Running on Empty (8 page)

I had my moments of doubt. Ray's schedule taxed me, took me to my physical and mental limits over and over again. At the end of 2007, as a training exercise, I participated in a seventy-two-hour run with the goal of completing seventy miles a day for three consecutive days, the same daily mileage we hoped to cover once we began the “real” event in California. About ten hours into the first day of the race, as I circled the looped course, I was right on schedule with more than fifty miles behind me, when I began to question myself.
Why am I doing this? What's the purpose? Do I really want to be here? This is incredibly hard, and I don't want to be out here for another sixty-two hours.

I'd had enough.

I quit.

When I told Heather that I was through, that I was done with the whole endeavor—forget this race, this insane training schedule, and running across America—she didn't believe me, however much she may have hoped it was true. Quitting was out of character, out of the blue. But, I insisted, I'd been thinking about it for a full hour before I stopped. I wasn't ready to carry this burden.

Everyone goes through these periods, not just in athletic pursuits but also in life, and we all find our way through them somehow, even if they last longer than we want. We call on our friends. We lean on our spouses and ask them not to worry too much. Ultimately, we suck it up and start talking ourselves out of whatever tailspin we've been in. It took me a good month to get over it, to regain my confidence and motivation after quitting; it took the people I love counseling me to accept what I was going through and give myself permission to let it be; it took one of my closest friends telling me that it didn't matter if I never ran another step and that everyone loved me for myself, even without the running; it took my coach, Ray, telling me that it would pass and not to force it.

It took me realizing that it was okay to lose the battle so I could come back to win the war. I could be kind to myself about a temporary “failure” to complete, and it served to save me, psychologically, for the times when it would be
really
important to continue no matter what.

Ultimately, the start-date delays allowed me to train hard and taper several times before we got to the starting line in San Francisco. During this time, I also devoted an hour or two each week to phone sessions with a friend and mentor for toughening up and steeling myself never to quit during the transcon. We'd talk about the upcoming race. We'd talk about Ted Corbitt and the bunioneers. We'd talk about heroes and history, about myth and mystery, about the rigors of the road and what it would take to march my body across the entire United States. These conversations were designed to prepare me mentally, just as Ray's training plan was designed to prepare me physically, for the upcoming ordeal, to give me the strength and stamina to deal with whatever might happen once we were under way.

Yet all during that training period, from October 2007 to September 2008, Heather and I had more immediate hardships to confront. There was her resistance, and my insistence. There was also a string of personal tragedies that pushed us both to the outer edges of loss and sorrow, as well as some moments of brilliance and hope and inspiration. All of this, too, may have been preparation for what was to come.

“The best I can figure is that we've been told too many times that adventure just isn't in the cards for everyday folk like you and me. It's reserved for the people we read about in books and magazines, not mere mortals like us. Well, I'm not buying it.”

Chris Douglass was always saying things like that, getting himself and other people inspired to do what's out of the ordinary. He'd competed in marathons and an ultramarathon, struck out on wild adventures he called “small world treks,” written charming vignettes about the people he'd met and the places he'd seen in the world, and recently embarked on a new interest, short films.

That's why he called me in May 2008, four months before the start of my run across America, to introduce himself and request an interview. He told me that he admired me, that he was preparing for his own cross-country trip (walking from Colorado to Maine), and that he wanted to talk with me, get to know me, pick up a few of my “secrets,” and put together a promotional clip I could use, gratis. At twenty-eight, he came across as incredibly warm, friendly, and enthusiastic about this project and the kind of life he'd carved out for himself. I could tell, already, that Chris was my kind of guy, a kindred spirit, and I wanted to meet him, too.

“Sure, come on over to the house and we'll interview each other.” I thought it would be fun if he asked me whatever questions he had, and then we'd flip the camera around and I'd return the favor.

After a lively afternoon together, filming mostly on my back deck in Idaho Springs, Colorado, we said our good-byes and Chris promised to send me a finished clip in a couple of days. When he left, Heather turned to me, an odd look on her face. “My god, Marshall. That was what I imagine it would have been like if I'd met you twenty years ago
.
Those intense blue eyes. His build. His dreams and energy.”

To tell the truth, the similarities were eerie, except Chris exuded positivity in a way I never had. That's not to say he was some airheaded Pollyanna. He had a way of sharing his ideas and experiences, displaying a groundedness that was invigorating and reassuring at the same time.

What a breath of fresh air! Heather and I had been through the wringer ever since I'd decided to do the transcontinental run, and meeting him gave us a lift we desperately needed. For months, we'd faced some agonizing twists and turns. Heather had continued to worry that I was going to permanently damage myself physically or psychologically in attempting this feat, and I'd had a hard time envisioning such a journey without her support. I'm not sure she was able even to consider giving it to me, however. In the spring of 2007, her father had been diagnosed with stage-IV kidney cancer, and she'd made him her first priority. We'd fully expected him to be gone within a few months, but we'd gotten lucky, and Rory was given more time than that.

Even as Heather was being frustrated in her attempts to talk me out of running across America, Rory was cheering me on. “Tell me what you're doing again?”

