My Ultra-running Summer or: How I learned to balance family, running and racing


by Chris Chigbrow


Groveling at Mercury’s feet: a dream, chaotic pre-waking thoughts. Before I wake I have that feeling of being pursued in a race: someone catching up to you as you approach the finish line. Not a nightmare but . . .


I wake and look at my phone 3:57am. Once again I wake before my alarm goes off. I slide off my bed and into a sitting position on the floor. The plantar fasciitis stretch my podiatrist instructed me to do doesn’t seem to help much but I do it anyway – it is part of the ritual now. A ritual gesture too, I lay my head on the bed, smell the warm soporific smells, listen to the breath and sleep-stirrings of my wife. There is the soreness in my feet as I stand. A few ginger steps as I adjust my balance and try and make my feet happy.


Running is like a religion: it has taken over a decade to get to my current level of devotion. I turn the coffee maker on and soon enjoy, once again, that sweet tasting rocket fuel; dare I say coffee is a sacrament. And then out the door for a morning 10.


***


The appeals of running are many. You may enjoy the fitness gains, the weight loss/management, or the increase in overall health. I love to eat so running helps justify whatever intake of pasta and beer I find myself craving although those cravings have been moderated through running. The social aspect too: all of a sudden an avowed introvert like myself having a social circle, going on group-runs now a thing. And there is the aesthetic, the things you see, trails and city scenes, odd moments like startling a coyote in the hills or the spontaneous creation of an Eadweard Muybridge motion picture produced by your running-shadow cast by auto headlights against fence slats.


I’ve described it as a compulsion, my desire to run, which is convenient shorthand for a web of needs and desires happening on conscious and subconscious levels. From a pure physical level there are the endorphins: Oh. Man. The endorphins. Speed is fun and so is that connection to your environment that running lets you attain. For millennia – via running – man has been able to approximate the whirling, mind bending landscape-in-motion which Modernist painters sought to capture after the introduction of trains. This is why cruising through a forest, every footstrike in tune with the terrain, trees whizzing by, is so viscerally satisfying. A heady combination, those sensations together with those stimulated parts of the brain.


But these feels are available at 5 or 10 miles a week, through being adequately, minimally conditioned to run. Why run 30, 40, 50 miles – or more – a week? The longer distances – in training, races, or projects – is where conflict with my loved ones was created. I’m 41 years old. I’m married. I have two kids. I’ve got a full time job and – gasp! – I have a few other interests besides running. Balance? Yes, a balance was required. And reaching that balance wasn’t easy. Wait. Let me rephrase that: reaching that balance is a constant task, something I’ve learned is perhaps even more difficult than getting those desired miles.


***


I was caught unawares when my wife confronted me about my running. But it only took a few seconds to completely understand. It was one of those things that simultaneously had to be brought up but which is so awkward a good time really never comes up. I was conciliatory – honestly conciliatory – our track records were littered with passive aggressive interludes, casual trespasses registered and abided until later coming to a head. I recognized the confrontation for how necessary and timely it was. I had finished a race a few days before and now was expressing my desire to run a local ultra, the Resort to Rock. The phrase “not spending time with the kids” was spoken and I understood and agreed. A metaphysical mirror was held up in front of me and I mustered enough humility to take a glimpse. I would learn that there are different kinds of being and that just because I was home with fam didn’t necessarily make that time quality time. I would have to look at running – which has become a key part of my identity – and make a change. 41 years old and still learning.


And of course I said I still wanted to run the ultra.


***


Full disclosure: during my ultra-running summer I ran only one ultra. Yes, just one, but also a trail marathon. But that previous spring I adequately pre-funked, running 3 ultras in three days, the last day covering some 40 miles.


Owyhee County – the southwest corner of Idaho – encompasses some of the most remote, inaccessible land in the US. It is the second largest chunk of wilderness that is not in a National Park. The utilitarian, wedge-shape of the county belies the rugged, varying terrain, high desert cut with canyons. The idea to run across this amazing yet forbidding land was conceived by friend/running partner Micah Lauer who is a science educator. He painstakingly devised a route that would see us cross the remote and rugged county from south to north, 116 miles all told. The start date was early May 2018.


Describing this plan to most people – to non-runners – garnered the usual comments one receives when you express the desire to a) run and b) to run distances longer than a 5k. “You’re going to do what?”, “Why?”, “You’re crazy”. However, with the Owyhee Crossing, I did hear the unusual addition of “Don’t die”, an awkward but validating indicator of worth coming from my boss.


There is something different and special about having your wife give you the “You’re crazy” line. Of course there are all the endearing, loving sentiments at play. These are the sentiments that make her giving you the “Don’t die” line all the more poignant. Training would take me away from my family for hours each week, dying in the high desert would take me away forever. Training for the Crossing therefore carried with it a weighted imperative. My wife knows that me doing such – crazy as they are – adventures are a bedrock of my sanity. So agreeing that I could attempt the crossing was also an implicit acceptance of the time needed to prepare.


***


My training proved adequate, the Crossing successful, a success in many ways. For one, Micah and I delved into those difficult mental states that adventure often necessitates. And we emerged emboldened and unscathed. We saw ranch ruins and rattlesnakes, a bobcat and a set of monster bull elk antlers. Through bushwhacking and following faint and growing-fainter jeep tracks – tracks being reclaimed by wilderness-designated sagebrush – we followed an historic path.


My wife was impressed, perhaps dutifully so. After the Crossing my weekly mileage dropped but after three weeks I was back, averaging 65 mi/week for a period spanning late May and into early June. I picked a race to run, the Dirty Dog Marathon, figuring that my fitness was high enough to have fun. But, truth be told, I didn’t want to just have fun . . . I wanted to be a top 10 finisher. I wanted to have my name show up on the best results section of UltraSignup. I didn’t want to just finish it, I wanted to crush it.


***


I mean, like I said, we all run for unique, personal reasons. I didn’t get into running to create conflict and by and large I would say running has invited positives into my life. But running does take time and the boundaries between amateur/semi-pro/expert/pro are all-too fluid. Like anything you get out of running what you put in. And also, like anything, you must engage/indulge in the activity in a manner that balances with your life.


Balance might come easy to some folks. It may come naturally or with only a modicum of conscious will. But for me balance has proven to be subconscious alchemy, the domain of dark rationality and the un-scientific. 50 miles a week seemed healthy: a challenge, sure, but still possible to assimilate into my life. You won’t be going pro with that mileage but, if you include a healthy dose of elevation gain in those miles, you will be able to compete in various longer race environments.


I finished 5th in the Dirty Dog, had fun and hobnobbed with some of the local running royalty. It was an awesome time and before I left the parking lot I was wondering what I was going to do next. I kept the 50 mile average up and eyed running once again the Foothills XC12k in early August. Summer was winding down and the need to run was still with me. It was after the 12k (PB and 10th overall) that the discussion with my wife was had. Two weeks after the 12k was the Resort to Rock 50k. In my sweaty, beer-soothed, post-race state after the 12k I decided to run the Resort to Rock. I knew I had the fitness to finish, but – in my heart of hearts – I knew I could do good. My only prior 50k was an over 6 hour affair. I would go on to snag 4th place overall in this one and, like at the Dirty Dog, have the winner hook my up with a beer. The little things. So cool.


But the discussion with my wife had happened. Moving forward, how much would I run? How much should I run? How could running fit harmoniously into my life?


***


In the two weeks between the 12k and the ultra I tapered – and reflected. Looking back at the summer I could see the struggle being played out. We kept up on hikes, camping trips and family outings. But I saw that I pushed the accommodations that my family granted me too far. I melded family and running, my wife and kids coming to the finish line of a couple of races. They had fun and I think it is important for the kids to experience that kind of positive environment. I feel like I was close to my family during the summer but quantity doesn’t equal quality. When my wife said that running was taking away time spent with the kids she was not only referring to actual time spent away but also to me being present while at home. I would cajole my fam into early bed times. I would be tired and inattentive in the evening. Planning on an early run the next morning I would fixate on the clock: my schedule had become the schedule for us all.


After the Resort to Rock 50k I settled down. Now I make the effort to be attentive when I help on 2nd grade homework problems. I don’t sweat it if we get to bed late, even if I have a run planned for the next morning. And if 50 miles is not going to happen any given week then that is fine. Family, running and life: a balance is possible, it just takes work.





Things go in cycles and perhaps next year will see me escalating my mileage and preparing for new projects and picking new race targets. Whatever project or race I move forward with I will be forearmed with what I’ve learned this summer. But this lesson learned was not spontaneous. It was a product of talking with my wife and soul searching on my own. Family life and running life, running life and family life. Like some master-control graphic equalizer for my reality, the balances are constantly being adjusted.

Book Review: A God in the Shed by J-F. Dubeau (book put down, unfinished)

So, still on a horror fiction kick and wanted to stay international (this time Canadian) after reading the wonderful I Am Behind You by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Sweden).  Perhaps it was because Lindqvist's book was fresh in my mind that The God in the Shed by J-F. Dubeau disappointed so: to the point that I unfortunately did not finish reading it.  Alas, not to speak entirely ill of the work - very soon I will describe my putting the book down unfinished (kind of bizarre for me), a book that I purchased, nevertheless - the representation of the titular god was intriguing.  Indeed the characters interacting with the god had some goose bump moments which are the sensations I love in literature (esp. horror lit.).

But, from the start, things were not to my taste.  A town plagued by a serial killer for decades - the result of a man trying to keep the god at bay which would have prevented more bloodshed - was too fantastic.  Tied to this is the beleaguered yet loved police chief who worked so hard to crack each murder/disappearance even though he was aware of the supernatural underpinnings of the towns societal structure.  I just wasn't buying/could not maintain my sensation of disbelief.

What finished it off and which was another source of distaste from the start was the employing of children to take part in the narrative, high school kids and younger, the death and desecration of a kindergarten-aged kid an early lynch pin of the story.  This book has some gory scenes which is fine if it works as it did in Lindqvist's I Am Behind You.  The Swede included dismemberment, vicious hate crimes, and live humans getting melted by acid in his book and it all worked, the stomach-churning placated by well-wrought prose.

The discussion between the middle-school aged characters as they walked out to the shed finished me off - unnecessary prattle that should have been culled.  A novel is of course an accomplishment and I salute Dubeau and wish him further success.  As someone who is over the age of 40 I find the need to maximize my time, to get the most out of each moment and this book, though I made an effort, didn't make the cut.

Book Review: Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All is a very good book that serves up a lesson, one that — to me — is not manifest within the pages itself. The mission of the book is to explore the attitudes and behaviors of the elite and that term — elite — loses any nebulous qualities as Giridharadas goes to the source, interviewing heiresses and philanthropists who find personal turmoil in how their relationship to money affects the world. He talks to financiers in-training who are choosing to join the system while also trying to act on grave reservations they hold about that very same system. He highlights the Clinton Global Initiative’s (CGI) culpability in contributing to negative effects on the world and even interviews former President Clinton himself.

And that is the crux of Giridharadas’ argument, the point of the book — to unpack how things seemingly so integral to the functioning of the world are also — and more importantly so — negative. Now, let me say that discerning how the success of something like the CGI can be another person’s evil is a delicate matter. But Giridharadas succeeds, spotlighting how “marketworld” — the winners — have used their power to limit how government institutes social programs, instead taking on the task of social betterment themselves. And it has worked.

