"I grabbed a pack of gel. With my knee in excruciating pain, that sounded perfect. I opened it, and thinking it was some sort of soothing sports crème, rubbed it all over my knee. Boy was it sticky..." 

LEG #3: 26.2-MILE RUN
(out and back twice to a turnaround point 6.5 miles away in the rural hills)

I started into a slow jog and hoped that maybe my knee just needed some time and a good consistent pace to work out the trouble. Not a chance! Again, I tried not to think of the distance ahead of me, and again, I did an incredibly poor job of it. I had run 10K races in the past, and each time I had sworn I’d never run another race. Yet here essentially each of the four legs of the run was going to be longer than a 10K. And I was nearly dead to begin with… What was I thinking?

As I left town and headed into the hills, I could hear cheers behind me. Though I didn’t want to think about it, I knew that I had just spent longer on the bike than some people take to do an entire Ironman. With a few miles behind me, I came to an aid station. When you think of an aid station during a race, you might picture volunteer workers running a few steps alongside the competitors to reduce spillage and smooth the handoff as the runners zip past. As I approached, an eight-year old helper saw me, grabbed some fruit, and started running with me in anticipation of the handoff. She ran right past me and had to turn around. I wasn’t zipping past anyone. I heard someone yell “water!” I grabbed and gulped down a cup of water. “Banana!” I grabbed and downed half a banana. “Gel!” I grabbed a pack of gel. With my knee in complete pain, that sounded perfect. I opened it, and – thinking it was some sort of soothing sports crème – rubbed it in all over my knee. Boy was it sticky. Boy was I stupid.

It turned out to be Power Gel, which is basically a liquid candy bar. It gradually hardened around the sweat and I must say the pain, though fierce, wasn’t quite strong enough to overcome the discomfort of sticky leg hairs. If only I had shaved my legs like the real athletes… If only I hadn’t become delirious in the meantime… If only I were running fast enough to have been out of view of the now hysterical aid workers before my faux pas.

At the next aid station I grabbed two water bottles: one to drink and one to rinse off my knee. It didn’t help much, but I was far too miserable to stay embarrassed for long. Later on as I recounted this story to a cousin of mine – who apparently suffers from the same genetic disorders as I do – I found out that it could have been much worse. She actually reversed the situation and ate the sports crème during a race, mistaking it for PowerGel! I guess I’d rather run with a sticky knee than spit out Dicocoyl Pentaerythrity and other enigmatic ingredients for twenty-six miles.

Somehow I struggled over the hills, got out to the turnaround, and headed back the other way toward the finish line. It wasn’t my finish line, of course, but I had to pretend I was on the home stretch just to keep myself going. Though the fittest athletes had already finished, there were still plenty of people around me who were wrapping up their second loop, so at least I had some company.

I started hearing the cheers from over a mile away. As I got closer, I saw that the finish line was just a few hundred yards past the turnaround point. Who would know if I just ran to the finish without heading out again? Sure, these guys with their electronic tickers might suspect something fishy when they realized I had clocked twenty sub-four-minute miles back to back. But I didn’t know a soul there, and even if they did disqualify me, no one I knew would ever find out... My mind was playing games with me, but ego and its evil twin, stupidity, overcame and I headed back out, practically alone.

Behind me now, I kept hearing the cheers, realizing that the pain was over for everyone else. I cursed the race organizers for the double loop, which could only have been a deliberate act of torture aimed directly at me and the other stragglers. A few hours earlier I had thought there was nothing I would have rather done less than to head out on the road after the painful bike ride. I had been wrong; heading out a second time after watching people finish was much, much worse.

I needed to draw on strength I didn’t have, so I thought about I had recently seen about the Bataan death march. I pictured myself as a POW surrounded by guards who would bayonet me if I stopped my march. I’ve always wondered if I could survive something like that – well here was my chance to test myself. That thought got me going for a few minutes, but pretty soon I was back to feeling like I couldn’t take another step.