Despite his own suffering, he wanted to hear about my training regimen, which I'd begun that fall over Heather's protests. We always called Rory my biggest fan, because he made sure I knew how proud he was of me, and not just for the athletic achievements, but also for my character. The feeling was mutual. I admired his intellect, valued his opinions, and connected with this respected biologist's affection for the outdoors. In short, I loved Rory. We were friends, and at only ten years older, he was basically a contemporary of mine. I remember him telling me when we met that it was okay for me to date his daughter “as long as you don't call me ‘Dad' and I don't have to call you ‘son.'”

Deal. We understood each other. Still, when he became so ill, I couldn't help feeling as if I was losing a father figure. Nor did it keep me from resenting the time Heather was spending away from home to care for him. As much as I loved Rory, I wanted to be her first priority, and this was, understandably, the cause of even more friction between us. Somebody once said that adversity doesn't build character, it reveals it, and that's certainly been true for me, for better and worse.

When winter of 2007 came, we heard that Ted Corbitt had died of complications from prostate and colon cancer. It struck me not just as a personal loss, but also a calamity for our sport. My grief was intensified by a feeling that we were burying an icon, a standard bearer. He stood for a kind of sportsmanship that seemed to be waning, one marked by ethics, doing what you say you'll do, and setting an example for the up-and-comers. With Ted gone, it felt as if the torch of the elder American ultrarunners had been passed to me, and just two months into my training for running across America, I made a silent promise that I'd hold that torch high in his honor.

Then, in April 2008, while we were at Rory's house with Heather's mom, taking care of him after a serious setback in his declining health, I got a call from my own mother.

Your dad's not doing well, son. He's in intensive care at the hospital.

What? This was too much. “What's wrong, Mom?”

My father had prostate cancer, had had it for thirteen years and told no one except my mom, who alone looked after him, though he wasn't exactly giving in to the disease. She'd even had to trick him into going to the hospital when he clearly needed emergency care. (She'd pretended to be driving him to work.) Assured that Rory was stable enough for us to leave him, Heather and I both went to see my dad at the Northern Colorado Medical Center, where he faced death like the old soldier he was. Compared with the horrors he'd observed during World War II, our life—by no means luxurious—must have seemed like a dream to him, and Dad knew how to appreciate it. So when he passed away, at age eighty-five, he had no regrets. I know because my daughter Ali, then eighteen, had offered to go out and do anything that her grandpa felt he'd left undone, and he'd patted her hand and told her no, there wasn't a thing. My dad died at peace with what he'd accomplished in his life.

There were things Dad never told us and that we discovered only after his passing. We knew that he'd risked his own life to carry a wounded soldier off the battlefield, not because my dad talked about it, but because the man he'd pulled to safety kept in contact with our family for the rest of his life. But it turns out that Elmer Ulrich had also participated in the liberation of survivors from the Buchenwald concentration camp. He never spoke of it. My cousin had found out only because she'd recently interviewed Dad for a school project and asked pointed questions.

I talked about this, and the father I knew, when I delivered his eulogy on a wind-whipped spring day.

We returned to Winona, Minnesota, to help Heather's mom, Janis, care for Rory, and just three weeks later, on May 10, he died, tearing Heather's world apart. I found myself reverting to an old role, trying to stay strong and positive in the face of what was becoming an avalanche of loss.

That's the emotional landscape onto which Chris had walked, and we drank in his youthful exuberance like two thirsty travelers who've finally wandered out of the desert and found water.

The short film he made about me was posted on You Tube within a few days, just as he'd promised. (You can watch the clip, and others he made, at
http://www.youtube.com/user/ChristopherEDouglass
.) We were so impressed with what he'd done that we showed it, like proud parents, to lots of our friends, including one who did not disperse praise liberally. Someone who was more likely to designate something as “complete shit” than a treasure, she loved what Chris had produced, thought it was fantastic, and wanted to be introduced to him right away so she could discuss some projects they could do together.

On May 28, Chris called us from his car while he was driving to the start of his Colorado-to-Maine adventure, just to let us know how thrilled he was to have met us, how flattered he was that my friend liked his short film, and how he looked forward to working with her as soon as he got home. He was sure life couldn't get any better than this.

Thirty minutes later, Chris was dead, killed in a car accident.

His mother called to tell us what had happened, and a few days later, shocked and further numbed by our compounding grief, Heather and I traveled to Maine to attend our third funeral in two months. Although I'd known Chris for only a short time, his parents told me that I probably understood him better than anyone else, that Chris had called me his hero, and they asked me to deliver Chris's eulogy. While we were there in his hometown, we stayed in his room, slept in his bed.

I quoted Chris during that eulogy, repeated his rejection of the idea that adventure wasn't in the cards for ordinary folk. Chris had embodied a philosophy the two of us shared: that living life to its fullest is what it's all about. Yes, there may be suffering—in fact, it's certain there will be—but it serves to heighten our joy. It makes us grateful to be alive.

Without question, I was grateful to have met and known Chris, if only for a few weeks. Although his death pained me, I felt something extraordinary had transpired between us, and I cherished it. His vibrancy of spirit, like that of the other men who'd recently passed into memory, redoubled my commitment to carry out the transcontinental adventure. I was determined to go.

 

We were at it again, arguing about the impending run, which was now only a few weeks away.

Why? Heather was asking me for the who-knows-how-many-eth time. With all we'd been through, with all I was sure to go through, why? Why?
Why?
Worn down from more than a year of this, I said the only thing that made sense to me anymore.