Why We Run 100-milers - by Bruce Gungle

Chase raised the question “Why does one run a hundred mile race?” and then went on to surprise, neh, startle me, by writing an entirely serious response to that question. I both agree and disagree with his answer. I agree that running ultras, and especially hundred-milers (and up), provides us with the skill set or ability or confidence or self-reliance to be able to succeed at other difficult, arduous, and/or tedious challenges that life throws our way or that we purposefully pursue. I disagree that this is why we do it. And I seriously doubt that one can fully articulate why we are driven to run 100 miles, but nonetheless, I’m going to take a crack at it.

Probably part of the reason that 100 milers are such a physical and mental challenge has to do with the fact that the vast majority of us (= ultramarathoners) are simply not in shape to run 100 miles. It seems that there are enough hours in the day to train appropriately for 50 miles, but not nearly enough for the 100, especially if you have a job and are not a gifted, high VO2 Max, athletic endurance machine. But in the end this is beside the point, as the question is not so much how, in spite of not being adequately trained, do we manage to finish these races, but rather why, in spite of knowing the unpleasantries that lie ahead, do we ever start? And why do we continue on to the finish line, at least most of the time, in spite of the fact we are at the end of our rope, feel like shit, blister our feet, strain various muscles, fall on our faces,  puke on our shoes,  dehydrate, lose pounds, cover ourselves with salt residue and dried spittle, and occasionally even shit our pants? It makes no sense.

The first time I ran an ultramarathon it was of my own devising.  I measured the distance from Gates Pass, on the west side of Tucson, to Reddington Pass, on Tucson’s far east side, and found much to my glee that it was almost exactly 50 km. I drove the route in my 1968 Mercedes 250S (in the years before cheap GPS I figured that I was better off with an odometer engineered in Germany) and stuck wire flags in the ground every 5 miles and at the finish. I talked my wife, Carolyn, into dropping me off at the top of Gates Pass a bit after sunrise one October Sunday and off I went, Gates Pass Road on the rural west side to Speedway Boulevard, Speedway Boulevard into the city, Speedway Boulevard  out of the city into the rural east side, a one mile jog to the north on Wentworth Road, and then east on Reddington Road. At some point around mile 20 or 25, Carolyn remembered to track me down and got me some more water and then a bottle of Gatorade and I ran on to the top of Reddington Pass and my first 50 km run. Somewhere around the house here I have my time, and it was not fast. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop me from spending a couple of days writing an essay about my adventure, and at the core of that discussion was the same damn question:  why did I do it? It was only 31 miles, but it was beyond the norm, so the question seemed implied simply by the action: why?

Since then I’ve run Western States, I’ve run Badwater 3 times (135 miles, temperatures up to 132 F out on the road one year), I’ve run Javelina Jundred when I hadn’t trained, I’ve climbed Mt. Rainier a couple of times, at 49.5 I learned to skate board, built myself a half pipe for my 50^th birthday, and can still drop in, I think, at the skate park. I rode my bike 384 miles of the Furnace Creek 508 most recently—yeah, I dropped out; basically timed out. I’m slow. But I started, because, as Chase said, thanks to succeeding at 100 mile runs, I know I can put up with all sorts of tedious, physical misery. And every time I was planning to do one of these things, all anybody wanted to know was why did I do it. Why run 10 miles at noon in June in Tucson, temperature 108 degrees, to train for Badwater? Why enter a race that was a full order of magnitude beyond what the normal person thinks is a reasonable distance? Why spend precious annual leave to run a race that brings your body to the brink of physical collapse and then leaves you unable to walk normally, nor without pain, for  days and in a condition that most research suggests is anything but good for your health? Well, you do get the belt buckle; there is that. But seriously, what does it all add up to? Ego? Sure, to some degree; we enjoy telling others of our success (hence the above catalogue of accomplishments). But it certainly seems there must be more to it than that, especially given that most people to whom we brag think we have a screw loose.

So let’s begin with our obsession with trying to figure out why we run 100s. People have all kinds of weird hobbies and they get asked about them all the time. Just think of all that crazy crap your retired friend loads into your email box—a model of San Francisco big enough to fill the living room and made out of toothpicks? 10,000 exact scale model cars with moving parts you can’t even reach to move, and all made from scratch and painted by hand? A collection of beer mats from bars around the world, all mounted and I.D.’d? How about Jackass, the Movie? I mean, running a hundred miles pales in comparison to some of the odd-ball stuff people come up with to kill time. And every one of those people get asked: why do you do it? One can understand the first shoe-box size model made out of tooth picks or the first couple of model cars…or the first couple of miles, but then it gets out of hand and everybody wants to know why you do it. So the first point is we are not alone—lots of people do weird shit, and then they get asked why, why do you do it?

