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Kearsarge Pass
Selfie, coming up Kearsarge Pass from the west.
Extremely good news.
I was in Albuquerque in April to run Cedro Peak 50K on my birthday. Ken Gordon said “You’re running High Lonesome!” Ken is running it too. I needed a reminder, though. What is High Lonesome? Apparently I’d put myself on the waitlist for this small, new 100 mile race in the Sawatch Mountains of Colorado. I was #30 on the list. The race only starts 100 runners. It seemed highly unlikely to me that I would get in.
Some months later it seem less unlikely. The list had churned, a lot. And suddenly, I was in.
I am a sea level guy. I struggle with rain. High Lonesome has its lowest point at 8,000 feet, and the first climb tops 13,000. Summer monsoon thunderstorms were almost guaranteed.
I am also an Aspie. Unlike Courtney Dauwalter, who just puts on her giant shorts and runs, apparently without much of a plan except to deal with whatever comes up, I struggle when things don’t go exactly as planned, and segueing to plan B is a challenge I am not always up to. Things never go as planned in a 100 mile race, especially one in the mountains of Colorado during monsoon season. They never go as planned in life, either, so this is good practice.
The Three Commitments.
In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition the Three Vows, or Three Commitments, are three methods for “embracing the chaotic, unstable, dynamic, challenging nature of our situation as a path to awakening,” Pema Chodron writes. Immediately in front of me on the path is High Lonesome 100. I reckon these methods will help me with that, too.
Unlike the Eightfold Path and the various sets of Buddhist precepts, the Three Commitments must be done in order. The first is committing to not cause harm. The second is committing to take care of one another. The third is committing to embrace the world as it is.
It’s tempting to try to rush ahead to the third commitment. After all, embracing the world as it is is pretty much the finish line; you are well on your way to awakening when you can do this.
The first commitment seems pretty straightforward, too, if you are marginally ethical and moral, especially because we humans are often inclined to grandiosity in one direction or another (often both), and this is an easy commitment to look at in epic terms: “I shalt not kill. Okay. That’s easy. I’m not murderous.” “I shalt not steal. Easy enough, I guess, as long as I am allowed to play a bit with business expenses come tax time…” I don’t covet my neighbor’s wife, and even if I did, nobody would know, so no harm would ever come of it, except, maybe, to me, since this covetousness might keep me from fully embracing my own relationships. Even in epicness, we hedge.
Looking up at Kearsarge Pass, just before a storm.
Right Speech.
When I pull in to an aid station during a race, I try to be courteous and grateful and show my appreciation for the volunteers’ efforts to help me, and all the runners, through the race. If they ask me “How are you doing?” my answer is almost always “I’m doing great! Thank you for asking, and thank you for all the work you are doing!” With my crew, however, I am usually a little more candid, and often angry with frustration at whatever has not gone according to plan: “This sucks. My feet are killing me. I’m way fucking off pace. I don’t know why I do this shit.” And once I’ve delivered that blast of negativity, it’s out there in the world, and it seems to have become much more real. I’ve derailed a few of my races this way.
Consequently, I have decided that I do better without a crew.
It is only recently that it’s occurred to me that there is another way. Maybe, just maybe, instead of being candid, bitter, angry when talking to my crew, I could try to treat them with the same gratitude and appreciation I strive for with the aid station volunteers. After all, my crew, which these past few years pretty much consists of Andrea, are also volunteers, and volunteering to crew me is a pretty thankless job. Maybe instead of saying the words that make me and them feel like shit, I should say the words that make us all feel better, and I know what words those are because I always feel a little better after telling the aid station folks how great I feel.
Right speech, it turns out, is an important part of doing no harm. In fact, it’s a more important part, for me, than not killing or stealing or coveting my neighbor’s wife because I don’t do those other things. I do speak unskillfully with alarming regularity.
As luck would have it, the Buddha gave some pretty specific directions regarding right speech: abstinence from false speech, malicious speech, and idle chatter. Avoid speaking in a hostile, angry way, don’t lie, gossip, or use speech to promote discord. Instead, tell the truth, but make sure you say it in a kind, gentle way that promotes harmony, and try to be mindful that what you are saying is useful and purposeful.
That’s a lot of instruction, and it’s going to take a lot of work just to remember it, never mind actually putting it into practice. It is easy to recognize, though, that when your crew says, after past races, “I was afraid of what your mood would be when you came into the aid station”, you have not been practicing right speech. I’m not like Donald Trump. I believe that nobody on my crew should ever be afraid of me. It’s also easy to recognize that angry declarations like “This sucks, I am having a terrible time, I don’t think I want to finish this race even if I could, I’m done with racing” are not useful or purposeful and do only harm. So I think I will try to start there.
Maybe if I don’t say “This sucks”, it won’t, and if it does, it will suck alongside the wonder of being in such an awesome place, of being able to run in it, of being able to run at all, of being able to run and hike 100 miles, all at once, never mind all the other things for which to be grateful, like that the pesky Hep-C virus seems to be finally cleared from my body, or my friends, my family, my trusty sidekick Julian the Cat, and even all the mistakes I’ve made that somehow led me to this place. It has not been a straight line.
Looking north from Kearsarge Pass, Pothole Lake below.
Kearsarge Pass.
Kearsarge Pass is my current happy place. I’ve been spending a lot of time there because it is beautiful, because I can get there in just a few hours, and from the trailhead in Onion Valley at 9,000 feet it’s four-and-a-half beautiful miles up to the pass, at nearly 12,000 feet, past lakes, waterfalls, through forests and then above tree line. I’ve also been spending a lot of time here because I am trying to get a little bit better adjusted to elevation, since I will be running a race with elevation between 8,000 and 13,000 feet in less than a week from now.
I’m also a little bit thrilled that I finally seem to be overcoming my crippling fear of heights – a genuine phobia in my case, that has, in the past, left me crouching on a trail trying to fend off a panic attack.
There were a series of little breakthroughs not that long ago. The first one was on a stretch of trail nearing the top of San Gorgonio Peak, 11,500 feet, the highest peak in Southern California. There is an exposed stretch cutting into a steep-but-not-too-steep slope of a generally rather round mountain. In the past, I would always turn away at these stretches in panic, and then beat myself up for it after. On this particular day – Mother’s Day – a Sunday – I was feeling particularly mortal. I had just learned about the cirrhosis. I was going in for an ultrasound the next day, to check for liver cancer. I felt as healthy as could be expected given the circumstances, but the circumstances were not so great. Two more folks from the punk rock days shooting speed in Texas, which is how I came to have this Hep-C that had given me cirrhosis, had died in recent months. Maybe my luck was running out.
Feeling mortal did not dissuade me from that ridge. Instead, it did the opposite. I suddenly understood in a very real way that time was something I was running out of. I stopped being intellectual abstraction. Statistically, the middle of my life was nearly twenty years ago. I couldn’t keep putting shit like this ridge off, hoping that maybe tomorrow I’d have the courage to overcome my fears.
The trail up to the top of Kearsarge Pass is a lot gnarlier than that trail on San Gorgonio.
Kearsarge Pass Trail starts in Onion Valley, west on Independence, which is just north of Lone Pine. In between Lone Pine and Independence is Manzanar, a concentration camp where Americans of Japanese descent were held during World War II, imprisoned solely because of their ancestry and race, a dark time in a young country that is full of dark times, and relevant today because of the racist and xenophobic policies of the Trump administration, supported by fearful mobs of white men who believe that equality has unjustly robbed them of their power.
According to wikipedia, the first known crossing of Kearsarge Pass was in 1864. Of course, this ignores the fact that Native Americans has been using the pass for hundreds if not thousands of years. The Kearsarge Pass Trail continues does from the pass, past the Kearsarge Lakes, to about mile 40 (northbound) of the 212 mile John Muir Trail.
The lakes are clear and beautiful, and warmer than the Cottonwood Lakes.
The eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains are an escarpment, a much harsher, harder drop down than the gently sloping west.
Mikaela, JMT thru-hiker, Kearsarge Pass
Mikaela
Wednesday July 18, 9:30pm, Los Angeles. Sirens blaring in the near distance. Cars driving by. A helicopter overhead. Someone is playing piano at Temple Beth Israel next door. Faintly in the background, the robotic voice of the Gold Line train announcing “This train is out of service”.
These are not the sounds I heard yesterday, taking my fifteen minute meditation sitting on a flat slab of rock, looking down over Kearsarge Lakes, a mile west and 1,000 feet down. What I heard there was distant thunder and the wind.
Mikaela is hiking the John Muir Trail. I met her earlier when I came through the pass on my way down to the lakes for a swim. The John Muir Trail is about two and a half miles west. Mikaela is headed to the Onion Valley pack station, where I started, four and a half miles down, to resupply.
She started her hike at Cottonwood Pass, as did almost everyone else I meet thru-hiking the JMT. This is a little bit south of the beginning of the John Muir Trail, but it’s much easier to get permits to begin there than it is from Whitney Portal.
Mikaela probably has no idea that yesterday President Trump sided with Russia against the United States. How peaceful it must be to be shut off from all the chaos, anger, and idiocy that is happening down at sea level. If more people came up to the mountains or somehow experienced the peace I feel when I’m up here, we probably would not have elected Trump, (and there are those who argue, convincingly, that we didn’t).
The piano playing at Temple Beth Israel is nice, a much gentler human sound than most sounds that drift in my window, but not as nice as the wind, the thunder, the marmot, from Kearsarge Pass. I am sensitive to sound. I prefer quiet.
Swimming in Kearsarge Lakes
Marmot
“…the curved one, to God.”
It’s Hardrock 100 weekend. Nikki Kimball ran the race. She’s a great runner, but her best days might be past her. She struggles with depression, and is candid about it. Sabrina Stanley won for the women, leading the race the entire 100 miles. Nikki Kimball, who was running Hardrock for the first time, was back and forth with Darla Askew, a perpetually smiling five time finisher. Here was a tweet:
“Nikki Kimball is third woman at Engineer, mile 51.9, 61 minutes back. Says she took some minutes to meditate, and realize she has to accept aging. Had a talk to herself, and now she’s in great spirits.”
Nikki finished second.
Darcy Piceu, after her win at the Andorra Ultra Trail race, quotes Catalan architect Antoni Guadi: “In order to do things right, you need first love, and then technique”
One of my favorite Guadi quotes is “The straight line belongs to man, the curved one to God.”
Oh, yeah, Darcy also has the women’s FKT on the John Muir Trail.
Kearsarge Lakes
Breathe In, Breathe Out.
It’s all about these habitual responses: anger, fear, jealousy, impatience… In order to have some freedom, I need to learn to respond differently, so that the anger passes in a day, and then, as I continue to practice, a few hours, an hour, minutes…
This is important because I cannot spend every moment up on Kearsarge Pass, and even if I could, eventually those thoughts would reach me there. So what I do, and what I have done for the past ten years, with increasing success, is I sit down every day for 15 – 20 minutes, eyes closed, posture erect, and focus my attention on my breath.
I have no fucking idea why this works. I really don’t. But it does, and that’s all I need to know.
