easy, light, smooth and fast.
“Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by,” Kerouac wrote. “Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.”
― Christopher McDougall
“I have to write about this book!” was the first thing I thought of when I awoke this morning. I had spent 8 hours reading it from cover to cover.
I have been back on my reading spree since Alyx put The Hunger Games trilogy in my hands at the beginning of this month. I can’t just casually read a book. I pick up a book and I start to read and I don’t put it down. It’s frustrating to those around me. “What’s for dinner?” ….”Whatever you can find.”
Late last afternoon I picked up “Born to Run” by Christopher McDougall. I had been flipping around the ultra runner blogs and the barefoot runner blogs and in each they had quoted or mentioned in some way, this MUST READ book. I wasn’t even sure what the book was truly about because Ultra running is one thing, Barefoot was another. Right?
The full title didn’t give me any more information other than it was about a tribe of superathletes and the greatest race the world never seen. Vague.
Regardless, I bought the book to just to be able to say, ‘yes I read it’ when people would come up to me and ask me after seeing me wearing my Vibrams if I had read the book. Now I see how stupid that is because I started wearing the shoes before I read the book and it’s not why I was wearing them. My first introduction to barefoot running came from running behind Tabitha for miles and miles and watching her leg muscles get super defined. I figured she was some sort of mutant woman who could morph into whatever she was doing and that is why she took to running so well and why her legs were rocking hot. Then Dan got a pair of them and after miles and miles of running behind him I noticed the same definition of muscle that hadn’t been there before.
I also noticed that I was a good 5 minutes behind Dan on the uphill when before I could take him all the way to the top. No, I couldn’t catch Tabitha…but that woman is a mutant superhuman running machine and when you put Vibrams on her feet she floated up hills.
After watching the both of him do the uphill work on Steven’s trail and look like they were out for a walk in the park, while I was rolling around in the parking lot like a dog’s chew toy after a good thrashing, I decided I was going get a pair for myself and see if truly did make a difference.
It made a difference and now I am one of those people that want so badly to preach the joy of barefoot running, but I’m doing all that I can to shut up and just say, “Yes, they are very comfortable. No it doesn’t bother me that I have things between my toes and no I don’t feel every single rock I step on.” Because I don’t want to be the person that says, “I can’t believe you wear those feet coffins!”
I’m not there yet because of my true love of my Brooks Cascadias.
The Brooks Cascadias brings me back to this book.
I wasn’t really sure what I was getting into in the first 5 or so chapters of the book. Was this book about the crazy guy? Was it about the writer looking for complex answer to his simple question? Was it about the Tarahumara people and their ability to not only run fast, run for long distances AND be smiling and laughing while doing it? Was the book about the shoes they wore, or better yet, the LACK of shoes they wore? Was it about the start up how the ultrarunning began and how it evolved? The pioneers in the sport? Nike? The Olympics? The Big Bang Theory? ….what the fuck was this book about and when was I going to finally ‘get into it’.
It crept up on me. I was actually ‘into it’ long before I noticed I was into it. I couldn’t put it down to save my life. Then it started talking about the Western States 100. I actually swelled with pride when the author mentioned Gordy. How could he not? The bad ass that pioneered this shit in our own backyard. I have read every single account of Gordy’s 1974’s little jaunt in the woods that I can find online. I have actually seen him running on the trails and each time I look back at him and I am certain what I am seeing isn’t real. How could it be real? How could the man that ran the first Western States run be running on the same trails as I am at that same day? Impossible. I have been running and I told Tabitha and Dan, “I swear that was Gordy.” And each time they will respond with, “Who?”
I found him on Facebook. There…ON FACEBOOK. I had the option to “add as friend”? not just like, but ADD AS FRIEND? Are you shitting me?! I’ve never added anyone on Facebook. I feel like it’s a bit presumptuous and I feel awkward about it so I have never added anyone until my mouse hovered over ‘add a friend’ next to Gordy’s name. I must have sat there for a good 5 minutes debating on if I should click the damn button. ‘He won’t accept me. He doesn’t know who I am. He has NO idea how inspired I am by his story of crazy oddball people that saw what he did and said, ‘yep, I wanna try that too.’ And low and behold we have a new sport. I didn’t even go searching for the first guy that thought, “hey I think I will jump out of a plane…’ when I started skydiving, but bet your ass I learned all about the history of skydiving because if I am going to do something, be it jump out of a plane or attempt to run 100 miles, I’m going to know how it got started and why.
