Running on Empty Read online

  Desert

  They cannot scare me with their empty spaces . . .

  I have it in me so much nearer home

  To scare myself with my own desert places.

  —Robert Frost, “Desert Places”

  1.

  As Far As I Can, As Fast As I Can

  During the two years that our family lived with Jean’s cancer, the 5Ks became 10Ks, which became ten- and thirteen-milers, and then I graduated to mountain races and marathons. After my wife died, I pushed beyond these distances to elite courses and ultrarunning races. They were the most punishing, and they made me feel the most alive.

  Hills became my proving ground, and although I had yet to realize my dream of climbing Mount Everest, I conquered more modest elevations. As a boy in Greeley, Colorado, I’d looked longingly at the Rocky Mountains from the valley of our family farm, and in my thirties I was finally exploring them, running on the local territory and running over my own persistent sense of loss. I missed Jean, and my life after her was lonely despite my attempts to rebuild it.

  In 1982, I remarried, and I also ran my first Pikes Peak Marathon in the front range of those mountains, completing the prestigious race in 5:40:37. It was a respectable time, and I felt honored to have competed in one of the oldest marathons in the country, severe in both elevation and terrain. Established in 1956, it began as a challenge between three smokers and ten nonsmokers. None of the smokers finished the course. Adding to its colorful history, in ’59, Arlene Pieper ran the Pikes Peak race, making it the first U.S. marathon venue ever to host a woman, and she became the first woman ever to complete such a race.

  I felt an urgency to accomplish as much as I could as quickly as possible, to not put off the pursuit of any goal. Who knew how long I’d be around? I needed to hurry up and get things done. I adopted a new motto: “As far as I can, as fast as I can.” It’s how I articulated my mixed feelings from having faced death: the impulse to make the most of every minute and the fear that my time could run out any day. It didn’t matter that I was healthy, loved my wife and daughter, and owned a flourishing business. I needed to do more, as much as I could, now.

  So as soon as I’d succeeded at Pikes Peak, I was looking for the next big challenge. Ramping up my daily mileage, I prepared for greater distances. Sixty to eighty training miles per week, and less than a year later, I ran my first ultra, the Rocky Mountain 50, a hilly fifty-mile course on dirt and gravel roads from Laramie to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and finished with fifth place in 7:51:53. Having given it my all and feeling completely wrung out at the end, I thought I’d completed the ultimate endurance race.

  Just a few months later, my son, Taylor, was born. Life goes on, yes? And nothing affirms it as joyfully as the healthy yell of a newborn. With my family growing, I had every reason to spend more time at home and no real excuse for taking on bigger challenges. Yet I kept up my rigorous running schedule, continuing my early-morning training year-round, racing in local 10Ks whenever they were on (most weekends) and in half-marathons and marathons during the fall and spring.

  My motto manifested itself not just in my running but also in my pursuit of material success. I invested in a car wash in New York and bought a condo in Steamboat Springs because they came at a good price. And I continued to work long hours, expanding our family business into Nebraska. I went to the plant six days a week, pushing to be the best and take down the competition with an unparalleled work ethic. Year by year, we picked off the other local rendering operations by giving better service. We were the first in our area to pay for the remains we hauled away, and I was one of the few “dead truck” drivers around who didn’t insist that the farmers pull their animals out of the corral. I’d drive right through the open gate, engage my winch, secure my load, and then go on to my next stop quickly, if I was lucky enough not to get stuck in the mud and manure on my way out.

  The costs of my amateur athletics could easily have outstripped my professional profits—if I’d taken time off from work, flown to events around the country, stayed in nice hotels, and paid for other luxuries—but I’ve always been frugal by nature, and kept a keen eye on the bottom line of both ventures. I’d drive to races relatively close to home, sleep in my car if necessary, and always make it back in time to start the workweek. There was a price, though, and my family picked up the tab. They had a good provider, a man who took his responsibilities and commitments seriously. What they didn’t have was a husband and father who made being at home with them a priority.