I am not trying to stop these thoughts of fear, of anger, of frustration. Instead, I just observe them. Sometimes, I try to follow the thought from its beginning, through the arc, to the ending, which I note. Other times, I just note that I am thinking, and return my concentration to my breath, and maybe to the sensations of my nostrils flaring, or my lungs filling. I enjoy these bodily sensations. I like the way my body feels. I like to be aware of it functioning, and functioning well. I got lucky with this body, I guess, but I also take care of it. I didn’t always. I used to drink, smoke, do drugs, and that has not been without a cost. Twenty one years ago, when I got sober, I was physically pretty much of a wreck. I have hepatitis C, or did; treatment might have finally cleared the virus. I have mild cirrhosis of the liver.
The breath is amazing. It is essential to human life. You can go without food or water for days, but you can’t go without breath for more than a few minutes. Concentrating on the breath is a fundamental meditation technique. It’s also what my Mom used to say, and probably yours too, when you got agitated: “take a deep breath.” Mom was on to something.
I love the way my lungs feel when I’m running, especially on a cold, cold day, when the air is thick and you can feel it going down.
Trail to Kearsarge Pass from the west.
More Songs About Cornbread and Jail
Snow
Harvoni treatment, month 1
My history with drugs is a colorful one. The colors are mostly shades of dark. For a very brief time, forty years ago, I was an iv drug user. It all ended a long time ago, I stopped shooting dope not long after I started, and I stopped drinking and all other drugs twenty one years ago, but those days of hard living weren’t without lingering consequences: hepatitis C, and, I recently learned, stage 1 cirrhosis of the liver.
There are, finally, new wonder drugs that will cure hepatitis C without crippling chemo-therapy like side-effects. I started on those treatments a month ago today. The first installment of this story is here.
This is more about forty years ago, and more about today, one month in.
Texas speed
I was studying geology at UT Austin, when I could get my shit together to go to class, which wasn’t often, so I took a break, got myself a job and an apartment up on North Lamar, and a roommate named Frank to help pay the rent.
Frank was an awful guy but a great roommate. He was never around. It wasn’t safe for him to enter Travis County, and so he’d slip in once a month in the middle of the night around the 3rd and leave his share of the money in cash on the TV set.
Frank was the guy who introduced me to shooting speed. Back when he could still safely enter Travis County we’d cop good Texas biker meth, pick up needles at the hobby shop (we’re building a model airplane!) head to this chick’s place, and all shoot up in the bathroom and play new-wave 8-track tapes and shoot up some more; the rush was like being fucked by God, this giant body fucking meth and adrenaline blast that would leave me spent and quivering and dying for more. I’d wind up shooting so much speed during a two day period just to keep experiencing that God fuck rush over and over that I would be far too loaded to even move.
It couldn’t last long.
Frank started fucking this very sad woman who worked at Le Femme massage. She had two kids. She wanted to open a clothing store. She was making decent money as a whore, and giving him whatever she had left for free, so he started coming back into Austin. He got busted in a huge raid just on the other side of I-35 in East Austin; the cops blocked off the entire street and went in there with guns. I never knew what he was wanted for.
As far as drug users go, I was young and naive and very much a non-hardened criminal. The bikers we would cop from made me nervous. I knew I didn’t have much skill at reading people, and I also sensed that they did, and that this made me a target. I still had this idea that I could somehow fit in and join the herds of normal American kids, and I sensed that shooting up drugs was not really gonna get me there. I felt like those scabs on the inside of crook of my elbow weren’t something I would find on other kids riding the UT shuttle bus to geology or engineering or political science classes.
Frank’s arrest was the end of my IV drug days, nearly 40 years ago. It didn’t last long, but it doesn’t need to. Austin was a small town. We were part of a small scene. Nearly everyone I know from those days who shot drugs ended up with Hep-C. A few of them, like Big Boys singer Biscuit, died.
Audience at a Black Flag show, 1983.
Take me to the river.
Take my money, my cigarettes
I haven’t seen the worst of it yet
I want to know that you’ll tell me
I love to stay
Take me to the river, drop me in the water
Take me to the river, dip me in the water
Washing me down, washing me down — Al Green.
Burn Center, Austin, in front of my house, 1983
It’s an epidemic, man
About 3% of baby boomers test positive for Hepatitis C.
The Center For Disease Control recommends testing for anybody born before 1965. Up until recently, the CDC only recommended testing for people believed to be at risk, a strategy that didn’t work because of the stigma; not too many people want to come forward and say “That’s me! I used to shoot dope!”
It’s also a little hard to believe that something you did so long ago, and have probably put behind you long ago, could be causing such dire consequences only now.
Here’s the thing: when I shot drugs, we could buy needles at hobby shops. Whoever was the least strung out or tweaking looking one of us that could still lie convincingly (which means it was never me – I’m pathologically honest) would go in and score them, pretending to be building a model airplane. We did not know about AIDs – AIDs would not be officially discovered for another few years, (other than folks had already noticed a weird “gay cancer”) – and Hepatitis C (HCV) was only recognized as non A, non B hepatitis. It would be a decade before the virus would be identified.
In 1979 the only consequences to shooting dope were immediate: overdose or arrest. Okay, with heroin there was the probability that you would get strung out, but cocaine was still officially considered non-addictive, and the biggest danger from speed was the bikers you had to buy it from. That and that crazy tweaker chick who thought she was in love with me and would throw rocks at my window trying to wake me up, breaking them. I’d likely have drunk myself to sleep and would be out cold, and would wake up freezing, with a bad hangover and glass on the bed, and would have to explain yet again to the apartment manager that I really had no idea how my bedroom window kept getting broken, week after week. The broken window really was a mystery to me at first. I learned what was going on because my neighbor Bill was a little paranoid and had trouble sleeping. Bill knew everything that went on in the parking lot at night.
America Loves The Freedom, Austin Tx, 1980
Hector the Dealer.
We used to score weed from Hector. Hector was this brooding hispanic guy with long hair and a constant tweaker paranoia about having his phone tapped by the FBI. This was back in the days of 8-track-tapes and tall tower speakers, and Hector would often drag his speakers out onto the lawn of his apartment complex, lay them down on the ground facing each other and fall asleep between them, Lynyrd Skynyrd 8 Track playing full blast on loop all night. The neighbors were frightened of Hector so nobody would say anything. Half of them probably bought weed from him.
Hector’s weed made me paranoid, too. Well, all weed did, actually. I really hated that stuff. What I hated even more was turning down drugs, so I would smoke it anyhow if a joint was being passed, and then retreat quickly into my mind, and then to my apartment, where I would sit still and quiet in the dark, hoping nobody would notice I was home. Once the tweaker chick came around and started throwing rocks, and I couldn’t deal with her, so I sat there as still as I could and tried to will her away by extending the quiet out beyond myself and into the world at large, or at least my area of apartments down off Riverside Drive, but the only thing that would make her leave was the sound of the glass of my bedroom window shattering.
Sinners Welcome, Highland Park
What does it mean to live in a human body today?
The mind is this kind of amazing thing that works in harmony with the body. That’s why mental stress brings on heart attacks. That’s why quitting my job last year actually brought down my blood pressure. That’s why autoimmune disorders tend to flare up when we are agitated for prolonged periods.
Most of us think of our bodies as though they were cars – just something to transport us around, or containers for our brains – except that we tend to take better care of our cars than of our bodies. For those who believe in God, and think that God created us in h/His own image, it might pretty fucked up how so many of us have let ourselves go, with cigarettes, alcohol, obesity, sugar, processed food, anger, self righteousness… There’s not a picture I’ve ever seen of God where He looks like Jabba the Hutt with a MAGA hat. Aren’t we dishonoring h/Him with our Cheetos and Poptarts and hormone filled factory farmed meat and Bud Light and Marlboros and guns?
Yeah, I know, I’m a fine one to talk, with my HCV due to iv drug use, and my cirrhosis of the liver, recovering alcoholic, recovering two-pack-a-day smoker; I’m one of those fucking obnoxious, sanctimonious reformed dudes trying to shame people into looking after themselves.
Don’t bank on starting over and doing it right in the afterlife. Get it right now. This might be the only life you’ll have, and it surely is the only body you’ll ever have. I might be lucky, because I only have stage 1 cirrhosis, and the liver is the one and only major organ capable of regenerating itself. Maybe once this HCV virus clears, it will be able to. But a heart, or lungs? Once those are toast, that’s it. You’ll need to fetch new ones…from a corpse, at great expense, unless you become a corpse yourself first.
Some shit just isn’t fun and games, kids.
Cedro Peak 50K
Snow on singletrack, Cedro Peak 50K
Mile ten or so, and my middle-of-the-pack had settled into a nice evenly spaced groove, all of us about fifteen to twenty feet apart on the soft singletrack. Nobody talked. This was notable, and welcome. For once in a race the trails were mercifully quiet, except for the sound of our feet, labored breathing, and the wind. Nobody talked about their training plans. Nobody talked about beer. Nobody talked about their shoes, their race schedules, their close calls with DNFs, or the Latter Day Saints’ Boyscouts. Nobody talked at all. It was soothing, and I was grateful.
This was the first morning of my fifty-ninth year on this planet. It was a cold, dry desert morning. All I knew about where I was going was that in thirty-two miles I’d be right back where I started, which is a kind of perfect summary of life itself.
Around mile 12 or so, my quads were aching. This was very early in a race for this to happen. I’ve slowed down a lot the past year. I wasn’t sure what was happening – some combination of being undertrained, not used to the elevation, on a medication of which the most common side-effect is muscle weakness, and just plain getting old, but I knew the race was gonna be a slow one. For once, I really didn’t care. There’s something about the expansiveness of New Mexico that makes me open up. A lot more seems possible there than typically does in LA.
Thirty eight years after the days shooting biker speed down in Texas, twenty one years after my last drink, weighed down just a little with the new knowledge that I have stage one cirrhosis of the liver from those days and the hepatitis C that they resulted in, there I was, down by Tijeras, New Mexico, just south of Albuquerque, in the Manzanita Mountains. It had been cool and windy the past few days. There’d been a light snow overnight. 32 degrees at 7am. A cool, beautiful morning. My birthday.
Two races started together – the 50K and the marathon. Both shared the same course, which is more-or-less an out-and-back, except that those of us running the 50K had an extra loop after the high/mid point, on Cedro Peak. The marathon runners turned around and headed back to the start. The 50K runners did a beautiful, rough, rocky and mountainous loop, by far the nicest part of the course, that brought reminded me quite a bit of the back of Strawberry Peak, one of my favorite runs in the San Gabriel Mountains front range.
I finished with my second or third slowest time ever in a 50K, although it was a slightly long 50K, by a couple of miles. There wasn’t much run left in me at the end. I’d enjoyed the race, but I was also very happy to get to the finish line.
The next day I could barely walk. We did a short loop just outside of Santa Fe, so that I could get a recovery hike in, and it was quite a struggle. I felt like I’d run 100 miles.
Cedro Peak singletrack
Side Effects.
Compared to the old treatments for Hepatitis C, the side effects of Harvoni are mild.
The old Hep C medications involved interferon, which are naturally occurring proteins that the body produces when it senses infection. It involved a weekly injection of man-made interferon that kicked the immune system into overdrive, fighting not just the HCV but everything else it could find with typical fighting-an-infection side-effects like having a severe flu with fever, fatigue, muscle aches, except that this flu didn’t last a week. It lasted a year, and during that year you would also experience abnormal blood counts, suicidal thoughts, aggression, maybe psychosis, and possibly system-wide damage to vital organs like the liver, kidneys, bone marrow, and heart. Not fun. On top of that, it only cured Hep-C in one-in-four people with genotype 1.
