Andrew Titus

“…When things look worst, we run the most.” – Christopher McDougall

You don’t need me to tell you how bad things look; the media just as well as the barbershop or coffee-stand banter writes up the diagnosis better than I ever could anyway. Suffice to say, things are rough all over. Add to that the fact that I just lost a job that I have held and loved for over a decade to nothing more than cold finances (seriously, I would rather have been fired in a flurry of incendiary curse words), and yeah, ‘rough all over’ seems a little gentle.

And yet, there’s our man of myth and strength Rickey Gates deciding that the time is ripe for a short run across a wide land, and ultra-endurance cyclist Juliana Buhring–perhaps the most remarkable example of smarts and wits and existential excellence our sport has to offer–all set to take her freshly wracked knee for a rip from tip to tip in Australia, and Jim Walmsley… holy cow, JIM WALMSLEY! And me–there I am too, lining up a series of races and adventures that I can’t really afford for the summer and yet so clearly can’t afford NOT to do. There I am, training smart and genuinely happy to do so, to run veritable fields of ice with the spikes on, to freeze my nads off for mile dumped on glorious mile of blizzard, and to ride that bike trainer so hard that, finally, it seems to be groaning more than I.

I give talks sometimes–nice folks who run big companies and teachers who gather to share stories and recharge sometimes call me up and ask if I’ll come to talk to them. I always go–I like talking to people and I love to talk about running and riding my bike and I especially dig it when I tell them that they can do it too, that adventure is right in their backyard, that fitness is probably more than fitting into a certain size jeans. I tell them about how I never really fit in, how my shape didn’t seem to have a spot in the world’s puzzle and how, until I found the trail and ultrarunners, that I was entirely unsure that there was a place where I fit. I felt, as Annie Dillard says, “totally unfit for life in this world,” as a matter of fact, and acted accordingly.

But then again, as our man George Sheehan says, “The unlived life is the real threat”–these days, it seems to me, that translates into saying, “Don’t forget, we teach through our actions.” In a time where words fail, where truth is up for grabs by the most forceful instead of something verifiable, what we DO is who we ARE. And so, reach your hand even more to those around you, invite more people out for a run, hold a community drop-in on how to change flats and fix chains, take a rip through someone else’s neighbourhood and stop in at the local espresso dive to hear the local chatter, keep planning, keep riding, keep recalling why we have national parks and where your ancestors came from and why our mutual lands of Canada and America and so many other places are founded on diversity.

That we all fit in. That this is a big place, that it invites big ideas, holds dreams in its mountains and rivers and pastures. Running is just as much politic as it is art and athletics, use it.

-Originally published at irunfar.com

[Note: This essay was written in the summer of 2015.]

I was planning to run a race over a mountain and then ride a 75-kilometer gravel grinder this coming weekend. I hadn’t trained one little bit; I know that sounds crazy, but it felt like the most sane thing I’d done for some time. See, a month and a half ago my sister died and then work for the season ended (I’m a seasonal/sessional part-time prof) and then I wiped out on my bike and then I pulled a hamstring.

That makes me seasoned and strung and shocked and… well, sitting around has never been my thing. Ever.

Don’t get me wrong–man, I tried to train. I ran the distances and clawed at the hills, pounded the quads, cranked up the speed, and dutifully did my back-to-backs. I nursed the hamstring, went to the physio, iced, didn’t ice, stretched and rolled and strengthened. I talked with family about my sister. I set my sights on summer projects and put some hot irons in the fire.

And then last week the wheels came off. Funny expression, but I get it now–it’s the feeling of total awe and utter surprise you get when you think you’re cruising along and everything is humming together and then the one thing you least expect — the wheels come off! — happens and BAM! You skid to a stop, dead in the water.

The training felt awful. No need to psychologize, wax poetic, or run the numbers–it just felt awful. Fast times? Whatever. Big hill rush? So what. Another hundred-plus week? Meh. I never say ‘meh’! I knew something was up. I needed to check my temperature, have a look-see under the hood.

See, I love to run, so how could this happen? It felt impossible.

Muhammad Ali, fly poet of all athleticism, once said “impossible is nothing… impossible is not a statement, it’s a dare.” It’s a challenge that rings so true it can’t be unheard. Like the audacious George Mallory quipped when the newspaperman asked him why in the world he would ever want to climb Everest, an impossibility taunts us until we attempt it, just “because it’s there.”