I thought about my pioneer ancestors, stranded for the winter half-way through their thousand-mile walk across the plains. I pictured myself in the relief party, running to save them. I tried imagining any scene that might add some incentive to keep going. If I couldn’t do it for myself, could I do it for others? This added perspective – mixed with a little coercion – helped me manage to dig deeply enough into my soul to shrink my own problem and keep me going just a little further.

There were few enough of us left at this point that the rolling hills blocked my view of the other runners, so I was pretty much alone for the rest of the race. Some people say endurance races get you closer to God. Well, the combination of pain and solitude definitely had me praying out there. I even started making deals with God. If he’d just get me through this, I’d never, ever get upset with anyone again; I’d spend the rest of my life doing charity work; I’d give away everything I owned and live on locusts and wild honey.

I thought of the story where Jesus spent forty days wandering around alone in the desert without any food. Well that might be pushing it a bit. How about twenty days, four PowerBars, and a canteen? I didn’t sense any divine approval of my barter. “No? OK, fine,” I said aloud, “I’ll do the full forty.” Then I remembered that Jesus' reward at the end of his walkabout was seeing the devil himself… I'd have to draw the line there. “Oh what the hell,” I found myself saying a few painful steps later, “I’ll deal with the devil, too. Just get me through this race!”

I’ve always had an annoying tendency to get songs stuck in my head with the rhythm of the pace when I’m out on long runs and have too much time to think. One of the first to enter my head (and the last to leave) this time was “500 Miles.” The upbeat version by the Proclaimers had me huffing out, “I would walk five hundred miles” over and over again – one syllable for each step. But that soon gave way to the repetitive Peter Paul and Mary version of the drawn-out, lamenting folk tune that unfortunately shares the same title. “Lord I'm one, Lord I'm two, Lord I'm three... ” and so on.The numbered mileposts kept stacking up in my head all the way to infinity and whatever lies beyond; I was seriously considering just quitting right then and there, but like a broken record, I got stuck on the lyrics, “Lord I can't go a-home this a-way.”

I needed something a bit less depressing if I was going to avoid going a-home a-failure. So I cast that song 500 miles away and tried giving something more sinister a chance: Black Sabbath! I started wheezing out that lick “I am Ironman,” imagining what it would feel like to cross the finish line. Again, I tried to get the syllables in sync with each painful step, but my parched lips stuck together, and it came out as “I am Moronman!” Perhaps that was more fitting after all. 

I tried to convince myself that the pain I was feeling was nothing more than neurons in my head. I kept messing with the lyrics for more distraction: “Die, damn neuron, man! da da da da da,  da  da  da  da…” From there it turned into anything that rhymed, from “I’m a Mormon, man" to “I can iron, man.”

I was cracking myself up again with these Weirdalian parodies, but this time it hurt too badly to laugh. Since I was on the topic of irons, I started wondering if having a hot iron pressed against my ear would be preferable to the pain I was in. I seriously couldn’t decide. On a weirder tangent, I was fascinated by the realization that if you say iron really slowly, it almost sounds like I run, which was precisely what I was doing right then. How ironic, or rather homonymic... Or is that oxymoronic? Or just plain moronic? I had officially lost my mind. How hard would I have to get hit by an iron for it to knock me out completely and put an end to the misery?

Time to do some math for more attempts at pain distraction. The previous night I had taken my clueless guess at a completion time, added an hour or two as a buffer, and scheduled a late dinner with Michael and some old friends in Berkeley. Gauging by my last split time, estimated time elapsed, and distance remaining, I figured out that I would have to run 45 miles per hour for the remaining 8 miles to make it for dinner. Even though I had told myself I wouldn't stop for anything, I didn't want them waiting for me all night, so when I spotted a cheering family outside their house (these were pity cheers for the stragglers), I justified my first and only stop along the way.

“Mind if I use your phone?” I asked hopefully.

They brought me a cordless, and I called Michael to say I wouldn't be making it for dinner.

“Maybe we'll make it later?” he asked.

“No,” I replied, “at this rate I might not even make breakfast!” 

I limped back to the point on the road where I had left off. Man, had it felt good to stop! And man, was it tough to make myself start running again! Left foot, “move!” Right foot, “move!” Left foot… Focus, focus. More mind games, more pain.

