Running Through Opposite Land

This year’s Haliburton 50-miler shouldn’t have gone well. The previous two weeks had been insane, what with the launch of my new radio show, and the impending publication of my novel. I got 8 hours of sleep in the three days before the race. Also, I was being force-fed a bunch of life’s predictable crap sandwiches.

You know how it is: hidden icebergs of grief, bullet-holes in the drywall, gale-force winds.

Long story short: my head wasn’t in the game. Which is why, in the rush to catch my train, I forgot to pack my watch, salt pills and favourite shoes.

Doomed, I thought. I’m totally doomed.

Oh well. Might as well run the dang thing anyway.

Happily, Saturday morning, the conditions were perfect. Firm trails, and air so brisk you could see your breath. I went out waaaay too fast, but for some reason my body never crashed. Maybe because I ate a TON of food. Potatoes, bananas, gels, and uhhh Clif bars.

Now, I have a love-hate relationship with Clif bars. I hate it when I eat them, and I love puking them up.

Seriously – Clif bars are tougher to gag down than soggy woolen mittens. Sure, they have calories, but it’s like swallowing a Christmas sweater.

Luckily, at aid station 5, after trying to coax a third oatmeal-mohair bar down my throat, a fellow runner gifted me a packet of tangerine Gu chomps. Have you tried these chomps? OMG. It was like the Book of Genesis unfolding on my tongue.

The sugar flooded into my bloodstream and I started sproinging up the hills. Sproing! Sproing! Sproing! Sproing!

I bounded up hills I’d only walked before. I was a gazelle, a dik-dik, a Kangaroo Rat. The only hills I didn’t run were the diabolical three ‘sisters’ between Ben’s Trail and The Pass, and that 300-foot monster at the start of the King and James trail.

I had no right to be running this well. But sometimes runners get lucky, and wind up in Opposite Land. If you’ve been running for any length of time, you’ve probably been to Opposite Land. You train and plan meticulously for months, and yet, when race day comes, everything falls apart. Other times, even if you’ve been eating nothing but Pocky and crying your eyes out every night, you can still – for some inexplicable reason – exceed expectations.

Opposite land. That’s where I was. So I kept running hard. No part of my body complained.

I ran into old friends at aid stations and stopped for hugs. Those friends gave me more energy than a dozen boiled, salted potatoes.

“I miss you like whoa!”

“I miss you like whoa too!”

“I’d love to stay and chat, but-”

“Keep going! It’s a race!”

Shawna asked me what I thought about during this run. I told her I didn’t think about anything at all. Maybe my mind was too blasted from the radio show or the book or the drive-by shootings in my mind. Yes, it felt like the whole world was crashing down, but out here on this trail, I was in complete control. For nine hours, my whole existence was a dusty brown ribbon, two feet wide. It was that simple. Just keep running. Everything else will unfold as it should.

As usual, the trails were storybook pretty. Tree trunks as thick as elephant legs, and leaves that rattled in the breeze like twenty dollar bills. When I got to aid station 4, ten miles from the finish, I asked a volunteer for the time. I was delighted by her answer. I had a shot at breaking 9 hours. I ran on, and started to fantasize about the finish line. What would I do when I got there? Turn my usual pirouette? Do a couple of cartwheels? Or should I moonwalk? Hmmm.

In the end, I just leaned forward, and ran it in. My time was 9:02.

I know – pretty boring.

My parents were there, cheering wildly. And the moment I crossed the line, I realized my mistake.

Instead of racing straight across the fline, here’s what I should have done:

Abruptly stopped running – ten metres shy of the finish.
Walked over to the side of the road and hugged my parents.
Grabbed them by the hand.
Pulled them across the finish line beside me; all six of our hands raised high.

That’s what I should’ve done. Because all of my victories – deserved or not – are entirely thanks to them.

That’s what I learned from Opposite Land. Calories only push you so far. Heart pushes you further.

The Grind

As usual, I hated every minute of it.

I ran the North Face Endurance Challenge the other day. A fifty mile race, up and down Blue Mountain, in 40 degree humidity.

It was a punishing course, on a punishingly hot day. 100 or so runners struggled up 800 feet of elevation gain in the very first kilometer. Stupidly, I forgot to take my salt pills, and by 2 p.m., after 9 hours of running, my mind had turned to oatmeal.

“May I please have a double ocean liner freeway paste?” I asked a volunteer at the aid station.

“I’m sorry?” he replied.

“I said, I want an ecclesiastical marzipan hope merchant on a tugboat—“

Inside my head, my little speech made sense. But for some reason, when it left my mouth, it came out mangled.

Suddenly I yanked in my breath. Someone was chopping away at my back with a pickaxe.

Wait a second – no. It was just cold water. The volunteer had poured a glass of ice-water down my shirt.

“That better?” he said, snapping his finger in front of my eyes.

My eyeballs narrowed into laser beams. Suddenly I was all-powerful and alert. I was the Millenium Falcon! I was a Kendrick Lamar song!

“Thank you very much,” I told the volunteer. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to run.”

I ran 11 more miles after that. The temperature spiked and the sun was unrelenting. Runners dropped all around me, from heat exhaustion, quad muscles torn to shreds, sneakers melted into gluey white puddles.

The entire time I kept asking myself, WHY? WHY do I do this stupid sport? Am I really so fond of the nausea and the knee pain and the medicinal taste you get in your mouth after sucking down 20-odd vanilla-flavoured gels and the sight of yet another 150 metre ski hill you must force your complaining kneecaps to ascend? For what possible purpose do I do this? Vanity? A trim belly? An uppity post on facebook?

Of course, my attitude changed when I got to the finish line. Shawna was there. She told me that she’d finished reading my new novel, and that it had made her cry, and that she loved it, just loved it.

Suddenly the race was forgotten. All the pain, all the nausea, all the self-loathing – GONE.

“Seriously,” she said. “It’s really good.”

It’s a weird feeling, when, after three long years, your book has finally been finished, and goes off to China to be printed. Your editor stops texting you hourly, and your agent moves on to the next in a long line of impatient writers, and you suddenly feel adrift. You can barely remember the anguish you felt, slugging through each of the book’s 240 pages. At times, it felt like the agony would never end.

Writing is a lot like running that way. It’s intensely painful while you’re out there, but once you cross the finish line, you just feel lost.

Sight Unseen comes out October 1st. You can pre-order your copy here.