The new drugs are anti-virals, which means they specifically target the Hep-C virus, or HCV. It’s a 12 week treatment rather than 48 weeks, the cure rate is 95%, and the side-effects are mild: nausea, mild stomach ache, headaches, insomnia, and, most commonly, muscle weakness.
I’m feeling the side-effects.
I often have a slight stomach ache, and feel gassy and bloated. My muscles feel weak, and tire easily. Not so weak that I can’t run a 31 mile race in the mountains, but weak enough that I tire earlier and it hurts more than usual. Running Cedro Peak 50K, my quads felt really tired at the 10 mile mark. I was undertrained for the race, and it was at (slight) elevation for a sea level boy (7,000 – 8,000 feet), but I should have enough base fitness and mileage and I regularly train at that elevation. I’ve never had muscle soreness that early in a race. But I finished. The side effects are mild enough that I am still running 50+ miles a week. In the aftermath, I felt more beat up than usual, and I thought I might have injured myself. I could barely walk the next day. None of that is usual.
Muscle weakness is relative. I am still able to finish a 31 mile race on rough, rocky trails. That I can do it at all is a truly wonderful thing, even with the hard work I put into it. That I can do it on Harvoni is awesome.
I run in the mountains, on trails, and, occasionally, on the road, because it is one of the most natural, fundamental things there is to do. The human body was made to move. This thing where we sit at desks is a new development. We spent a lot longer hunting mastadons with clubs and spears. Evolution designed us to run around the plains hunting bison, not sitting at desks typing shit into Microsoft Word. It feels good to run. It feels good to draw the deepest gulps of breath I can into my lungs while my arms and legs pump as I run along the Pacific Crest Trail, or in the Manzanita Mountains, or up and down rolling hills in Griffith Park. This is where I belong. It’s where we all belong, most likely. I should have sore legs at the end of a glorious day. What I shouldn’t have is Hep C and cirrhosis of the liver. What I shouldn’t have done is shot up speed. What I shouldn’t need to be doing now is taking Harvoni. Nevertheless, those are my circumstances, and I am grateful that I can get this medication, and also that I have had and will continue to have the ability to move across long distances on foot in the mountains. For all of that, I am blessed.
Take me to the river, reprise.
Talking Heads, from the album More Songs About Buildings and Food.
Hepatitis C, Harvoni, week one
Harvoni
Newly sober, 1997
It was spring of 1997. I was just a few months sober, in a women’s clinic in Santa Monica, because in those days there weren’t that many places that you could get a free HIV test, and an HIV test seemed like an urgent piece of housecleaning. The nurse took whatever bodily fluid they took back then, and then gave me the talk: had I thought about what I would do if I tested positive? Did I have a support group?
The answer, with a gulp, was no, and no, but in the week to come I thought about it a lot. Basically, I started to put my affairs in order, even though I didn’t have very many affairs to organize. Someone to adopt Boris the cat. That was about it.
I had this heavy, heavy guilt and shame that I imagine is typical of many of us when we get sober. I’ve never been a religious person, but I was looking at the situation very much in Old Testament terms, and I was pretty sure I was gonna test positive, not so much as a consequence of the life I’d led but as punishment for it.
It was a really long and difficult week.
I did not even know about Hepatitis C at that time. The disease had only been discovered in 1989, although it had been around much longer. It was a junkie thing, I reckoned, and I wasn’t a junkie. It was hard to get tested for.
Three Blocks East of Easy Street
2002, living down in Long Beach, a starving artist struggling to pay rent. In those days I went through girlfriends pretty quickly, or maybe they went through me, it’s hard to say. Some of these women were literally straight out of the psych ward – this is not hyperbole – and I was not much better myself, so as each ended and/or new one began it was off for another barrage of tests.
My previous girlfriend was an ex-crack-addict ex-stripper who worked briefly for Heidi Fleiss. She assured me however that she didn’t whore for Heidi. She just used the call-girl thing to get her foot in the motel-room door so she could rob ’em at gunpoint. She figured an upscale clientele like that could afford the money but not the scandal. She seemed safe. I’d never heard of anyone catching an STD from pointing a loaded gun at someone.
We broke up and I started up with a new girl. I drove my beat up 1974 Dodge Dart Swinger up to 20th and Long Beach to get my blood drawn at the Beach Mobile STD Van parked in front of the 99-Cent-Store. I filled out a bunch of Health Department paperwork then waited under the awning and read a few Spanish language pamphlets on abstinence.
My friend Tony (who died last year when his body just stopped working after a lifetime of drug abuse) suggested I had syphilis, for reasons I do not recall, but whatever they were it reminded him of some of his symptoms, and he’d had syphilis.
I didn’t take well to this suggestion. It seemed like such an old, dirty disease. It wasn’t like herpes or clap. It didn’t sound like the kinda thing you’d catch from having too much fun with modern women. It sounded more like the kinda thing old men used to get from worn out, lowdown, rundown, cheap broads who were looking to make rent after spending all their money on booze; you got it in tilting clapboard rooming houses, you had to be near a railroad track, maybe hoping to catch a freight train to the next town and the next job yourself. You needed to be a character in a bleak pulp fiction novel written by an embittered and impoverished alcoholic like Jim Thompson. You had to be lowdown and desperate in the first place to catch something as lowdown and desperate as syphilis.
I was a nice bohemian white boy from a good, proper, dysfunctional upper middle class family; I had a university education; I was an artist who did official shows in official art galleries and in coffee shops. Important people heaped praise on my work, and other important people said terrible things about it, and the controversy looked impressive in my press kit. I myself used to be an important person, or at least a person of minor importance and some notoriety back in the punk rock days. And my ex, who probably gave this mystery ailment to me, she came from a nice family too, and used to play in a goth band, and in her death rock hey-day she’d done drugs and had sex with a lot of famous guys and a decent number of famous women. Okay, yeah, after that she was a stripper and a crackhead and an armed robber; she was angry and bitter and had body image issues and racial identity issues and incest survivor issues; she hated herself and hated men – she wasn’t perfect. But neither was I.
My current romance was with a fetish model who lived on the East Coast. She owned a condo in Maryland, and lived in a single room of it, just off the kitchen, like a burrow. It was a big condo, and all the other rooms were empty. She used one for bondage photos. The rest she was frightened to go into. There was something in her eyes that spoke to me, some sort of passion or desperation. My friend Myriam told me it was insanity, and I should stay far away. “She is hot, though,” Myriam admitted. Myriam was a lesbian. We had the same taste in women.
“All the women hate me and all the men want to fuck me,” my girlfriend would say. This had become her identity, and she was proud of it.
She had been a tweaker, but claimed to be clean when we met. She was struggling with it, though, and after a while she was back, snorting ritalin. I knew things were getting bad when she called me from someone else’s closet, where she had been hiding for several days. It quickly escalated to a lot of drugged out s&m scenes with random strangers from clubs. Blood may have been involved, and it seemed pretty sketchy.
One night this conversation took place:
“I think you should get tested,” I told her.
“I don’t want to get tested. We’re all gonna die anyhow. You just think I’m a drug addict skank.”
“You share needles. You have unsafe sex with other iv drug users. I read the infection rate is 70-90%.”
“I don’t give a fuck. You’re always comparing me to other people. I’m not like other people. I’m not like any girl you’ve ever met. I don’t give a fuck about other people’s infection rate. Stop comparing me.”
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll get tested first.”
I said this not because I thought she might have given me hep, and was worried. It’s not a sexually transmitted disease. I said I’d get tested to prove a point, and maybe nudge her in the right direction, because if anyone was likely to have caught it, I reckoned it was her. I never really considered that I might test positive. My IV drug days were long, long behind me.
And that’s how I ended up at the Free Clinic near my place in Long Beach, three blocks east of Easy Street, next to a church where they handed out Fruit Loops and other breakfast cereal to mostly Asian immigrants. I filled out more paperwork. The nurse checked the box labeled “indigent”. “Indigent,” I thought. “All this time I thought I was bohemian.” I sat down and read a farm-workers pamphlet telling me how since I was over 40 I was entitled to special anti discrimination rights. One delusion after another quietly dropped away.
It was a weird scene. The Doctor, or nurse practitioner, who was around my age, and hot, was having an oddly personal conversation with me about what kind of music and books I was into, first date conversation, while she was holding my dick with a latex-gloved hand investigating for I’m-not-sure-what, and the whole thing had a right place, wrong time (or maybe it was wrong place, right time) vibe that left me confused about everything except that I was suddenly pretty sure I was dating the wrong person. Once I had my pants back on and she’d drawn blood, she gave me the same talk the lady at the Women’s Health Center in Santa Monica gave me. My answers hadn’t changed much.
I’d been sober a few years and wasn’t wracked with the same shame and guilt that hit me so hard in early sobriety. I also hadn’t really been much of an IV drug user – those days were short, and at the beginning of my illustrious career as an alcoholic – so I didn’t have a week of morbid certainty that I was going to test positive. I just went about my day-to-day business of trying to hustle up rent and figure out what I was gonna do for Christmas. I was surprised when I got the call to let me know I had Hep-C.
Another conversation with my girlfriend:
She said “You think I gave you the Hep-C, don’t you?”
“Who knows, baby. What does it matter? I’ve got it.”
“I’m really worried about this Hep-C thing. I’m scared to find out I have it.” And so she went out and got loaded and got laid. “What else is there to do if I’m stressed out? I need my release. Besides, why else would anybody go to a club except to get loaded and get laid?”
Our relationship was going down hill.
Christmas of 2002. I was feeling genuinely poisonous. The stuff coursing through my veins that kept me alive was full of something else that was killing me, and that could kill you too if you somehow managed to get my blood in your veins. In addition to the Hep-C virus, I’ve got Catholicism in my blood, so I know how to beat up on myself and feel penitent. If I wasn’t so loathe to draw attention to myself, I’d probably walk around in a sackcloth and ashes. In my mind, the main difference between me and Job is that unlike Job, I’m pretty sure I deserve it.
The last I heard from the girlfriend was January 2003. She was back in town for a porn shoot.
“I just want you to know I got my test results back,” she screamed into my voicemail. “I’m clean, no thanks to you, so FUCK YOU, you asshole.”
Long Beach, 2002. Her ass was black and blue from a beating at a fetish club in LA, and she was proud of it. She liked to boast that she could take more than anyone could dish out.
Chronic Hepatitis C
Hepatitis C, or HCV, is the junkie disease. Infection rate amongst IV drug users is somewhere between 60 and 80 percent, although it’s hard to know for sure because this is a population that likes to stay in the shadows. It’s estimated that there are nearly 3 million folks infected with HCV in the United States.
Hep C was first noticed in the mid 1970s, but it wasn’t until 1989 that the virus was actually identified and named hepatitis C, or HCV. Up until that time, it was known as non-A, non-B hepatitis. Until the virus was identified, it couldn’t be measured, and until it could be measured treatments couldn’t be measured, because all you could gauge was their effectiveness treating the symptoms, and chronic HCV is generally asymptomatic until it’s nearly too late: HCV is the most common cause of cirrhosis and liver cancer in the Western world, but once it gets to the advanced cirrhosis or liver cancer stage, you’re pretty much toast.