And so, impossible as it might have seemed, I didn’t want to run. I was hurt, inside and out, but of the many things this gig as an endurance athlete has taught me, adaptability is the key to long-term success, to making it. As Harriette Thompson (aged 92) proved on June 1st by becoming the oldest woman to finish a marathon, or Bill Dobson who on March 1st tried to set the new world record for the 50k distance in the 80-85-year-old category and, as the New York Times reported, wiped our twice, then a third time and then crawled across the finish line and missing the record by eight seconds. You can bet he’ll be back next year. For that matter, as Scott Jurek is proving right now on the Appalachian Trail. Again, as our man Muhammad (“Say my name!”) Ali roared, “I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit.’ Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.” Until life and limb are threatened in a very real way, quitting just isn’t an option. As Annie Dillard, American writer of systems eco and belief, said of being faced with the utter absurdity of life, the first thing we have to do is realize that “we cannot do nothing.”

***

When I was 13 or 14 years old and living in the sticks, my friends and I rode our bikes everywhere. During the summer we would meet up early, our 10 speeds oiled and blood vessels lubed with Captain Crunch, backpacks full of whatever we could loot from the cupboards on the fly, and bicycle miles and miles of endless road. I have always, as someone once said, only been interested in hanging out with “wild people doing wild things in wild places.”

The bike has always gotten me out of toughs jams, has been the perennial emblem of liberation. When the bullies gave chase, it was the supreme getaway vehicle (never caught me on that thing, not once); when my friends weren’t around and the only other choice on a Saturday was chores, down the road we rode fast; and when twice my whip was snatched from me, once from the fire escape outside my window (buggers even left the snapped lock behind) and once from the back of my car in broad daylight in the grocery store parking lot (she was a beaut, but I felt so bad for someone so desperate to think that was their best option to fetch some quick cash), my freedom felt stolen, too.

I’ve ridden all kinds of bikes, each one a particular change in perspective: that amazing ten speed when I was a kid that I hoped would propel me out of the country with its sleek urbanity, a black Norco hybrid that I plastered with Bad Religion and Rancid stickers when adulthood seemed to be encroaching on me a little too fast, a pink and neon green Gary Fisher that seemed to ooze of Red Hot Chili Peppers bass lines, a hybrid duly dubbed Little Miss Marin the Mountain Destroyer that would finally set me straight. These days, I ride a Minnesota Framed 1.0 Fatbike (white with sweet tricked-out orange rims) and a gunmetal green Cannondale 29er named Adderly (you figure it out). These two beasts get me everywhere and I ride them year round both for fun and to get where I’m going, which is no mean feat given the fact that I live in the Arctic vortex of the Atlantic northeast in Canada, where winter last year, for example, started in November and by mid-April we were wondering if the woods would be clear of snow by June. These bikes are more to me than often seems sensible, but their utility and aesthetics both stem from their mechanistic simplicity (can you repair your four-wheeled gas guzzler yourself? I sure as hell can’t.) and their importance as objects of liberation, rebellion, and hope for a better future. As H.G. Wells once said in a moment of uncharacteristic optimism: “when I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.” Our man the NYC Bike Snob likes that one too, and this probably because he knows perfectly well how hard it is to make it over the bridge from being a hopped up kid on Captain Crunch killing the miles on a Saturday afternoon to a grown up who still finds some tangible happiness in the strength, flexibility, and real freedom of range and motion that a bicycle gives you. The Snob says that “you should treat your bicycle like a washing machine — you should constantly subject it to filth and sweat.” And why not? Isn’t that, along with rain and trees and high fives and fresh fruit, the stuff of life?

Climber and all around hard ass Will Gadd says that as an athlete your job is simple–keep moving. Every day. And if something hurts, do something else. This living thing isn’t static any more than it’s for wimps; it’s about adjustment, ephemera, “fluid movement,” as Christopher McDougall says, “over rugged terrain,” to which the Snob adds that “this initiation involves physical pain. Yes, in order to liberate yourself from the psychic pain of being alive you will have to experience some physical discomfort. Much of it will disappear but some of it will remain. The good news is that you will come to embrace and even enjoy that discomfort… it’s better to feel cold than it is to feel like cattle. In fact, sometimes it can feel great to be cold.”

