only;
the only black man in the mix. Or were they? I took another look.
Everyone who passed me was focused. Each in their own pain zone. They
didn’t even see me.
I was losing touch
with reality in small doses, because my mind was folding
over on itself, loading tremendous physical pain with dark emotional
garbage it had dredged up from the depths of my soul. Translation: I was
suffering on an unholy level reserved for dumb fucks who thought the laws
of physics and physiology did not apply to them. Cocky bastards like me
who felt like they could push the limits safely because they’d done a couple
of Hell Weeks.
Right, well, I hadn’t done
this
. I hadn’t run
one hundred miles with zero
training. Had anybody in the history of mankind even attempted something
so fucking foolish? Could
this
even be done at all? Iterations of that one
simple question slid by like a digital ticker on my brain screen. Bloody
thought bubbles floated from my skin and soul.
Why? Why? Why the fuck are you still doing this to yourself?!
I hit the incline at mile sixty-nine—that seven-foot ramp,
the pitch of a
shallow driveway—which would make any seasoned trail runner laugh out
loud. It buckled my knees and sent me reeling backward like a delivery
truck in neutral. I staggered, reached for the ground with the tips of my
fingers, and nearly capsized. It took ten seconds to cover the distance. Each
one dragged out like an elastic thread, sending shockwaves of pain from my
toes to the space behind my eyeballs. I hacked and coughed,
my gut
twisted. Collapse was imminent. Collapse is what the fuck I deserved.
At the seventy-mile mark I couldn’t take another step forward. Kate had set
up our lawn chair on the grass near the start/finish line and when I teetered
toward her I saw her in triplicate, six hands groping toward me, guiding me
into that folding chair. I was dizzy and dehydrated, starved of potassium
and sodium.
Kate was a nurse; I had EMT training, and
went through my own mental
checklist. I knew my blood pressure was probably dangerously low. She
removed my shoes. My foot pain was no Shawn Dobbs illusion. My white
tube socks were caked in blood from cracked toenails and broken blisters. I
asked Kate to grab some Motrin and anything she thought might be helpful
from John Metz. And when she was gone, my body continued to decline.
My stomach rumbled and when I looked down I saw bloody piss leak down
my leg. I shit myself too. Liquefied diarrhea rose in the space between my
ass and a lawn chair that would never be quite the same again. Worse, I had
to hide it because I knew if Kate saw how bad off I really was she would
beg me to pull out of the race.
I’d run seventy miles in twelve hours with no training, and this was my
reward. To my left on the lawn was another four-pack of Myoplex. Only a
muscle head like me would choose that thick-ass protein drink as my
hydrating agent of choice. Next to it was half a box of Ritz crackers, the
other half now congealing and churning in my stomach and intestinal tract
like an orange blob.
I sat there with my head in my hands for twenty minutes. Runners shuffled,
glided,
or staggered past me, as I felt time tick down on my hastily
imagined, ill-conceived dream. Kate returned, knelt down, and helped me
lace back up. She didn’t know the extent of my breakdown and hadn’t quit
on me yet. That was something, at least, and in her hands were a welcome
reprieve from more Myoplex and more Ritz crackers.
She handed me
Motrin, then some cookies and two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,
which I washed down with Gatorade. Then she helped me stand.
The world wobbled on its axis. Again she split into two, then three, but she
held me there as my world stabilized and I took a single, solitary step. Cue
the ungodly pain. I didn’t know it yet, but my feet were slivered with stress
fractures. The toll of hubris is heavy on the ultra circuit, and my bill had
come due. I took another step. And another. I winced. My eyes watered.
Another step. She let go. I walked on.
Slowly.
Way too fucking slow.
When I stopped at the seventy-mile mark, I was well ahead of the pace I
needed to run one hundred
miles in twenty four hours, but now I was
walking at a twenty-minute-a-mile clip, which was as fast as I could
possibly move. Ms. Inagaki breezed by me and glanced over. There was
pain
in her eyes too, but she still looked the part of an athlete. I was a
motherfucking zombie, giving away all the precious time I stored up,
watching my margin for error burn to ash.
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