I almost certainly caught HCV during my brief iv drug use days in my late teens, at the beginning of my practicing alcoholic career. Austin Texas was a small city, and the punk scene in it was a small crowd, so even if the iv drug users were a large part of that small crowd, it was still a small group of people. I knew them all, and the number of folks from that scene who turned out HCV positive is huge. I’m just another one of them.
Left untreated, the prognosis pretty much sucks. The problem is that until things get really bad, people who are HCV positive don’t really have any signs that they have it. I got tested not because I had symptoms, but because it seemed very possible given the life I’d led, and I had access to a place where I could get tested. Free clinics in Long Beach were much more accessible than the free clinics in LA, especially before the Governator slashed funding in Jan 2004. There was a tiny window for diagnosis, but treatment wasn’t yet available.
Sixteen years later there is effective treatment. Sixteen years later I have health insurance, in fact I’ve specifically designed my health coverage to enable treatment. But that also means I’ve lived another sixteen years since diagnosis, and probably 40 years since infection, with HCV. For nearly the first twenty of those years I drank heavily and generally abused my liver. This means despite 21 years of good clean living, my liver is a little bit of a mess.
2006. Echo Park. Pegasys
Pegylated interferon alfa-2a, brand name Pegasys was what they used to treat Hep-C back in 2006. It was nasty stuff involving a weekly injection under the skin; people I know who went on it would schedule their injections for Fridays because it would leave them sicker than a broke dick dog and contemplating suicide for a few days, not in any shape to work.
Being a bohemian artist in my 20s was not a bad life, but being an indigent loser in my 40s was not really working so well, so I’d finally broken down and gotten a job, and with that came health insurance.
The doctor said that pegasys had a significantly less that 50% success rate with my genotype. Another round of bloodwork showed that my liver function, while nowhere near right for a normal person, seemed fine for someone infected with Hep-C, at least at the moment that the blood had been drawn, which is all those tests can tell. There were new drugs a few years away from approval, wonder drugs, with a much higher success rate and not nearly the side-effects. He said to wait.
Round and round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows
Newsweek reports “the Commonwealth Fund has rated the U.S. health care system as the worst among the 11 developed nations it analyzed as part of an evaluation conducted every three years.” We also came in last place in 2014. We rank last in access, administrative efficiency, equity and health care outcomes, but highest in cost.
I stayed sober. I stayed at my job. I stopped smoking. I started running again, and then I started running ultramarathons. I ate well. I took care of myself. My bloodwork held steady.
I hated my job. I wanted to quit, but I also wanted to get treatment for Hep-C. The new wonderdrugs had hit the market.
We’d changed insurance companies at work – six times in twelve years. I couldn’t keep the same doctors. I’d start the process by making an appointment to see my primary care physician. They could fit me in in 2 months. I’d go in. They would weigh me. They would take my pulse and my bloodpressure. The doctor would stick a finger up my ass. They’d say “whatever you’re doing, keep doing it, you’re in great shape“. I would tell them I want a referral to a heptologist. They’d take my $60 copay and in a month or so, I would get a bunch of papers with all the referral approvals. I’d call the heptologist. They could see me in 3 months. I’d go see the heptologist and they would talk to me for five minutes and then order bloodwork. I’d get the bloodwork done and make a new appointment. They would be able to see me in 3 months. I’d go in with the bloodwork, and they would say “we need a fibroscan”. I’d wait a month or so for the approval and then make an appointment for the fibroscan, in three months, and somewhere in the process I would either give up or else my insurance would change and I’d have to start over with a brand new set of doctors.
I was perfectly healthy. There seemed no urgency, other than I was getting older. One thing was clear: I was never going to make it through the end of a treatment cycle the way my insurance kept churning. That seemed to be part of the design. Stick a finger up my ass and charge me $60, like I’m a john with a butt fetish. Not enough to be an ass fucking, just a mini violation.
San Gabriel Mountains
Gilead, birthplace of the Prophet Elijah
Gilead means hill of testimony in the Bible. It’s a place, a mountainous region, in Jordan, and first appears in Genesis 31:21-22: “So he fled with all that he had; starting out he crossed the Euphrates, and set his face toward the hill country of Gilead”
The prophet Elijah lived in Gilead. He was the primary defender of Yaweh, the Old Testament God, back in the day, doing battle against Ahab, against Baal, and against the wicked Jezebel herself. The Jezebel Spirit is called the “nastiest, evil, most disgusting, cunning, and seductive spirit in Satan’s hierarchy”. Jezebel is associated with prostitution, and makeup, and, of course, the worship of false idols and renunciation of God that goes hand-in-hand with lascivious sex, eye-shadow, and cloying perfumes that hide the musky funk of sex. For a long time, there seemed to be a whole lot of Jezebel Spirit in my life and the lives of my lovers.
Gilead is also the name of a drug company founded in 1987, and this company makes a drug called Harvoni, which is one of those new wonder drugs for the treatment of Hep-C.
It’s not a weekly injection but a daily pill. The cure rate for my genotype is 95%. The side effects are minimal. An ultrarunner friend ran San Diego 100 while on it. She said she felt dizzy shortly after taking the pill at mile 90 or so of the race, but I feel dizzy at mile 90 of a race no matter what I take – a pill, a GU, PB&J…
The stuff ain’t cheap. Full retail price is a little over $1,100 per pill! But anyone who pays full retail got a problem in the head, like Crazy Gideon, and for reasons that I don’t understand but am extremely grateful for, Gilead is subsidizing the copay for people like me, which means a $94,000 12 week course of treatment actually becomes doable. This could save my life.
Harvoni Treatment, Week One
Day 1
It’s a foggy morning walking in Silverlake, and the smell of damp trees and flowers is beautiful. Deep breaths. I remember when I started running again 11 years ago, around the reservoir and in Elysian Park, my lungs just clearing after having quit a two pack a day habit, sense of smell coming back, startled and delighted by this world of smell. Having a sense suddenly open up like that brings a huge sense of newfound freedom. Shaking an addiction does, too. It felt really great to be alive. It feels that way today, too.
Day 2
More of a hike than a run up Acorn Trail and then east on the PCT. First time I headed in this direction was May 2013. I’d caught the flu from my sister when I went to Colorado to run Quad Rock 50. After three weeks of taking it easy I headed up to the mountains, against all advice. “Stay away from elevation until your lungs are cleared” was the suggestion I was not following. I started the run at Inspiration Point, headed up the PCT past Blue Ridge campground, past Guffy, past the Acorn Trail, and into new territory for me. The trail headed gently down for several miles. I passed a few PCT thru hikers on their way up from Mexico. At some point, the land turned rather abruptly into desert. I was feeling good and ran hard down a long downhill.
Suddenly my heart started pounding and I was short of breath. I stopped to let it pass. It didn’t. I turned around and headed back up the long climb, as gently as I could. The thru-hikers ahead of me were making much better time than I was. Every quarter mile or so I would have to stop, sit down, and try to meditate or something to bring my heart rate back down. It took three hours to get the five or six miles back to Guffy. There were moments when I genuinely doubted I would make it. I was afraid I was going to have a heart attack. Once I hit the road I started stumbling down it rather than the trail, hoping I could catch a ride, which I did. I spend another half-an-hour in the truck at Inspiration Point.
This is called tachycardia, and tachycardia is apparently an occasional side effect of Harvoni. That day was terrifying, and I did not want to experience it again. I took it even easier than usual on the PCT.
Sheep Mountain Wilderness, looking at the North Baldy backbone trail
Back in town. Julian the Cat needs new cat litter. It’s practically a crisis. We’re bachelors, and sometimes it takes us a while to getting around to stuff like this. Longer than it should.
Older man in the parking lot of Trader Joes in La Canada waves his finger at me. “You’re not very good at parking,” he says and shakes his head. He continues walking, looking back at my car. “I see your license plate is upside down too,” he calls out. “That’s not a good thing.” I’ve just come back from a nice run all alone up on the PCT near Wrightwood. It’s a bummer I’ve disappointed this guy, but he’s being a buzz kill. I don’t have a clever response. “Leave me alone, please” I call out to him. “Ok. I will. You have a nice day now!” he calls back. No wonder I don’t like people.
He looks kind of like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck – a doughy, white, totally nondescript 65 year old Republican guy. His demeanor is more Ned Flanders, but an admonishing Ned Flanders. I’m pretty sure he would be horrified to know that I run ultramarathons and am on day two of my Harvoni treatment. People don’t usually get Hep-C doing the sorts of things this fastidious pillsbury approves of. Honestly, it’s kind of a miracle that I am driving a brand new car, making car payments, employed, with good health insurance, and can run in the mountains, even if I do it in a way that is really excessive, even if my front license plate is upside down, even if I’m not very good at parking. Ned Limbaugh or whatever this little busy-body’s name is would be mortified if he knew that there were such people in La Canada Flintridge, even if we are just passing through on our way from the mountains down to Highland Park.
Day Four
It’s 102 degrees in Griffith Park when I get back to my car, a steamy morning in early April. The run felt good. The pharmacist calls – well, actually a nurse practitioner. She wants to check on when I started taking the medication and make sure I am aware of what the side-effects might be, go over some details, etc. She is surprised that my Dr. has made no effort to call me with info on my genotype, viral load, or otherwise check in on me about the medication. My Doctor is useless. Her call reminds me that I need to call them again and ask for that stuff. I’m not surprised.
She tells me something I would never have thought of on my own: make sure I change my toothbrushes, razors, etc, frequently. Hep-C can live outside the body on that stuff for 3 weeks. I could clear a lot of the virus in that amount of time. I do not want to reinfect myself. This would have been handy info to get from my Doctor.
A cop has a guy in handcuffs on a sidestreet off Eagle Rock Blvd. They are both smiling and laughing, relaxed, like they are old friends. This is weirdly heartwarming.
I have a couple of books I like to start each morning with. One is a book of Buddhist quotes for each day, the other a 12-step version of the same. Today’s 12 Step book says that sometimes we find ourselves in situations that appear to be unsolveable crises. We become obsessed with them, and engulfed in despair. The reading reminds me that there is some good in everything, even the darkest troubles, and what I need to do is learn to find that goodness and concentrate on it.
The Buddhist reading takes a slightly different approach with a quote from Pema Chodron: “Until we stop clinging to the concepts of good and evil, the world will continue to manifest as friendly goddesses and harmful demons.”
Whatever I do, both say, I need to stop fixating on all the bad shit.
I skipped yesterday’s reading. It said “Instead of allowing ourselves to be led and trapped by our feelings, we should let them disappear as soon as they form, like letters drawn on water with a finger.”
Okay, so 102 degrees is a little warm for the beginning of April, but it’s still a beautiful day, and I might be wilting a bit in this heat, but I can still run. Griffith Park is 4,200 acres of often pretty rugged land, even if on the edges of it are some true iconography: the Griffith Park Observatory and the Hollywood Sign. In the scrub behind all of that are deer, coyote, bobcats, a mountain lion, and some rugged little stretches of singletrack. I’m fortunate that it’s here, and that I can run in it whenever I want.
Day Five
On day five, I learn that I have cirrhosis of the liver.