But this is where we’re different—those other people know why they do it. The toothpick models are aesthetically pleasing, just like anything any artist does; a beer mat collection provides a connection to places you’ve visited and the beers you’ve drunk; stupid stunts make you the center of attention and test your bravery in a weird way, and, in the case of what’s-his-name, the Jackass guy who just crashed his car into heaven, it makes you money (until you die). Yup, those other weirdoes know why they do their weird thing.

We don’t.

And that’s why we keep writing these essays and get into those really interesting conversations out on the trail where we finally figure it all out but then, when we get back and shower up, can’t quite remember or make out the logic that we had all sorted out on the trail at mile 85. It’s kind of like doing acid, actually.

So this leads us to the conclusion that whatever it is that motivates us to run 100 milers runs deeper, much deeper, than the reasons Chase threw out there. And I don’t mean to just that shallow, Pleistocene depth outlined in Born To Run (we run because we learned to hunt by outrunning other animals and so that is why we run today—because we have been bred to run by evolutionary processes). I think it runs even deeper than that, to that root desire that makes us want to move in the first place.

The desire to move is quintessentially captured for me at Badwater, the 135 mile race through Death Valley that takes place each year in July. People tend to fixate on the heat, but the heat is manageable if you approach it right. What really makes the race unique is the size of the valley through which the runners move. It’s the deepest valley in the lower 48 (-283 ft at Badwater to 11,049 ft at the summit  of Telegraph Peak), it’s quite wide, and exceptionally long. It is also complex geologically and aesthetically, and still, even through this vast chasm, Badwater runners pass on through on their own two feet. Perspective changes. You, the runner, move through Death Valley under your own power, out in it, part of the landscape, part of the heat. To move organically through this vast landscape is satisfying, incredibly so. Yes, but why? What drives that?

Think of it, perhaps, as a linear dance. Indians dance. Africans dance. Hippies dance. Movie stars dance. Rastaman dance. Ultramarathoners dance.

Our dance, the dance of the ultramarathoner, is to the most basic of rhythms—thump-thump-thump-thump—that is, the two-beat measure of foot to trail or foot to pavement, the pounding of the heart, the first conscious sound heard from within the womb. How far back does that go? In terms of the collective unconscious, probably to the first multicellular organism that had a beating organ that pumped oxygen-loaded plasma to the rest of the body. In terms of me, and you, and him, and her, it goes back to before we were born and before we were conscious—our own hearts and our mothers’ hearts pounding away inside and outside the placenta. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Out on the trail, we recognize that rhythm when we run—what could be more familiar to us as individuals and us as a species?—and it drives us on, that familiar rhythm, boom-boom-boom-boom. We’ve all been through that little epiphany when we hit 15 or 20 miles and we are feeling great and we think to ourselves: I could run FOREVER! In terms of when we decided to become ultramarathoners, for most of us that was the turning point. But why run as far as we possibly can? Why keep going for 100 miles or more? Because we want to keep that familiar, comforting rhythm going as long as we can, that rhythm we find or to which we return when we dance the dance of the ultramarathoner, thump-thump-thump-thump, down the trail.

I think that this may be part of it, the dance of the ultramarathoner rocking to the beat of the heart, but obviously there are other components to it as well, or we’d all just hang out at concert halls and drum circles, smoke weed, and hop from foot to foot to the back beats found there. But we do more; we go out into the desert, the woods, and dance linearly through the landscape…maybe that’s where our training as Pleistocene hunters comes into play; we run to a beat but at that more recent level, we run with an evolutionary purpose.

Or not.

Why do we run? And especially, why in god’s name do we run 100 milers? The motivation is obscure, hidden in the overwhelming desire to run a few steps in the first place, hidden further  in things that go deeper, that drive us on to test the limits of endurance, to keep running, dancing, forward, as long as we can. Thump-thump-thump-thump. I want to run forever. Thump-thump-thump-thump….boom-boom-boom-boom…thump-thump-thump-thump-thump….