You’re a Long Time Dead

My buddy, Daniel, is hoping to beat his time from last year at the Fakahatchee 50 kilometer race this Saturday. In 2012, Daniel took just over six hours. I am also hoping to beat my time from last year of minor medical emergency.

With my spatial abilities, I easily can, and frequently do, become lost in my own home. It therefore came as no surprise that I got lost in the Everglades. Daniel and I and the 87 other runners were supposed to follow the orange ribbons tied to overhanging tree branches and fluttering from stakes in the ground along the course. But at some point the orange ribbons had apparently gone for coffee and my intrepid party and I took a few wrong turns. “A few” wrong turns in the sense that Noah is said to have seen “a few” rain drops.

Apparently in ultra-marathons it is common for the course to be both approximate in length and difficult to follow. Or as one of my running buddies put it, “It wouldn’t be as challenging if the course were measured with perfect accuracy; frequently the course is a mile or two longer than advertised.”

“Got it,” I said. “We’re running 31 miles through a Python infused swamp with calf deep mud* and vines ensnaring our ankles pulling us down into the muck at every step. I certainly understand how you wouldn’t want it to be too easy.”

And it wasn’t as if the race organizer, Bob, an erudite gentleman who has himself run more ultras than I’ve had hot meals, hadn’t considered the possibility of fledgling disasters including imploding entrants and intrusive wildlife. Each participant was given a whistle. No, that is not a typo. A whistle. “To scare the alligators off the path,” Bob explained deftly.

Daniel looked thoughtful. “I’m pretty sure alligators don’t care much about being whistled at,” he said. “Maybe to identify the bodies.”

Ah.

Fortunately the temperature never got much above 90 degrees and we were able to find water at many of the aid stations. Or, more accurately, the aid stations we were able to find all had water. So, as ultras go, the event was pleasant enough through the first four or five hours of face plants in the muck. There were home baked coffee cakes and cinnamon rolls at the aid stations. My new best friends and I–I had got talking to Mike and Carla somewhere in the first ten miles–stopped to eat and chat under the gumbo limbos at a point that may have been around 25 miles in. It turned out that Carla had run a number of ultras before. Mike recited some poems. Both were willing to listen to my Vaudeville Era jokes. Good food and new friends. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Still and all, the tricky bit was getting lost in the prairie. When I get lost in my own home-unable to find the dishwasher, say, or the dryer-I can frequently find something else with which to amuse myself, writing a newsletter for example. Getting lost in the prairie is a whole different kettle of alligators in that there is lots more prairie in every direction all the way to Lake Okeechobee a hundred and fifty miles to the north, not a dishwasher in sight. In the Fakahatchee Strand, lost is lost.

So I had a little “come apart” as these electrolyte imbalances are referred to in ultra-events. (Note to self: in an ultra, when your body tells you it wants ginger ale, do not, under any circumstances, drink ginger ale.) Unable to run, unable to walk, unable to stand, unable to sit, my options seemed limited. I determined my best available course of action was to lie on the path and twitch. So I lay down in the dirt and twitched. I felt that if I were especially lucky, a neighborly eight-foot alligator might stumble over my spasming carcass and devour me, curtailing my running career but also ending the concerning snapping and popping sounds coming from my legs. If I were unlucky, I could just lie there twitching until the first snows arrived.

Let’s leave me at the end of my “romp in the swamp” last year–surely I survived somehow and got back to write this–and return to your children. “Remember the time we ate sugary foods and watched the Disney channel for 14 consecutive hours on a Saturday?” No loving parent ever made this claim. No one remembers sitting around the house, doing nothing, watching TV, listening to their arteries constrict.

The Maltese Falcon may have been “what dreams are made of,” but suckling on electronics is not what family memories are made of.

Wouldn’t you prefer this narrative instead? “Remember the time we got lost on that hike in the mountains? We had no food left, and the sky opened up and we were drenched to the skin? Remember how we huddled against that big rock for two hours? You couldn’t have been more than nine years-old; you said the rain was never going to stop. I gave you my sweat shirt and it was so big it came down to your knees.”

“Then the sun came out and it was a beautiful day again. We started walking in some direction and you found a mile of wild raspberry plants and we picked and ate, picked and ate until our hands were bright red and we were stuffed. And it turned out we were only two miles from the road and we went back to the campsite and burnt the dinner so we just ate more raspberries?”

Sure it’s hard to organize trips. It’s tricky to take the time off from work, make the reservations. Yes, rental cars are expensive and the rain is cold and there is certainly no guarantee of finding sunshine and wild raspberries.

But there is something worse than DNF, (Did Not Finish,) as you are whisked through those few sweet, wonderful years with your kids. The only real tragedy is DNS.

* Defined as mud deep enough to drown a small cow. Sorry.