But perception of this status quo, while not the purview of the book — indeed, Giridharadas explicitly meets the elite on their own turf, gauging their attitudes — does not get discussed. The populace, the 99%, or better to say the middle class and everyone below, is a radically ineffectual blob intentionally (in my mind) advertised to by their betters: the message is a continuation and amplification of the Horatio Alger myth. The Americans who would benefit from a change that the elites will not make are not even capable of formulating an understanding of their situation.

“Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent” Wittgenstein said and I argue this is applicable in the context of politics as it relates to topics like the brotherhood of man and the global community: seeking justice on these fundamental economic issues is — again, to me — decisively rendered ineffectual based on the inertia of the — of our — system. The same error is made when talking of an ideal libertarian world where some fiscally conservative yet socially liberal regime somehow rules. 

Libertarianism generally is connected with the right and on the left we have Communism, the inevitable outcome of an outgrowth of Capitalism, a system that will rule the future and justly dictates action today. Libertarianism likewise, based on an idealized view of its principles, argues its own importance in making decisions today.

Giridharadas presents an elite who’ve managed to squelch dissent and, though it is nonsensical, are the victims of their own success. Which means they are not victims — they have successfully done as Fredrick Gates, advising John D. Rockefeller, said to do: “Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an avalanche! You must keep up with it! You must distribute it faster than it grows”. Giridharadas provides this quote, a word of advice to the successful in an age when public resentment of the rich was being channeled into populist movements.

Today that word of advice is being heeded more than ever — where are the popular movements decry economic injustice? They are there, don’t get me wrong, but — sad and difficult to say — popular action is diverted into so-called social justice movements and not movements seeking economic justice. Done with the complicity of the media, the media an ally to the powerful for many reasons not least that they are owned by the powerful.

Is there hope? I think of Winston Smith’s thoughts from George Orwell’s 1984, words that have stuck with me since I first read the book in high school:
“ ‘If there is hope,’ wrote Winston, ‘it lies in the proles.’
If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within."

That the impetus for meaningful change will not come from the winners is the between-the-lines message of Giridharadas’ book. Today the winners have taken all, the proles have been captured.

Book Review: I Am Behind You by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Despite graphic scenes and tragically well-rounded characters John Ajvide Lindqvist's I Am Behind You (titled Himmelstrand in the original Swedish) will remain for me a surrealist novel.  The obvious dream-like expanse in which the characters wake to find themselves notwithstanding Lindqvist's work dwells on the heavier themes that inspired various surrealist's darker dreams.  Cue Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou for an exempli gratia.  And I do shy away from violence.  However, even as Lindqvist references films like Hostel - abhorrent torture porn - and presents some horrific scenes, these parts are not what linger in my memory, instead existing as necessary moves to get to the satisfying end.

Trite as it may sound the characters prove to be their own worst enemies, something Lindqvist is slow to reveal - the creatures/entities/things that prey on the people do so with the characters consent albeit via some mindfuckery.  At the end the morphing monsters along with the other zombie creatures whom they have a sanguine symbiotic relationship with prove to simply be part of a bizarre ecosystem, a - yes - surreal ecosystem.

John Ajvide Lindqvist (photo by Teemu Rajala)

The concept of "high strangeness" is one I've come to love: use The Mothman Prophecies as a primer, the book and not the movie.  In many ghost/supernatural/religious/ufo experiences there often exists an element of weirdness - a quirkiness to the sundry encounters that seem to be artifacts of a world radically foreign to ours overlaping at a 90 degree angle.  I Am Behind You captures this vibe, describing an arc that is complete yet which contains elements of the nonsensical, a dream-logic that the reader is not privy too.

As some reviewers have said, this book can stand alone but is part of a trilogy.  Some have said that the second novel, I Always Find You, would be helpful to read even before I Am Behind You.  I'm looking forward to reading the next one but almost want to wait a year or so just to let I Am Behind You continue to seep in.