5 Runners That I Know

Two weeks ago, the night before my first ultra marathon, I received an email from a friend. It was sent to two others as well; the four of us ran on the same high school cross-country team.

Kate, training for her first marathon said: "I am on a low mileage week (long run: only 14!), yet still was able to achieve a goal that I've been aiming for my entire running career...I bet the Attackerman [that's me] can guess, when I say that it is the most hardcore thing a runner can do...I puked during a run...It really is something I've equated with ultra-awesome athletes since my WHS track days. And here is the story... Now, maybe yesterday I had ice cream for dinner with a dessert of peeps. So maybe I wasn't properly fueled. And I certainly knew it from the beginning of the run, when not even a half-mile into it I slowed down because I had that feeling in my stomach. I thought that I knew how to push the line appropriately without tanking or ralphing. But as Josh and I are .75 miles from the end of the run, going not-fast but uphill, I stopped, said "I've just got to puke", then puked. Gu and gatorade. A few times. Then started running again! It was f***ing phenomenal...I ran until I puked, and then I ran some more.

Only another runner would understand how impressed I was. I don’t neccessarily advocate running to the point of vomiting, and despite what a few graphic remarks about my knee in recent posts suggest, I am not a masochist. Yet, all the runners I know appreciate the way putting one foot in front of the other again and again and again makes one discover and challenge the limits and possibilities of their own bodies.

Fellow former Blue Devil, Kathleen replied "Lately, when I run I start to get teary eyed as I imagine racing again, running as fast as I possibly can. I'm not ready to race yet, but I have been running an hour about 3x a week. My new orthodics make me a superhuman! My orthodics have addressed my 'one leg shorter than the other' problem and I feel so straight whenever I wear them. It's amazing."
Hearing about their running, particularly the night before my first ultra marathon was enormously inspiring. Angela, a medical student at Columbia University, has yet to surface from her hospital rotations to tell us what she’s up to. But hearing from the others reminded me of watching her race one day. It was the end of the season, but the first time she was able to compete that year. She was worried about the race, but when the gun went off, in the biggest display of courage and love I have ever witnessed, she did what everyone else did. She ran. It took her 30 minutes to complete 2 miles. She was the last to finish, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind who the real winner was that day. She was 16 years old at the time, and she had cancer.

Running makes people do truly remarkable things. After a year of lonely running in Maseru, I’ve been lucky to find a few amazing running partners. I met one of them on the way to the Soweto Marathon. He was running the 10k (which I believe would have been the longest he ever ran) and he gave me a ride up to the race. In the first conversation we ever had, he informed me he would never run a marathon, and stopped short of telling me he thinks I’m insane for 1) doing it and 2) liking it, though he made these feelings clear later. It took a few months, but I eventually coerced him into running with me. He contemplated running the Two Oceans half-marathon until he found out that unlike the ultra marathon, the half marathon did not actually reach the ocean. His solution? Less than 6 months after the Soweto 10k, he ran the 56k Two Oceans ultra marathon. (Technically he remained true to his word and has still never run a marathon).

To train for the Soweto Marathon, I used to do long runs going across the border. While doing some post run grocery shopping in Ladybrand, the nearest South African town, an English man approached me and asked me if I had run all the way there. I confirmed this, and he asked if I’m mad. Shortly after this meeting, he joined the ranks of the insane, and we started training for Comrades together. Chris had run his first and only marathon 20 years before at the age of 21. A former paratrooper at well over 6 feet tall, I have never had such harassment-free running as I do with Chris. It's like running with a body guard. We would meet at 5:30 am and while I gasped for air, he would chat away sharing army nutrition tips (baby food is easily digested energy during grueling exercise), aphorisms (“no one can take this away from you”) and hard core-ness (“If we can’t find a hotel near the race, I’ll sleep outside next to my car"). On his birthday, he told me that he makes the same mistakes at 41 that he did at 21. Being closer to the latter than the former, I didn’t know if I should find this a comforting thought or a terrifying one. Chris became my Two Oceans hero on the starting line. Rather, it was a little before the starting line, as we were lined up so far back from the starting line, we couldn't even see it. 30 seconds after the gun went off we could still sense absolutely no forward movement from the runners ahead. Chris, towering over the rest of us, peered down the street and said he couldn’t believe how many of us there were, it looked like minute or so until we could begin moving- not running, necessarily, but sort of drifting forward. I craned my neck wistfully, but couldn’t see beyond the hairy shoulders of the runner right in front of me. So Chris lifted me up above the crowd to the cheers of the other runners around us, and I saw through the fine rain and the 6 am darkness, for as far as my eyes could see, thousands of pinpricks of runners surging forward like a wave.

2 minutes and 35 seconds after the gun went off, I finally reached the starting line. And thus began my first ultra marathon, which I ran with gratitude and respect to one runner who ran until she vomited and then ran some more, one runner who flies in her orthotics, one runner who raced in between chemo treatments and jogs today cancer-free on the streets of New York City, one runner who ran 56 kilometers to see the ocean and one runner who showed me 7,000 others who ran my first ultra with me.