This past weekend I had planned to run over a mountain, but life got in the way. The wheels came off, I hit the ground, and the blaring reality of our physical limits and mortality and all the rest roughed me up. The impossible happened and life dared me to do something about it–like a big bully it got right up in my grill, poked me in the chest and said, what are you gonna do about it? It was clear, at least, that I could not do nothing. So I rode my bike. Hard. Through the mountains and into the countryside and toward my past. I let the machine, so beautiful and powerful and intelligent, take me into the heart of the world. Buddhist nun and former elementary school teacher Pema Chodron said that “the trick is to keep exploring and not bail out,” regardless of how frightening or weird it might get. We cannot do nothing.

-Originally published at irunfar.com

I was thinking, which always makes trouble, and my body wasn’t having any of it. I was thinking about pain and making it go away, about cool rivers and big snacks and how much I wanted them both; about being tired, being uncomfortable in my skin, and I was thinking it was all just utterly, absurdly pointless. I was not at all in my right mind.

In Buddhism these things are called ‘the five hindrances,’ nasty and nefarious demons that come to roost in your brain, feeding on all your insecurities and doing everything in their powers to keep you from waking up to the moment. Blameless, they are without motivation, which makes them all that much worse–like terrorist splinter cells they have no head, no leader, and only exist to wreak havoc. They are the original Iago, the first bad seed: craving, aversion, restlessness, sloth, and skeptical doubt, they are the arch enemy of that ‘most powerful weapon on earth’ and that which every endurance athlete aspires to–the ‘human soul on fire.’

So I was thinking and the demons were tucking in. You hate this, they were saying, wouldn’t you rather be resting? The pain is horrible, why are you doing this? What is the point? What do you have to prove? Geezer. The more I thought–you know the drill–the more I slowed. The more I slowed, the further away my ambition and the finishing line were getting. The race–a 44k out and back, up and down the spine of the highest peak in eastern Canada–had been a brutal combination of steep and muddy singletrack, boulder fields, a snow-filled pass, and an exposed stretch of scree. “Take your usual marathon time,” the website had said, “double it and then add some”– they had not been kidding and the more I thought about how much was left to go, the less my body was having any of it. The demons were winning: emotional bonk was immanent.

***

Tenting is good for you, that’s clear. Being away from cell signals and bills, traffic and shopping malls, and all other forms of consumerism camouflaged as convenience is good for you. And this is especially true when you have kids.

That being said, it takes a while to unplug. We’re less like lights that can be switched on and off, and a lot more like fires that flame up and slowly simmer, cool, reignite, blaze, flame out, burn down. Stress doesn’t easily leave and similarly kids need time to adjust to not having their devices (being, as we all are, afraid of the dark, which you can take as you will). So, we bluster around the campsite, arrange and plan, sort and straighten, the kids freak out and fight with each other and then get bored. Sitting in boredom is good, too. We settle down, let go, and this takes some time. Quality boredom takes time to nurture.

Our good man of forest and field trip Henry Thoreau correctly said that “we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. We can never have enough nature,” which is to say that we are what we eat, literally and otherwise. Old Buddhist smart mouth Thích Nhất Hạnh once made the profound observation that just as we wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) eat junk food all the time, because even though it tastes good it’ll make us sick, we probably shouldn’t feed our minds junk food for exactly the same reason. Be careful, he therefore counseled, to offer your heart good things to eat–less the candy bars and french fries of YouTube videos and Facebook updates, less the whiskey shots of news reports and the six packs of sitcoms, and more the fruits and vegetables of, well, trees and sky and, quite frankly, rocks and roots and mountain views. We definitely get sick of cruddy TV, but “we can never have enough of nature.”

It’s hard to settle down, to get over the withdrawal of such busy, mediated lives, but once the campfire is going and sticks are cut for marshmallows, once it gets dark and all the boisterousness we brought with us from the city streets drains and the stars come out, we start to listen again. The forest speaks and, as Annie Dillard says, “in our humility, we attend.” It’s an awesome experience to watch nature work her magic on an agitated 12 year old’s mind. What better medicine is there? The stars, after all, have been paying attention to us for a long time. Again, as Dillard so sadly and poignantly points out, “You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it;” that onus is, as they say, on us.

***

Around 30k things start to shake down. The boulder field on the way up (and then again down), the (count ‘em) two peaks, mud, heat, and the vertical kilometre I raced the day before are all catching up and the demons are storming the hold. I drink but I am still thirsty (I think), the pack is making my neck and back hurt (it seems), I eat but my stomach doesn’t like it (does it?). And then I get passed. Twice. Things aren’t looking good (are they?).

