Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness (13 page)

Combine the flours, ground seeds, baking powder, and salt in a mixing bowl. Add the milk, olive oil, sweetener, and vanilla and mix thoroughly. Fold in the strawberries. Grease a skillet with the coconut oil and heat over medium-low heat for 3 to 5 minutes, or until a drop of water sizzles when it hits the pan. Pour ½ to ¾ cup of the batter onto the skillet for each pancake. Cook until the bottom is golden brown and bubbles appear on top of the pancake, then flip to cook the other side. Repeat with the remaining batter. Serve topped with maple syrup or your favorite fruit sauce.

MAKES
10–12 6-
INCH PANCAKES

10. Dangerous Tune

(MORE) WESTERN STATES 100 TRAINING, 1999

Snow. Sun. Sandstone. Sky. He was doing what he liked and knew. It was now. And this now had no pressure, just permission.

—
JAMES GALVIN

There were no manuals on how to be a 100-mile champion. I knew because I looked. And the Internet was just being born. So I developed my own plan. First, in late April Leah and I moved to Seattle. I had been offered a job at a place called the FootZone by the owner, Scott McCoubrey, another long-distance runner I met at the Cle Elum Ridge 50K in 1997 during my internship in Seattle. I had learned what I could from the snowy trails and the cold nights. For the Western States, I needed mountains.

Second, I turned to coaches from another age.

When Arthur F. H. Newton decided to enter South Africa’s Comrades Marathon (which is actually 55 miles) in 1922, he was thirty-eight years old, not particularly fit, and well aware he would be competing against younger, faster runners. Whether out of wisdom or desperation, he trained at the then-radical and unheard-of distance of 10 and more miles a day. In addition to winning that Comrades Marathon, as well as five more, he set world records at 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, and 100 miles. If anyone can lay claim to being the father of LSD (Long Slow Distance) training, it is Newton. He was also a nutritional pioneer; he swore by a concoction people called his “secret elixir.” (It was made from lemonade and salt.)

Lemonade and long distance, though, wouldn’t be enough. So I studied the wisdom of the Australian Percy Cerutty, a former women’s clothing shop manager, an advocate of whole foods, and one of the strangest characters in the oft-strange pantheon of ultrarunners.

In 1939, when he was forty-three, Cerutty (he said it was pronounced “just like ‘sincerity,’ without the sin”) suffered a nervous breakdown. After doctors told him he would be dead within two years, he embarked on a regimen of diet, exercise, and a philosophy of living that he called “Stotan,” which he explained as a combination of Stoic and Spartan. He wrote that an athlete needed “hardness, toughness, and unswerving devotion to an ideal,” but he also needed to embrace “diet, philosophy, cultivation of the intellect, and openness to artistic endeavors.”

According to Cerutty, “You only ever grow as a human being if you’re outside your comfort zone.”

Cerutty recovered (he would live to be eighty years old) and, among other training innovations, eschewed stopwatches in favor of an intuitive approach that relied on an athlete’s innate intelligence. He had his runners sprint over sand dunes, lift heavy weights, practice yoga, and keep to a strict diet rich in raw foods and whole grains. He studied the way animals ran to see what human runners could learn. He also warned against drinking (any liquid) with meals and socializing after midnight. His most famous protégé, Herb Elliot, the premier mid-distance runner of the late 1950s, called the Stotan sessions “beautiful and painful . . . underneath it all there was a sort of sound philosophy based on ‘Let’s improve ourselves as human beings, let’s become more compassionate, let’s become bigger, let’s become stronger, let’s become nicer people.’”

Both coaches operated outside the norms of conventional athletics—Newton in his emphasis on long-distance training, Cerutty in his admonishments about almost every other aspect of a runner’s life—while including training and exertion. Though my childhood was unusual by most standards, my behavior had been ferociously conventional. I had spent my life being the Good Son. I had lived not just inches but yards within the lines etched by parents and teachers, bosses and coaches.

That’s why I was drawn to outliers like Newton and Cerutty, men who pushed themselves far beyond the lines that others set.

It was runners like Dusty who stirred me. It was men from other eras—crashing through barriers others had deemed inviolable—who taught me. But the one who pushed me most of all was Chuck Jones. He became my Western States idol.

