J. M. Thompson - Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

For Shawn

See that all things are full of light. See the Earth, settled in the midst of the All, the great nurse who nourishes all terrestrial creatures. All is full of soul, and all beings are in movement.

Corpus Hermeticum XI: The Mind to Hermes

This is a work of nonfiction. In the course of writing these pages, I considered every salient trace of my past. In addition to my own memory, and the relevant scientific and philosophical literature, I reviewed multiple further sources, including letters, diaries, emails, photographs, videos, my medical records, and interviews with family members about their recollection of events at which they were also present. I have left nothing important out. I have not compressed multiple events into single scenes, created composite characters, or invented anything. I have represented dialogue to the best of my knowledge with fidelity. The following names are pseudonyms: Miriam, Chris, Don, Emily, Sebastian, Ned, Clara, Joseph, Dr. Jensen, Thelma, Dr. Browning, Dr. Hewitt, Mr. Butler, Roland, Mr. Martin, Sam, Mr. Keene, Sandra, Tara, Naomi, Mike, Andrew, Martha, Jim, and Dr. Carson. I have altered the names of some locations to protect the privacy of the individuals concerned.

JMT

The trail leads into the quiet of the trees, the ancient ones, the womb of dirt and unseen birds, where no one knows my name: Welcome, injured pilgrim. Sugar pine, nuthatch, sierra juniper, the huff-puff of respiration, all the sad, mad, raging voices from the bad old dayseverything transforms into the step before me and the instant I am in. Perhaps I have always been here, in this zone between the inner world and the outer one, where Earth in motion merges with mind and feeling and with all the times in memory and all the voids forgotten yet somehow sensed and known. The rhythm of my body, held within the blanket of the tree canopy, matches the music of the sparrow and the babble of the creek as all the mourning and madness turns into sweat and sunlight, and Earth moves under me and around me and within me. Hail, hawk and hummingbird. The leaves are whispering, Hush now, little one, hush. Hello, lupine, chickadee, thistle, blackbird, marten, nuthatch. Good morning, buttercup, yarrow, squirrel, robin, woodpecker. In the beginning there were no words, only sound and light and feeling, a rhythm of nothingness and being, and I feel it once more now in the sound of the wind, and in the pulse of sensing, again and again, the solid sentient core of an upright animal, accustomed to forest time. There is a path ahead of me. Nothing is ever altogether lost. There is a ground beneath us that never goes away.

ITS AROUND ELEVEN IN the morning on a sunny Friday in the fall. Ive climbed above the tree line and reached the high country. Im about 5 miles into the Tahoe 200, a 205-mile ultramarathon on the rugged mountain trail around the largest alpine lake in North America. Ive been running ultramarathons for a decade, but never this far. Right now Im running on a ridge about two thousand feet above the lake. The lake looks back at me with its sparkling turquoise eye. The land below stretches to a faraway horizon as my body floats down the trail. I can feel the sunshine warm my face and hear the trees dancing in the wind with a sound like the cosmos breathing life into the world. The land and sky are shining as if someone has turned up all the colors of the world. The flowers look as bright and cheery as a bunch of little munchkins. Seeing Earth at this scale does something to the eye. Your focus shifts from the world up close to a bigger picture. Climb a little closer to our friendly neighborhood star and the mind shifts out of clock time into a timeless way of being.

I drove to Lake Tahoe with my wife, Miriam, and our son and daughter from our home in San Francisco around lunchtime yesterday. I love coming back to Tahoe. When I see the lake, I remember all the other times Ive been here. The memories spiral on top of one another. Everywhere I look, now has then folded up inside it. Yesterday afternoon, gazing across the vast, still, blue surface of the water at the snow-flecked mountains on the other side, for a second I glimpsed the lake in my minds eye, the way I saw it for the first time, eighteen years before. As I kept staring at the water, my mind spun back and forth between two bodies of water, one in the present and the other in memory, like two circles overlapping and then merging into one. Youre running around all of that? my daughter said, looking at the lake and the distant mountains surrounding it. Yes, I said. Why? she said.

Two hundred miles: it is the kind of distance you see on a freeway sign. Am I out of my mind? Not anymore. Ultrarunning can sound like insanity to people who dont do it. But ultrarunners understand its mad logic: running for days and nights nonstop brings you right up to the edge of breakdown but also to the opportunity for breakthrough. Its chaos, in a container: a kind of organized insanity that can help keep you sane. Still, I understand the optics of lunacy. I once heard a story about a group of runners in a caf in a little mountain town. The runners were chatting about their plan to get up at four in the morning and run for thirty-six hours straight in the hills. A person at another table in the caf overheard their conversation. That sounds completely unnecessary, he said. And so it is. On the surface, an ultramarathon is neither necessary nor reasonable. And yet men and women in the tens of thousands appear compelled to do such things, myself among them. It follows from the unreasonable nature of an ultramarathon that the ultrarunners motive must reside in a domain outside reason: the unconscious mind, the shadows of times forgotten, yet still felt.

Life is movement. Even a leaf can turn toward the sun. As a child, I loved to read about the stars and planets. I knew they ran around in loops, driven by fundamental forces of physical being, like clock hands turning on a clockface. Matter isnt free. Planets dont get to choose their orbits. But people do. I do.

Runners: You can see us on the street. You can see us on trails and tracks and sidewalks. Bodies surge forth, arms like pistons, feet kicking the ground, every push-off propelling our hard, sinuous limbs in hyperkinetic leaps that accelerate with every revolutionthe movement of liberation.

But there is another kind of runner. See the frightened ones, crouched in the alleys and doorways, faces wan and haggard. Perhaps you wonder where they came from, or what rage or madness brought them there, these wounded souls. Exiles. Runaways.

Runners and runaways: life moves between these two poles of possibility, between what you choose and what gets chosen for you. One exists in conscious motion; the other follows an unbidden path on an orbit set forth by history or the structure of reality. The runner picks a point a hundred meters or a hundred miles away and decides to move toward it. The runaway feels the impulse in the background, the momentum upon which physics or history threw you into being, from the spiral loops of the galaxies and the orbit of Earth to the life cycles of cells in your body and the legacies of love and hate that loop across generations and centuries. To be human is to be a composite of both kinds of revolving cycles: conscious yet unconscious, a spirit at once free and determined, a rhythm between earth and air, like feet leaving the ground and then landing again. I understand both kinds of running because I have lived them. I am a runaway who became a runner, a trauma survivor who became a trauma psychologist and an ultramarathoner.