And then, when things seem most dark, when all the tricks have failed and even the drive to crush some skulls isn’t working, my son’s voice comes to me. Just in the nick of time; it blinks in the total darkness, just like the star he is.

***

“Hey dad,” my son’s voice comes through the dark. I’m trying to get to sleep–the next day is the long race and the huge powerhike/run up the vertical kilometre has me wiped. “Yes?” “Do you want to hear a story?” “Sure. Lay it on me.” I close my eyes.

“Once there was a mouse who really wanted to fly. His friends all knew it so one day one of them went to him and told him about a hang-gliding event that was going on nearby and that this was probably his chance. So the mouse went over, climbed into a man’s backpack and, the next thing he knew, he was flying! At first he thought it was really exciting, but then he got kind of scared and started missing his family and friends and wishing he was back on the ground with them. But then he thought, No, this is what I wanted all along! And he really enjoyed the rest of the flight, landed safely, and had great stories for everyone.”

“That’s a great story, thanks.”

“When you’re out there in the mountains tomorrow, Dad, and when it’s really not fun anymore, remember the mouse, okay? Just enjoy it.”

He’s 12. I honestly have no idea how he has become so wise.

***

As Jimi Hendrix did with guitar playing, so too has Kilian Jornet done with mountain running; that is, founded a school from which no one has graduated. As such, the rest of us are left lumbering up and over boulders or slipping as sloppily down a scree field as an adolescent learning scales. The rocks, very clearly and seemingly intentionally, were killing me; or, more like, I had lost all nerve and focus and was horribly giving in to all the things that were hindering me from enjoying this amazing run and finishing well: I was craving the comfort of being back with everyone, vehemently trying to avoid the pain in my quads, restlessly wrestling with the frustrations burning up my brain, steadily giving in to my perceived exhaustion, and, worst of all, doubting what the hell I was doing out there.

And then my son’s voice: “…when it’s really not fun anymore, remember the mouse, okay?” The mouse! How sweet this race? “Mountains, man,” I said out loud, “you’re in the MOUNTAINS, man!” as I cracked out one of those exhausted, haunted, alone cackles and then proceeded to turn up the engine, righteously drowning all the voices and head on to finish strong, happy, and well.

Back home, I tell a good friend this story. “How did that kid ever get to be so smart?”

My son’s name is Koan; a kind of Zen riddle which, while stripping away all rational explanations and understandings of the world, brings the practitioner into direct experience with reality, with nature, just as she is. If you’re into it, and the requisite ‘staring at the wall, listening to the breath’ that goes with it, it’s like a combination existential punch in the gut and slapstick comedy smack across the jowls. A really good one goes something like this: “A man was being chased by a tiger. He ran toward a cliff, saw a vine hanging over the edge, grabbed hold, and swung down. The tiger stayed at the top, looking at him and growling. As he hung there, two small mice, one black and one white, started nibbling their way through the vine. The man saw a lone strawberry growing out of the side of the cliff–he held the vine with one hand and with the other reached out and picked the strawberry. How delicious it tasted!” Ha! Hilarious!

Trust me, if I explained it, it wouldn’t be funny; kōans are like that.

***

Sitting in the freezing river after the race and way better than okay, I tell Koan how much his story helped, how much I may not have made it without his help. He offers me a banana and a swill of Gatorade. They are amazing; I tell him they are like William Carlos Williams’s plums that he stole from the fridge, like something forbidden to mortals, “so sweet/ and so cold.” He’s 12 and looking at me like I’m the lunatic, but the mountains are all around us so huge and the sky so blue and this river extends from winter through summer and back and so I leave it at that. If I explained it, it wouldn’t be funny and, besides, I like the look on his face and this moment is more than enough as is.

-Originally published at irunfar.com

It’s Monday at 8:30 a.m. and I’m standing at the front of my first-year English Lit class; we’ve been at this for a few months now and so it’s pretty informal. Over the weekend I’ve had them read Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘A Tell-Tale Heart’, a short, mind-bending first-person narrative about… well, that’s the question, isn’t it? I ask if anyone would like to summarize the story for us–what they don’t know is that it’s a trap; not a trap that I’ve set, I teach class with my sleeves rolled up so everyone can see that there’s nothing in there, but one that Poe himself put in there.

If you’ve read the story, maybe you can already see it coming–a brave or otherwise just talkative student pipes up. “It’s about a crazy guy who kills an old man, chops him up, puts him under the floorboards, and then freaks out and confesses to the cops that he did it after he thinks he hears the heart beating.” Seems right enough, right?

