Deconstructionist

Sunday, June 10, 2018

6/10/18 11:07 PM

Hood to Coast 2017: Second Leg I started this story, and I feel like I have to finish it. I feel like enough has happened that it's not a spoiler to say that I live through this run. I am alive.

Leg 18 begins at the St Helens High School parking lot and leads out onto a long, featureless stretch of highway. After dark, we are required to carry a flashlight, and to wear a reflective vest and flashers or face immediate team disqualification. I am so adorned. I wait for our runner 5. I bounce on my toes a couple of times to test my readiness. We high five each other as our runner rounds the corner. Runner 5 passes me the baton within the cones of the exchange, and I take off out the parking lot and down to the lonely highway.















I see an occasional runner twinkling away. Mostly it's just me: my bouncing safety flashers and weak flashlight beam metronome set against the red and white lights of traffic. My footfalls are jarring. I breath, jarred, and settle uneasily into pace down the miles of yawning highway. At an indiscriminate point, the route turns left into a poorly lit suburb.

The suburb is a relief after the highway. I come closest to joy, running, running, thinking this is fine.

But the thin lights of the neighborhood are not enough. They get thinner and farther and farther apart. I stumble on a dark rise of pavement, twist my ankle, and barely don't fall. I am not pitched over this rolling ankle into a gully of blackberry brambles on the curve where the road leads back out of the suburb.  I straighten, shake it off, and run past a lone volunteer directing runners by flashlight out toward darker and darker country roads. I can not see their face. They do not say a word.









These are hilly country roads, thin gravel shoulders, ditches, and shitty, splintered, falling down fences. Are they though? Is this a hill though? What do I know. It's too dark. There is lots of brush and tall grass shadow shapes. They imprint in my swirling visual cortex. I remember grinding up the hill to the crickets and frogs screaming, maybe owls hooting? and wolves howling? It seems improbable but I probe my memory and feel quite fucking certain there were wolves. I'm running like there are wolves.

I remember the song of every second of this run...  the sturm and drang of this dark wild night... of will run headward into failure. I have failed to be, to train, to become, to do, anything, right. Never again... I'll never do this again. I'm never going to do this again. I am awful. It is miserable. Nothing feels good. Nothing is good. Wolves take me. I am here to die on this road where I have no business running in the middle of the dark night. Yet by force I run and I run and I run.

Until the run, like all runs, ends. The end comes slower than I'd hoped. I see a hint of lights in the dark. Red lights. The first volunteer is a vortex. She tells me how close I am just a little ways out, but her words are a chasm of elastic space/time. I'm pulled out from the center, down, flattened, stumping along the accordion road drawing a singular note of disharmony. It just keeps goooooing and fucking going and going and going and fuck, it's still going. There is another volunteer. She calls out the team number on my bib. And some people. Someone closer to the people calls out the bib number again. More people. Lights, dark, flashers, flags, dark, lights, dark, lots of reflective shit flashing. I'm done. I have failed my way to the exchange. I pass off the baton. I am hot, sweaty, and gratified. It is quickly wicked away by the cold damp mist and thundering disinterest of the teeming exchange.

Van 2 is off running. Through the dark flattened-grass field we find our way back to Van 1, and in an act of unspeakable ironic cruelty, drive back to the very exchange where I took the baton bracelet and began my last run.

We pay a couple bucks each for a tiny towel and access to the high school's locker room. The shower heads are high-pressure, low-volume and the tepid water feels like needles on my skin. They are set to blast just under my clavicle; a height that is so perfectly inconvenient it feels calculated and sadistic. I rinse away the sweat and salt. I contort under the shower head to wash my hair, sideways, backwards, tired, and strained. I feel like I've lost a layer of my skin by the time I'm quick and done. My dry clothes feel rough. My bones are cold. I am acutely aware that I need electrolytes. I know all the symptoms of imbalance.

Out in the main hall, the PTA is selling breakfast to all the Van 1 teams. It is after 11pm, but it is sweet, cheery, and bright. They give us large warm servings on paper plates: eggs, pancakes, sausage, butter, syrup, hot chocolate, orange juice, coffee...  I am so goddamned spirited about this plate of food, but after I eat a second bite I get weak. I keep trying but I can't eat. I just need electrolytes.  My teammate looks me over.  You need electrolytes, she says. Then we lament my plate of food together.  Our eyes are so hungry, but she is full and I can not eat. We try. We nibble. We can't.

Back in the van, I pull on wool socks, a down jacket, sweatpants, a hat, and wrap myself in a Rumpl travel blanket. I drink electrolytes. I drink more. More still. I'm cold. My clothes feel rough. I sleep, kinda. The van rumbles back through the same roads I just ran and on... to the next van exchange where we'll wait in light slumber for the final Van 2 runner. I'm cold. Cold, cold. cold.  cold.

Ehhgh, I think over and over. I hover into light non-restorative sleep, stirred occasionally by a faint tremor from my cold weary bones.



Sunday, September 03, 2017

9/3/17 1:52 PM

Hood to Coast 2017: First Leg
I am the last runner in Van 1. I’ll be Legs 6, 18, and 30. My first leg is 7.1 miles, easing down the last transition from the mountain into the town of Sandy. I’ve run these legs before and I don’t like this one. Leg 6 is a net -408 elevation, seemingly easy, but it is long, dry, and highway-bound ugly. As you encroach from the mountain into town, its outposts and inposts seem to suggest you are there, almost there, almost there, almost… but you are not fucking there. You are miles from there. You might have surged a little bit to get there, but there you go, you’re still not there.  I've done this before.  



I am anxious through all five of our other Van 1 runners. I am not excited. I am not certain I can complete my leg. The lower part of my Achilles tendon on the inside of my left heel is very tight, and I feel it strain every time I push off. I've known this was a problem. I am certain it will tear. Every foot fall of my 7-mile run, I compensate, making micro-adjustments to how I land, how I thrust, how my ankles rotate, how I bear weight on my hips, on my knees, on both sides of my body. It is exhausting. I can feel the realignment work its way up to the tendons, straining at the top of my quads. I have 10.5 more miles after this, if I even make it through this fucking leg. Let’s just make it through this fucking leg.  























I roll deep into Sandy and come across the first in a string of volunteers.  I hadn't let myself hope, but now I know I'm close:  

"Right at the light, you're almost there"

At the light:

"Stay on the shoulder, just couple hundred yards, almost there"

I runstumble on the graveled shoulder to a cross walk:

"Just across the street, almost there"

Across:

"Just down this path to that arch, almost there"

Down the path, under the arch:

"Through that tunnel, take a right.  Almost there!"

Through the fucking tunnel:

"Cross over to that path along the pile of skulls, so close!"

Cross to the path.  Nearby I see lots of relay participants.  I must be close.

"Run along the backstop, don't make eye contact. Almost there!" 

Stagger past the backstop:

"Up this bark-chipy path, around the clubhouse... sooo close!"

Each foot sinks deeper. Hope is extinguished. I never get there. I die, exhaling hot, dry slivers.   

But then I'm there, at the exchange.  I give the bracelet to Runner 7 from Van 2. The Van 1 crew pat me on the back, we load into the van, and drive to someone's house.  We shower, eat, and lay still with our eyes closed. I wouldn't call it sleep. In a few short hours, we’re back on the road.  


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