Umstead 100: Demons, Exercised
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| Photo credit: Dennis Geiser |
This did not help.
The next morning, she tried to make me feel better by explaining the movie, not only making things worse, but leading to an irrational fear of being possessed that lasted well into adulthood. Good stuff, right? Still waiting for that race report?
Life experience, religious study and spiritual growth eventually led to the wild discovery that yes, while I have a host of “initial disorders” from childhood trauma that might lead to such an irrational obsession, the possession I saw in that film was actually just as my mother explained it – a movie. Real possession, as I have experienced it, is when the negative is allowed to become the obsession, defeating the positive before our eyes. The cake doesn’t look perfect, so instead of turning the crumby side to the back and admiring our work, we deem the whole thing a failure as we throw it away. Not that I’ve ever done that.
It had been four years since I’d run a 100-miler, the last one a punishment for the day I ran 87.5 miles at Umstead, in freezing rain, to win the 50-miler and not learn until four years later that I would have won the 100 had I just gotten my frozen butt back on the course. But I digress. Four years encompassing the loss of my unicorn job, a foot injury from a foster dog, a global pandemic, the loss of my re-built consulting business, and a case of shingles so brutal one of my doctors said the picture of it made him want to cry. It’s been seven months since that saga, by the way, and I still have to use lidocaine creams at night.
It had been four years since I’d run a 100-miler, and a mere five months since I’d started running again after the shingles imposed six-week layoff. I had no idea what kind of shape I was in, and little recollection of the girl in the photo on the Death Valley highway that I swore in the new year I was on my way to find. In response to this, of course, I made a rational and conservative plan: just go out and get your feet wet again. No worries about time or place. Do what you love in a place you love doing it. Climb those steps, Star, those blasted trail steps to that Umstead banner, and just let being your best self again be enough.
(Also you always run really well here and you’ve still not run that sub-19 100-miler and you’re not getting any younger and if you don’t go for it you won’t get it so let’s just do some math and make some spreadsheets and really put some hearty pressure on you and oh look! You’re race number is 2 even though Devon Yanko is a (wonderful) monster and there are some other really fast women on that registration list that are literally fifteen years younger than you! Fun!)
Which brings us to Saturday morning, 4 am. I wake, drop bags packed, legs rested, mind racing. Layer those last two paragraphs on top of each other, press fast forward, and welcome yourself to my mind.
“STOP,” I said, aloud.
“STOP.”
But there’s no rest for the wicked.
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In many ways,
it was not a good day. My hydration was
off and I started the race bloated and mildly hyponatremic. I typically pee every four to five hours
during a 100; I was peeing, and copiously, every hour, while eating straight
salt from my palm at the aid stations. I
drank nothing from miles 12 – 18 hoping to let some fluid off; blessedly, the
strategy worked, leaving me time to focus on my allergies instead. That’s right kids, it’s winter in Ohio and
spring in North Carolina, the kind of Umstead spring that leaves yellow pollen
all over black rental cars. I was a
congested, snotty mess, histamines on overdrive. Histamines, by the way, are what cause the
“brain fog” or “space cadet” feeling you sometimes get with allergies, and they
also cause sluggishness and fatigue. The
remedy? Anti-histamines,
which cause – oh, right. Dehydration
and fatigue.
This is an excellent bit of mental exercise with only 82 miles to go, especially when one is thinking “If this were a training run, I’d probably be calling it about now.”
But “one” is not done. One then doubles down on the fun factor as she posits that yes, there was a lot of pollen on the cars, but we’re also still in some zone of the pandemic, and masking behavior has been waning and we just flew, and running 100 miles if, God forbid, we have COVID, is probably, I don’t know, one of the most dangerous ideas ever, so maybe we should see if the next aid station has a thermometer?
Seriously, kids.
