More is Different

Road to Hatteras Roiling surf the Friday before race day seemed to auger a repeat of last year's event.   In the 2013, second annual, running of the Graveyard 100, coastal flooding forced a reroute, turning runners back just at the threshhold of Hatteras for a return trip to Corolla. Conditions seemed worse this year.  Steady winds pushed a lashing cold rain in from the north and east.   Little hurricanos formed in random gusts.  The thought of running in this was appalling.  I struggled just to walk from my car to the hotel lobby. But weather reports assured us Saturday would be different.  Race director Brandon Wilson sounded confident at the 3PM briefing (one of two provided on Friday), giving us a 95% chance of safe crossing into Hatteras.   I had run the out-and-back alternate before and felt comfortable with either outcome. I was intensely curious to cross the bridge into Hatteras and I fell asleep that night hoping I'd have a chance...

Early one recent Sunday morning,  I pulled into Riley's Lock, my usual start for long runs on the C&O towpath.   There were no other cars in the normally busy lot, which didn't surprise me.  It was still early, the sun just up, and with the so-called "polar vortex" settling in over our mid-Atlantic world, the temperature remained stuck in the single digits.    I headed north.  There were several inches of almost fresh snow covering the path. Mine were the only human tracks among the overnight skitterings of animals. As I ran, the sun flashed through the bare trees and across the ice and the snow.   Thirty minutes in, I was warming up more quickly than expected and felt loose-limbed and relaxed.  I even stripped off a layer or two. I felt a little frisson of excitement.  Putting words to a wordless sensation, it was the pleasure of a felt contrast between the icy woods around me and the warmth I was generating within--like sid...

Some eight hours or so after solstice--the sun's southern turnaround in its annual race--I joined about 300 other runners for the start of the 5th Annual Seashore Nature Trail 50K.  Imitating the celestial seesaw, we would be looping back to this spot twice more, ending where we began, in a parking lot in the southern end of First Landing State Park, a beautiful maritime forest on the headlands of Cape Henry. By chance, this year's race fell squarely on the first official day of winter.  You wouldn't know it from the conditions though.  Another lesson in the folly of consulting extended weather forecasts before race day: what had been projected as a cold pelting rain 10 days out had by 5 days prior fizzled to a warmish drizzle, then, with a day to go, had morphed into a prediction of mostly clear skies and Florida-like warmth. The sensation of having traveled south was enhanced by hanging Spanish moss, glimpses of open water, sand, and the odd subtropical plant. ...

John Annerino.   Running Wild, An Extraordinary Adventure of the Human Spirit.  New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992, 1998. Thirty years ago, John Annerino--avid climber, runner, and sometime instructor at a community college in southern Arizona--ran the length of the Grand Canyon.   He did so three times during the early 1980s, each attempt following a path more remote and arduous than the previous. Running away and running toward Annerino's motivations for undertaking these unprecedented journeys on foot were at the outset unclear even to himself.   Never reticent about dramatizing the private, he recounts a colorfully failed engagement (probably for the best), a climbing injury that nearly kills him and then nearly takes his legs, and a vague disaffection with modern culture, including the "running boom," still in its early stages, being hyped in ever larger and more commercial venues.   Ultrarunners often begin by running away from as much...

This is a race report about a race that wasn't.  Not for me.  As of this writing, it remains to be seen whether the 2013 Grindstone 100 will happen for anyone. Last Tuesday, 2 days ago, we learned that the race was suspended.  Although the George Washington National Forest is open (a Forest is not a Park, you see), as a specially permitted event, the race needs to be supervised by USPS personnel--who, like most of the other 800,000 furloughed federal workers, are not allowed to so much as answer a work-related email while the government remains shuttered. Getting off the grid  What I will miss. There is nothing in my experience like the moment just before the start of an ultra.  All the better if the huddled souls at the starting line are few, the location remote, the terrain rugged.  Better still if shadows are beginning to lengthen and the trail appears to disappear into the darkness of trees and mountainside.  A chill in the air doesn't ...

This sinister-looking image is the elevation profile for the Grindstone 100 mile trail race, which takes place each year in early October in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia.  The race twists through what is sometimes called the "Rollercoaster," a rugged, relentlessly up-and-down course with a cumulative altitude gain of over 23000 feet and a total mileage of 101.85 miles.   A year older, but apparently no wiser, in a bit over a month, I'll be returning to Grindstone for the second time.  On Friday evening of October 4, I'll set off with slightly fewer than 200 runners for a full night of running.  We'll run all the next day.  For most of us, when the sun goes down a second time on October 5, we'll still be running. The cause for which I am running This year, I'm running on behalf of  The Soldiers Project , an innovative and award-winning non-profit that provides free counseling and support to military service members who have served in ...

Alexandra David-Neel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet .  New York: Dover, 1971.  (Translation of the 1929 publication, Mystiques et magiciens du Thebet.) Lama Anagarika Govinda, Way of the White Clouds .  New York: Overlook Press, 2005.   The first references in the West to the lung-gom-pa runners of Tibet are the eyewitness accounts of Alexandra David-Neel, published in 1929, and the spiritual autobiography of Lama Anagarika Govinda, recorded a decade or so later.   Born in Germany in 1998 as Ernst Lothar Hoffman,  Lama Govinda describes in some detail the range of practices that are grouped under the umbrella of lung gom pa.  Multi-day cross-country "tramps," as David-Neel calls them, were just one manifestation.    The related practice of tumo , for example, involved the control of body temperature and the ability to produce internal heat, allowing the adept to walk about in the coldest weather with nothing but a light toga. ...