Here’s how it happens. The nurse practitioner calls me again from CVS. I’m surprised that this giant pharmacy, acting on behalf of my insurance company, seems much more interested in my health than my doctor and his staff, who thus far seem completely disinterested in the situation. The folks at CVS are also a little surprised. They tell me that I seem like an intelligent, well informed guy who has done his research, so it is startling to them that I cannot tell them what my viral load is, or my various blood markers, or even my genotype with anymore specificity than I’m pretty sure it’s genotype 1. They figure I’ll learn a little more when I see my doctor after the first month of treatment. I don’t tell them that I’m pretty sure the last time my doctor did bloodwork was almost a year ago.
I hang up the phone feeling a little concerned. AA has pithy sayings like “Let go and let God,”, which is intended to remind me that much of my life is outside of my control. My stepfather had the opposite outlook. His motto was “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” Sadly, the Old Man’s advice is better than AA’s in this situation. Letting go and letting God does not seem to be working here. I guess God is not involved in the US healthcare system.
Once again I call the doctor’s office, and once again I get a rather apathetic receptionist. It’s not really her fault, but she’s the one on the line, so she has to deal with my anger. I’ve done a lot of work on trying to control my temper, so I am very aware of how my anger builds. On the phone with the receptionist, I feel the annoyance swelling quickly into anger, and it’s interesting to observe it happening. I also do nothing to rein it in because I have learned, sadly, that the only way to provoke them into doing their jobs is through outrage. Politeness has netted me nothing.
“Can you hold for a minute?” she asks, and after 10 minutes on hold I’m pretty sure she’s abandoned me in the phone system. Suddenly there is another voice on the line – the doctor’s assistant, for whom I have left many messages. Finally we are talking.
My fears are confirmed: the only bloodwork they have is from last June. She tries to blame this on me. I shut that line down pretty firmly, and she doesn’t pursue it. I also learn that they hadn’t scheduled any bloodwork for my upcoming appointment, which sort of defeats the purpose. She says she’s going to send me authorization for bloodwork, and also for an ultrasound. We postpone my appointment until early May.
I’m not sure why I need an ultrasound. I’m not pregnant.
And that’s when I finally get the results of the fibroscan they gave me four months ago. I have cirrhosis of the liver.
A lot of my heroes have died of cirrhosis: Eric Satie, Chögyam Trungpa, John Cassavettes, Billie Holiday to name just a few… Still, I’d rather not join them, at least not any time soon.
Days Six and Seven
The side effects I’ve been told about are insomnia, muscle weakness, fatigue, nausea, headaches and diarrhea. I’ve been monitoring myself carefully. I wonder whether or not I am going to experience them psychosomatically.
My running feels a little off. It must be that muscle weakness, except that it’s felt off for more than a year and half, and I’ve only been taking Harvoni for seven days. Cross that off the list and nothing seems unusual. I’m in great shape for a 57 year old man who is slowly dying. We’re all slowly dying, after all, and lots of people much younger than me are dying much faster.
Next week I’ll run Cedro Peak 50K, just outside of Albuquerque, my first race of the year, and I am fully expecting it will be my worst 50K performance ever, but I’ve been expecting that for a while, long before this treatment started. The race is on my 58th birthday, and that more than anything could be accounting for this sudden slowdown. Getting old is a bitch, but at least I get to do it. It wasn’t really apparent or likely 25 years ago that I would make it even this far.
Sandia Mountains, Albuquerque
New Mexico Sky
Mt Taylor, Grants, New Mexico
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Apartment hunting in Albuquerque. The courtyard. Not so far from mountains. Just off San Pedro. Quiet at 8:37 am on a Saturday. Cars are a little beat up. Not bad.
“Don’t use that tone of voice with me, young man.” I’ve been hearing that for 57 years, it seems. Finally, too late to save things currently, I’ve started to recognize the tone of voice. It’s just the way I speak. Maybe I can do something about it but I’m not so sure. The easiest thing I’ve figured out is just to not speak at all. I’m seen as an arrogant asshole either way.
Not much hurts more than knowing that just by opening my mouth I seem to hurt the kindest most patient, gentlest person I know. It pains me that I can never convey how much I support her and really am listening. All that comes out seems to be criticism. She talks feelings and I counter with facts. These are really two separate things but my brain doesn’t seem to get that even though I am more than capable of an emotional response, usually anger, often at lightening speed, frightening those around me.
I saw a beautiful little apartment today a couple of miles away from where I sit now on the embudito trail.
In the beginning Andrea bought one book after another trying to understand how an aspie mind works and how to deal with it. How to deal with me. It’s sad that she who believes that everything is possible has given up on this.
I don’t like being the most difficult guy in the room. I don’t like the alarm I see in people’s faces when I open my mouth to speak.
I’m sitting on a rock headed up to South Sandia Peak, typing this into my phone. The wind is cold. It’s beautiful up here, even on a rare overcast day. The city down below – that will be my new city, soon enough.
I made it to the crest without any worries. Last year, I tried a few times and always got terrified by some stretch of exposure that was too much for me then. Today I’m not even sure where that stretch was. Nothing seems the least bit frightening on this trail. It seems I’ve lost a bit of fear, and this is important, because fear is pretty much what rules me. I’m afraid of so many things these days. I’m afraid of being stuck in LA. I’m afraid I’m just too old to start up anything new – romance, relocation, having kids, retirement. I’m also afraid I’m just too old not to do any of those things, soon – the clock is running out.
Sandia Crest, Albuquerque
It’s a tough world out there.
It’s a tough world out there. We look for love and for validation from out in that tough world, when we need to be looking within.
I heard a story about a man showing up on his grandfather’s doorstep. The man is in his twenties. He’s an addict, with two young kids. His wife just died of an overdose, and he gave up the kids to her parents, their grandparents, with a tender loving grandmother who would turn the kids over to the tender, a-bit-too-loving grandfather, a pedophile. Addiction, overdose, death, orphaned children, pedophilia, all in sunny middle class Southern California. My current problems, in comparison, are nothing, and I beat myself up over that, too, even though my background is filled with a lot of the same stuff: alcoholism, death, abuse…
Abandoned doll, Salton Sea, 2006
Things change, or things fall apart?
I found an apartment, down by Old Town, a few blocks from the Bosque, a quiet little adobe style place. We went for a run along the Bosque. We meditated at the Albuquerque Shambhala Center, walking distance from the casita we were staying at, near the Sawmill District. It felt right. It felt wrong. I slipped in and out of panic. The next day I was committed to the move, even though I had my doubts, but by the time I got back to LA I had changed my mind again.
My move would have been me pulling a geographic. All the things that have me so twisted up here in LA are things I would bring with me to New Mexico. Every time I looked in the mirror in my new home in Albuquerque, I would be looking at the same man carrying all the same baggage he had in LA, and that’s not fair to New Mexico, or to me. There are a lot of good reasons to come to New Mexico, but I was only going there to leave LA. There are a lot of good reasons to leave LA, but I would have been leaving for the wrong ones.
I cancelled the move.
Ring of Fire
Nine pm on a Tuesday night, headed through the passes into LA. Traffic is at a standstill. The air is thick with smoke, and it burns our throats.
The American Dream is alive and well in Southern California, but only because it remains a staple of TV, and TV comes from here. It exists only as artifice. It’s not the American Dream anymore, but the American Fantasy.
California just doesn’t seem to carry with it the promise we’d all hoped. Maybe if you are Tom Joad, coming from Dust Bowl Oklahoma, there’s some hope, or maybe it’s just that you’re escaping something worse. I don’t really know. But the dust and dirt in the air does not compare well with the wide open skies of New Mexico. You shouldn’t be able to taste the air. You shouldn’t be able to see it, either. It needs to be something that is felt, like an emotion. Air should never feel oppressive.
In the book Caliphobia, LA’s four seasons are described as earthquake, fire, drought, and flood. It’s mostly been fire and drought the past few years. Anita Carter’s Ring of Fire is an appropriate song for the city right now:
Love is a burning thing
And it makes a fiery ring.
Bound by wild desire
I fell into a ring of fire.
I fell into a burning ring of fire,
I went down, down, down and the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns,
The ring of fire, the ring of fire.
The taste of love is sweet
When hearts like ours meet.
I fell for you like a child,
Oh, but the fire went wild.
Good Lucks Jewelry, Gallup, New Mexico
My love/hate relationship with LA has finally ended.
Michael used to tell me “The opposite of love is not hate but indifference.” He was telling me this after my lunatic ex girlfriend had my phone cut-off, again, for the third time, and the second time in one day. She’d been living in a single room of her otherwise empty condo in Washington DC. She was all jacked up on speed. A month or so earlier, she’d called me from someone else’s closet. She was hiding. Now she was moving to Long Beach. She’d found my social security number and had the guy she was currently fucking call up all the utility companies pretending to be me and having everything turned off.
Bite Marks
I called ATT again, from a payphone. “Sounds like ex girlfriend trouble” said the customer service guy knowingly. “Yeah. So what can I do about it?” I asked. “Well, your account is attached to your social security number,” he said. “Can it be attached to something else?” I asked. “Some number they don’t have? Can you make a secret code?” They made a secret code and attached it to my social security number. The next time my ex’s tweaking boyfriend called, they asked for the secret code and when that didn’t work they asked for my social security number, and once he gave them that they gave him the secret code, and the phone was turned off, a third time.
My ex girlfriend liked to bite me until she drew blood. She also like to be beaten. She would go down to the S&M clubs in Hollywood and put on shows. She was proud of being able to take more abuse than anyone was willing to dish out.
She was trying to get me angry enough to respond, and that’s not a difficult thing to do. I am a hot-head. Michael said whatever happens, do not reply to her emails, do not return her phone calls, do not engage. Her desperate reckoning was that if I wouldn’t love her at least she could get me to hate her; they are not that different, there’s a passion to both, and it’s hard to tell them apart sometimes, especially if you are insane. He urged me to pause, to strive for indifference, and if that didn’t work, to at least behave with indifference, no matter what I was feeling. “If you need to scream at someone, call me,” he said.
Suddenly, 23 years into this second visit to LA, and 18 years since the last bite wound healed, I am finally feeling indifferent towards Los Angeles. This is a good thing. Let me try to sustain it. Let me simplify my life, divest myself of more of the stuff I don’t use, both literally and in terms of how I identify myself. Let me be the person I want to be, and let me move that guy to Albuquerque.
Clouds over the Sandias
Bobbie & Margie’s Cuban Cafe, Cuba, New Mexico
The New Normal.
Last year, the drought that has plagued California for a decade finally broke, with record rains and snow-fall filling reservoirs beyond capacity and causing flooding in the Sierras. But that was followed by the hottest, driest summer on record, and now the return of the high pressure ridge that is keeping the rains away again, a persistent new weather condition that is sure to bring about the return of the drought. The drought is no longer a temporary situation. It’s now the way it is. Add to that record Santa Ana winds blowing in from the hot, bone dry high desert, picking up speed as they funnel through the Santa Ana Canyon to the east of LA, or the San Gabriel canyons, or Malibu Canyon (it’s become a generic term), gusting up to hurricane force 80 miles an hour.
There’s a lot of New Normal these days. President Trump is the new normal. Sexual violence and men in power openly boasting about it and getting elected to office despite it is the new normal, the gig economy with its lack of benefits of any kind is the new normal. Climate change is the new normal. Overt racism is the new normal. Generally speaking, a brutal lack of caring about anything and everything but ones own self is the new normal.
