Hood to Coast 2017: Third Leg

Leg 30 was supposed to be easy. With the exception of one significant half-mile, the entire course runs downhill. Despite the strain and exhaustion of the previous two legs, I was confident I could settle into the relative ease of this leg and expend what energy I had left and be done.

It's been a year and a half, but despite the passage of time, I have very distinct memories of this leg. At least the beginning, the end, and everything that followed.

I remember the asphalt, how the bitumen was sunk and pocketed, rougher then the surfaces of city streets. The white shoulder paint was worn in places, and layered thickly in others. I remember the forest and fields, dewy and unsympathetic. The creek watering by, cold and tuneless. The light starving for warmth.

I remember watching the muscles of a runner in front of me contract expand and contract expand and contract expand like it might be enough for both of us, but he drew away from me and I was left to suffer the work of moving my own legs.

I remember the betrayal of marked pavement miles. This, I will never forget.

It is cold in the coastal mountains just past dawn, and we are moving toward the 29/30 exchange at a crawl, still more than a mile from the start of my final leg. On this final stretch of the course, the rural roadways become a clustered fuck of idling vans pushing toward the exchange, trying to arrive before their runners. In a pique of impatience and discomfort, I get out of the van and start to slowjog speedwalk to the exchange. I feel weird and crampy and porous. I convince myself it is excitement.

At the exchange, my runner arrives well before the van. He runs back, and I forward.

It is experience and pain tolerance that get me the first mile down the road. It is not easy but I know how this works. I know the anatomy of discomfort and how to submit to it. This mile passes quickly, and with relief, I notice mile marker HTC 2 stenciled, small and faded, to the side of the road. It measures up to my perceived exertion so I press on faithfully, prayerfully, hoping for deliverance, counting on the downhill to pull me home.

But I pass HTC 1 mile marker, new, white, and bold, a gaping two miles later. I am sure, certain even, that it has been more than one mile. Yet I suppress a tremble of fear.

And miiiles beyond the HTC 3 tired ghost marker, a shiny clean HTC 2....   I am weak and filling with despair. 

Each old and faded mile comes fast, but the new are yawning out along a fibonacci sequence of spacetime. When I reach the newer HTC 3 marked mile, I am in place I've never been. There is no order. There is no comfort. It is entropic freefall. The baptism of sweat is a lie. Faith in the virtue of this pain hallow. The gods are smote. The temples crumble. I exhale ashes in vaporous clouds of disgrace. I am consumed, ataxic, seized by cramps, crying out to stop, afraid I'll be unable to start again if I do.  I'm in exquisite suffering, but it no longer matters. This is the end of times. The crops fail. The birds fall from the sky, already crawling with maggots. My hips grind over top of each femur until they splinter in long sharp fragments. I move by falling but the pavement doesn't stop me.  I just keep falling and falling and falling in to the sharp shattering exhaustion...

Past the false prophets that HTC 4

HTC 5

There is no downhill. 

The light still has a shitty bleak quality when I reach the exchange.  The baton passes over, cold with sweat.  I see a face I think know, and empty like I am, follow it into a shush of damp crowd, vans, mud, vans, people...  But it's not anyone I know. No one is any one I know. I wander around on the reedy trampled mud grass, splintered and without grace, cold and without heat. Just about the time I am found, I begin shivering in earnest.

Back in the van, I am still shivering. We trickle back out to the road and leave the remains of the race behind.  It's still a long drive to Seaside.

I'm shivering through wet cloths, but I don't have the energy to peel them off. I add layers, and shiver through them. I shiver with every muscle in my body. I shiver until the tips of my fingers become numb.

But we are done. We have completed all three of our legs, and we are done. I am done. 

4/14/19

__________________

7/22/22

But I wasn't done.  Coming down from the coast range is a whole change of seasons.  Down here it's summer, doggedly summer, and everyone is looking for a refreshing breeze.  It's hot and goddamned bright.  We're driving south on Hwy 101 to Seaside and I'm still shivering.  It takes a full hour in the sun until the cold deeeeep in me begins to thaw. The shower at the high school feels like needles on my skin, but when I'm dressed, I feel about as well as could be expected running something-teen miles, sleep deprived, underprepared, and starving.  Finally in cell range, I called home to tell them I'd made it, but am feeling profoundly de-electrolyted and maybe a touch hypothermic. THEA'S BEEN UP ALL NIGHT WITH A FEVER OF 103, Clark says.  

Oh, dear, I say, well I hope she feels better soon.  I'll be home this evening after our second van arrives.  

Nothing clicks. 

Van One finds the nearest restaurant and we crowd in. I order breakfast, coffee, and a bloody mary.  About three sips into it my appetite evaporates.  I don't want this, I don't want that, I have never wanted that less. Food is indecent, eating an act of vulgarity. The caloric deficit doesn't manifest any sense of urgency or need.  I push my plate away and wait for everyone else to finish.  

By the time we get to the beach, it's almost noon.  The sun is high in at the extremely blue sky and it is hot.  We get beers but I can't.  I remember staring at the plastic pint, light breeze, the sun on my skin and sinking into myself.  I push the beer away and find the medical tent.  Sounds like a norovirus, nothing you can do but let it run it's course.  haha, I already did that.  I made it here. I wander out onto the crowded beach to a constructed platform with mats and beanbags for tired runners and fall asleep in the hot hot sun. I'm sweating and overheated, but still with an untouched cold at my core.  I don't know how long I lay there. 

 

At some point, I get the keys and curl up in my sleeping bag on a stretch of lawn next to the van behind the public restrooms.  I sleep there, hot and cold, some place in-between belonging there and being nowhere.  The temperature climbs into the mid-90s, but I'm already in the 100's and rising.  I don't know how long I'm there but I'm there when the second van arrives, when the team crosses the finish line, while they drink beer, while they go out to eat, while they celebrate and retell stories.  I'm still there in the late afternoon when the few people going back to Portland finally come back. I take the farthest back bench seat and sleep in my sleeping bag all the way home, sweltering and unable to feel warm.  

It's still light out when I get home, like a pinkish dreamy haze, like lingering smoke.  I make my way into the house past my husband who says in the hearty way of someone vigorously not-sick WOW, I'VE NEVER SEEN YOU LOOK SO SICK and he takes carries my bag inside for me.  

I hobble in to join my sick child in a mess of bedding and we lay about out in feverish delirium.  Except I'm the parent.  She is the child.  I am the one barely able to walk, cleaning vomit at 1:47am and 3:22am and 5:38am, struggling to move in a body aching with fever, prickled nerves, and extremely sore and stiff from running 17.65 miles up and down two mountain ranges.  It's an exquisite viral misery heightened by the microscopic trauma I've sustained in every single muscle in my body. I can't tell what is delayed-onset muscle soreness and what is the raging virus. It's at least 10 days until I can do more than climb the basement stairs without becoming utterly exhausted.  Thea missed the first day of third grade. 

It makes sense now, why it was so strenuous and exhausting.  why I couldn't get warm. couldn't eat. why I didn't have the strength to remove my wet cloths, why I shivered so hard my teeth hurt.  What the fuck is wrong with me. 

Hood to Coast 2017: Second Leg

Spoiler: 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.

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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