Part 12 (1/2)
The ground swayed.
My teacher regularly walked over chasms thousands of feet deep. He scaled terminal granite rock faces with no safety equipment. He pioneered the sport of freeBASE climbing (free solo climbing with a parachute as the only means of protection) and at the moment was trying to figure out a way to dive off a cliff, soar through the air, and land without a parachute. He said it was merely a matter of physics. Because he practiced ”dark” arts, they called him the Dark Wizard.
His real name was Dean Potter. Jenny introduced us in January 2010, and he invited us to the small cabin he rented in Yosemite Valley. He called it ”the shack.”
I had heard-and read-about Dean, how he sought to alter his consciousness through feats of extreme athleticism and challenge. He had read Born to Run and saw me as a kindred spirit.
Yosemite was Jenny's favorite place on earth. I loved the outdoors. It seemed like a perfect place to go after my mother died. Dean's shack was clean and neat. His refrigerator was stocked with chia seeds, young coconuts, and spirulina powder. On his wall hung an old advertis.e.m.e.nt, yellowed with age, for Eagle Electric. In small print, it read: PERFECTION IS NOT AN ACCIDENT.
I wanted to spend time in the valley grieving, healing from my mother's pa.s.sing. I also wanted to understand why I ran and to decide whether I wanted to continue. To help me understand and to help me decide, I would walk on webbing between trees. Slacklining is a discipline that requires extreme focus, yet your body has to remain fluid and relaxed. You must calm the instinctual fear that has allowed humans to survive. It teaches you to let go of your fears and forces you to trust the power of your mind-to trust a power somewhere else. Dean had started me 4 feet off the ground. Learning took time. When I stepped on the line, it would shake uncontrollably from side to side, making it impossible to balance. It was a challenge in itself to stand up on the line, let alone take a step. Progress was slow; time after time the line bucked me off until I realized that I was causing the line to shake and learned to calm it with my body and mind in sync.
I considered quitting before. I talked about it once to a nonrunner I had met a few years earlier. We were at an aid station on a ridge line 3,000 feet above Ojai, California, welcoming runners, offering them bananas, filling their water bottles, and telling them they were doing great. It was November 2008, the Rose Valley 33-Miler, and I didn't realize it, but I must have been telling the guy about my doubts.
The guy had fixed me with an odd glare.
”Dude,” he said, ”you had better take advantage of what you've accomplished. You're not going to be Scott Jurek forever.”
There are ultrarunners who don't question why they do what they do, but I'm not one of them. Why did I run? Is ultramarathoning crazy? Is it hopelessly selfish? Can I have solitude and also love? Is there any value in winning? Compet.i.tion drives me, but I know that losing myself is the real key to fulfillment. How can I win without ego?
Was I too focused on winning? Had I lost the capacity for being in the moment that had-paradoxically-brought me my greatest recognition? Or were my doubts and loss of motivation merely chemical?
Countless studies have pinpointed the source of ”runner's high” as being elevated levels of endorphins and endocannabinoids, naturally occurring substances that affect the brain, produced in large amounts by exercise. This might explain the apparently large number of recovering addicts in the ultrarunning community.
I met a runner named Bill Kee when I was in Southern California in 2001, training for the Angeles Crest 100. He had long gray hair and a gray handlebar mustache. He wore cutoff shorts with flames painted on both sides. Running from one pocket to a belt loop was a heavy metal chain, holding his wallet. This was the uniform he ran in. He carried two 48-ounce Gatorade bottles and when he finished a race, he put them aside and put on his leather jacket, with its Team Death insignia, got into his big black Chevy van, and drove toward the horizon.
Kee told me that he started drinking and doing drugs when he was eighteen, and he didn't stop till fourteen years later, when he decided that life as a drunk and an addict-with its jail time, three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day, and other wonders-wasn't working. He was living in Ojai, California, right next to the foothills of the Topatopa Mountains, and every night, jonesing for a cigarette, he'd hike into those hills. One cold night, he parked his car at the bottom of his driveway and decided to run the quarter mile to his house. Then, on a dare, he ran up a 3-mile hill, 1,700 feet of ascent. Marathons followed. He didn't know what he was doing, bonked often, learned fast. He didn't even know what an ultramarathon was until he read about it in a magazine.