  Although it wasn’t a conscious decision, I kept my distance.

  Sometime in 1987, I was reading an article in Runner’s World by George Sheehan that described a monster of a California trail race, the hundred-mile Western States Endurance Run, and I was completely taken aback. Wait. What? People run a hundred miles in a race? How had I never heard about this before? It was probably because ultramarathoners didn’t bother with publicity back then; they were a bunch of guys (mostly) who were willing to go insane distances and didn’t care if anyone else knew about it. The accomplishment was the thing. There wasn’t big prize money, or stadiums of adoring fans, or even an ultrarunner’s club— just bragging rights whenever you made it to the finish. George Sheehan wrote about the silver belt buckle that served as the sole prize for completing the Western States 100 in under twenty-four hours, the outrageously beautiful and brutal landscape of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the small number of participants, and the sometimes eccentric personalities of the competitors. I wanted in.

  Without consulting the family, and now considering myself in training for the Western States, I started looking for a relatively flat course where I could push beyond my fifty-mile distance before taking on the greater challenge of the California race, which was coming up in June 1988. It just so happened there was an appropriate event in New York. Score! I had to visit the state anyway, to check on the car wash and meet with my partner there. I signed up for the twenty-four-hour run in Buffalo, which would be held in a park on a one-mile bike path loop, during which participants would circle the course as many times as they could in the time allotted.

  So, at the age of thirty-six, I set my sights on running at least one hundred miles in twenty-four hours. The math seemed solid: If I could average just under fifteen minutes per mile, I’d achieve my goal. I had no reason to believe I could pull it off—I’d never run that far or that long—but I felt confident: Just as Mom had taught us kids, I believed I could do anything if I applied myself. Knowing nothing about training for this distance, I figured I’d ramp up my mileage bit by bit. So I increased to eight miles every morning with a twenty- or thirty-mile run on the weekends. As presumptuous as it sounds, I have to admit that I never questioned myself in this, never asked myself if I should try.

  Why not do it?

  Sure, I was scared, but I didn’t let myself think about that until I was standing at the starting line, and then it hit me: Oh, shit. What have I gotten myself into? But by then it was too late to turn back, and soon after the gun went off, the jitters fell away, and my practiced focus and concentration kicked in. To my great surprise, I completed 122 miles, won the race, and set a course record.

  Even more confident than before, I ran the Western States 100 for the first time just a month later. Two months after that, I completed my first Leadville Trail 100 in Colorado, and a month after that won a silver medal at the U.S.A. 24-Hour Run Championship with a finishing distance of over 133 miles.

  Totally unexpected: I had a natural talent for these extreme distances. When others slowed down, I held steady, even sped up. I could take the discomfort of running hour after hour, beyond soreness and fatigue and even pain. Sometimes, I’d run negative splits—come back faster than I went out—so I could catch up to and keep pace with 2:30 and 2:40 marathoners at the tail end of races over fifty miles. My iron gut was suited to these tests, too. I was able to eat on the go, get the calories I needed, and keep on running. It’s not uncommon for people to throw up what they’
ve just eaten because their systems are too delicate to ingest, digest, and exert energy at the same time. But I was able to keep anything down, metabolize it, and burn that fuel efficiently until the end of the course. Mentally, I’d been prepared by my upbringing to work hard until the job was done, no matter how long it took. My mother had insisted to all us kids that we always hold our heads high, keep our backs straight, move with assurance; it says something about a person, how he carries himself. All good lessons for running, besides. A stickler for form, I trained my body to become more and more efficient in the sport, conserving energy and covering the ground economically. Even if injured, I did my damnedest not to alter my stride, never hung my head or slouched forward. Giving in to the pain would mean breaking form and potentially creating a secondary problem, so I steeled myself against it.

