TRAIL RUNNING
I Ran My Sorrows Up a Mountain
It hurts to climb, stings falling down, but there’s this moment of clarity at the top
A spray of sunlight at dawn burns tangerine pink specks through billowing indigo clouds in an infinite sky.
Beautiful. But I’m looking down. At dirt, snow, big rocks jutting through a rushing brook, monitoring every step of my blue Brooks Pure Grit trail running shoes.
I don’t want to fall, like last time. So I watch my feet.
After almost three hours, a nine-plus mile climb, the thicket of shortleaf pines and black gum hardwoods thins out, and the mid-morning scene opens up before me.
I stop, look, gasp, hold my breath. It’s a Bob Ross painting in real life — majestic mountains disappearing into smoky purple heavens.
Crushed by sadness and joy, I exhale a cry. I shed tears and sweat. For here is a response to desperate prayers whispered during recent sleepless nights.
I need to know what happens when we die. It’s my midnight plea to anyone or thing who might hear. Is there another life? A spirit world?
The mountains, sky, and sun reply, Is this world not enough?
I forget my exhaustion and the pain in my feet, legs, lower back, my throbbing left hand that’s worse when cold, and wounded heart. I stand still, tranquil, in a moment of divine ambiguity.
Then I wipe my cheeks with gloved palms and trot toward the aid station, where volunteers around a campfire smile and cheer.
“Water?” asks one, reaching for my flask.
The other offers rice crispy treats, pastries, trail mix. There are two such stations along the sixteen-or-twenty-mile, depending who you ask, Ouachita Switchbacks Trail Race.
I grab a sugar cookie before barreling back down the skinny path, zig zagging thirty-three titular switchbacks, passing participants still pressing toward the top, willing myself to be both courageous and careful.
Two years ago, the last time I was here, I fell while running down. I broke several bones in my hand and fingers, had two surgeries, and the limb is still battered, bent, and barely functional.
Like other scars incurred as a result of self-destructive behavior, I own it, treat it as a lesson.
My aching oddly-angled hand is a result of hubris, thinking I could take this mountain on adrenaline alone, improperly dressed for cold weather, with virtually no vertical trail training.
And that’s why I practiced this time. This was my comeback.
I’m still not sure I should have been in the race at all considering events of the previous week.
On the Tuesday before the race, my teenage niece, my brother’s daughter, died suddenly. It’s the worst tragedy my family has ever experienced, and we’re no strangers to trauma.
Wednesday I told my running buddy, Paul, and our other traveling partner Matt, about it. They’d met my brother just a couple weeks prior, at my birthday party, loved him, thought he was hilarious, and they were devastated on his behalf.
We all assumed the race was out of the question.
Thursday, I accompanied my brother and his wife to the funeral home.
Deep in the night I demanded that God, if there was one, let me know they were there. If anything, a spirit world, an afterlife, another life after this existed, if I would see my dead mom and niece again — I needed to know.
I decided there is nothing. That death is a dreamless empty sleep. That made me sad, scared, and I remembered why we invent gods and rules and heavens. Nothingness and randomness is unbearable, terrifying.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name, reads the Tao Te Ching. Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know …
In other words, according to the ancient foundational text of Taoism, my questions are futile. No one can answer them.
I spent most of the week with my brother and various family members, but come Friday, everyone went their separate ways.
Tasked with the obituary, I went home alone to think and write about the girl who was like a daughter to me, gone in a second, poisoned by drugs, like so many young people. Why not me? I was the addict in the family, after all.
My grief felt unbearable, and I longed to be climbing that mountain, to think of nothing but my burning lungs and aching feet, to fly back down at breakneck speed.
Gently reminding me of my navigational deficiency (even in the best frame of mind I have a tough time finding my way to off-grid cabins or remote trailheads), my friends picked me up and we drove from Dallas to Big Cedar, Oklahoma.
In order to collect our racing packets Friday night, we traveled two miles down a dirt road to a fireside camp where the lanky event organizer was having his dinner. After introductions he handed me a bib, №54, and a hoodie featuring a John Muir quote: The clearest way to the universe is through a forest wilderness.
The next day, when taking in that sky, those mountains, I would recall a biblical verse, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.
There is plenty to navigate now, in this life, with its exquisite and hideous places, births and deaths, expected and unexpected, destruction and recovery, hate and love, war and serenity, successes and suffering, proposals and rejections, first kisses and last words.
Focus on this life, the people here now, I sensed. Our dead live in them. There are mysteries to uncover here and there, now and later, there is time for everything.
Many of us do our seeking on trails and mountains or in oceans or under waterfalls and big starry skies. Beautiful places, especially ones that are painful or risky to reach, can have a revolutionary effect.
My journey back down the mountain presented further challenges. For about an hour I barreled downhill, blowing off guilt and breathing in joy.
After the last volunteer station, however, I missed a turn, crossed the wrong section of river and found no trail on the other side. Panic rose up as I looked around for people or the blue trail markers I’m supposed to follow … nothing.
Fuuuuuuccckkk, I hollered.
Then flapping in a breeze, a blue ribbon in a tree. Aha. I climbed up a hedge and found the trail.
Then, once I had ratcheted back up my pace, though I was still concentrating on the ground, my toe caught a root and I went flying.
Last year I started taking martial arts classes. One of the first things I learned is falling. Thus, as practiced, I tucked my left arm and hit the ground with the left shoulder and knee, and a little bit of head judging by the mud and leaves I would find stuck to my beanie.
I landed hard, and it took me a minute to shake off the sting. I was pissed, shouting obscenities, but no one was around (if a runner screams the f word in a forest and no one else hears it …)
Somehow, despite all that first-half incline, there was plenty of climbing across the back two miles, a condition that also provoked my ire and dismay.
I pushed myself to near collapse and was spent at the finish line, where the race director congratulated me on being, with a time of four and a half hours, give or take, the second place masters (40+), which earned me a prized token bottle opener.
While waiting for my friends, I considered my broken hand, which, although permanently injured and deformed, did not prevent my successful return to trail racing.
Perhaps a broken heart works the same. You find ways to move with it. You pay close attention to how it feels, take extra care to prevent further damage. You examine it often, because it reminds you of both your fragility and strength.
Following my mountaintop revelation, I did not sink into worry and despair about tomorrow.
I felt my throbbing fingers and sore muscles and the camaraderie of the trail runners. I went for pizza with my friends and thanked them for saving me from myself that weekend.
“Drama queen,” they joked. I didn’t laugh like usual, but I smiled. I wasn’t euphoric, as I can be after such an adventurous race, but I enjoyed reminding them that I, once again, reign fastest among our trio.
Thanks for reading. In case you missed it, here’s the story about my first time at the Ouachita race:
