[This was an unfinished post I worked on about 8 months ago. I'm posting it now because I've decided it is enough and I don't know for certain that I will ever find that particular frame of mind again. I hope to return to my running adventures, but for the moment I'm on hiatus and I can never tell where that will lead.
--EL]
As a person with rather tenuous loyalties to certain elements of personal identity, I’ve managed to see the world through a variety of filters over the years and this has afforded me a unique perspective. But while I have always felt some mysterious regard for what exists, at least for now, beyond the crush of mankind’s boot, it wasn’t until I started running trail ultras in the desert and mountains, places that prove somewhat inhospitable to settlement by men, that I began to discover the lure of the wild. Even when I spent most days of the week climbing, I was always more interested in the sport aspect of it, the beauty in movement, and not the opportunity to explore. So I spent many a day toiling away on plastic in chalk-filled gyms, focusing on being strong and agile, instead of out in the mountains touching rock.
I moved to Colorado almost solely because I became enchanted by the views. It’s stealing the phrase from Montana to call Colorado “Big Sky Country,” but that’s the way I’ve always thought of it—the place where, in every direction, you can see the sky touching the earth, and in between is where you are, tiny and insignificant, but still you’re there. Often now, I discover myself in places that take hours of travel on foot to find, places without enough of all the right things like Oxygen or water, high places, dry places, raw places that might steal everything from you if given the chance. Maybe I’d always known these places existed, but I’d never heard the wind buffeting my voice away as I spoke, breathless, at the top of a high altitude climb, surrounded on all sides by the naked peaks above tree-line. I’d never raced across a desert mesa feeling the zing of electricity in the air while watching dry washes become raging rivers in the space of an hour.
There is untamed power present in the world still--not all the big predators are yet extinct and the weather won’t always be sunny. You my get eaten by a mountain lion, though it’s probably pretty unlikely, or you may get rained on, but the fear is part of what creates the lure. Not everything in life should be safe, I’m discovering. As I embark on increasingly difficult adventures, I am often afraid and some of those fears aren’t unfounded. I ask myself: if I died or became seriously injured while running out in the middle of nowhere, far from help, under the pressure of some extreme condition or other, would I regret under-taking the task. More and more lately, the answer is “No.”
--EL]
As a person with rather tenuous loyalties to certain elements of personal identity, I’ve managed to see the world through a variety of filters over the years and this has afforded me a unique perspective. But while I have always felt some mysterious regard for what exists, at least for now, beyond the crush of mankind’s boot, it wasn’t until I started running trail ultras in the desert and mountains, places that prove somewhat inhospitable to settlement by men, that I began to discover the lure of the wild. Even when I spent most days of the week climbing, I was always more interested in the sport aspect of it, the beauty in movement, and not the opportunity to explore. So I spent many a day toiling away on plastic in chalk-filled gyms, focusing on being strong and agile, instead of out in the mountains touching rock.
I moved to Colorado almost solely because I became enchanted by the views. It’s stealing the phrase from Montana to call Colorado “Big Sky Country,” but that’s the way I’ve always thought of it—the place where, in every direction, you can see the sky touching the earth, and in between is where you are, tiny and insignificant, but still you’re there. Often now, I discover myself in places that take hours of travel on foot to find, places without enough of all the right things like Oxygen or water, high places, dry places, raw places that might steal everything from you if given the chance. Maybe I’d always known these places existed, but I’d never heard the wind buffeting my voice away as I spoke, breathless, at the top of a high altitude climb, surrounded on all sides by the naked peaks above tree-line. I’d never raced across a desert mesa feeling the zing of electricity in the air while watching dry washes become raging rivers in the space of an hour.
There is untamed power present in the world still--not all the big predators are yet extinct and the weather won’t always be sunny. You my get eaten by a mountain lion, though it’s probably pretty unlikely, or you may get rained on, but the fear is part of what creates the lure. Not everything in life should be safe, I’m discovering. As I embark on increasingly difficult adventures, I am often afraid and some of those fears aren’t unfounded. I ask myself: if I died or became seriously injured while running out in the middle of nowhere, far from help, under the pressure of some extreme condition or other, would I regret under-taking the task. More and more lately, the answer is “No.”