“Albuquerque is a tough town,” says my friend Gordon, originally from Oklahoma, now living here in LA. This is a story I hear a lot, but isn’t a town that propped up Harvey Weinstein for 30 years while he was raping women just as rough? I’m back in LA, driving down Figueroa in Eagle Rock. There’s a homeless camp under the freeway bridge. I’d like to make a right turn into the grocery store parking lot but some guy has the driveway blocked with his shopping cart. He is pissing on the asphalt. LA seems like a rough town, too. Despite his warning, Gordon thinks the move is a good idea. “I say do it! The future yields to the brave!” He says he misses Albuquerque, and more than that he misses the desert around it.
Cuba, New Mexico
Basic Goodness, the heart of sadness, & the rawness of a broken heart.
At the foundation of the Shambhala Buddhist tradition is the concept of basic goodness. Pema Chodron writes that an analogy for basic goodness is “the rawness of a broken heart. Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic; sometimes to anger, resentment and blame. But under the hardness of that armor there is the tenderness of genuine sadness. This is our link with all those who have ever loved. This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we’re arrogant and soften us when we are unkind. It awakens us when we prefer to sleep and pierces through our indifference. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing that when accepted fully can be shared with all.”
Chogyam Trungpa writes “Discovering real goodness comes from appreciating very simple experiences. We are not talking about how good it feels to make a million dollars or finally graduate from college or buy a new house, but we are speaking here of the basic goodness of being alive—which does not depend on our accomplishments or fulfilling our desires.
We experience glimpses of goodness all the time, but we often fail to acknowledge them. When we see a bright color, we are witnessing our own inherent goodness. When we hear a beautiful sound, we are hearing our own basic goodness. When we step out of the shower, we feel fresh and clean, and when we walk out of a stuffy room, we appreciate the sudden whiff of fresh air. These events may take a fraction of a second, but they are real experiences of goodness.”
I’m not a guy who has trouble feeling sad and alone. The rawness of a broken heart has been the rawness of my own heart as long as I can remember, and I can remember almost back to infancy. I’ve never really considered those qualities made me warrior material.
I’m having trouble finding basic goodness. Basic goodness seems to be covered by the noise of existence, and here in LA, the noise is really loud. This is literally true: the sound of leaf blowers, blowing dirt from one person’s yard into the next, or maybe across the street, the sound of people gunning their engines as they speed up Avenue 57 (and I wince when I hear that sound; 3 years ago one of those guys, drunk, careened back-and-forth across the street, totaling six parked cars, including mine, before his final crash. He did not have enough insurance to pay for the damage). There’s the noise of the stoners across the street, fighting, again. There’s the noise of helicopters flying overhead. There are the visuals: piles of garbage in the streets, the homeless camps, the guy blocking the driveway to the grocery store with his shopping cart while he takes a piss in the middle of the street, the homeless guy shitting in a bus stop. There’s the noise of aggression, and of egos, and of people trying to make it in showbiz, and the noise of their grandiosity; you need to have delusional levels of belief in yourself to stand a chance in “the industry” which is what showbiz likes to call itself. It also likes to call itself “creativity”, oblivious to the contradiction. There seems to be something really oxymoronic about the idea of industrially mass-produced creativity. For those of us like me, with the sensory overload that accompanies Aspergers, finding the basic goodness that is at the heart of everything is especially challenging. I’m usually trying to stave off panic. The basic goodness in me seems very hard to find underneath all my wound up hostility that’s borne of nothing more, or less, than fear.
How do you find the basic goodness in someone who prides themselves in being able to take more punishment than anyone can dish out? How do you find the basic goodness in Donald Trump or Mike Pence or Paul Ryan? The answer is this: “you do not possess basic goodness but you are the basic goodness.”
There is something called renunciation of privacy which frightens me because invisibility has been my go-to defense mechanism since infancy. Invisibility is the ultimate expression of privacy. It seems that renunciation of privacy is an essential undertaking if I am to experience basic goodness, and the idea of basic goodness fills me with hope and with optimism, which are sorely needed these days.
“The need for renunciation arises when you begin to feel that basic goodness belongs to you. Of course you cannot make a personal possession of basic goodness. It is the law and order of the world, which is impossible to possess personally. It is a much greater vision than your personal territory or schemes. Nonetheless, sometimes you try to localize basic goodness in yourself. You think you can take a little pinch of basic goodness and keep it in your pocket. So the idea of privacy begins to creep in. That is the point at which you need renunciation — renunciation of the temptation to possess basic goodness.”
Along the Bosque
“It’s windier here than in Los Angeles,” says Andrea, as a warning. She knows I dislike the wind. It is an Aspergers thing for me: the wind touches my body in a way that I don’t like being touched. But this is a dry wind down here as we run along the Bosque, a trail that runs alongside the Rio Grande in the middle of Albuquerque. I like this trail. It reminds me of a lot of trails along rivers. It reminds me of Fish Creek, in Calgary, or the Bow River bike path, or the trail around Millpond Creek, in Mayville, Wisconsin. What it doesn’t remind me of are any of the river trails in Los Angeles. A concrete river bed just isn’t the same thing. It might be a great river bed for filming car chase scenes, but as far as a river goes, it’s just not real. It is real concrete, though, and this is the problem I have with LA: the city is real, the poverty is real, the homelessness is real, the income disparity is real, the artificiality of it all is real; it’s a film set populated by the struggling, the delusional, the power mad… there is no center here, no middle, not a middle of the city, not a middle class… The only thing in the middle is the weather, not too hot, not too cold, just right, relentlessly so, even while the city is ringed with fire.
I can take the wind in New Mexico.
New Mexico monsoon, through the windshield
San Joaquin River Trail Race Report
San Joaquin River Trail
EconoLodge.
“Fuck you!”
“No, fuck you!”
This is the sort of well thought out argument that takes place between two drunk women in the room next to us at the Econolodge in Fresno.
A good night’s sleep was not in the cards.
Andrea went to sleep agitated and woke up even more agitated. She wasn’t sure she could finish the 100K inside the cutoffs. When I saw her climbing the hill ahead of me when I reached the 50k turnaround she was in next to last place. The only person behind her was a girl in American flag short shorts and Luna sandals.
When I saw her again at mile 43.5 of the 100k, she was just behind first place female. Andrea doesn’t really sandbag people. She just runs smart and counts on everybody else to go out too hard and then fall apart down the road somewhere. They usually oblige.
Moooo.
The 100K started at 5:30am. It was a small pack of runners. A few had taken an early start, heading out just as we pulled into the parking lot. We fetched our bibs, and then Andrea was off.
The 50K began an hour later, at 6:30am. I was not feeling great. The poor nights sleep at the EconoLodge was not helping me feel a whole lot of Carpe Diem. It felt more like the day was going to seize me, and probably shake me by the throat. It’s been a rough couple of years, especially because I am convinced it’s been a rough couple of years. It’s all about perception. I’ve been letting the days shake me by the throat a lot recently. But the San Joaquin River Trail is a beautiful trail, and it was a beautiful morning. Maybe I could let myself not have bad day.
The race opens with a solid 1 mile or so climb, followed by a downhill and then a series of rolling ups and downs on singletrack, on the southern slope of the canyon carved out by the San Joaquin River. There are cows grazing throughout this area. The slope of the hill gets steep enough in a stretch that the cows can’t graze on either side of the trail, and just use the trail to get from one grassy hill to the next, which is what they were doing when the runners hit the same stretch. There was no room for the cows to get off the trail and let us pass. Cows don’t particularly like to run, either, but they were being forced to, which was not exactly what any of them had planned for the morning, and they weren’t happy about it. It’s kind of amazing how much a cow can convey in a “mooo”. What I heard was “Really? Guys, give us a fucking break here. We’re going as fast as we can. We’re cows.”
Runners would find places where the trail widened and pass the cows, who were lumbering along unhappily. It’s hard to feel aggressive when you are running in the middle of a herd of cows. It set a nice tone for the day.
Cows on the San Joaquin River Trail
The beer drinkers.
I was running behind a girl in shorts that might have been too small on a girl smaller than her. It wasn’t a particularly aerodynamic look but she wore it well, owning it like someone who was going to embark on some Carpe Diem. She and her running partner had a plan: they were going to drink a beer at every aid station. They could not wait until they got to the first aid station, which would be at about 7:30am.
I’m not so sure about the strategy of drinking a beer at every aid station. Many years ago I used to drink beer and run. After that, I just drank beer. After that, I stopped drinking beer, and started to run. Turns out I don’t multitask well, especially when drinking is involved.
I remember being out for a run after dark one evening in Austin, Texas. My friends pulled up next me and someone offered me a beer. I was thirsty, and I liked beer, so I guzzled it down. I ended up cutting the run short so that I could get back to the house and drink more beer. When faced with a choice between anything and drinking, I always opted for drinking.
Earlier that summer, I was running a 15K at some small town festival in the hill country outside of Austin. It was the early 80s jogging boom and every small town seemed to open their local festival with a 5 or 10K, and that would bring in the city slickers like me. Whether or not the town was in the district he represented, Congressman JJ Jake Pickle would always be in the parade, riding in a Cadillac convertible, throwing pickles out to the audience.
I finished the race. All they had to drink at the finish line was beer. Texas summers are hot, and I’d been sweating. I was crusted with salt and very thirsty. Three beers later, I was pretty much toast. It was about 8am, too early to be that drunk. I sampled as much chili as I could from the chili cook-off, hoping to soak up the alcohol. I watched the fiddle contest and the coronation of the 1981 Sausage Queen and promised myself never to drink that much beer again before 8am., a promise I mostly kept for nearly fifteen years.
Thirty six years later, (and twenty years since my last beer), I was running the San Joaquin River Trail ultra for the third year in a row. I was drinking Tailwind. I passed the beer drinkers in the miles approaching the first aid station, which was several miles further down the course than we thought. The beer drinkers were worried, but not so much that it threw off their game.
As expected, beer is not a performance enhancing drug, and they gradually dropped back a few miles. I say they dropped back because I do not feel like I was making any bold moves forward. I saw the girl again. She had taken off as much clothing as possible, revealing lots of glistening tattooed skin flushed red with alcohol. She looked happy, and a bit unsteady.
Jake Pickle hands a squeaky pickle to Coretta Scott King
My dark places.
I’ve refined my skills when it comes to hitting dark places. Normally the territory of 100 milers, I can now hit pure despair in a 5 mile run. It’s a special talent I’m trying to learn to deal with.
About 10 miles into the race, on a beautiful section of trail still running along the southern side of the river (the 50K is always beneath the river except for turn-around point which is just across a bridge), having managed to ditch the beer drinkers and finding myself wonderfully alone for a few miles, I started reviewing my life, which is never a good thing these days. Gratitude is in short supply, mostly because I deal with change about as gracefully as the cows do trail running, and the past two years have given me lots of change to moo unhappily about.
My dark places get absurdly dark these days. This is why at mile 12 or so of San Joaquin River Trail 50k I was seriously contemplating killing myself. It’s beautiful up there and I thought I could wander off trail a bit, slit my wrists and bleed out gently in the warm sun. I would send Andrea a text which she would not read until her race was over. The only problem was i hadn’t any signal. ATT is not a very good carrier. Nor did I have anything I could use to slit my wrists.
Knowing that I had neither cell signal nor a blade meant I could indulge the thoughts a little longer than thoughts like that should probably be indulged. Thinking about killing myself every day is really not a good thing and I need to find a way out of it, something that shouldn’t be hard on a beautiful Saturday morning running along the San Joaquin River.