But why do we assume so much? First, why think that the narrator is ‘crazy’? From the first line, we are implored to NOT think that: “TRUE! –nervous –very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” Uh, because he killed an old man and then cut him up? Hmmm–okay, then why do you believe that this crime took place at all? Do you usually believe what ‘crazy’ people tell you?

Uhhhhh…

And while we’re at it, why do you think the narrator is a man? Find me ONE place where you can conclusively prove the gender is EITHER. Bet you can’t.

You see the trap–you can’t prove it at all and the even validity of the story itself is definitely questionable. As a matter of fact, the more you dig in, the less you learn about the narrator or the story and the more you learn about yourself, because just like all truly excellent and insightful works, we don’t just read it, it reads US. That’s art; and what’s more, that’s not just art, that’s any human activity that brings you to the point of self-awareness through unraveling your sense of certainty, well-being, security. Being okay there, knowing that deep down you can live with doubt in the face of challenge, is called coping.

Last summer, at the Brookvale 50k, I met Tyler Heggie. If you follow the on-going debate surrounding kids and ultrarunning, you may know him too–he’s competed in a few distance races, run a handful of solid marathons, and, most remarkably, ran the length of Prince Edward Island on Canada’s east coast the summer before last in seven days. That’s 273 kilometers, a week’s worth of marathons. He was 11.

You can, I’m sure, just hear the ire that this raised. It was ire that had a hard time getting any purchase though–the amicable and very talkative Heggie was all over the media, his wiry and tanned self seeming to writhe with happiness as he talked about his run, all the great people who were there with him (lots went along for a bit, no one made it the whole way with him), and the cause that he felt so passionate about–raising money and awareness for MS, a disease that his mother suffers from. The naysayers didn’t stand a chance.

And really, neither does anyone who tries to rain on his ultra parade–as I witnessed at Brookvale, if you step up to him and try to give him one the “aren’t you a little short/young to be running 50k” lines, be ready for the seemingly endless and breathless rants that he’s capable of. He talks the way he runs–with sure and steady tenacity. To say that you’ll get an earfull is an understatement. But don’t get me wrong, he’s not angry; far from it, he LOVES to talk about running and being outside and pretty much anything else that comes to mind.

A couple of months later, in October, I met Tyler again–this time at the Beat to Snot 28k on the Wentworth Ski Hill in Nova Scotia. This race boasts being one of the toughest races around, with over 3,500 meters of gain and the following posted on their website: “Trekking poles are recommended for race day. Lots of hill work (hiking up and running down) for training would be a very wise move as this course’s intent is to be very difficult… and you will be beat to snot in the end!” Strong words that ended up being 100% true.

At the start line, about 20 of us toed up–Tyler was already talking at 80 miles an hour. He was psyched, he had only had a couple of hours sleep having arrived from Prince Edward Island (PEI) late the night before, and he wasn’t sure if this was such good idea as, he said with an impish laugh, “I have a cross-country race tomorrow!”

When the horn blew, as always happens, we took off at full speed–which, as it turns out, was extremely short lived as we hit the first steep ascent after little more than a 50-meter sprint. Jamming it into low gear all the banter dropped off and the laborious breathing and under-breath swearing at the race director started… for all of us except Tyler, who was busily chatting away about, well, about whatever was going through his hornet’s nest of a mind.

Tyler’s strength, if not his speed, is already legendary. As I overheard at Brookvale when an older gent asked one of Tyler’s young friends, who had come along for the fun, how he got started, Tyler started running cross country in elementary school and then “just kind of kept going”. Straight across PEI apparently. And despite his detractors, shows no signs of stopping any time soon. In a manner of speaking…

The Wentworth climbs were utterly heinous–I know it’s sort of an overused term, but the dictionary, honestly, should have a photo of the central hill we grunted up to illustrate the definition that reads “utterly odious, wicked, monstrous, abominable; as in ‘a battery of heinous crimes’.” It was all that, and as the sweat was literally rolling off the end of my nose in streams and I focused on counting my steps, I briefly wondered how Tyler was doing, what he was yammering on about, why he would come here, with all of us at least twice his age and size, the day before a cross-country meet with his peers.