Jones started running 50-milers in 1985 and in 1986 surprised the (then tiny) ultrarunning community by winning the Western States, upsetting the former champion, pistachio farmer and Church of God preacher Jim King. Jones trained for the race with 200-plus mileage running weeks. (The standard at the time was about 120 to 140 miles.) When an ABC reporter pulled up next to Jones on a particularly punishing ascent late in the Western States and said, “You’ve been smiling since we started filming you,” Jones, without breaking stride, replied, “Well, I like runnin’.”

He was the thirteenth of fourteen children. He avoided team sports because his mother couldn’t afford uniforms or offer transportation. (His father had committed suicide when Chuck was four and a half.) A drummer and a practitioner of transcendental meditation since he was sixteen, he took up speed walking in his early twenties. To lessen the recovery time, Jones eliminated caffeine, tobacco, and meat—at the same time. It helped.

A difficult childhood. An unconventional and difficult training regimen. A simultaneously cerebral and primitive approach to running that brought childlike joy. It seemed familiar.

It was the same way I felt about Dusty, who since I had left Minnesota had kayaked the entire circumference of Lake Superior, tossed pizzas, won races, built houses, romanced women, waxed skis, lived in five states, and had generally been, well, the “Dust Ball.” A few years earlier, the night before Grandma’s Marathon, Dusty was drinking at the Anchor Bar, near the finish line. Worried that he might oversleep and miss the morning bus to the start of the race and being at least slightly intoxicated, he took what seemed the most sensible course of action. He ran to the nearby finish line, then ran the course in reverse to the starting line. He then took a nap on a none-the-wiser Minnesotan’s lawn until the gun went off, after which he ran the race in the intended direction, finishing in just over 3 hours. If I was always asking why and considering all the options, Dusty was taking what he wanted when he wanted. Dusty, Jones, Newton, and Cerutty had all bumped against the limits of their bodies and their minds, then created new limits. Running wasn’t just exercise or a hobby, or even necessarily competition, for them. Basically, they were existentialists in shorts. I wanted to be one, too.

In Seattle, I ran to work, 6 miles each way. After I got home, I ran through the streets of the city, letting the moist air cool me as I felt my muscles loosen and learned about my new home.

My serious training, though, happened on weekends.

That’s when I looked for my limits. I found them in the Pacific Northwest at a place called Mount Si.

Serious climbers planning assaults on Mount Rainier and Mount McKinley climb Mount Si with packs to get a taste of the struggle that awaits them. Some families make an annual tradition of a Mount Si climb. Some very serious Seattle mountain runners will run the route. Some very, very serious ultrarunners will run back-to-backs: up and down, and up and down again.

I had my path. It had started in the flatlands, but now it was about to crest mountains. I needed the mountains. On my first Saturday in Seattle, I drove out to the trailhead. I was going to do a back-to-back-to-back.

The mountain rises 3,400 feet, which doesn’t sound like much until you realize that it does it in 4 miles. That’s over 800 feet per mile. My steepest climb in Minnesota covered a route from Lake Superior to the highest ridge. It was 600 feet, but it took 2 miles on a smooth, paved road.

Boulders big as RVs lined the path. Gnarly old roots extended from towering hemlocks and Douglas firs and laid claim to the floor of the trail. Three-foot-long, two-foot-wide leaves from Devil’s Club plants brushed me as I climbed. I passed hikers struggling up and others coming down. I was the only runner. From the base of the mountain, it seemed like the ascent would be straight up, but I knew that was impossible; there had to be at least one level patch. And there was, exactly one, halfway. It went 100 yards, and I thought of it as Si Flats. Every half mile, just to remind me that I was in for a day of hurt, there was a moss-covered, wooden signpost. That first day, it took me 14 minutes to cover the first mile.

The mountain reminded me that races are not run all at once, that the only way to survive an ultra was piece by piece. So I ran Mount Si piece by piece. The snowmobile trails in Minnesota with their foot-grabbing snow had taught me the pangs of a single step. Mount Si taught me how to climb as fast as I could when I couldn’t see my destination, then to run hard down—not amble—the way I had come up. I didn’t jog up Mount Si, and I didn’t pick my way down. That first day, I made three trips up and three trips down as fast as I could. Then I drove home and put in a full shift at work.

