Saturday, May 24, 2014

Why We Run Ultramarathons

Why.

There are as many reasons as there are miles: Lose Weight! Feel Good! Fight addictions! Fresh Air! Connect With Nature! Get Away From The Spouse/Kids!

But really, why do we run? Especially the long, Superlong, multi-hour or multi-day distances? There has to be more to it than Exercise...and there is. After 7 years, 4 marathons, a half-dozen 50k's, couple of 50 milers, couple of 100k's and a lone 100 miler, finally, I found the answer in the unlikeliest of places--during a mere 1 hour-long, 4.5 mile non-descript jog on a moderately populated trail in a moderately populated part of the midwestern United States.

The story of why we run ultra-marathons starts at where we're coming from. We work 8am-5pm jobs, then have 5:30pm-7:30am families, live in lawn-mowed communities in the vicinity of paved cities, we shop for our wares within strip-mall settings and set advertisement-dictated goals; by that I mean we want the cars, the beer, the financial planning and the clothes that television or the Internet tells us we want. And all of it, 100% of it, is a lie.

I'm not saying your families aren't important. They are. Just bear with me.

When there is a planned ultramarathon race coming up, especially a big one (let's say a 100k), we don't just think about it fleetingly once in a great while. No, we Think About It. We obsess over it. We check the weather daily, check our gear, check our diets, check our schedules, check our poo, and suddenly everything in our lives will revolve around the fast-approaching race.

The last couple of nights before the race we obsess over how much we're sleeping. Any of the most minor little discomforts in the foot, knee, hip, leg, toe, ankle or ITB are given ridiculously careful scrutiny. Everything has to be perfect. There can be NO setbacks.

Then we get to the morning of the event. There's over a 99% chance you didn't sleep well the night before, which throws you off. As soon as you're awake on race day morning you start thinking about the race, the clothes, the weather, the gear, the food, and the hydration. Any minor imperfection throws you off. Bladder and bowels transition from unmentionables to Critically important factors which can make or break one of the biggest days ever. All of it has to be perfect.

On no other days of the year is this the case, only on race day. It's literally impossible for 100% of everything to go perfectly, so as you progress through the morning, you continue obsessing and end up at the starting line taking stock of just how far short of 100% you are for that particular race.

So you toe the line, somebody makes a somewhat-absurd attempt to yell "Go" and suddenly you're easing into a jog that will last for a long, long time. You get into a rhythm, enjoy the music you may be hearing, drink what you're supposed to be drinking, eat gels or real food or nothing, navigate the roots & rocks and/or paved turns & maybe the course markers/flags, maybe walk the uphills and run the flats & downhills.

You see other runners. Maybe you talk to them. It's a special, close-knit community. You're among your kin, your brothers & sisters, starting to feel the sweat, the oxygen, the air, the sounds, the life. You drink the water, eat whatever you eat, and start to feel that old, familiar, special, all-important "ache".

This is where we begin.

Remember that job we were talking about earlier? Me neither. After reaching about that 2-3 hour mark, all of those reports, emails, meetings and leveraged synergies suddenly have zero importance. The Neighborhood Watch, the shrubs, the lawn, the driveway, the porch furniture, the gossip, all are reduced to an importance-level of zero. Family still matters, that never goes away, but all the other less important stuff really starts to fade, little by little, mile by mile.

I'm kind of an idiot but despite this I've read some of the writings of people like Aldous Huxley, Friedrich Nietchze, Timothy Leary and Jim Morrison. Maybe none of these folks would agree with what I'm about to say, or they'd agree 100%, but as a result of their writings, during my little 4.5 mile trail run, I realized finally why Trail Ultramarathon running is such a profoundly spiritual experience.

Going back just for a moment to that typical morning in typical suburbia in whatever part of the world one lives in, when it's NOT race day, this is what we do: we wake up, put on a face that fits what we've spent our lives becoming, then we put on clothes that create a costume that fits what we've spent our lives becoming, then we head off to stores or jobs or places where we continue wearing those masks and costumes, and we play our parts in the great stage-play of life that we call everyday Reality. Society. Civilization. Get up, clean up, go do whatever it is we do, go home, go to bed, wake up the next morning and repeat.

Now back to the trail. We've run for a few hours, our clothes are now saturated with sweat, we've been drinking fluids and eating whatever we eat for some time now, the music we're listening to means less and less while the earth and sky and life around us means more and more. Little by little that mask we've crafted for ourselves starts to chip away. The costume that we wear starts to fade. The stage and props that help frame the play that is our lives all starts to disappear. Little by little, the "reality" that we've built for ourselves over the course of all of those years starts to vanish...and what remains in it's place is something far more organic, more true, more real than life itself. The entire façade of our lives becomes stripped away, replaced one mile at a time by that very thing we're running towards, which is, to be honest, Real True Actual Life.

Perhaps Alice In Wonderland was a fitting analogy. Start running an ultramarathon and see how far the rabbit hole truly goes. Once you've stripped away the mask, the costume and the stage of what has become "life", and bring to the forefront your true, actual Self, then you've finally started to really become Alive for the first time in months or years or ever.

Unfortunately, then you start to approach the final miles, then the finish line is in sight, you finish the race, hug your family, go back to you car within the paved parking lots, return to your homes within those lawn-framed communities, feel that creeping façade re-apply itself to your existence, and get back to normal. The dream of Reality is over, and you are back on that tired old stage playing the role of your "life" again.

But before that entirely happens you get this far-off look in your eye as you think back to maybe mile 29 or 43 when you had finally shed the cloak of reality for a few brief hours and became, gloriously, truly, for once in your life, Alive. Really and unquestionably Alive. That's the real reason why we run ultramarathons: so that we can leave our lives in order to truly live.