Of course, the answer to that last question was maybe a bit too obvious for my exhaustion-addled brain to handle–he was here for exactly the same reasons we were, regardless of size and age; that is, to test ourselves against this mountain, to be in nature, to understand the meaning of life through the exercising of effort. To survive and in so doing come to know ourselves a little better. As Alex Honnold said of his and Cedar Wright’s Sufferfest, we do this to build some character “even if in the middle of it, it really sucked”.  In crystal-clear terms, we were there to cope.

At the finish line, utterly spent, I wobbled over to the RD and asked how Tyler was doing. “Oh, he left.” What? I said, did he finish ahead of me? No, he had dropped after the first loop. Oh man, is he okay?  The RD smiled, “for sure, he was just tired and had to get home and finish his homework so he could rest up for the race tomorrow.” Knowing Tyler, he had probably relayed all that information in a matter of moments while he stuffed a few bananas into his face and packed up his stuff for the drive home.

Tyler’s story, in a time of rampant youth anxiety and ADHD and cutting and bullying and low self-esteem and pharmaceutical solutions to what often appear to be either environmental or social problems, is important for this simple reason: it’s not about whether or not kids should be running ultras or not, it’s about how they might learn to cope through extraordinary physical and emotional effort. Tyler’s example is an awesome one, not just because he can run amazing distances while chatting away like a granny over tea, but because, when the chips were against him, he knew what to do. If ever I have seen one, that was a noble DNF. “Gotta’ get to my homework and have a good night’s rest before I kick some serious butt tomorrow”–how much more legit do you want than that?

Like in Poe’s short story of the macabre, we learn much more about ourselves on the long and difficult run than we do about the run itself. Ask anyone who’s finished a six-hour-or-more effort what they are left with an they will almost undoubtedly regale you with all the manifest ways that they solved the world’s problems, but as for the terrain itself? “It was beautiful.”

It’s a strange thing to confess, but when I get to the point where I consider myself to be an accomplished distance runner, I hope to be just like Tyler Heggie–solid, present, dedicated, focussd, and in possession of all the tools necessary to plunge headlong into the unknown and come out smelling like sweet PEI canola fields.

-Originally published at irunfar.com

A little while ago, one of my running heroes, the one and only Smilin’ Southern Man Billy Simpson, posted a video on his Facebook page called Les Rescapés, a which literally means ‘the survivors,’ showcasing the 2014 Barkley Marathons. If I had to, which I often do, I’d describe this race I’ve never run as a kind of moving death, a seemingly impossible and unnecessary punishment packaged as a fringe athletic event. I would speak of its participants as only marginally sane and their chosen version of endurance sport as a combination of outright masochism and the kind of machismo that made movies like Manhunt and undertakings like polar dips popular in the first place. Face it–there’s something to it that sidesteps all reasonable philosophies. As a friend of mine often says, Barkley isn’t on “the Bucket List.”

My daughter looked over my shoulder as I watched the video. “Are you going to do it, Daddy?”

Pfft. Foolishness. No way.

Being a distance runner changes you, though. Learning to and then running through the forest all day long builds compassion and understanding, forces the mind to open as new experiences relentlessly encourage, even demand, altering perspectives. “To these monks,” says Scott Jurek, “the sacred is everywhere.” And like monks practicing their meditation, distance running teaches letting-go and letting-be in radical ways. As Sally McRae says of how she wanted to race Western States, which it seems to me is also how we all learn to approach our lives, it’s all about being “strong and passionate, but also patient and wise.” Sage words indeed.

There was something about Laz, though, something that made me pause. Something about the way this mountain of a man spoke of the participants; something like how I think a bard may have elegized early Athenian Olympians. And then there was something about the landscape–that it wasn’t ‘pretty’ or grand at all in the usual sense, that the trees were bare and sky grey and yet… and yet nature does not exist, like mountains seem to say, for our ‘ooos’ and ‘ahhs,’ it does not need to appeal to the human senses of calendar-stock beautiful to be everything we need.

And then there was the man Billy Simpson himself, the perennial strong finisher and long runner, happily bowing out and smiling as always (you do remember that photo of him from the middle of the night at Hardrock last year, right? Would you have been so happy and well?). There was Billy Simpson tapping out and shaking Laz’s hand and saying, “I’ll be back.” Happy.