The brief stop had caused my bad knee to swell up even worse, so much so, that it wouldn’t bend any more. I wondered if I was irreparably injuring my knee. Common sense should have told me that even winning the race wouldn’t have been worth chancing permanent damage, but at that point I was ready to sacrifice my knee to the ego gods. I hobbled ahead like I was lugging a ball and chain, swinging my stiff, straightened leg around to the outside with each step in an incredibly awkward and inefficient gait. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my cheerleading family making their way back inside, shaking their heads at the ridiculous sight.

The hills seemed to be getting steeper, and my slow pace was slowing even further. Wasn’t I entitled to some sort of second wind? The concept seemed foreign, and my mind went off on another tangent. Wasn’t there some song back in the eighties about second wind? “Don’t forget your second wind” or something like that? Once I remembered the melody, I realized it was a Billy Joel song I didn’t even like back in the eighties – but now it was stuck in my head for miles on end.

Each painful step jostled my brain with an ever louder, internal drum beat as I tried to occupy my thoughts with enough absurdities to keep going. The light was fading fast, and a chilling fog rolled in to replace it. I was eventually distracted by a strange, green glow coming from within the fog. Now I don’t have any genuine trips to use as a comparison, but I would venture that the psychedelic hallucinations playing out in my brain at that point would rival anything that Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, or John Lennon could have mustered with chemical assistance.

The strange little firefly soon transformed itself into a light saber, wielded by a spooky figure gradually emerging from the mist. On my mind’s movie screen, the figure quickly became an amalgamation of the grim reaper, Sauron of Mordor, and Vader the Sith Lord. I pressed forward toward the light; it could have been space aliens in the sky with diamonds for all I cared, as long as they’d beam me straight to the finish line.

As I approached the figure and returned to reality from my magical mystery tour, it turned out to be simply a benign aid worker handing out glow sticks.

“So you don’t get run over,” he said to me on the handoff.

I grabbed it and dove back through the veil of fog into oblivion. The glow was inadequately dim. “It’s broken!” I shouted back to the Darth Vader stand-in.

“Shake it up!” he shouted back to me.

Sure enough, a good shake got its luminescence going, and I now had another eighties tune in my head to oust Billy Joel and keep me company out to the last turnaround.

At this point I could really tell where I stood, because any glow lamps still approaching from the other direction would mean someone was still behind me. After running a mile or two back toward the finish line, I had counted four other stragglers like myself. So I wasn't quite the saddest of sacks, but I was darn close.

This was the last leg of the last leg, and it was finally starting to feel like I was nearing the end. With four miles to go, a set of headlights emerged on the horizon. I debated tossing my pet glow worm to increase my chances of getting run over by a farm truck, which, in turn would give me an excuse not to have to finish the race. My new little friend’s fluorescent glow was so mesmerizing, though, that I couldn’t bring myself to part with him. I started a dialogue instead that quickly morphed into the nonsensical lyrics of the tune Birdhouse in Your Soul: 

I’m your only friend

I’m not your only friend

But I’m a little glowing friend

But really I’m not actually your friend

But I am

As the slow-moving headlights approached ever closer, I figured I ought to stop talking to myself to avoid being mistaken for criminally insane by the vehicle’s passengers. Given my slow, stiff-legged motion and the green glow lighting my face from below, I could just imagine some frightened child glued to the window of the passing vehicle – forever claiming to have encountered the living dead in Guerneville. Blinded by the headlights, I smiled and waved as the vehicle passed, trying to look as sane and docile as possible; I was met with a piercing horror scene of my own that prompted me to pick up the pace with a sudden burst of energy – it was a vanload of zombies: The straggler bus! It’s a lawsuit-prevention device that they send out at dusk to pick up those who have no hope of finishing in time.

When the race organizers warned all of the participants about the cutoff time that morning, I had dismissed the admonition as not applicable to myself, who would surely finish in less than sixteen hours. Now the bus only had to make it the short distance to the turnaround point before it would be breathing down my neck.