  On I ran, racking up some first-place wins at elite races, earning more medals, setting more records. I ate hills for breakfast. I learned how to deal with the mental torture of great distances, how to compartmentalize my physical anguish across the miles, how to push through the injuries and exhaustion, how to strategize my races and overcome my opponents. Running, I invited pain, embraced it, made it my own.

  Not long before my third child, Alexandra, was born in 1990, I discovered the notorious Badwater Ultramarathon, which National Geographic has ranked as the toughest footrace in the world. The magazine called it that because of the desert’s scorching temperatures (up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit), drastic changes in elevation on the course (from 282 feet below sea level at the start to the top of Whitney at 14,496 feet), and the extreme distance. That July, the first time I ran it, the race was 146 miles from the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere to the highest point in the contiguous United States. (They’ve shortened the course to 135 miles since then, and it now stops at the Whitney Portal, at 8,360 feet.) The next year, in 1991, the same month I turned forty, I set the 146-mile course record to the top of Whitney, which at the time of this printing still stands as the fastest.

  After three more Badwater wins, I got creative. In addition to the organized ultrarunning races, I started inventing extreme challenges that no one had ever attempted before. It was my way of making a personal statement, of adding something significant and unique to the sport. I felt that I’d mastered “conventional” ultrarunning and was ready to break previously conceived barriers, to prove that the body—even a middleaged one—could go farther and recover faster than anyone else had thought.

  So I devised combination challenges no one had ever tried before and few others were likely to attempt after me. Running the Pikes Peak Marathon four times in a row. Doing the Leadville Trail 100 and Pikes Peak Marathon in the same weekend. Completing the Badwater solo, self-contained and unaided, hauling my water, food, clothing, and medical supplies in a cart that weighed more than two hundred pounds.

  All these unusual accomplishments garnered recognition from others in the ultrarunning world; the invitational Badwater, in particular, became a kind of homecoming for me every year. Early on it was just about a dozen runners who’d show up, and each time about half came back from prior years, and there were always more, a growing number of us ready to kick up some dust across Death Valley, to test ourselves against uncompromising desert heat, extreme elevation changes, and the punishing distance. I found friends there, people driven by their own demons and dreams, men and women of extraordinary grit and drive and determination.

  Despite my achievements in business and sports, my family life remained challenging, owing mostly to my unresolved grief and the ripple effects it caused in my marriage. Continuing to use my athletic endeavors as an escape and proving ground, I was convinced that the best way to prevent getting crushed by another tragedy was to achieve greater and greater self-sufficiency. I guarded against intimacy to protect myself from the pain of losing anyone I loved again. Ironically, though I suppose predictably, Danette and I divorced when I was in my early forties. Elaine and I moved out, and a joint custody arrangement dictated that Taylor and Ali lived with their mom but stayed overnight with me every other weekend.

  In 1995, I started adventure racing, participating in team expeditions that took me to remote jungles and deserts in Africa, Australia, and Asia, as well as here in the United States. Yes, I would finally explore the outback, paddle in Patagonia, trek the Himalayas, but my first experience with one of these multidisciplinary, multiday sporting events was an Eco-Challenge in Utah. Created by Mark Burnett, it required a five-person coed team, and by the time we were done, two other racers and I were calling ourselves “Team Stray Dogs.” It turned out to be fitting; in adventure races we entered after that, we’d pick up one or two other elite athletes with the right skills and temperament to round out the group. These contests require diverse skills: some combination of endurance disciplines like trail running and hiking, climbing with fixed ropes, riding a bike (or a horse or a camel), swimming, and paddling, so you want teammates who are strong in the areas where you aren’t.

  Adventure racing provided opportunities for me to conquer old obstacles, particularly my fear of heights and water (not phobias, but definitely weaknesses), as well as a contrast to ultrarunning: with the team, it was better to be less intense, have a sense of humor, try to relax and enjoy what we were doing. I didn’t train specifically for any of these events, and instead relied on my endurance and my team to carry me through whatever we might encounter, wherever we might go. As amazing as most of the locations turned out to be, these adventures weren’t vacations in a traditional sense (and we sure as hell were not catered to in any way—think Survivor without the amenities), but they were about working together, having a good time, trying new things. The looser we were, the more we seemed to do well.