So on I run, through loop three, rejecting generous offers of allergy medications, enthralled with this beloved course of mine yet swimming in an allergy-induced brain fog like an utter zombie. Rhonda has started biking her loops of the course and offers encouragement, to which I reply my allergies are wreaking havoc on me. She replies, very simply, that I should outrun them. I have mixed feelings about said undertaking. These feelings are underwritten by perhaps the worst possible clothing choice for my current condition, a simple white tank that reads in black letters: “All About the Hustle.” Hustle? My day thus far has consisted of peeing, blowing snot rockets, and trying not to fall asleep.
But the thought that I’m miserable need not cross my mind. To some extent, I’ve allowed myself to be miserable for quite some time now. I’ve not done the healthiest job of carrying my (small) portion of pandemic life stress, and my bout with shingles left me a more fragile version of myself, distrustful of my own body. I feel overwhelmed constantly; I’m carrying too much, figuring out too much, trying too hard or not at all. My life is one epic blessing after another, I told my therapist, but I’m just so disconnected.
“It's not uncommon right now,” she said, “and I need you to stop being so hard on yourself.”
“There’s a war in the Ukraine,” I said. “Friends with cancer. Tragedies of epic proportion.”
“Star, you went through tremendous, repeated trauma –“
“Almost forty years ago –“
“That had long-term effects that include PTSD, OCD, and chronic depression. I need you to acknowledge that you’re struggling right now so we can work through that.”
But I’m such a good little Enneagram 1.
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It had been four years since I’d run a 100-miler, and for added effect, I'd invited a host of demons. They weighed down my shoulders; rode on my back. I wondered when this stopped being a fun adventure, a whole day of just playing in the woods, and became something so heavy instead. I lugged and hauled my demons about, cursing them for all they had robbed me of. The field was fierce, I was not in peak shape, and I was buried in pollen. It had been four years since I'd run a 100-miler, yes, but it had been so many more since I'd actually enjoyed one. Mile splits, loop splits, aid station breaks, hiking intervals: all recorded on a pre-race scorecard, setting the stage for impossible performances. My best races, a distant voice reminded me, had never been the ones I had planned for, but the ones I - just ran?
Why, after all this time, was my soul so disquieted within me, simply because this might not be a marquee day?
Maybe, I told myself, the reason that placing means so much to you is that it’s something people understand. You tell a person your time, numbers etched onto your heart, and it doesn’t have meaning. You say, “I was second” and it means something.
This, of course, is a lie. So I go back to basics, and as I climb "Moss Hill," I put words to the truth.
“I placed enough times that I feel like people expect me to so when I don’t I feel like a failure.”
“Oh,” I gasp aloud.
The epiphany was not the fear of failure. The epiphany was its self-infliction.
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As I pick up speed down Powerline Hill, still on loop three, I know I will finish Umstead. I litter the hill with demon remnants, an array of self-inflicted wounds disguised as coping mechanisms. I float for the first time, light on my feet. I skip over rocks. I access joy. No, I’m not done going for the sub-19 or running the most competitive races I can, but I know now that I am done turning races into math problems. Making spreadsheets. Worrying about numbers. After telling myself for so many years that my problem was trying to process major life crises on the trail, I acknowledge that, too, was a lie. My problem was giving myself exactly two options: perfection or failure. Perfection, defined by a PR or a placement, or failure, defined by self-sabotage. Numbers or death!
I’ve never been good at math in the first place.
So for the rest of the race, I do a novel thing. I have fun. I revert solely to my original race plan. I take no mile or loop splits. I continue to run every step of the course except my 18 named and pre-determined hills. I eat as much as I can for as long as I can. Knowing I’m already sluggish from the allergies, I hit the caffeine early. I take care of myself instead of judging my performance.
I run joyfully and gleefully.
When Rhonda passes for the second time, she tells me I’m among the happiest runners on the course, touching my heart in ways I'm unable to process. I come upon Darris, as predicted, as I run down Powerline Hill for the fourth time. We hike the next series of hills together, the “Walt” and “Gralyn” hills, before separating. Darris is the one struggling now, and I commend to him music and caffeine.