But the next morning I didn’t want to get out of bed. I could hear music. It was the siren song of a warm bed, a cozy couch, a few hours of reading, or listening to music, or just being. No one was forcing me to run. No one said I had to. No one was going to die if I just relaxed a little. Those were the lyrics of the song. It was the catchy, terrible tune that had seduced so many runners to drop out of races. It was a melody I could not afford to listen to. The song was calling:
Rest. You just ran one mountain. No need to do another.

So much for my improved recovery times, my new über-resilient self, thanks to my diet. Had I pushed myself too far? Most coaches suggest reaching a training peak 80 percent of the distance you’re going to be racing. Most coaches, of course, do not run ultras. No one could consistently do 80-mile training runs. So I had decided I would do the next best thing. I would re-create the stress—physical, emotional, and mental—that an ultra would present.

The day after Mount Si, when all I wanted to do was stay prone, I blocked out the perilous tune. I tackled another course just as tough—some would say tougher.

There was no trail map for the Twelve Peaks run, a 35-mile course created by a Seattle runner in his fifties named Ron Nicholl, invariably referred to as “the legendary Ron Nicholl.” He was also known as “the trail masochist of Seattle.” While many ultrarunners (myself included) look to improve efficiency in their stride and maximize the ratio of the distance traveled to the effort, Ron was known as a guy who did things the hard way until they got easy, which is when he tried to make them harder.

The Twelve Peaks climbs weren’t quite as long as those of Mount Si, but they boasted other attractions. They covered 35 miles, compared to the 24 of three trips of Mount Si. They contained an ascent of 10,500 feet and the same descent. And they curled and climbed and plunged over slimy, moss-covered boulders, through mud, straight into a salmonberry-infested jungle known to those who survived it as “’Nam.” Thick, wild ferns and sinister hemlock sprouted from impossibly green foliage. Douglas firs loomed, made a cathedral of wood and needles for me, turned midday into eternal night. I ran them in sleet and in snow and in 85-degree heat that turned the forest as clammy as a pressure cooker.

The moss and muck delivered the pain I sought, but I wanted more.

My hero Chuck Jones had granted interviews (and confused interviewers) where he spoke of vibrations and wavelengths and signs from the hidden world, and while I knew what he meant—the sensation of losing oneself, of entering a zone at once connected to the earth and separated from earthly concerns—I wasn’t sure how to achieve it on a regular, predictable basis.

I had improved myself as a skier by reading, so I read. And what I discovered was bushido, the culture of ancient Japanese warriors, who espoused courage, simplicity, honor, and self-sacrifice.

According to bushido, the best mind for the battlefield—or the race—is that of emptiness, or an empty mind. This doesn’t mean sleepiness or inattention; the bushido concept of emptiness is more like that rush of surprise and expansiveness you get under an ice-cold waterfall. The empty mind is a dominant mind. It can draw other minds into its rhythm, the way a vacuum sucks up dirt or the way the person on the bottom of a seesaw controls the person on the top. When I hear a runner say he “runs his own race,” what I hear is bushido.

Bushido is letting go of the past and the future and focusing on the moment. As Thoreau, an American practitioner (though he probably didn’t realize it) of bushido and a pretty good distance walker himself, wrote, “Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers . . . simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.” I created my own bushido exercises. I stood in icy rivers to strengthen my mind’s control over my body. I sat cross-legged and meditated, visualizing my breath, focusing.

Another part of bushido is mastery of the martial arts, an intensely concentrated study of one’s craft. My craft was running, and as I climbed those northwest mountains, I tried to do so with extreme focus. It’s easy to shut your brain off when you’re running long distances, and sometimes it’s necessary, but I stayed plugged in. I concentrated on running a particular section harder, on picking up speed downhill while I rested my heart and lungs.

In my two months training in Seattle, my endurance improved all by itself. Dusty and all the other tough guys were right about that. Just do the distance, and that will (usually) save you. But my joints and muscles were memorizing new movements, too. My mind was becoming easier to empty and easier to fill with determination. Sometimes I even felt as if I was floating over the mossy trails.