Running Into Empty
The ultramarathoner's odyssey
By Melissa Bond
The dark wind starts to blow as your mind separates from your body. Fear and uncertainty crawl your body like ants. You are blistered, pulsing with agony. Everything in you shouts to stop, but you don’t. Instead you push through a kind of gossamer cloud. And everything is different, otherworldly. You feel as if you’ve ceased to exist, yet strangely you’ve never felt more alive. You are free.
All the ultramarathoners in Utah’s Wasatch Front 100 Mile Endurance Run, which winds through the heart of the central Wasatch Mountains, will tell you their versions of this story. Often called “one hundred miles of heaven and hell,” the Wasatch course begins in Kaysville and ends at the Homestead Resort in Midway. Runners gain 26,000 cumulative feet in elevation, which ranges from 4,700 to 10,460 feet. Temperatures dip into the 20s at night and often edge into triple digits during the day. The descents can be bone-breakingly steep and are coupled with rocky terrain that can fling a runner off the trail.
Hypothermia is a concern, as is renal failure from the acute dehydration that can overcome even the most experienced runner. The course is primitive and isolated and brutal. It’s also one of the most popular ultramarathons in the country.
I’ve met many who’ve run the Wasatch Front 100, and they’re part of an iron-willed, scrappy breed. Ultramarathoners hold one another tight. They don’t compete with other runners much. They compete with the mountain. There’s a fury for living in their bones, a quest for the personal freedom that’s held in the metaphor of running anywhere, anytime, all under your own power.
Though I’ve never run the Wasatch Front 100 and claim a genetic predisposition to shuffling, I am obsessed with ultramarathoning. My obsession with endurance running took form in the fall of 2000. I was angry about the way my life was going. Daily work consisted of mindless paper filing and data entry. What I’d imagined as a promising romance had gone sour.
My ego flailed. I’d flatlined into a cliché, and it made me furious. I decided to run the Rim to Rim, a 50-mile hump from one side of the Grand Canyon to the other. I trained for months, running for miles under the furious noise of Rage Against the Machine and Ani DiFranco. My reasons for running were base. They were primal. I was pissed. I needed to unhinge, take the lid off, do anything that would break the pattern of malaise and mediocrity that had become my life.
I’d heard of Dean Karnazes, the ultramarathoner who’d run 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days. He’s run the Western States Endurance Run and the Wasatch Front 100, and he won the Badwater Ultramarathon, “the world’s toughest footrace,” covering 135 miles in 120-degree temperatures. Later, a friend told me about Ron Zeller, a Utah man who’d run the Wasatch Front 100 one year after being diagnosed with stomach cancer. I felt different from these people. Their accomplishments seemed superhuman, completely out of the ballpark. They were the X-Men of the running world, simultaneously admirable and insane. I was not one of them. I imagined them to be made of muscle and light.
On the evening of his 30th birthday, Dean Karnazes tells me, he was plastered and lumbering around the Paragon Bar and Café, a swanky nightclub in San Francisco’s Marina district. Disenchanted with 12-hour days in a corporate office, he’d answered his malaise on this particular night by getting trashed on tequila. It was the only thing he knew to do. Running was something he’d done as a kid, but he’d hung up his shoes at age 15 and hadn’t picked them up since. Recounting this time in his life isn’t hard for Karnazes. He’s told his story to innumerable reporters. After Outside magazine named him “America’s Greatest Runner,” and his book Ultramarathon Man became a national bestseller, he was catapulted into the position of ultramarathon’s poster boy. His life changed drastically. But before this, he says, he’d lost his center. He was moving fast; he had a new Lexus and a hefty options package, but was he moving forward? Everything had become about chasing the deal and making as much money as possible. He sensed his life was being wasted.
The night of Karnazes’s 30th birthday would be a pivotal scene, were one to make a movie of his life. The woman who was not his wife would shimmy up to him with a smile bright as Hollywood. She’d lean in. Karnazes would stand as if at the edge of a cliff. The scent of temptation would fill the bar. The background would grow dim, fuzzing into a slow, uncertain blur. And then Karnazes would turn. He would turn and walk to the back of the bar. He would walk through the kitchen and out the back door into the alley. Upon arriving home, still woozy from tequila, Karnazes would make the move that would invoke the spirit of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who would have been an ultramarathoner if he'd ever been a sportsman.
