By HPRS Staff Columnist Jacob Stevens
“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?” –Hunter S. Thompson
I sat down to write a race recap for the Silverheels 100-Mile Endurance Run and the words simply never came. This happens from time to time and there is normally something to be learned from times such as these. I say that without ever having really learned anything specific from these events, but it sounds much more professional and journalistic when a thought ends with an insinuation of a grand insight or something revelatory…I have none of that to offer. Thus, I present a catastrophe of dissonant thought and ramblings that will hopefully resonate somewhere with someone.
Times of conscious unrest or lack of artistic development is tough to diagnose as it is disguised by the productivity that comes with day-to-day life activities in which we are externally rewarded but feel internally empty. There needs to be something to get excited about and something to strive for in order for there to be any real motivation; not the type of motivation to do the things that society has come to require of us but the motivation to do the things that others won’t understand, and if we are calling a spade a spade, we don’t entirely understand ourselves. Resting on things that happened previously, no matter how recent, can provide temporarily relief to this type of unrest but its reprieve is short-lived…
The race itself was a beautiful disaster in its own right which offered rewards that I am still coming to terms with and trying to understand. If you have read any of my previous writings, I have often alluded to this idea that we can resonate on an unforeseen level through our thoughts and words; by passing on our own thoughts, feelings, and ideas through art we can live on as pieces of our philosophy or code is passed along.
I was fortunate enough to have dinner with a young man who was running his first 100-mile race the next day. We unsurprisingly talked mostly about the upcoming race, and I offered up the best words of wisdom I could muster as I fielded his questions over the course of our meal. We shared some early miles together the next day and then as the altitude got to me, I fell behind. Fast forward about 18 hours and we just so happened to be 9 miles apart and coming into the same aid station in the middle of the night. By this point I had given myself every opportunity to make it to the morning and genuinely believed, as I still do, that I had given all that I had to give that day and it simply wasn’t enough to make the fast approaching 22-hour cutoff.
My friend, however, was mentally in the same space I was but had plenty of time to make the next cutoff; I could feel exactly what was going through his head in that moment, it is a little hard to explain but I simply knew where he was at; we had a conversation and I bid him farewell. As it would turn out I would get a text message explaining to me how he was going to quit at that aid station; that our conversations and what I said to him put him in the right frame of mind to get up and find his way to the finish line. Him and I met indirectly a few years ago at a previous race but this was the first time we had ever met or even spoken to each other before. In a sense, when he crossed that finish line, a piece of me did to. This may be why I am at peace with the way the race unfolded but don’t have the words for a proper race report…the race report is not mine to give; only my thoughts and ideas that stem from experiences taking place in the darkest of nights on mountains with peaks jaggedly extending to the heavens as if to offer some extravagant gift to the universe.
It is during these cold, dark, ghoulish nights where the transformations take place; never during the warm, sunny, cloudless days while I traverse trails engulfed in wildflowers and drown in views from 12,000 feet that will take your breath away, figuratively and literally. It’s as if we are teased with a beautiful, albeit steady and stagnant, worldview only to be thrust into a place where the colors collide with one another creating a worldview resembling a kaleidoscope where sounds are seen and felt rather than heard and music visibly unfolds on the trail in front of you as if guiding you on the ultimate tour of your soul. The first few times this happens is of course terrifying and most make the wise and logical choice to never go back but if you do however choose to go back into the darkness you begin to wrestle with the idea of mortality, purpose, being, time, and space … all the really cool metaphysical stuff; for better or worse that once terrifying place in the middle of the mountains without a soul in sight and a darkness so deep you can’t see your hand in front of your face is all of the sudden not so terrifying…it even begins to feel a bit like home.
The real question is what to do with these experiences once I come back to the world in which I came from, the one that seems slightly more distorted than when I left and it is a world in which I don’t quite understand, and I am fairly certain doesn’t quite understand me, whatever that is supposed to feel like. I also suppose that this is a place many people have found themselves in before at some point and can relate to. Thus, the question remains, where do we go from here?
Self-expression through art seems to be the most dominant and accepted solution to the issue at hand which is why I find freedom through running and then writing about my experiences while others create in all sorts of different ways from gardening and music to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and mountaineering. The most important aspect of all of this, in my opinion, is that we show up. Not just physically but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually as well. To be fully present and aware of what we are navigating as humans is one of the most useful experiences we can engage in.
I had the honor and privilege to speak to our local cross-country teams here in Dalhart, Texas tonight and what a rewarding experience. To show their commitment, dedication, and willingness to show up and put the work in, the team holds a practice at 12:01 am the day they are officially allowed to have mandatory team workouts and I was fortunate enough to be involved. To be completely transparent, I spend most of my time training alone, which is by design; in the last five years I can literally count on one hand the number of people I have been on a run with outside of a race. This type of solitude can be very intrinsically rewarding but it also tends to open up planes of thought that others may not fully understand, and I may not be able to fully articulate. To take a break from the seclusion turned out to be a very rewarding experience.
To see 35 pre-teens and teens gather just before midnight for a cross-country practice has, in a very real sense, restored my hope for our future. While running in groups with pre-determined pacers I witnessed what this sport is all about. I was there to motivate them and in turn, I was the one reminded of what is important and thus inspired. The workout was essentially 4x400m with some pacing variations and within one of the groups was a child much smaller than the others and, I would find out later, was there with his older sibling.
On the home stretch of the 2nd or 3rd repeat while sprinting this young man went down, and he went down hard. He was immediately attended to and helped off the track to be checked out and assess the damage; a bit shaken up and fighting back tears I watched this 9-year-old boy, with no advice or direction from anyone, set his water down and walk back onto the track…he never missed a repeat.
This is what we do with those experiences; this is where we go. Not necessarily to your local cross-country team but the communities around us is the place where we can pass on our experiences and leave a positive impact…we may just learn a lesson or two along the way ourselves. I showed up tonight to try and provide a little encouragement and a little inspiration but in return I was the one who was inspired and shown one the most important keys to success play out in real time…you show up and you finish what you start.
The beauty of ultrarunning, and trail running in general, is the diversity of our sport. This is a place where you can come to search the depths of your soul while suffering in desolation only to be reminded of one of life’s greatest lessons by a young man on a high school track; it’s a place where the only thing that matters is that you show up; this holds true for life as well; if we will simply show up, we can grow and experience life as we were truly meant to.
