When You Don’t Know What Else To Do – Run

When I first decided I wanted to be an ultrarunner, I knew pretty much nothing about the sport other than I WANTED TO DO IT.  From my limited worldview in El Paso, I had only two points of reference: Dean Karnazes and Pam Reed.  I don’t know if this is because I was too lazy to find others, or if there just wasn’t a lot of information about the sport out in the world.  Either way, for good or for bad, I only had two role models.  So, I did what they did.

Dean was the runner famous for his memoir, Ultramarathon Man, where he regaled us with stories of running through the night, from city to city, stopping at stores for sodas, Gatorade and candy bars, and ordering pizza to be delivered to him at random intersections in the middle of nowhere.  For some reason, this laissez faire type of “training” fascinated me.  No plan?  No problem.  Just run, and when you get where you are going, turn around and go home.

So, that’s what I did.  I simply started running to random places.  Like the mall.  Or my parents’ house.  Or Tim’s office.  Anywhere I could show up sweaty and stinky and not get forcibly removed from the premises.

As insignificant as this “random” running seems now, it was a very big deal to me at the time because it represented something I felt deeply that I had lost: freedom.  While marriage and motherhood had both been lifetime goals for me, their quick and complete hostage-taking of my independence took me by total surprise.  Where I had envisioned myself traveling around the world, mothering my French/Spanish/Igbo speaking children in foreign countries, maybe even on the sea in a sailboat named Le Grand Bleu, in reality I found myself in a two-story French Tudor in what would be classified as the suburbs if El Paso was big enough to have suburbs.  And while I sang “Come Sail Away” and “Wild World” to my children as lullabies, there was no escaping the truth that I was no more living the adventurous life I had envisioned as a girl than if I had joined the convent or become a window washer.  I had sleepwalked into adulthood and ended up with a very beautiful life that didn’t fit.  And I didn’t feel lucky.

So running to the mall felt like a very big deal.  I would put some money, a light jacket and a book (to read while I ate a slice of pizza – I wasn’t quite ready to have a delivery man meet me on a deserted highway somewhere) into a thin nylon drawstring backpack and head out right after I’d dropped my kids off at school.  Up Mesa Street, one of the main thoroughfares in El Paso, I would jog, dodging cars peeling off to get into or out of one of the curb-to-curb strip malls that lined the road.  Most of the time it was hot, or at least that’s how I remember it, and since it is the desert, the odds are pretty high that my memory proves reliable.  Sometimes I carried a water bottle, but other times I would just stop at a Chevron station or 7-11 on the way up the road.  Even those little detours into random convenience stores felt like part of the adventure.  In Texas, we are people who travel everywhere by car.  Going by foot to any destination feels like you might as well be trekking the Mongolian Steppes.

The hardest part of my runs was not the actual running or dodging of traffic, but rather, the stares I got from passersby.  It was like I was some sort of deranged lunatic let loose from the asylum and being pursued by the authorities.  People in their cars would just stare at me as they went by, looks of bafflement, amusement or disdain (sometimes, all three) showing up on their faces.  At first, it bothered me so much I tried to pretend like the cars weren’t even there, like I was running alone on the road and everything around me was just background noise.  My desperation for a small taste of physical freedom so tangible, I was able to ignore all annoyances of running in full traffic.  But eventually, I truly did get where I was able to see the cars without registering anyone in them, or what they might possibly be thinking about me.  My self-consciousness somehow morphed into self-determination.  I wanted to get somewhere.  I wasn’t sure where, but I was going to keep moving until I figured it out.

My second tool, hijacked from Pam Reed, and the one that ended up being the holy grail for me, was to run twenty miles a day NO MATTER WHAT. And the NO MATTER WHAT was the important part.  That was what Pam did, so that was what I was going to do, and somewhere in there it would all come together.  It was that simple, I believed.  I would become an ultrarunner, and also find myself somehow, in twenty miles a day.  And it worked; the simplicity of the instructions proving too straightforward for even my over analyzing brain to screw up.

Even now, I use that quasi-Calvinistic approach to get me through pretty much everything.  If you can’t figure out how to get something done, set yourself a time limit, a page limit, a mileage limit and start working.  Don’t stop until you’ve hit your daily goal, even if the way forward isn’t clear. Most importantly, don’t overthink it.  Eventually, you will get somewhere.  And often times (most times, I think), it is exactly where you were supposed to end up.

Tagged as: Running, ultrarunning