I can admit it–the Barkley Marathons thrill me; not just in a boyish kind of way, but deep down inside. See, I’ve been surrounded by this kind of pioneering spirit my whole life and in so many ways events like these smell of sweet soul food. My brother-in-law was jumping out of planes when I was a kid, my father’s feats of strength are the stuff of legend in my family, and an even deeper piece of family lore has it that a great-great-grandfather marched his fine self some 150 kilometres through the brush of New Brunswick, Canada back in the day only to buy himself 200-pound bags of seed which he then proceeded to chuck over his shoulders and hoof back home again to kickstart the farm and save everyone from a winter that would’ve ended the Titus line right there. Then there’s the tale of my grandmother giving birth to my mother on the kitchen floor and, once she’d plopped her on the open oven door swaddled in blankets afterwards, went right back to cooking dinner. Toughness, fortitude, and a powerful sense of adventure pervades my bloodstream, it seems, and this rugged landscape of Barkley… this rugged landscape and the test it promises speaks to me of our humanity, of our own legends.

But I can admit this, too–it scares me.

When my good friend Jodi Isenor told me he was going to Barkley last year, I rolled my eyes and pffft’d him, just like most everyone–everyone except the one person who would prove us all wrong when he crossed the fun run finishing line, becoming the second Canadian to ever do so; his partner Karine, that is. She knew he’d get it done. It became a hot topic, though. Would he make it? Could he make it? What was his training? The odds were stacked against him–14 of 800 entrants have finished, for crying out loud! Fourteen! And badass entrants at that! Barkley had finished off mountain men and hardboiled women, runners and hikers, and some of the toughest, meanest trail veterans the world (yes, the world!) has to cough up. Have a look at them here on Geoffrey Baker’s website. It’s awesome what it does to people.

“Awesome.” Pffft. More like madness.

And who the hell would even think about it? Why, why put all that time training and spend all that money getting to a race where your chances of failure are so high? What are they testing? The line, we all seemed to be agreeing, between challenge and whacked had been crossed. Our friend, trail gods love him, had gone over the deep end. Clearly.

And yet.

The German philosopher Shopenhauer says that all truth goes through three stages: that it’s first mocked, then violently opposed, and then accepted as common place. Look at anything from women’s rights to gay marriage and you’ll see the salience of what he’s saying. And maybe, just maybe, there’s some truth in Barkley itself; maybe because it is so extreme, because it does carry such a potential for failure, that it really is so utterly outrageous, that it’s worth doing. When I first heard of this race of all races, I scoffed it off–what lunacy. I laughed at the foolhardiness of it, at the death-wishers that played with its fire, and at the labyrinthine application process. When our friend Jodi said he was in, we mocked him on the outside, but I think we were all secretly cursing him and inherently challenging his bravery, wondering deep down if he hadn’t reached a kind of bravado that bordered on pure insanity. It’s clear to me that when we witness someone approaching the edge of the unknown, we react as if it were a personal affront. If you’d like proof of this, ask anyone in the running world what they think of Kilian Jornet’s bid for the summit of Everest. I somehow doubt their reaction will be lukewarm. There is always a hint of the ‘how dare he,’ of ‘he’s going to die.’ Just as we love to see celebrities drowned by the paparazzi in their worst moment, we reel back from anything remotely superhuman.

And then…

Well, why not Barkley? Why not Everest? Why not the South Pole on a bicycle, or a skydive from the outer stratosphere, or a base jump off a tower in Dubai? Really, why not?

I am taken not just by beauty, but by the poetry of excellence and extremes, by the audacity of this nearly impossible race in the middle of nowhere. Like the Spartathlon, Badwater, or the Idiatrod, I am more in love and awe of these things than offended, disturbed, or otherwise bothered by their extremity. As Eric Newby may have been when he first laid eyes and heart on the Hindu Kush, I am tipped over the edge by it, gobsmacked, righteously. This year, Laz won’t be getting a letter from me, because as I said to my friend Jodi who suggested (enthusiastically encouraged, even) that I enter, this is not yet my league. These runners and explorers of the human spirit, I told him, are building superstructures with bricks and mortar while I am still snapping Lego blocks together to fashion houses. No, this year I may try to run around an island in the north of Wales or eek my way into the books by setting an FKT on the Fundy Trail, but I won’t be there in the wild of Tennessee when Laz lights his smoke.

But I also won’t be mocking anyone who thinks they might. Instead I’ll tip my hat to them and give them that nod of awe that says, “Yes, I am impressed. No, I will not laugh at you or stand in your way. Yes, I take it as obvious why you would do this. We are human, and as long as there are grand things to try, we will lace up and plunge into the darkness every time.”

-Originially published at irunfar.com