He ran his first one in 1999. He's fifty-four now. He lost a kidney in a motorcycle accident in 1980. He's been suffering from Lyme disease since 2005. But he's been sober and smoke-free since he started running. ”Scott,” Kee told me in 2001, ”running is my new drug.”
Kee has plenty of company. The mohawked, tattooed, reptile-toting Ben Hian didn't become an ultrarunning legend until he kicked his addiction to mood-altering drugs and trained his obsessive focus on running long distances. And many of the runners I have encountered in my career have talked about their struggles with marijuana, as well as eating disorders, and a general difficulty finding peace anywhere but on the trail.
Can running become its own addiction? One gruesome study showed that rats love running so much, they can actually run themselves to death. When offered food for only one 90-minute period per day, the rats in the control group (without an exercise wheel) soon learned to adapt, taking in all the calories they needed during that meal. Rats with running wheels, however, ran more and more every day while eating less and less. They eventually starved to death.
Some of ultrarunning's greatest champions seem to have burned out or just given up at a certain point. Cautionary tales abound in the ultra community, pa.s.sed from runner to runner at prerace breakfasts and postrace award ceremonies like the story of Icarus and his doomed wax wings was whispered among ambitious, worried Greeks.
My hero Chuck Jones ran his last ultra in 1988, when, after watching a UFO hover over Death Valley during the Badwater Ultramarathon (he suspects it was a hallucination brought on by dehydration), he pa.s.sed out.
”Now I'm a sunset runner,” he says. ”I work all day in the sun [laying asphalt] and then I just want to run, relax, and recover, to see what the body can do.”
The great Ann Trason, who won fourteen Western States and almost beat the Tarahumara in a widely publicized Leadville 100 in 1994 (the Indians called her Bruja, or ”the witch”), has suffered numerous injuries, and though she hasn't stopped running, she hasn't entered an ultra for several years. She lamented to a reporter, ”I just wish I could go out and run every day. I think I took it for granted. I knew I'd slow down and get older, but I didn't know there'd be a cliff.”
The summer after he showed me around the San Juan Mountains, in 2007, Kyle Skaggs returned to Silverton to run the Hardrock 100. He set a new clockwise and overall course record by almost 3 hours. He also set speed records for the Wasatch Front 100, circ.u.mnavigating Mount Rainier on the Wonderland Trail, and running the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim.
Then, at the age of twenty-four, he quit. He now grows organic vegetables on his farm in New Mexico. He hasn't run a compet.i.tive step since 2008.
Had I reached my cliff?
I had always been careful to rest when I needed to, especially when hurt, conscientious about treating my body right. But was burnout-or apparently happy abstinence-the inevitable price of intensely focused training like mine? Could I succeed without my focus? Had I been lying to myself by thinking I was living a life of balance?
Jenny thought we should take a break to process the recent events in a peaceful place. A week after my mother died, we drove the 6 hours to Yosemite.
We spent three days with Dean.
I saw that he was a balance of yin and yang: There's exquisite sensitivity and softness in his movements when he's walking a line or free soloing a granite wall. He seems to work with rock and sky, as though he's able to sense-and surrender to-currents of air that are invisible to the rest of us. At the same time, he climbs with ferocity and maintains a crus.h.i.+ng training routine. You need that kind of ego strength to overcome fear.
Dean was married for eight years before divorcing in 2010. It was one of the things we bonded over. Another thing we had in common was our age. Like me, Dean was nearing the peak of his physical ability. At thirty-eight, he was starting to talk wistfully about the rising generation of whippersnappers with intact joints and the fearlessness of innocence-he called these climbers ”monkey children”-who made everything seem so easy. I liked the way he was handling his transition. He lived in a simple cabin in Yosemite with his little dog, Whisper. His life was minimal, lit up by solitude and nature.
We talked about nutrition, and about the deaths of my mother and his father years earlier. He said he was so focused when he was on 20-hour link-up climbs of big walls that he went into a trance and was convinced he heard radio frequencies. We talked about G.o.d, the limits of technology, how in order to win, one had to realize that winning didn't matter.
I didn't think I could make it to the tree in front of me. I antic.i.p.ated a fall.
”One step at a time,” Dean said, as I faltered and swayed. ”Stay present.”
