ultras they picture trail runs through remote wilderness and don’t often
imagine circuit races, but there were some serious runners in the field at the
San Diego One Day.
This was the American National 24-Hour
Championship and athletes
descended from all over the country hoping for a trophy, a place on the
podium, and the modest winner-take-all cash prize of, ahem, $2,000. No,
this was not a gilded event, basking in corporate sponsorship, but it was the
site for a team comp between the U.S. ultra-distance
national team and a
team from Japan. Each side fielded teams of four men and four women who
each ran for twenty-four hours. One of the top individual athletes in the
field was also from Japan. Her name was Ms. Inagaki, and early on she and
I kept pace.
Ms. Inagaki and I during San Diego 100
SBG turned up to cheer me on that morning with his wife and two-year-old
son. They huddled up on the sidelines with my new wife, Kate, who I’d
married a few months before, a little over
two years after my second
divorce from Pam was finalized. When they saw me, they couldn’t help but
double over in laughter. Not just because SBG was still beat up from our
workout the night before, and here I was trying to run a hundred miles, but
because of how out of place I looked. When I spoke to SBG about it not
long ago, the scene still made him laugh.
“So ultra marathoners are a little weird, right,” SBG said, “and that morning
it was like there were all these skinny ass,
college professor looking,
fucking granola eating weirdoes, and then there is this one big black dude
who looks like a fucking linebacker from the Raiders, running around this
track jacked the fuck up with no shirt on, and I’m thinking of that song we
had in kindergarten…
one of these things is not like the other
. That was the
song going through my head when I saw this fucking NFL linebacker
running around this damn track with all these skinny little nerds. I mean
they were some hard motherfuckers, those runners.
I am not taking that
away from them, but they were all super clinical about nutrition and shit,
and you just put a pair of shoes on and said, let’s go!”
He’s not wrong. I didn’t put much thought into my race plan at all. I
hatched it at Walmart the night before, where I bought a fold-out lawn chair
for Kate and me to use during the race and my fuel for the entire day: one
box of Ritz crackers and two four-packs of Myoplex. I didn’t drink much
water. I didn’t even consider my electrolyte or potassium levels or eat any
fresh fruit. SBG brought me a pack of Hostess
chocolate donuts when he
showed up, and I gobbled those in a few seconds. I mean, I was winging it
for real. Yet, at mile fifteen I was still in fifth place, still keeping pace with
Ms. Inagaki, while Metz was getting more and more nervous. He ran up to
me and tagged along.
“You should slow down, David,” he said, “Pace yourself a bit more.”
I shrugged. “I got this.”
It’s true that I felt okay in that moment, but my bravado was also a defense
mechanism. I knew if I were to start planning my race at that point, the
bigness of it would become too much to comprehend. It would feel like I
was supposed to run the length of the damn sky. It would feel impossible. In
my mind, strategy was the enemy of the moment, which is where I needed
to be. Translation: when it came to ultras, I was green as fuck. Metz didn’t
press me, but he kept a close watch.
I finished mile twenty-five at about the four-hour mark and I was still in
fifth place, still running with my new Japanese friend. SBG was long gone,
and Kate was my only support crew. I’d
see her every mile, posted up in
that lawn chair, offering a sip of Myoplex and an encouraging smile.
I’d run a marathon only once before, while I was stationed in Guam. It was
unofficial, and I ran it with a fellow SEAL on a course we made up on the
spot, but back then I was in excellent cardiovascular shape. Now, here I was
bearing down on 26.2 miles for just the second time in my entire life, this
time without training, and once I got there I realized that I’d
run beyond
known territory. I had twenty more hours and nearly
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