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I’d lived in Santa Fe for three years when I ran up Atalaya for the first time. It was a total whim. No one I knew ran up mountains, but I was lonely and heartsick. My boyfriend of a year had decided to move to New York for business school. I was so crushed I taped a Post-it note to the ceiling above my bed, the first thing I saw when I woke up each morning: Everything takes you to a new place.

  It was a summer evening, after work. I drove to the trailhead and started slowly, jogging the first half mile. Then I decelerated to a hike. For the next mile and a half, I alternated between a jog and a fast walk. I went only as far as the false summit, less than halfway, then turned around and jogged back down, careful not to trip over my own feet. I did this for a few weeks, maybe a month, going a little bit higher, running a little bit more each time. I was breaking the mountain down into smaller pieces, the way rock climbers practice different sequences of a route for months before trying the climb in its entirety.

  Each time I staggered up Atalaya, it felt like a physical catharsis. Sweat poured out of me and evaporated instantly in the dry air, leaving a skim of salt on my skin. I would strip down to my sports bra and shove my T-shirt into the waistband of my shorts and feel the sun on my back and the breath surging in my lungs and chase my shadow all the way to the top.

  I couldn’t think at all when I ran. It took every ounce of effort and willpower just to get myself up the mountain. I couldn’t think about the boy in New York, about losing him through my own stubborn independence. I couldn’t think about missing my parents or what would become of me. I could think only about my feet crunching on dirt, the tightness in my hamstrings, and how I was going to make it through the steepest, nastiest section, which I knew lay around the next bend.

  I took a perverse pleasure in punishing myself on Atalaya. I was starting to feel things in a new way, and it didn’t matter that they hurt. I liked the scratches on my legs, the dirt on my shins. I liked coming home pulverized from the effort, with visible proof that I had persevered. Thrashing myself on a long climb was better than brooding at home, staring up at a Post-it note taped to the ceiling.

  Running up the mountain in the last light of day felt like an act of audacious nonconformity. Most of my friends from New York were dating investment bankers and had a closetful of dry-clean-only clothes they wore to their marketing jobs. I had a casita a mile from the trails and scabs on my elbows and a low-paying job I loved. Money wasn’t freedom. Running in the beauty of the faraway was.

  By the end of the summer, I’d broken down the whole mountain. I could run to the top of Atalaya and down again in just under an hour and a half. Years later, a friend gave me a copy of the book Running with the Mind of Meditation. In it, the Tibetan lama and marathon runner Sakyong Mipham explains the four progressive phases of meditation and running. Tiger is the neophyte stage, when you are learning to develop focus and strength. On Atalaya, I was becoming a tiger.

  I ran all that year and into the next. I’d started writing for Outside, and running was one way I wrote. On the trails, my thoughts unspooled in the silence, one to the next as though in a waking daydream, ideas spilling forth of their own accord, the same way I’d written my stories while shooting the basketball years earlier. It was like the feeling you get when you’re talking to someone as you drift off to sleep. You can hear the words coming out of your mouth, but you’re not sure who’s talking. Whole sentences moved through me, up from the earth and into the soles of my feet. My only job was not to forget them as I ran beneath sun-hot ponderosas, along dry creek beds, to the top of my world and back down again.

  7

  Progression

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Mom, Pennsylvania, 1965

  The secret to running isn’t speed or stamina. It’s progression. Whether you’re starting out or training for a new distance, the important matrix isn’t time or pace, but improvement. Even if you’re just goofing off and having fun, running for no one but yourself, even if you don’t care about results, if you pay attention, if you stay devoted, you’ll see improvements. Your legs will become stronger, your lungs not quite so winded. Hills that used to seem steep won’t feel so formidable. You will progress, a little bit farther, higher, faster. This is what gets you out of bed in the morning, on gloomy days when the sky matches your mood and your calves balk with every step.

