The Why… an Ultra
Those that know you watch as the mass of runners push off through the shoot for the fields and into the woods laden with mist and predawn dew. What is it they see in those that pass by? What hopes, what doubts, anticipation, excitement, fear? All of these in one?
And what is it they witness scrolled across the deep sweat and muddy furrows of each face as they stagger one by one toward the finish? Each worn raw by the countless dark morning runs through home woods on trails lit by the single beam of a bobbing headlamp, diet, injuries, dark lows and runner highs that brought them to these woods to test their merit against this mountain. What stories they carry with them as they make the grueling climb as a single member of a moving body struggling toward a common end.
What is the why? To outrun age, to see just how far one can push their suffering, and then to know what lies beyond that threshold? Some running through recovery, into past trauma. A score to settle. Some to define their parenthood, or the son running for the bed ridden mother plagued by cancer, a gift… hope… solidarity.
Is it the community? Where one supports the all and each other in seeing through what goal brought them there, to grind through to the painful end , or to be broken tying.
Or is it in protest to a society in which everything is convenient, for which little is now earned, where traps are laid at our every turn to play to our addictions, to poison our bodies, to rot our minds, to quiet our raging spirit?
Once the Rogues that frequented honkey tonks and hole in the wall bars have now taken their mis-fits to the wilderness, shooting pickle juice and loading up on salt tabs, fighting the inner tempest, lifting up brothers and sisters brought together by the common mother…pain. They lift each other with words of encouragement whether passing or being passed without difference.
And so they look on as you enter into that mist veiled treeline. They may know who enters into the ordeal, but they can not know who or what will push through it, what pain, what obstacles, what demons, what angles to be encountered, and none can say who will emerge again into the sunlit fields having endured.
What more why do you need?
“If you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds of endurance run, then the world and everything is in it, and once more you’ll be a man my son.”
If, -Rudyard Kipling