Connecting with Others If you're an ultrarunner and you spend hours and hours alone on a daily basis, training in remote, unpopulated areas, running can be a solitary undertaking. It's ironic, then, that some of the greatest and deepest joys in my running career have come from the people I have met and the things we have shared. You don't have to be an ultrarunner to take advantage of the social rewards of running. Try running-at least on some of your routes-with a friend. Join a running club or weekly group run. Enter a 5K or 10K race. Do something for running that doesn't involve running. Working at the finish line or at an aid station or joining trail work parties-all of which I've done-provided great ways for me to partic.i.p.ate, to give back to the sport that's given me so much. Running can be a lonely activity. It can also introduce you to people worlds beyond your imagining.
Smoky Chipotle Refried Beans The Tarahumara eat these beans smeared on corn tortillas. They ate them on our burly 30-mile hike over and down into the Copper Canyon, and they ate them before, during, and after our race, too. At home I eat them with fresh tortillas as a snack or with a plate of chile rice, guacamole, and some salsa on the side for a hearty meal. If you have leftover beans, freeze them for future lunches and dinners.
3 cups dried pinto beans 1 medium white or yellow onion, chopped 23 garlic cloves, chopped 1 -inch piece dried Kombu seaweed (optional) 12 dried whole chipotle peppers or canned chipotles in adobo to taste 1 tablespoon chili powder 2 teaspoons dried epazote (see Note) 1 tablespoon olive oil 1 teaspoons sea salt Soak the beans in water to cover by 2 inches, 8 hours or overnight. Drain and rinse the beans in a colander a few times, then transfer to a large pot. Add the onion, garlic, seaweed, chipotles, and spices. Add water to cover the beans by 2 inches. Bring to a boil and simmer over medium-low heat for about 1 hour, or until the beans are soft and cooked through.
Drain the beans, reserving 4 cups of the liquid. Remove the seaweed. Remove the chiles, or leave one in if spicier beans are desired. Cool the beans for 15 minutes, then place in a food processor along with cup of the liquid and process until smooth. If desired, you may thin the beans with additional cooking liquid.
Return the pureed beans to the pot with the olive oil and salt. Simmer over low to medium-low heat for 20 minutes to allow the flavors to blend. Serve warm.
Refried beans keep refrigerated for 5 to 6 days or freeze well for several months. For a quick meal or snack, spread cold beans on a corn tortilla and toast in a toaster oven for 1 to 2 minutes and top with ”cheese” spread (see recipe, [>]), guacamole (see recipe, [>]), salsa, and/or hot sauce.
MAKES 7 CUPS, 810 SERVINGS NOTE: Epazote is an herb that can make beans more digestible, as well as adding a distictive flavor. Look for it in Mexican grocery stores or near the Mexican foods at the supermarket. If you can't find it, you can subst.i.tute 3 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro, stirred in just before serving.
21. Back to My Roots.
TONTO TRAIL, GRAND CANYON, 2010.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
-RUMI.
Here was another good place to stop, cold, dark, silent as a deserted cathedral. A velvety snowfall. In my running career, there had been so many of these places. This time, I would submit. Almost twenty years of serious running, more than a decade since my first Western States, a lifetime of sometimes you just do things and I had done them, and what had it accomplished? It hadn't prevented my marriage from failing. It hadn't warded off injuries. I had done things when I didn't think I could do them anymore. Dusty was angry. Dave Terry had killed himself, and my mother was gone. I could do things every day the rest of my life, every minute. What would it matter?
On this day, my food was almost gone. My headlamp had dimmed and was losing battery life fast. I was at least 50 miles from a phone or a road. It was 2 A.M., cold, and part of me knew that it might be dangerous to stop. Part of me didn't care.
I had been running for 20 hours. Below, a yawning chasm. Above, a black dome, smeared with stars. And there, on my right, a flat rock outcropping with a shallow cave. A perfect place to lie down, to hide from the darkness and the cold. I would lie there and wait, and rest, and in a few hours the dome would pale, and tumbleweeds would stir, and the cacti would emerge from the gloom like gentle, friendly sentries, and I would be rested and warm, and then I could run, then I could do things.
”Not a good idea, man. It's too cold. Once you lie down, it's going to be really hard to get up. If we stop now, we might be stopped forever.”
How many times had someone urged me on? How many times did someone tell me to get up, to get moving, that even if I didn't think I could go on, he or she knew better.