Oooh, I Thought You Said “Take a Nap”

It happened again – I got bamboozled into signing up for another race.  “It’ll be fun!” Rob said.  I was not convinced.  “It’s even longer than a half marathon – it’s over 14 miles!” Rob exclaimed cheerfully. This was not a selling point.  “It’s FREE!!” cried Rob persuasively.  “Where do I sign?” I asked – resignedly.

The SP Crater race is held about 20 miles in some direction from Flagstaff on private and state range land.  Picture a sea of land that stretches farther than the horizon, awash in waves of cinder hills.  The whales in this oceanic scene are the cows, while the antelope are the playful dolphins. Prairie grass serves as our metaphorical seaweed.  It is an area with an immense and unending view of land and sky. 

Training here in Flagstaff was going according to plan and was starting to show results.  My times were surprising me.  My recovery times were quick.  My eating was not going off the charts.  I was feeling unexpectedly like I could run.  Rob and I decided it was time to get serious and spend some time on the race course during our training runs.

The race course during the actual race is marked with tapes and flags and staffed with wonderful volunteers.  There are aid stations and EMTs and all manner of support for the runners.  This was not the case for us as we loaded up our 1988 Bigfoot camper for an outing to the Land of Never Ending, without telling anyone our plans or whereabouts.

That’s not to say we don’t plan, prepare and understand what we were doing.  We’re old hands at this.  We often load up our “mobile locker room” and head out for a run.  We don’t run together. We are life partners — not running partners.   We like being married and want to stay that way.  We generally run by time.  We wear our GPS watches and agree on the amount of time we will be running, and we have always made it back within minutes of our agreed upon time.  We have found the joy of our timing synchronicity enhances our love for each other, as opposed to having my human gazelle chat me up while I am constantly breathless and growing increasingly furious trying to keep pace, when all the time he is a half step ahead of me, maintaining that we are ‘running together.’

In learning what works best for us on our running outings, Rob is still devising systems to keep me from getting lost. He doesn’t understand it — but has come to almost accept it — that the truth of the matter is I was born without a compass. I have no magnet.  It’s not that I don’t have any sense of direction.  But my sense always advises me to turn the wrong way or to go either the shorter or longer distance – whichever is erroneous.  It’s genetic.  My sisters are plagued with the same flaw.  And while it’s comforting to have a familial support group, they’re no help.  One sister thinks Siri is nothing short of a miracle and has given her the freedom to go anywhere she wants without getting lost.  I’m a little skeptical.  To follow directions from anyone — or anything — assumes that when you are in foreign territory (that’s anywhere outside of a 500-yard distance from your driveway) — and distracted by everything around you, you will be able to distinguish your left from your right and do it with precise accuracy.  Don’t be fooled – you can drive around in circles listening to Siri.

Rob is the exact opposite.  It remains a mystery to me to see him pull out a map and pour over the hieroglyphics printed upon its pages and stay immersed in its wonders for hours on end — for the sheer enjoyment of it!  I have no ear for the language of maps.  I start to sweat when he folds down the massive sheet of paper, peers over the edge of it and tries to point out where we are and where we are going.  It makes me cry.  My brain does not translate tiny squiggly multi-colored dotted and dashed lines onto the ground whereupon I am to place my feet.  I believe it is for both our sakes that I escape to my happy place and start to hum whenever he ever pulls out a dreaded topo map.  To make matters worse, I have a very short term spatial memory.  To make matters even more interesting, I tend to slip into a day dreaming extravaganza just as I am slipping out of the range where my spatial memory is still intact, leaving me with mere dots and dashes of visual recall.  I am befuddled about my whereabouts often. 

Rob did his due diligence for this training run and explained where we were going and what we were going to do – several times.  Having done this race just last year, I was not very cooperative listening to the directions over and over and over, as he is apt to do.  I was to start at the start line and run for a total of 8 miles.  Rob was going to drop me off at the start line, drive 3 miles ahead, park there, and run the entire course, backwards, for a total of 14.3 miles.  He estimated we would see each other when I was about 2 miles into my run.

I stepped out of the truck at the start line.  It was cold!! And windy!  I did have the thought to bring a small water bottle with me to simulate what I would need to carry in the real race.  It was cold enough to wear a jacket, hat and gloves.  But I felt good and strong and able, and most of all — confident.  I ran past the cows (not one, but two rather huge herds) that can ordinarily send me into an admittedly irrational Level Six phase of panic, but I had assurances that cows are herbivores and really are more afraid of me.  “I am not cud” was my mantra for the cow episodes, and while I was still not obliviously comfortable running by them, trying not to make eye contact with their creepy red eyes and horns, I did survive.

Sure enough, about 2 miles in, there was Rob.  I hardly wanted to stop and talk because the run was feeling so right.  But he waved me down to tell me that the truck was parked at a very opportune spot, because there was a right hand turn I would have to take there.  He gazed deep into my eyes while telling me this, and it sparked a little something inside me that registered for the first time that there were turns I would be needing to make on this little jaunt.  I responded in all confidence that that was good to know, that everything was fine, and when he saw me next I would be in the camper having a cup of tea, waiting for him to finish his run.

