained speed. Somehow, we were silently passing other runners, bolting up short uphills, cruising down the gradual downhills. We ran lightly into the last aid station. When she waited for me while I used the bathroom, I knew we were bonded. It was one of the simple acts of solidarity that define this sport, like the four leading 100-mile runners who had decided, hours earlier, to cross the finish line as one group, holding hands. Christine and I set off together. Forty-eight miles down. Four miles left.
The next two miles flew by, drawn like magnets toward each other and Christine pulling me forward. I knew I’d be walking if she wasn’t there. We slowed down to take icy popsicles from a volunteer when there were just two miles left, and he jerked his head toward a small group of runners in front of us.
“Those guys ahead are going slow, just sayin,’” he said.
I looked up.
“JASON!?” There they were, Jason and Justin, walking and eating popsicles in the waning sunlight. The simple joy of seeing people I sort-of knew in the span of such a sprawling course across mountains and valleys brought me a sweet sense of belonging, of connection.
“You gonna let me win?” I shouted as I passed. The false bravado made me laugh — I was crying an hour ago.
Jason passed us back, eventually, and we trudged in pain for the next mile. “Don’t run away from me at the finish,” Christine said. Not a chance.
After what seemed like days, the gravel road turned to pavement, and we picked up speed again. I spotted my sister and dad standing on the corner. My dog Blue was there. I wanted to stop but I loved this feeling of euphoric motion, of my legs buoyed by adrenaline that would be gone the moment I sat down and buried my face in Blue’s fur. A half mile left. Christine and I full-on sprinted across the infamous foot bridge that marks the start of the finish.
Then my pregnant cousin was screaming, running toward us in flipflops. I think I told her she looked really pregnant — I hadn’t seen her in a few months — and I know I gave her a hug. We turned the last corner onto grass and my mom was there with a high five. In that moment, there was no previous 51 miles. No heavy residue of my earlier crises. Just me, Christine and the finish chute lined by strangers cheering. We crossed together, like we promised. In an absurd spurt of unexplainable energy, I jumped up and clicked my heels.
For days afterward, I could hardly walk. But remembering the total ecstasy of that moment still makes me smile.
Getting over my inner barriers is why I do this. I hope running makes me a better person: stronger, but also urgently concerned with those who are sitting beside the trail, snot sliding out both nostrils, delirious. “What do you need?” I want to live my life asking that question more often, because people have asked me that on the trail, and those people are angels. From running, I learn not to believe everything I think. The race, like life, is about sorting through the crap self-judgments to get to a truer picture of myself and other people, one where we can all do more than we think we can. Running shows me that no matter how I’m feeling, that feeling will pass. Feel great now? Ha! Don’t cling. It’ll get shitty soon enough. Feel like your legs are disintegrating inside your body? Don’t freak out. That will pass, too. Running teaches me to not get too attached to a particular outcome — to a goal time, to the bacon at Mile 30. Bad things are going to happen. There will be mud. The bacon will run out.
But in the meantime, there’s the breath. There’s the trail. And unlike most everything else, those things are constant.