It’s hard to run with enthusiasm when you are pondering suicide. The thoughts passed. I picked up my pace a little and hit the next aid station.
Cow Fence
2015
The first time I ran this race, in 2015, I’d signed up for the 100K. Andrea had also intended to run it but was still dealing with injury from her Fatdog 120 DNF. The evening before the race I suddenly got a very bad sore throat and realized I was sick, and I ended up dropping at mile 18.5.
Looking back, my splits were all much too hard. I don’t know why I was running that fast. I’m certainly not capable of it now. We ended up driving towards Yosemite and wandering around sadly-depleted-by-the-drought lakes. There was snow on the ground. It was starkly beautiful.
2015
2016
Andrea had signed up for the 100K but dropped down to the 50K. I signed up for the 50K at the last minute. I’d been running slow since my Western States DNF. It seemed I was not recovering all that quickly from the knee injury that took me out at mile 85. Or maybe I had just gotten old; the latter possibility has been looking much more likely now that some time has passed.
I felt beat up on the return and walked a few miles on a stretch that should have been very runnable. Andrea passed me at the last aid station, around mile 26 or so. I tried to summon something up and nearly caught back up to her.
This effort was still good enough for an age group award.
Gluten free pancakes.
Are you one of those people who, when you think of Fresno, gluten free pancakes is not the first thing that springs to mind? If so, you might want to reconsider. Fresno is a gluten free pancake mecca. We rewarded ourselves with some the day after the race (much better than beer), and then took a detour on the drive home.
San Joaquin River
Detour
Let’s stay in the now.
This year, I was moving even slower. Blame it on the cows, or maybe just on laziness – I don’t seem to have the ability or desire to push it past third gear anymore. I have lost my capacity to hurt.
I thought I might pass Andrea on this stretch. She should be running a slower pace, and she’d had an extra 5 miles or so on an out-and-back, and those two should combine to erase her one hour head start. I didn’t pass her, though. She was about two hundred yards ahead of me, climbing up from what was the turn-around point for the 50K. I yelled out to her, and she called back. I was at the 50K point at the same time she hit it last year, she said.
Andrea had been worried about her 100K. The race cutoff was tight, almost an hour faster than her one previous attempt at the distance. This course seemed deceptively hard. She was actually agitated the day before the race, which was not something I’d seen before. She was slightly ahead of pace, though. Nevertheless, there was only one other 100K runner behind her – a girl in luna sandals, who didn’t look like she was going to finish, although I thought to myself at the moment that this was probably an unfair judgment, because I never expect anyone in luna sandals to finish a race. (Turned out it was an accurate appraisal. She would drop. Not sure why people try running in luna sandals.)
Andrea and I both run pretty steady races. We sandbag people. This is because she pushes it hard on the second half, whereas I take it really easy on the first half, so we usually have close to even splits. We kind of depend on other runners to blow their wads in the first half, and we pass them while they limp it in.
I started passing people. The beer drinker girl staggered towards me, minus most of her clothing, red and glistening. I passed a couple of folks who were chattering to each other. Often the sound of human voices really annoys me, (I much prefer moos) so I made a special effort to get far enough ahead that I would not need to hear them. This took a few miles. Sound carries in the hills.
What about the actual course?
Maybe you are someone who is trying to research this race. Maybe you are more interested in details about the actual course rather than the stuff that happens in the nether regions of my brain, even though in my brain the nether regions tend to be front and center. Well, if that’s the case, I wouldn’t want this to be a complete waste of time. After all, you’ve read this far.
There are two races, a 50K and a 100K. Both are out-and-backs on pretty much the exact same course, but the 50K turns around a lot sooner. The 100K also has a short out-and-back climb-up-a-hill-on-a-fire-road from the second aid station, which the 50K does not.
Aside from that out-and-back leg up a hill on a fireroad, both courses are almost entirely run on singletrack that runs alongside the San Joaquin River, crossing from the south side to the north side just before the 50K turnaround. This means the rest of the 100K is run on the north side of the river, on trail that is rockier and slightly runnable than the rest.
It’s a beautiful, low key race. If your thing is being surrounded by hundreds or maybe even thousands of runners, and you really get off on the energy of something like the LA Marathon, or need to be surrounded by excessive amounts of testosterone to really come alive, this low key race might not be the thing for you, and maybe you should try an iron-man® instead. If, on the other hand, you enjoy a beautiful trail with lots of space between runners, and quiet alone time on a brisk fall day in an environment that is totally local and feels like family, this might be enjoyable.
And while it might be a low key race, it’s not an easy one. The 100K cut-off is especially tight. It’s not for dilettantes.
The 50K has nearly 6,000 feet of climbing. None of the climbs are particularly brutal except, perhaps, the opening climb, which is about a mile long, and the climb back up from the turnaround, also about a mile long. It’s all quite runnable…but you are always going up or down. If you blow your wad early, your day might suck just a little on the return. I don’t consider myself to be much of a hotshot when it comes to climbing, but I passed a lot of people climbing on the return.
The elevation profile for the 50K looks like this:
San Joaquin River Trail 50K elevation profile
The trail often looks like this:
San Joaquin River Trail
Words of advice for young people.
CTS ultrarunning coach David Henry writes about four simple and smart long-distance pacing tips.
1). When in doubt, slow down. Even in a shorter race, like a 50K, you have plenty of time to take is easy and still make yourself hurt at the end. This is common coach wisdom in ultras, but not a lot of people follow it, preferring to start at front of the pack even when they are a middle of the pack runner, fully intending to PR by several hours, and then blowing their wads big time and having to walk it in if they don’t DNF first. Luckily, slowing down is seldom a problem for me. I just do it naturally.
2). When you are ready to push, wait! This is sort of like when in doubt, slow down. Basically it says “you’ve run a good, intelligent first quarter of the race. Now is not the time to be an idiot and go balls out. Try not to blow your wad until the finish line is getting close.” A chronic underachiever, this is also never a problem for me.
3). Don’t go to the well too early! Okay, so the race is halfway through and you’ve run smart and only blown half your wad. It’s still too early to go balls out. Again, not a problem for me.
4). When it’s time to hurt, make it hurt! This is the part where I run into trouble. Only once did I finish a race completely spent, and that was Leona Divide 50m in 2012. I might end the race with blisters or feet battered by the rocks, or just plain tired, but I seldom end it in pain due to exertion. If it’s a 50K, I run it like I’m running a 50 miler. If it’s a 50 miler, I run it like it’s 100K. In this race, coming up on that last climb, I had three goals. The first was to pass whoever was just in front of me. The second was to make a specific time goal. The third was to go hard and use up whatever I had left. What happened was a little different. There was no one to pass nor was I going to hit the time goal. With those two gone I couldn’t find anything to drive me to give it all I had in the last five miles. I don’t race well against myself, I guess. And I’m lazy. I pushed it just enough so as not to feel like I wasn’t trying, and that was good enough.
I finished second in my age group.
Obligatory selfie
Mile 43 aid station
Andrea’s 100K
After a short rest I headed out to catch Andrea at the 43 mile aid station. When I arrived I was told the first place woman, a Bulgarian, had just left the aid station. Andrea came in as I parked the car. A number of other runners – all men – showed up around the same time.
Andrea was pumped up. She was feeling good, and talking loud. Adrenaline was flowing. She was happy to hear that the first place woman was not that far in front of her, but said the woman was running strong. Both of them had picked up a number of places since the turn-around. Andrea was in and out of the aid station quickly.
Back at the finish the 100K runners were trickling in. The Bulgarian runner’s boyfriend finished his race. “She’s got it for sure,” said an enthusiastic local runner I’d seen at the 43 mile aid station. “Second place was at least an hour behind!”
That didn’t sound right to me. I’d not seen the Bulgarian runner, but I was told she’d just left the aid station when I arrived. Andrea tends to finish strong, so I doubted the distance between them would grow. I sat back to wait.
A runner was coming in, and the cheering was much louder than usual – either a local favorite or first place female. Once the Bulgarian woman arrived, I expected Andrea to be just after her. The crowd gathered around the runner who had just finished. I saw a pink V-Fuel shirt. It was Andrea, having passed the Bulgarian, first place female.
It seemed the Bulgarian had paced herself perfectly for a slightly shorter race, and suffered hard in the last few miles. I guess it was a puke fest. The 100K distance is no joke. For those of us who are not elites, it seems to set the distance limit of a race that can mostly be run.
More gluten free pancakes.
The next morning, more gluten free pancakes. We have simple motivations. I am sure we’ll be back again next year.
Andrea, back when she was still in 2nd place
Olsen’s Acre’s
Mogollon Monster 100 Race Report
Sunrise on the Rim
Frustration, bad spills, and broken bones.
I’d signed up for Mogollon Monster 100 almost on a dare to myself. My success at 100 mile races has been, well, not very successful, with a lot fewer finishes than I have starts. Things always fall apart in a 100 mile race, and I fall apart with them. I’m not the kinda guy who segues smooth as silk into plan B when plan A spirals clockwise down the toilet. This year had been marked by frustration, bad spills, and broken bones. It was not looking like I was gonna be the champion of anything. I’d quit my job, my relationship was sort of up in the air, I felt old and tired and ready to quit this running thing, so why not try my hand at one of the hardest 100 milers there is?
There wasn’t time to train physically, so I decided to focus on my weakest muscles, all of which happen to be located inside my head. How would I run Mogollon Monster if I was the Buddha? That was what I hoped I would figure out.
No crew, no pacers, just me and a few hastily packed dropbags. For no apparent reason, I was confident that I’d prepared myself for things to go wrong, and they did. Here’s how:
Let’s get this party started right
We took off along the Highline Trail from Pine, Arizona. After about 5 miles, the trail turned sharply, headed up to the top of the Mogollon Rim, a nasty, rocky, steep and exposed little the top. From there, a short romp and then a steep, nastier downhill into the first aid station at Geronimo, mile 12.
Coming down the hill I mistimed a jump over a downed tree and slashed my leg open, a long and bloody gash down the length of my thigh.
Bloody Leg
Geronimo to Washington Park
I came into Geronimo with my left leg bleeding heavily. I’m prone to falls and scrapes and disregard them, so I hadn’t really paid much attention to this one. The folks at the aid station did. As always, I declined medical attention. I always look in worse shape than I am. A couple of nurses were crewing a runner and insisted on working on my while I stood there filling water my bottles. They cleaned the cuts and then coated them with Squirrel Nut Butter.
The stretch between Geronimo and Washington Park is 12 miles along the Highline Trail, shared with the Zane Grey course. This would be the fourth time I’d run those 10 miles. They begin with a couple of miles of climbing and then things start to roll. The Highline Trail, which runs for 54 miles below the Rim, is pretty rough. There are a lot of rocks, and a few gorgeous sections of smooth red sandstone. For the most part, it’s exposed, but the heat and sun were mild.
Climb from Washington Park
The Mogollon Rim
The climb to the Rim from Washington Park was two miles long, on a very rocky jeep road. It started gently, but the last half mile was at about a 40% grade, sometimes more. That was slow going, and I thought to myself how little fun it would be on the way down.
There was a small aid station at the top of the climb. No aid really, just folks counting bibs and making sure everyone made it ok.