There’s so much more I could tell you, but the writing is long and the story wanes. At the start of loop five I have to make a bit of a trip off course to deal with a distinctly female matter; Mother Nature has decided allergies aren’t enough of a challenge. If I want this, she has decided, I need to show her. I do not dally, nor do I obsess about how I’ll “make up” the three minutes, forty seconds the trip to the camp bathroom took. I feel the sheer bliss of steam escaping a pressure cooker.
The loops pass more easily if not more quickly, and I find myself "already" at 75 miles, grabbing my ipod and checking into “Club Umstead,” an exclusive place where one rides the razor-thin edge of consciousness and hallucination whilst filling a single ear with house and techno. Dry mouth has turned all food to sawdust and my nutrition is coming exclusively from chocolate milk; my calories are insufficient and my stomach is starting to growl. At the mini aid-station at mile 85, I attempt Gatorade. Sip one is okay. Sip two is questionable. Sip three twists my stomach into a stabbing knot upon contact. I throw the offensive cup in the garbage, stagger three steps, and wait. The cramping is intense, the puking inevitable. I stick my finger down my throat and retch it out, knowing I can get broth or noodles in two and a half miles. I can get it faster if I run, so I run.
Darris has concluded his day and greets me, lovingly changing out the batteries in my headlamp and inquiring about my calories. He’s not happy – he’s never happy with my calories at this stage of the game – but I ingest what broth and Dr. Pepper I can. I do what I can, and I let it be enough.
I think about what it feels like to run after mile 90. You’re slowing but you feel like you’re sprinting. The darkness makes the hills steeper and more deceptive. Your stomach cramps more often. You’re consciously aware of being in pain without actually feeling it. And you are running. Maybe not as fast as the frontrunners, or even as fast as you’ve run in the past. But five months ago you were on gabapentin and struggling to run a 10-minute mile fresh out of bed, and on this night, this beautiful night, puke stains on the arm of your white shirt, you are still running. You are still running, right back to your husband, waiting atop a set of trail stairs you've waited four years to climb. And it is all perfectly, magically, beautifully enough.
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Chris, one of the race directors, offered me a copy of my splits, one of Umstead’s many special touches. “It looks like you stayed pretty consistent,” he says, congratulating me. I tell him it was a tougher day for me, just so grateful to be back, nowhere I’d rather get my feet wet again. I try not to literally knock Darris over by leaning on him so hard.
“Well,” he says, “I know you’re kind of an institution here. It’s been fun watching you today.”
I ask after Jenn, my favorite volunteer and a 100-miler herself. Darris tells me he saw her right after I started my last loop and she promised to find us. She does, after pacing a loop, which she’s done in the middle of running a downright legendary aid station. I see Jenn once a year, maybe twice, but she knows. She just knows, as does her hug.
I note, as Darris wraps my blanket around me, how cool I thought it was, all day, that our drop bags ended up next to Pete and Kim Penzone’s. Our paths cross over and over again at Burning River, Mohican, Umstead. We once traded them a shower and a bed to borrow their car, because hobo life. Pete will be in soon, and Kim has laps to go but hasn’t stopped smiling yet.
I remember a woman at the start, fangirling a little bit and telling me how much I inspired her. She passed me that night, on her way to a PR. I saw, as she ran up a hill, how inspiration happens.
“Another night, Star,” I whispered. And then I, too, began to run.
I remembered again what Rhonda had said. I simply remembered how many times Rhonda had passed me over the years, offering words of encouragement and an unspoken belief in me. Not in my statistics, but me. I remembered the years gone by, Jay passing me up those same steps on his way to a PR, Darris and Darrin huddled in sleeping bags waiting to force feed me, Mark sprinting out of camp with a roll of a duct tape and a devilish smile.
I sipped my hot chocolate, and I remembered this.
This, the people who know exactly what the numbers mean – the times, etched on your heart – and never gave a damn in the first place.
It had been four years since I’d run a 100-miler.
God and health
willing, it will never be that long again.
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