I ran along, noting that this section of the course was uphill.  I started getting warm.  By the time I got to mile 3 – and at the camper just where Rob said it would be – I decided to leave my jacket, hat and gloves there. I knew that I had to run 2.5 more miles past the camper.  My turnaround point would be when my watch registered 5.5 miles.  It appeared to be uphill this whole way and I knew when I turned around I would only have to come back down 2.5 miles to reach the camper. I was the Little Engine That Could.

I reached my turn-around point, made an about-face and I was hit with an arctic blast that took me by complete surprise. It occurred to me I made a mistake.  I should never have left my hat, gloves, and mostly my jacket behind.  I wrapped my bandana around one hand and figured I would switch it to the other hand before icicles formed. I only had 2.5 miles to run to get back to the camper, and my years of practicing positive self-talk was paying off.  I had pretty much convinced myself that I would not get into any trouble.  Panic began to take a back seat.

And then I came to a heretofore unseen T in the road at the base of SP Crater. I had no idea which way to turn.  Nothing looked right. Neither side of the road looked like I had ever been there. The cinder hills all had different faces on them.  The sky was the same everywhere.  Infinity was calling, and I was petrified.  Fear did not set in – I was immediately and completely embraced by it. It was as if Poseidon of the Prairie plucked me up and suspended me in the middle of his toy sand globe, slowly rotated it in every direction and placed it down on its opposite axis.  I used to play a similar game as a child. I found it fascinating to watch what the ants would do when I placed a stick in the middle of their track as they traveled to and from their anthill.  Unlike my fascination with scurrying ants, he watched me with what felt like a rather dispassionate observation.

I did the math. Running the wrong way could incur more miles than I felt ready for.  I was doing this run to see if I could run 8 miles – and that was questionable.  I was not prepared for a yard more.   I had enough calories in me for 8 miles.  I had no extra food or water or clothes.  But, I did have my phone.  I ran a few stuttering couple of tenths of a mile to the right and then ran back to the T.  SP Crater had become my anthill.   The road towards the right stretched on seemingly endlessly and uphill.  I was convinced I had already run uphill getting here so I should be heading down, and every piece of magnetic dust that does float around in my body was yelling at me to turn to the left.  I hesitated a few more minutes around the T, in the howling wind, until I felt my best recourse was to see if I could get hold of Rob.  I willed myself to not let my voice quiver, dialed, and he answered!  We had reception long enough for him to hear me say “I have NO idea where I am.” And the call dropped.

If you have ever heard the sound of silence – true silence — it can be deafening.  There was that, until I heard Rob’s moustache hit the ground.  I glared at my phone, shook my fist and looked up to the sky.  That’s when I discovered the pain of other over-aroused senses.  The view of infinity stabbed through my eyes and reverberated into my aching brain.  What was not lost on me was that all my senses were hyper-titillated, with the exception of my sense of direction.   My mantra became “I’m not lost, I just don’t know where I am.”  I was alone.  I was scared.  And my mantras were starting to not make any sense.

Rob was able to call me back by the time I had decided to run to the left again.  I had gone out a little over a mile, convinced myself it was the wrong way and came back to the safety of the T.  We had reception long enough for him to suggest since I had my phone maybe I should pull up a map.  It was then that old Poseidon chortled out loud and revved up the wind gusts.  And it was my undoing.  I was relatively brave until that moment.  I just wept and said between sobs, “If I can’t read a map in the living room, how am I supposed to read one out here???”  And that call dropped.

A few more interrupted attempts at calling each other resulted in Rob hearing such things as: “If I’m facing SP Crater is there supposed to be another crater in front of it?”  “What was your intention for telling me to turn east? Which way is east?” “Should I be running into the wind?”  “I’m not lost.  You just don’t know where I am.”  “I’m frightened, and my tears are freezing.”  

Then we had a call where I finally understood where Rob was. He had run to the top of SP Crater.  He was winded from having to amp up his easy run to an all-out life and death mission run.  He was about a mile behind me!  We ran towards each other and I was found! 

I had a tiny glimmer of vindication when we ran back to the T together and Rob was momentarily confused himself, but he determined that if we turned right and ran into the wind, we would find the camper.  We ran together for the last mile and a half, and by some miracle, there was the camper.  If I had run .02 of a mile more on one of my dashes from the T, I would have seen the camper.  Two Tenths of a Mile.  Instead, I cranked out just over 12.5 miles on my 8-mile run. 

I will continue to train, and I will continue to race and cross earthly squiggly lines and, quite probably, continue to get my lines crossed.  I will continue to seek my way as I work and cook and read and play and dream. Our suspended existence on this globe presents itself as an exercise in training in every moment of every breathe. And, perhaps, when I cross the final finish line I will come to know the truth about where I am.

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** A note of irony: SP Crater stands for Shit Pot Crater.

Thank you, Rob, who can be off on adventures anywhere and everywhere but mostly is by my side and always in my heart.

And to Barbara and Tara — wherever you are!