We often experience nature by gazing out our windows. I do a lot of staring outside mine as I begin to write my essays, as I tend toward procrastination. It’s early Spring in North Carolina and through my office window I notice a fresh green spreading across our grass, growing brighter with every warm day. The sleepy old Maple is shaking off her outer sheaths of new buds, revealing tender newborn leaves within. The Robin’s have returned, hungry travelers pecking at the earth where tiny bugs surface, feeling the warm pull of the sun. Because of my long trail runs, I have been on the other side of a window, enjoying the wilds of the woods. My 100-mile race is less than a month away so for the next two weeks, I’ll run 200 miles or so before I start my taper, decreasing mileage to rest and repair. A year ago I had an inspiration which started me on this journey and now it’s hard to believe that this Spring begins my 5th and final season of training.
Give me time in the woods and I am a woolgatherer of inspirations. Day after day, I run the same trails at roughly the same early hours so it’s easy to see subtle changes of light and shadow, color and hue. The moss that carpets fallen trees calls for attention with her lime green contrasting the dull, tarnished golds of winter. I stop to admire the Perriwinkle, the bravest of the wildflowers, who risks an early appearance, sending a message down through her roots to the other spring ephemerals, “its ok to come out now” she whispers.
The beauty of trail running is that it accounts for distractions. Moreover, it necessitates both distractions and a draining of the brain, thoughts or no thoughts, anything to keep the mind in check while the body does the physical work. We are disciplining the mind to simply observe rather than engage with sensations that are sometimes euphoric, sometimes painful and often somewhere in between.
Twenty hours into my 30 hour race, I’ll be running in the dark. My woolgathering will be mostly internal. With minimal vision, I’ll be wandering the rooms of my mind for tools I have gained in my training like counting, singing or reciting a mantra. During her 100-mile races, Courtney Dauwalter, widely regarded as one of the world’s best female trail runners, imagines she’s in a pain cave with a pickaxe, chipping away at the walls to make it bigger. How badass is that? Rather than avoiding pain, she enters it, welcomes it, and allows it a seat at her table.
“Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose”. Trail runners often use the word “freedom” when describing the feeling of running in nature. Maybe sailors, surfers and skydivers would say the same thing. But with running, it’s just you, nature and discipline. How do we defy gravity and focus the mind to carry ourselves to the finish line? I’ve received a lot of anecdotal advice from other 100-milers. Someone said that after the umpteenth hour, you begin to have nothing left to think about except eating and moving forward. Once you’ve lost everything, I imagine that thinking of very little (or better yet, nothing) is rather freeing.
On this beautiful Spring weekend I’ll be running a “back-to-back”, 25 miles on Saturday and then I’ll wake up at 2 am on Sunday to run another 20 miles in the dark. My wonderful running coach, Rachel Bell Kelly aka Wisp, tells me what to do and I do it. Since I still have some work ahead, I appreciate that I have one less thing to think about.
Acrylic Painting of Hellebores (Lenten Roses), in front of my procrastination window.
I'm running the Umstead100 Endurance Run, April 6-7 in Raleigh, NC while fundraising for Go Conscious Earth, whose mission is to empower the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Congo Basin Rainforest to protect their ancestral land upon which we all depend for survival. Please visit (and share!) my fundraising page GCE100 and make a donation for this critical cause. Also, please forward my collection of blogs to anyone who might be interested in learning more about my experience preparing for a very long race!
Thank you so much!
xo Anne
Beautiful essay