  In time, when we started posting some respectable finishes in or near the top ten, Team Stray Dogs attracted a sports agent to represent us, which meant sponsorships. Early on, single-event entry fees started at about $15,000 per team, and during the late 1990s they steadily rose to about $25,000 per team. We were grateful to have corporate support from Pharmanex (a division of Nu Skin) for our Morocco and Patagonia adventures and later from DuPont, which underwrote numerous races and for which we tested clothing and fibers. Incidentally, there was no financial profit in it for us athletes—not that we cared, as we were doing what we loved on someone else’s dime. But the agent made some good money, and the corporate sponsors got exposure when MTV, the Discovery Channel, USA Network, ESPN, or Nat Geo broadcast the Eco-Challenges or Raids Gauloises.

  Altogether, the running and the adventure racing took me away from home and work three to six weeks out of the year, not an unreasonable amount of time, I thought. Still, training runs and local races that ranged from fifty kilometers to one hundred miles consumed most of my “downtime,” leaving little for family or a social life. It was extremely rare for me to read a book, go to the movies, or watch TV. Today, it surprises me when I discover some sitcom of which I was completely unaware during the eighties. I still find “new” episodes of Seinfeld hilarious.

  So I worked. I spent time with my kids. I ran. I raced. And I thought up new ways of torturing myself, wanting to do something each year that no one else had ever done before.

  It felt as if 120-volt shocks probed my legs with every step. Arriving at the top of Towne’s Pass in Death Valley National Park, I’d already been running for five days straight, more than three hundred miles across the desert floor and up Mount Whitney—and I still had over two hundred miles and another summit of Mount Whitney to go. People surrounded me, giving me advice. But I was in a fog, stumbling around in my own world with memories and voices from the past floating through the haze. Self-doubt clouded my mind: I can’t do it anymore. The pain is too much. I have to stop.

  In July 2001, in honor of my fiftieth birthday, I was attempting to complete the first-ever Badwater Quad: running the Death Valley course four times in a row, plus tacking on a few extra miles so I could climb the mountain twice. When
I was done, it would be four crossings, 584 miles, and a total elevation change of 96,000 feet, essentially nonstop.

  A little more than halfway through and after 130 hours, I was feeling completely used up, suffering from severe tendonitis. No wonder. During one course completion at Badwater, your feet strike the ground more than three hundred thousand times, absorbing the impact of four million pounds—the equivalent of hitting the pavement after falling three thousand feet, or being struck in a head-on collision with a jumbo jet. Ask around at your local running shop, and they’ll tell you runner’s tendonitis is a “typical overuse injury.” Well, sure, I was in a state of overuse, but that’s where ultrarunners live, in that place where you feel as if there’s nothing left, no more energy, no more reason, no more sanity, no more will to go farther. Then you push forward anyway, step after step, even though every cell in your body tells you to stop. And you discover that you can go on.

  At this time in my life, I was running on empty in a larger sense, too, still punishing myself, still trying to prove that I could survive just about anything, still trying to outrun my mortality. In the twenty years since Jean’s death, I’d racked up a list of accomplishments as I’d strived to fulfill my definition of success and compensate for what I perceived as my personal shortcomings. Nearly all of my family relationships were strained. My dad, brother, and sister thought I was crazy for all the time I devoted to running, and they didn’t like that it took me away from our business. Dad had loaned me start-up money, and since then Steve and Lonna had bought into the business and were working in Greeley while I took care of things in Fort Morgan, so they each had a vested interest and strong opinions. I’d married and divorced Danette, then done it all over again with another woman, and I considered all three of my marriages failures—I was alone, wasn’t I? My relationship with Danette was tense, and my children (now eleven, eighteen, and twenty-three), resented all the time I’d spent away from them.