Self Portrait: Runner, Abstract

I, like so many others, am an addict.

I come by it honestly. My birth mother is an addict, and so is my brother, a bloodline largely uninterested in warning labels. If it makes us feel good, great – if it makes us hurt less, even better. Emotions are complicated and noisy. The more you can quiet them, the safer your heart.

My parents (my adopted parents, if you insist) brought me home just three months after my birth, but in that short time I acquired three separate names.

One, given to me by a frightened girl who decided I was a hurdle she could not leap; one, a secret forever, from a foster family I’ll never know; and finally, the one I use to introduce myself. The one that struggles to hold the frayed strands of my identity together.

I’ve spent a significant portion of my life trying to combine those three women: the could-have-been, the might-have-been, and the I-am. No matter how hard I try, the reflections only sometimes line up.

What we agree upon is this: I’ve fought tooth and nail to be here, mostly against myself. I enjoy a thriving career and the closeness of my family. I practice yoga, read regularly and meditate. There is rarely a day when the first and last words I hear are not, I love you. My children reach for me when they wake.

I live a beautiful life.

And there is rarely a day when I don’t think about ending it.

-

In 2024, sedation is a booming business. Stop at any corner store. I’ve worked my way through most commercial coping mechanisms: caffeine, nicotine, alcohol in flavors like peach fizz and island spritz. A getaway, if you believe the labels - maybe from the cruel, constant headlines, maybe from how poorly your own skin seems to fit.

Maybe, if you’re like me, from both.

It would be easy to classify ultrarunning the same way: masochistic, unnecessary, arguably dangerous self-medication.

The difference, I’ve found, is this – the farther you run, the less you can escape. Your body gets tired, but the mind quits first. When it does, its weight supersedes everything else. You must be able to both catalog your pain and either set it aside or sink into it. Either way, you are undeniably present.

World champion runner Courtney Dauwalter calls it the pain cave. The darkest, most secret part of yourself. The further you go into that cavern, the more loudly your brain howls: quit, and the more you have to trust yourself to reply, no. Not yet.

I often wonder how many of us found that darkness familiar and already well-furnished.

My mother asks why. My friends ask why. I smile and shake my head. Another popular adage: if you know, you know.

A runner is a haunted house.

-

Three months after the car accident, I’m awake in the middle of the night again, scrolling idly through Netflix. These days I sleep very little; I enjoy even less. My face has healed. The rest of me has not.

The neurologist calls it post-concussion syndrome. I suffer multiday migraines and crippling depression. I have both vertigo and panic attacks, shower infrequently and cry often. Once a week I see a therapist. When I ask how long this will last, the doctor lifts his shoulders and drops them again. He holds his hands palms up, so I can see that they’re empty.

The pandemic is still two years away.

We’ve yet to lose our business and my grandmother is still alive.

We rarely choose the things that change us most.

That night I watch a documentary called The Race That Eats Its Young. It is my first introduction to ultrarunning. The first time I have ever heard of Lazarus Lake or his crushing fever dream of a race.

The runners waiver between hell-bent and hopeless. I watch it a second time, and then a third. I scour running blogs and Reddit threads. For the first time in months, I am sure of something. I will - somehow - find my way to those mountains, and I will measure myself against them.

I make this decision as a twenty-eight-year-old mother of four with a bad knee and nothing more than a 5k on her running resume. I wear secondhand shoes. My go-to running trail is paved and lacks even the mild inconvenience of a hill; I have no outdoor skills to speak of.

In other words, I have absolutely no business chasing a hundred miles worth of book pages through the unforgiving Tennessee wilderness.

But to chase a thing that inspires madness, you have to let the madness in. Talent won’t suffice. It demands your total attention. Your obsession.

And to that end, I’m uniquely suited for the task.

It's two years later, having hitchhiked across state lines and still wearing someone else’s shoes, that I make my first run at the Barkley Fall Classic. I fall spectacularly short of the 50k. I put my name back into the hat immediately. This year will make my fourth attempt.

Since then, my vocabulary has expanded, as have my Google searches. I count off my goal races like rosary beads. Leadville. Western. Vol State.

And, always, the Barkley Marathons.

A runner is a madman.

-

Believe it or not, uncomfortable is the easy part.

You can sleep in, or you can run. You can stay dry, and warm, and safe – or you can run. Definitive choices. Yes or no answers.

It’s the reproach that’s surprising. The look on my son’s face when he says, softly, “But why do you have to go?”

The truth is, I am everything first except myself. A mother. A wife. A businesswoman. A teacher. An expert at making myself uncomfortable. For years I have marketed myself by saying, I don’t need much, while struggling to complete tasks as basic as feeding myself or taking a shower. There are days when providing myself compassion might as well be climbing Olympus.

Failure, injury - those things are givens, both in life and in sport. I’m afraid of neither.

What I fear is that my depression will kill me. That one day, the cave will become too dark, too far from the daylight, for me to make my return, and that our children will inherit the kind of wound that never heals.

Running is not a cure-all for mental illness. It is not a crutch I can stand alone upon, nor should I. But when I run, I put conscious distance between myself and that outcome. I commit not just to spending time present in both my mind and body, but to becoming comfortable there.

I lace my shoes and leave my life behind with every intention to return. When I do so, I don’t just choose my family. I choose myself. I choose life: painful, messy, devastatingly beautiful.

There’s no other option.

An impossible dream demands everything. You want it more than you want to spend time with your children or catch up on work. You ask everyone around you to make room at the table for this thing only you love.

I want our children to know the woman as much as the mother. I want them to know how often I was afraid and unprepared; that as often as I have succeeded, I have failed. That it is an act of bravery to be kind to yourself.

To live an authentic life, you must sometimes be selfish.

I kiss my son’s worried face, and I say, “I love you. I’ll be home soon.”

They say you find your way to the Barkley Marathons when you’re ready. I take comfort in the thought of that future: a day when the condolences arrive, when I have pleaded my earnest case to be released alone into the forest. A day when I am ready to trust that I will, against all odds, find my way home.

In the meantime: some days are easy, some days are hard. Each day leads forward. I take my breakfast in the forest whenever possible, slipping through game trails and down the riverbanks at dawn. I treasure the time away from e-mails and consults, the hours spent scouring for tracks and following the herds. I learn to both move quickly and be still. Sometimes I am silent. Sometimes, alone with the trees, I sing.

A runner is a woman: as Emily Dickinson wrote, out with lanterns, looking for herself.