Karnazes stripped to his white cotton briefs, donned a pair of gardening shoes, and began running.
He stopped, he says, 30 miles and seven hours later. He’d run from downtown San Francisco, down the peninsula, and over the coastal ridge to a small town called Half Moon Bay. During the course of that evening, Karnazes thought of his sister Pary who’d died in a car accident at 18 and to whom he would eventually dedicate his book. He realized he’d been in a state of bereavement over her death for nearly 10 years. It was on that run, Karnazes tells me, that he decided to honor her by living every second of his life to the fullest: “You never know when your number is going to be up.” During the period he calls the great emptiness of his life, Karnazes turned to running for strength. And he hasn’t stopped. It’s clear that, for him, running isn’t about running. It’s about testing the limits of human endurance and stretching the self. It’s a personal odyssey. Running is the vehicle that carries Karnazes’s heart, gives it space to breathe, gives it a room with a view. And, he says, he needs to know how far he can go.
In talking to ultramarathoners, the subject of addiction eventually comes up. Perhaps they’re taking the offensive against the inevitable analysis that sees their running as extreme. Perhaps, during those dark nights on the trail, they wonder themselves what the drive is all about. In his book, Karnazes doesn’t give a clear answer, because there isn’t one. He, like many ultramarathoners, has difficulty explaining the impulse to run 100 miles or more, through the night, in a sport that offers no corporate sponsorship, no ESPN coverage, and no great stadiums of cheering fans. The motivation is almost entirely intrinsic.
There’s little externally that promotes such action, beyond the camaraderie of being part of a gang of outsiders—and the belt buckle you get if you finish in time.
This question came up when I talked with Karnazes and again when I talked with Roch Horton, a tall man who was wearing Blade-style shades the night I met him and who gave me his phone number signed with the missive, “Running and thinking.” Attracted by its difficulty and the beauty of its point-to-point course, Horton has run the Wasatch Front 100 several times.
The addiction to the natural world is obvious, Horton tells me. “These miles of trails are simply connective tissue to what we all crave the most.” Beyond that, he says, is the addiction to the empty, to unaltered nothingness and timelessness. When on a long run, the mind simply checks out, quietly humming while the legs and body churn forward. Neurologists would point to this state of relaxed attention and explain that ultramarathoners are attaining a consistent alpha state. Exercise physiologists would discuss the endorphin payoff that comes after pushing the body to its limits. Karnazes would point to the hours and hours of mindless wandering and say, simply, “Freedom.”
After passing through Chin Scraper, Baugh Bearing Hill (treacherous footing), Lambs Canyon Pass (known for its puke spots), and Sleepy Hollow (the beginning of the pavement to Brighton), runners of the Wasatch Front 100 approach Catherine’s Pass, mile 75 and the place of the dark wind. The moment when reality seems to separate. Horton describes it passing through “a sort of gauzy, translucent curtain.” Everyone, it seems, has a story about Catherine’s Pass. Runners cannot bail out at this point. If you’ve left the Brighton checkpoint at the edge of dehydration or hypothermia, you’re in big trouble. In 1993, Ron Zeller barely made it to Catherine’s Pass. He was 65 and one year earlier had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. The doctors had been blunt: “You’ve got maybe a year.”
Not being one to take this kind of information sitting down, Zeller went on a healing journey. He spent time at the Ann Wigmore Natural Health Institute in Puerto Rico and worked with an Indian medicine woman. He upped his nutrition, got a handle on the fact that he was a workaholic, and started taking it easy. One year later, the doctors could find no trace of the stomach cancer. But they didn’t give him a clean bill of health. They told him the cancer might still be lurking. Somewhere. They just couldn’t find it. Fear blossomed. Zeller realized that, though he didn’t feel sick, he would have to do something to shock his mind into believing he was well. And though he’d never done anything like it in his life, he signed up for the Wasatch Front 100.