  I don’t consciously think My father has cancer, I have a new baby, I can’t go running. I don’t have time to think this. Almost all my waking hours are spent nursing the baby or rocking the baby or hiking with the baby so she will take a nap or telling the other, bigger baby to please keep her hands off the baby. And swabbing projectile spit-up off every surface in the house. And worrying endlessly that the babies won’t grow up to know their grandfather.

  This is how regression sneaks in. When you’re not paying attention.

  Someone once told me that when you have a newborn, you should set one goal for yourself every day. It should be modest and attainable—like brushing your hair or taking a nap or making the bed—something that will give you a small bump of accomplishment without causing you to feel more exhausted than you already are. Now when I consider this advice, I want to cry. I can’t choose just one thing. There’s so much I miss, so much that needs to be done. I want to run up my mountain and write in my notebook and tickle Maisy’s soft toes and lie outside with Pippa and pick out shapes in the clouds. I want to do anything but think about losing Dad.

  Breastfeeding has sucked almost all the extra pregnancy weight off of me, but my body is still a stranger to me. Everything is looser, my muscles and tendons jigglier, just a tad off-kilter, like I’ve been haphazardly slung back together after the physical trauma of childbirth. My gait is different, too. I’m not moving forward as much as diagonally, limbs askew, in a hasty awkward jaywalking. Instead of my normally flat, girlish chest, I have breasts now: smaller than average, but actual cleavage. Even jammed into my sports bra, they bounce and leak when I run.

  I’m not ready to suffer on Atalaya, so I stick with a rolling, four-mile loop around the base of the mountain. The key to progression is starting small. Even after a few miles at a torpid pace, the endorphin rush is phenomenal, even better than before the girls were born, when I could run whenever I pleased for as long as I pleased, when my body and time were all my own.

  I don’t wear a watch and never time myself, but I don’t need to gauge whether I’m getting faster. It’s a novelty to be out on my own again, remembering what it’s like to be unencumbered, a body in motion, to feel my lungs expand and my blood hammer in my ears and all the memories come flooding back.

  After our Fodderstack debut, Meg and I went back to Virginia each April to run the 10K. We didn’t train, but still we got better and faster, walking less and running more, shaving minutes off our time. Soon we were winning prizes for our age groups: hand-thrown clay pots, one for nearly every year of our adolescence. In the summer of 1980, I became obsessed with Terry Fox, the Canadian amputee who was running five thousand miles across Canada on a prosthetic leg to raise money for cancer. The whole world was rooting for Terry. He ran more than three thousand miles before his cancer spread to his lungs. I remember thinking How could he go that far? And then: How could he stop? He died in 1981, at age twenty-two. That was the year Chariots of Fire came out, and for weeks after Mom and Ron took us downtown to the Strand Theater to see it, I hummed the theme song under my breath as I ran.

  Female role models were harder to find. Our next-door neighbor ran marathons, but he was a father, so he didn’t count. All the mothers in our neighborhood stayed home, decorating their houses or volunteering for the Junior League; or they worked part-time, like my mom, and went to exercise class at the Y and did Jane Fonda’s Workout in the den after dinner. I didn’t see any of them doing exercise for fun or because they loved it and were good at it, or because they couldn’t not. It was way at the bottom of the list,
below the beef stroganoff and the kelly-green curtains and packing the Hostess Ding Dongs for our lunches.

  Only years later did I discover I’d been wrong. I was visiting my mother, fixing Pippa and Maisy their breakfast so I could go for a run, when Mom said, “You know, I just ran out the door while you and Meg were sleeping.” The way she mentioned it, almost dismissively, I assumed she meant running an errand. Once. But she meant running. Regularly. Sneaking out before dawn almost every day.

  “You were little, and I’d go out around 5 a.m., down the street and around the block a ways, out that road in Summit…oh, what was it called?” She paused, trying to remember. I felt the color drain from my face. My mother, a runner? How had I not known this?

  Mom shrugged, smiling demurely at the memory, and her ability to surprise me after all these years. “Well, it was only a couple of miles.”