Houston Brothers aid station would be four miles away, almost all of it on a smooth gravel road, the kind I normally hate, but a nice break after all the rocks.
The race has been rerouted due to pair of fires that burned away much of the Highline Trail past Washington Park. The ascent to, descent from the Rim would be along the stretch I’d just climbed, two times up, and two times down, and then we’d run a pair of loops on the Rim that looked more-or-less like the hemispheres of the brain.
Houston Brothers was headed by Arizona runner Michael Miller. I’ve known Michael for a few years, and it was good to see him. He admired the severity of the gash on my leg. “Is it just a getting old thing?” he asked, marveling at how every one of my races seem to involve blood.
Eight miles from Houston Brothers to Pinchot Cabin, on beautiful and mostly runnable singletrack, right down the center between the two hemispheres of the Rim brain.
From Pinchot back to the edge of the rim was another seven miles of beautiful singletrack followed by a two mile descent to Washington Park on the same rocky stretch we took to get up. The first half mile was slow going on loose rocks at a 40+% grade. I did not scamper down.
A quick turn-around at Washington Park – grabbed some food and warm clothes and headed back up to the rim the way I’d just come down. The second climb up took a lot more out of me than the first did. From there, a repeat on fire-road to Houston Brothers.
The sun had just set, and the moon hadn’t risen. The fireroad skirts the edge of the rim. Down below in the distance I could see the lights of Pine, which is a small that hasn’t enough light bulbs to light up the sky, so up above, the Milky Way was plainly visible. For us LA people, living in a brightly lit city of 13 million plus people, expanding in every direction under a shroud of smog and marine layer, seeing the Milky Way is a rare thrill. I turned my headlamp off so that I could better see the stars. Midway through a pretty brutal race, and enough things had gone wrong already, but this was beautiful. I was kind of thrilled that there had been no moments of mental derailment, and that combined with the stars was more than enough for me to be actually enjoying myself.
View from the Mogollon Rim
Puffy.
At Houston Brothers I noticed my fingers were puffy. I thought it might have something to do with electrolytes, but I couldn’t remember what. The only sports drink at the aid stations was gatorade, which I kind of love but isn’t scientifically proven to do much for you except get you fat. It’s basically a soft drink without any fizz: just a bunch of high fructose corn syrup and no electrolytes. I’d been taking salt pills every now and then. I’d been drinking a lot of water, too. I’d been taking down gels, but those were tasting pretty disgusting at the moment. I’d been peeing well, but hadn’t pissed in a few hours.
While I sat trying to process my nutritional strategy, I downed a few bowls of salty broth, and then headed back out.
Less than two miles later, I stopped to piss. About a mile further, I stopped to piss again. I came upon a couple of runners. I could pass them, but first I needed to piss. By the time I got to Buck Springs, I’d pissed eight times. My fingers were no longer puffy. The salty broth turned out to be miraculous.
Outhouse on the Rim
Lost
The trail was so incredibly well marked that it was impossible to get lost. Every intersection was be clearly marked, and there would be warnings ahead of the junction to let you know to pay attention.
From Buck Springs, we went to Pinchot Cabin for the second time, and from Pinchot back to Houston Brothers the way we’d come. There were warnings not to skip Houston Brothers, and these warnings confused me because I didn’t think skipping Houston Brothers would be possible. I was pretty sure the critical intersection would be just at the bottom of this hill. No? Ok, I guess it must be this hill…No? WTF. I started to wonder if I had somehow missed the intersection. Finally I saw it. I was tired. I read the signs carefully. Go straight for Houston Brothers, or turn left for Buck Springs. Just in case there was any question, mile 72 was marked as straight. I was heading to mile 72. I headed straight.
Just in case this next section is as confusing to read as it was to run, let me explain that there was Houston Brothers aid station, and then there were the Houston Brothers – two brothers from Houston, one of them racing, the other pacing.
I remembered that we had about a two mile downhill from Houston Brothers aid station to this intersection, which means in reverse I should go up. And yet I was heading down from this intersection to Houston Brothers. This did not seem right. I turned around and headed back. After half a mile or so I became convinced I’d been going in the right direction and turned around. After three quarters of a mile I became convinced I was going in the wrong direction and turned around again. This went on for a while, going back and forth and back again and forth again and back once more on the same half-to-three-quarters-of-a-mile stretch of trail until finally I spotted the Houston Brothers who shouted that I was on the right trail.
Thinking I was lost ended up costing me a few miles and about an hour of time. Whatever I’d gained on the cut-offs, I lost half of it going back and forth on the trail to Houston Brothers aid station. This is the sort of frustration that might once have derailed a race. This time I surprised myself by just dealing with it.
View from the Mogollon Rim
Descent to Washington Park
Geronimo Number 2: Mile 88
Geronimo 2 was bleak. The aid station had been open for nearly 30 hours. Everything was covered in bees. The people working it were miserable, and they couldn’t leave any food or drink out because the bees would swarm all over it. There were only a handful of runners left on the course who had a chance of finishing, and a handful more in desperate shape who needed to be found and evacuated, including runner #36, who I’d seen about 4 miles back, leaning heavily to his right, balance unsteady.
“You alright?” I asked as I passed.
He nodded, glassy eyed, without much conviction. I’m not sure he understood what I’d asked him.
Most of the folks left at Geronimo were Medical Staff, and they all asked me, one after another, if I had seen #36 and how far back was he.
“He’s in bad shape. You guys better go fetch him.”
The one remaining aid station worker was miserable. The bees were frightening her and she wanted nothing more than to leave. We still had an hour before the cut-off, but the race could not end soon enough for her. It couldn’t end soon enough for me either, but at least I’d get some glory out of it. She would be doing well if she could avoid being stung. I didn’t blame her for wanting to leave. I wanted to leave too.
The problem was I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue. Up next was a miserable climb. I did the math in my head, and the cut-offs didn’t seem possible. “You need to listen to what your body tells you,” said one of the Medical people, in passing. But all my body was telling me was that it was really tired. It was my mind that was telling me I was done; my body said it could keep going but don’t expect much speed. Another medical volunteer wanted to work on my leg. Bugs were collecting on the bloody gash.
I sat in the chair and watched the bees swarm around the miserable girl. To my left was a runner working on his calf with a roller. Stanford was his name. He was determined to continue if he could just get the cramps to stop.
The Houston Brothers came through. Dalton, the runner, called out that 88 miles was too far into the race to quit.
I decided Dalton was right. There was no way I could spend any more time at Geronimo 2 without feeling miserable. It made sense that I was exhausted; I’d been up for 30 hours and 90 plus miles on these rocky trails. If I was going to time out, I should do it on my feet. Nobody at this aid station was going to give me any encouragement.
Highline Trail Red Rocks
1974 Dodge Dart Swinger
I had a dented up 1974 Dodge Dart Swinger I’d paid $300 for in 2003, when my other car got stolen. It ran great until you hit a hill. On hills I’d drop it into low gear and it would crawl, slowly and getting slower, to the top. I always doubted it was gonna make it. If I had to visit my girlfriend who lived at the top of the hill on Echo Park Avenue, I would park down near the Pioneer Market and call her to pick me up. I smoked a pack a day back then and wasn’t gonna walk that last mile uphill.
I felt like both the old me and my old car as I started that last climb. I managed to pass Laura and the Houston Brothers, but things were starting to get steep. After a while, I had to take a seat on a log. Laura and the Houston Brothers passed me. It was a rocky climb, lots of switchbacks, all shaded, one-and-a-half miles, and the grade was somewhere around 40%. There were times I’d stumble and other times I’d swoon. When things would level out for short sections, I’d try to hustle to not fall far behind, and then rest again when the steepness hit. There was no sign of Stanford; I guess he’d turned around. The final water-stop aid station was not that much further. I had plenty of time, and the trail was shaded and beautiful, even if every step hurt. I did not look so pretty when I finally got to the top.
1973 Dodge Dart Swinger
The Last Few Miles.
The last few miles of a 100 mile race are always a little confusing if I’m at all familiar with the course. Time and distance stretch and contract. Everything is familiar but not exactly where it’s supposed to be. Sometimes it’s miles off. The smooth sailing is always just around that corner until you turn the corner and realize it’s around the next one, and when you get there it’s around the next one still. This can get a little disheartening unless you’re used it, and while I don’t have that many 100 mile finishes, I’ve become used to it.
Laura’s boyfriend’s father met up with us somewhere on the trail. We’d been going down on a rocky trail, and then we went down a steeper, rockier trail, and then it got gradual and rocky, and I was sure the smooth sailing last mile or two was just a hundred yards away, but it never was.
“Boy, are we glad to see you!” exclaimed one of the volunteers when I finally hit the Pine trailhead parking lot. I wasn’t really sure what he meant by that but apparently they were so busy trying to rescue #36 that nobody noticed until a little while later that I was gone. Or maybe they were just happy that the last few runners were showing up and they could all head home. It had been a long day for me, and I am sure it had been an even longer day for the volunteers.
A few miles of road into Pine and it was done.
There was a point where the last climb to the top of the rim started getting gentler. My legs had made it. There were only six or seven or maybe eight miles left to go. I had plenty of time. I was going to finish. When I hit that spot, I was the last of us left on the course, but I didn’t really care, and everyone else was still within sight down a short stretch of fireroad. I was tired. I was enormously relieved, but the relief was tempered knowing there were still maybe six, maybe seven, maybe eight miles to do – I really wasn’t clear. I’d started the race knowing I could finish, but I’d started all except my first hundred miler knowing I could finish, and I hadn’t finished more often than I had. That means I’d started this race knowing the odds were better that I’d fail, again.
It was nice having that monkey off my back. It felt nicer as we approached hit the top of the rocky downhill, nicer still when we reached the bottom, even nicer when I knew the Pine trailhead was in sight, but there was also a sort of matter-of-factness about knowing I would finally finish another race, because aside from Western States there’d never really been a good reason for me not to, and even Western States was probably the result of bad tactics and worse decisions in the first half of the race.
It wasn’t until I was back at the motel, after dinner with the Boulder crew, legs in pain, buckle in hand, that it started to sink in. Failure at work, failure in running, a relationship that had frayed badly at the edges and was probably coming apart, and that general sense of all around complete defeat that is at the heart of depression…here in Payson was a little glimmer of hope, a modest success at something not really so modest at all. Even though I knew it was possible as long as I didn’t get in my own way, I hadn’t really expected to break my losing streak. I was surprised.
Durango.
The next morning I drove up to Durango to meet Andrea, who was finishing her 500 mile thru-hike of the Colorado Trail. She’d been looking for something within herself since before I’d met her. It was apparent from the start that our relationship would be a stage in that process; it had recently become apparent that that stage was drawing to a close. Whether or not I was gonna be a part of the next stage was not so clear to either of us. This was just one of the questions for which she was seeking answers on the Colorado Trail.
Andrea finishes the Colorado Trail
Post Script.
10pm on Thursday. The race ended 5 days ago. The hike ended 4 days ago. The apartment is an explosion of drop bags and hiking gear. We got home Tuesday night. Today we took a short hike in the front range. It’s the first day of autumn. There’s a bit of that post-race/post-thing depression, that quiet what next? funk we get into after accomplishing something big.
My legs are sore. It rained today. The leaves are falling and the smells are thick in the little canyon that ends at Millard Falls. Deep breaths of air are a sensual pleasure.
Mogollon Monster 100 Buckle