Some more quick calculations based on my (so-called) speed relative to the bus told me that my current pace would get me picked up a mile from the finish line. One lousy mile! If I wanted to finish, I'd have to shave fourteen minutes off my time. Yes, by the way, it is possible to “run” a fourteen-minute mile. It's kind of like when kids try to see who can ride their bike the slowest without falling. Technically, in order to run, you don't necessarily have to move more quickly than a walker; one foot just has to leave the ground before the other hits the ground. Over 22 miles, I had proved that a fourteen-minute mile pace is the absolute slowest possible pace at which you can run. Any slower and you're pretty much just hopping in place.   

I did my best to pull it together and pick up the pace. After running that long, though, changing your pace even slightly forces you to use a whole different set of muscles. Prolonged pain gets you intimately familiar with every single muscle in your body, and now there was a whole new set of muscles talking back to me as I tried more mind-over-matter exercises.

I kept looking back to make sure there was somebody behind me for the bus to pick up. The dim lights of Guerneville came into view as I emerged from the woods and made my way down the final hill. I counted off the final mile markers with the bus in pursuit. As I made the last turn with a half mile or so to go, I looked back and saw that there was nothing but bugs between me and the headlights. The thought of this much investment only to get picked up a few hundred yards from the finish line... Time to give one last effort to squeeze out every bit of energy left in my body. Perhaps the incentive for this final push came not so much from my own determination, but more out of the fear that if I didn’t actually finish, I might be stupid enough to try the whole thing again someday just to “knock the bastard off” my list, as Hilary so humbly put it when he finally summited on Everest. No way was I going to go through this again!

Well what do you know, on my final kick I actually passed somebody! I prayed that this poor wretch would somehow block for me, perhaps by collapsing in front of the bus so they'd have to break out the stretcher. Would this victim stall them long enough to let me finish?

With the help of a chill breeze and a soaked T-shirt, it felt like the bus was literally breathing down my sweaty neck. The temperature dropped in an instant as I passed a depression with ponds on either side of the road. A mist was rising from the water's surface, and the headlights were approaching close enough behind me to cast my shadow through the fog all the way to the banner at the finish line. As I pressed ahead, something rustled in the bushes right next to me. The shadows took on frightening shapes in my mind, and from somewhere ingrained deep in my DNA, a primal fear arose. Goose bumps spread, and an instinctive alarm gripped my body thanks to countless primordial ancestors who had spent eons of time evading their predators.

Did I possess the genetic mutation that would allow my originating species to survive as the fittest, while my less fit competitor was tranquilized and devoured up by the voracious van? Or would it be the other way around? The thought that this ravenous creature was seeking to prevent my DNA from reaching the next generation sent shudders down my spine. All of humanity might have depended on my race toward refuge. Raw instinct took over and I made one final, panicked dash for the safety of the finish line. Thankfully, the hunter stayed put; I heard official voices emerging from within the van’s jowls, trying to coax the prey off the course. Sure enough, he was snatched up and – as if by divinely decreed intercession – the sorry sucker I had passed ultimately became the last casualty of the straggler bus.

Aided by this final burst of energy from some unknown reserve tank, I left that snarling bus in the dust – I was actually going to finish this thing! I had been going for so long; would my body even know what to do when I stopped? With just a few steps to go, I thought of that Greek guy Philippides who ran the first marathon ever. Well he finished his race, too, but died on the spot when he stopped. And his day didn't include swimming and biking. So maybe this last-ditch kick wasn't such a smart idea after all; maybe my heart was on its last beat; maybe “summit fever” is a human trait that nature, in an act of self-preservation, prefers to do without, in which case the Darwin Award would go to me instead of the busload of stragglers (who, after all, would live to pass along their genes while I might go ahead and join the frozen corpses on Everest by permanently removing myself from the pool). But by the time I had convinced myself that I was about to follow Philippides to my own doom, it was too late for any reservations; I crossed that finish line in disbelief, crusty knee and all. In one final act of exuberance, my fists shot into the air, with index fingers pointing to the sky. With zero remaining lung capacity, the accompanying shout came out somewhere between a whisper and a wheeze: 

“I AM IRONMAN!”

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