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Mom and me, Summit, 1984

  Mom had always drilled into us the importance of being indomitable. Weakness or doubt were not to be indulged, much less discussed. This was not delusion or wishful thinking on her part, but a sort of homespun positive psychology, years before its time. “We do not get allergies,” she told us, a suggestion of superiority in her voice. We did not get sick. We did not get stressed or worried. Our strong constitutions were a direct reflection of her sturdy Canadian stock and our own mental resolve. On the rare occasion we caught a cold, Mom made us Jell-O and safety-pinned a wool sock around our necks and let us watch game shows on television before sending us to bed with a hot water bottle. “You’ll be better in the morning,” she told us, and, whether by our iron willpower or our immune systems, we usually were.

  Laid up on the couch, I binged on The Price Is Right and Family Feud. The contestants’ naked desire to win something tangible yet utilitarian—a new toaster or dinette set—depressed and excited me. It seemed to reveal something important about the force of human optimism: a wild, hands-in-the-air hope that something fabulous awaited behind door number two, coupled with the sanguine acceptance that maybe it was only a washing machine.

  When someone you love has cancer, it feels a little like playing The Price Is Right. You’re faced with a series of doors. C’mon down! To the left is life as normal. Bang—that door closes. To the right is life with cancer. That one opens. Mild, treatable cancer? Closed. Aggressive, terminal tumor: Open for business! Two years to live? Maybe that just closed. Six months? God, let’s hope it’s still open. Every doorway, each step, forces you to recalibrate your expectations and make concessions. This in itself is a progression. How much uncertainty can you handle? Every day, a little more than you think.

  Dad is on his own progression, only it’s a negative progression. Regression. He’s dying a little bit every day. I’ve heard people say that about living—aren’t we all dying slowly all the time?—but now that Dad’s sick, I realize this is completely bogus. As long as you’re healthy, you can still improve, fumble forward, make leaps, slip back, inch up, claw your way out again. Your progress may be measurable, as it is with running, or indistinct, but there’s always the possibility of improvement and reinvention. You are evolving.

  * * *

  —

  As it had been for Mom, running was my own thing. The only time all year that I ran competitively was at the Fodderstack. In my mind, racing required a combination of elements that existed only at Huntly Stage: the rolling country roads, the anonymity of being an outsider from someplace else, the thrill of seeing Dad at the finish line. At home in New Jersey, I could run when I felt like it, and how I felt like it, and no one would care. I never joined my school’s track or cross-country teams. Meg did those things. She wore the maroon-and-gold-striped satiny thigh-grazers and went to state in hurdles. I ran out the back door in my gray New Balance 990s, clutching my bulky yellow Sony Sports Walkman, and blasting Bananarama and INXS through my headphones, with barely a glance from my mother.

  My motives were not always pure. In high school, I ran to catch a glimpse of the boy I liked driving by in his wood-paneled Wagoneer. In college in Vermont I occasionally ran up a forested hill called Snake Mountain. My boyfriend lived in a farmhouse at the base, so I could roll out of his bed and run up and down the mountain, burning off the late-night beer and pizza, and still make it to history lecture by eleven. The trail climbed a thousand feet through the trees, and on the broad clearing on top, I could stick my head out of the forest and look down on the lake and hills, and breathe.

  It wasn’t until I moved to Santa Fe, though, that I began to love running as much as I needed it. It was all that open space, so much of it still so wild and empty. You could see for thirty or forty miles in any direction on a clear day, often more. Everything was laid out in plain sight, but the distances were deceiving. Even the farthest mountains seemed approachable. Like if you set off and just kept going, you’d eventually get there.

  My distances began creeping up. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but something that happened naturally. My body was stronger, so I could go longer, and I had a new boyfriend who liked running, too. Steve was twenty-six, six feet tall, a gardener with thick calico hair and a sprinter’s lanky frame. His calves were perfectly shaped ovals beneath his summer-brown skin. He had a dimple just to the right of his mouth, and when he smiled, his green eyes did that exaggerated twinkly thing I’d only ever seen in the movies, like a leprechaun winking. He made me laugh all the time, but he didn’t need to be the center of attention. He could just be himself: the calmest and most direct person I’d ever met, as steady as I was topsy-turvy.

  PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD

  Steve, Stony Lake, 2005

  Steve was from New Jersey, like me. The youngest of four, he rode his bike for miles to the ponds and swamps in his town. His older brothers broke their legs running along railroad trestles and cracked their skulls jumping into stone quarries, and his mother had been worn down by worry. As long as he came home alive, he could do as he pleased. In Santa Fe, he explored the backcountry on skis, raft, bike, and foot. Our runs together were never fast, because he was more interested in covering new ground than competing. We were always bushwhacking, ducking beneath piñon trees, hopping boulders, scouting new routes. I envied his spontaneity, but sometimes I just wanted to make steady progress without being thwacked in the face by a branch.

  It was his idea to run our first trail race, a twelve-mile mountain run up and down Aspen Vista, a doubletrack forest road above Santa Fe that climbs from 10,000 feet to 12,000 feet. He hadn’t trained, and on the morning of the race we showed up at the trailhead with five minutes to spare, couldn’t find a parking spot, and had to sprint to the start just as the gun was going off. Steve finished seventh. I was eleventh, the second woman.

  It would be another year before we entered our next race, the Albuquerque Half Marathon. Steve and I ran elbow-to-elbow for 13 miles on a flat, narrow bike path along the banks of the Rio Grande; we were two bodies amid a sea of nylon-clad bodies, pounding along in an asphalt daze. In the final mile, though, a commotion on the curb caught my eye. A spectator was waving and yelling at someone. She was yelling at me. “SHE’S HURTING—TAKE HER DOWN!” The woman was pointing ahead, to someone I couldn’t see. “The second-place woman is just ahead!” she screamed frantically, gesturing for me to run faster. “You can catch her. CRUSH HER!” She didn’t know either of us, but she wanted a dogfight; she wanted a race to the finish. I glanced over at Steve and he dipped his chin, just barely a nod. Let’s go. Something in me snapped, and I took off.

  I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t intoxicating, that final pseudo sprint that carried me past my flagging competitor, with two blocks to go, and into second place; if I didn’t think I was sort of the shit as I stood on the podium while the race director looped a silver medal around my neck and the spectators clapped and Steve hollered my name. If I didn’t
, in the predictable upwelling of post-race endorphins, wonder what more I was capable of, and if I would ever have the chance to find out.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes progression happens in small, almost inappreciable increments, one step after another, so subtle you hardly notice. Other times it requires a huge, terrifying leap. In rock climbing, the most difficult part of a route is called the crux. It’s make-or-break. You have to reach for the next crimp with your hands, inch yourself upward to find a solid foothold, or you’re stuck. Once you make the move, you’ve passed through. There are not so many crux moves in life, really, in the scheme of things. Looking back, you might have had five or ten such decisive turns, where circumstances swerve one way and change everything.

  Not long after the half marathon, I convinced Outside to send me to Yosemite to write a story about the country’s top female rock climber. Steph Davis was a year younger than me and split her time between the red rock spires in Moab, Utah, and the granite walls in Yosemite, where she lived with her husband, pro climber Dean Potter. Toward the end of my trip, she suggested we climb Half Dome. I’d been rock climbing maybe half a dozen times in my life. When I told Steph this, she just smiled her dazzling smile and said, “Great!”

  On the six-mile hike from the trailhead, I tried to reassure myself that she did not mean I was actually going to climb Half Dome, the nearly five-thousand-foot granite crest that’s the most recognizable landmark in the park. Perhaps she was going to haul me up—or, in climbing parlance, “jug”—the way climbers ferry gear up a steep pitch, using a complicated system of ropes and pulleys. I had no problem being carted up the mile-tall monolith if it meant not falling to my death. Or maybe she said “climb” when she really meant “hike.” Plenty of regular people hike Half Dome every day.