He had six months to train.
Zeller never expected to finish the race. The farthest he’d run during his training was 15 miles. But something happened. He kept running. He reached mile 50 and kept running.
At the Brighton checkpoint, he tells me, he was done. He hunkered into a chair, and someone was spooning food into his mouth when he felt feet in his back. His wife kicked him up to standing. “Look, old man,” she told him, “you said you were going to run 100 miles. Get out on that trail and do it now.” And he did. And the dark wind started to blow. The next couple of hours, he said, were the hardest of his life. But after Catherine’s Pass, the wind died down. The sun peeked out. He started jogging and then running. Like Odysseus, he’d finally seen the shore, and nothing was going to stop him from getting there. He ended up winning the race in his age and weight division. He got his belt buckle, but the real prize was even bigger: He couldn’t deny the fact that he was healthy. He’d taken his fear on a run and it couldn’t keep up. The cancer was gone.
When I ran from one side of the Grand Canyon to the other, I let myself feel everything because I no longer wanted to feel nothing. My life had been a wash of white and I was sick of it. I ran and pain pulsed at my knees; the base of my skull; at my shoulder, bloodied because of an ill-fitting backpack. I wasn’t alone.
With just five miles to go, halfway up the South Rim, one of the men in our group collapsed. It was getting dark and the temperature was dropping into the 30s. Three of us stayed with him as dehydration crept like a delirium through his muscles.
He started to shiver and laugh hysterically. Then he started to cry: deep groans, like the sound a glacier makes when the temperature shifts and the earth itself seems to crack open. We spent the next half-hour rubbing his limbs vigorously and telling him bad, ugly, funny jokes that we’d never repeat. We told him he was beautiful. We made him drink and told him to get his ass off the ground. We rubbed and rubbed, thrusting our thumbs into his quads, his shoulders, his calves, rubbing the skin hard to bring the blood in.
Eventually, he hefted his body up and began slogging toward the top. We followed, shouting encouragement until the last mile when we fell silent, everything in us evaporating into the night. We made it to the top in the dark, all four of us, dragging our heels toward the car in the Arizona dirt. The stars hovered over us, the sharpest, most magnificent points of light I’d ever seen. I felt awake. I’d made it. I was ecstatic.
In my last conversation with Dean Karnazes, we talked about pain. I’d read the section in his book where he describes hitting a wall of pain at mile 99 of the Western States Endurance Run. That last mile was on pavement. Karnazes’s legs were nearly useless, so he crawled up the middle of the dark road. He collapsed in front of an oncoming car, and what happened afterward can only be described in mythic terms.
The car screeched to a halt. Karnazes, defeated and slumped on warm asphalt, began growling. He describes it as if he awakened out of a dream. Faces of the people who had helped him during the race ran through his mind: his sister, the woman with the espresso brownies, the two guys who had hefted gallons of water to the most primitive checkpoint on the path, the medic who’d glued his heel together with superglue. These people were not supporting him per se; they were supporting the singular human effort to break past barriers. He was simply the host, the body running that dream forward. Karnazes jumped up, shook his arms and legs wildly, growling and shouting, “I can!” He ran past the startled couple in the car and when the pain came, he leaned in. He hunted it down. His beliefs about himself, his entire history, were erased in that moment. From that point on, nothing in his life would ever be the same.
And I realize that there’s a common thread in all of the stories I’ve heard, including mine. Each one pulls out a hunger that exists like an animal inside of us. We want to live passionately. We want to run with our hearts singing. We don’t want grief or fear or sickness to bury us or break us down. But just wanting this isn’t enough. You’ve got to push it out. You’ve got to let that animal howl inside of you. And, sometimes, to let it howl, you’ve got to let it run.
Melissa Bond is associate editor and poetry editor for the Wasatch Journal. She is the 2002 recipient of the Mayor’s Artist Award for the Literary Arts and was named the Best Poet in Motion by Salt Lake City Weekly in 2006. Her book of poetry, Hush, was published in 2006. She lives in Salt Lake City.