So I clicked ‘add as a friend’. Heart hammering in my chest, I laughed. “I just requested Gordon Ainsleigh as a friend on Facebook…that’s funny.” And about 4 days later, he accepted that friend request. Floored doesn’t cover it. Then about a month later he commented on my facebook wall.
I’ve seen Alyx in the past year do this crazy obsessed teenage thing whenever anything about Taylor Swift or Hunger Games presents itself. I became Alyx that day. “NO FUCKING WAY!!!” No one of course understood the excited girly squeals of delight and breathless recounting of the story of how he commented because Gordy isn’t walking the red carpet or playing televised sports. Nope, he’s just that one guy that ran 100 miles with some horses and started this thing that I have grown to love…even though I have never once made it into the place of ultra running. I am like a child in awe of a adult that is able to walk around so effortlessly while I teeter and fall over after 10 minutes of holding myself up next to the coffee table.
Oh yeah, I was talking about the book. They mentioned Gordy and I felt such pride for my trails that he calls his home and started thinking about how many seasons he has seen on those trails, the changes he has watched through the 40 plus years of running he has been on them. I have 1 year under my belt. How weak.
Then they started talking about other runners running the WS100 and I felt pride for those people too.
The writer gave me a relationship with each of these people that I felt I understood each one on a personal level. Barefoot Ted, yeah…I get his ranting and raving about shoes. I understood the free spirit of Jenn and Billy, they were born to do this…that was what they were destined to do. I got Scott during the point of exhaustion when he had nothing left and there was no way he could keep going, but he did…and won…and set a record. I don’t get that part…YET. I do get the part where you pick yourself up from the side of a trail and just keep going because you have no other choice. That hasn’t just been my experience with being on these trails, but in life. Why keep making lemonade? Because life enjoys seeing me squeeze the fuck out of these damn lemons, THAT’S WHY.
This book wasn’t about the WS100, but some of the runners in the book knew the pain of the WS100 , so it kind of was. It wasn’t about barefoot running, but it kind of was. It wasn’t about the Tarahumara tribe…well, yes it was, but it was so much more.
It was about a group of people that had one thing in common and it was a special kind of spirit.
Tabitha had suggested I watch, “The Way”. I did and I understood why she liked it so much. It embodied everything we had learned last year about how you can connect with a person on a different level by just walking with them. You have time to hear stories. You understand why they pack their Camelbak the way they do. You see the type of person they are when you’re walking, hiking, running, jogging and just soldiering up a hill. Me, I pack everything in my camelback. I want to be prepared to nurse someone back from the edge of death if need be. Tabitha is a whimsical woodland fairy whose pack has the essentials to make sure that her time is fun and practical. Bug spray, lip balm and a bag of trail mix. Dan’s isn’t so much what is in his bag, but the efficiency of which he has packed it. I’ve brought others on trail runs and it’s interesting to see what they bring. Each person has a story to tell just by what they bring or don’t bring and how they manage to get it packed in.
The times I have had out on the trail with each person is a different story of strength, vulnerability and growth.
It has shown me that the core of who I am will always be the same. I am a survivor if I like it or not. The odds of me just lying down to accept what the world has offered up are pretty nil. As much as I joke that I will be the first to go when the zombie apocalypse comes, I realize that I won’t. I will be the one helping people to safety and nursing them back so they can fight another day.
Last night I had a dream about this race I am doing with a bunch of friends and I guess the book I managed to digest in 8 hours had a part in it. I was in the middle of this race and I got competitive. I’m not a competitive person at all. You want the gold? Okay, here I will help you get it. Oh, I have the gold and you want it? Here, you can have it. In this dream though, I was clawing to the top of this hill with a friend of mine and I was doing all that I could to get past him to the finish line. It wasn’t first place we were fighting for, it was to not be last. Somewhere above us we heard his wife yelling down at us two to knock that shit off and have fun. Then we did. We both fell backwards back into this mud pit we had been trying to claw out of and laughed. Then it started to get fun and we forgot about the fact that somewhere along the race I had burned half my hair off and he had a swarm of dead and splattered bees in his shirt and shorts. In my dream I was laughing with my friends.
Tthat’s why I loved this book so much. I could get out of my head for a few minutes and read about the love of doing what I do and how it started. It started because I was letting gravity pull me along these trails that I had walked before and knew what the end of the trail brought me, another beautiful trail…and if I moved just a little bit faster I could get there and see it before the day was over. If I kept going I might just find one more magical place.
If I just went a little bit further….