Katie Arnold - Running Home: A Memoir

PHOTO: KMA

Valles Caldera, New Mexico

Im floating alone through a million-year-old volcano. Less than a week from now, a wildfire will torch the edges of this high, scooped-out basin, but the only thing burning here today is me. Im just a body in motion, arms and legs firing in unison, swallowing the dirt beneath my feet, spraying a fine mist of silt in my wake.

The caldera extends for miles in each direction, tawny grassland fringed by fir trees, which from this distance look as tiny as toothpicks. At ten thousand feet above sea level, the air is thin and the sun ferocious, beating down on me from a cloudless sky. In the stark light, everything stands out in sharp relief: chunks of glossy black obsidian strewn across the rocky track, bleached white elk ribs, a lumpy cow skull. A knee-high dust devil swirls across the trail ahead of me, a miniature cyclone throwing its arms in the air.

Its late May 2012 in the mountains of northern New Mexico, and Im twenty-one miles into a fifty-mile ultramarathon. After nearly four hours on the trail, my brain has gone quiet at last, lulled by the repetitive motion of limbs, lungs, beating heart. It has ceased its tireless, stubborn spinning. Without words for pain and fear, without the conscious thought of them, the discomforts of the day have lifted, like skin sloughed off by the wind.

Im a speck on this enormous land, suspended between earth and sky, more sky than earth. More flying than running. For the first time in months, Im no longer afraid. I wonder, briefly, if Ive lost my mind. The answer is yes. Finally.

Everyone follows a different path. The path starts with a persistent voice inside, nudging you to try the unexpected, the improbable. This is the voice to listen to, not the voice saying No. Not the one saying Are you crazy? Dont worry if you dont understand it yet. You cant possibly see where the path will take you, twisting and kinking out of sight. Follow it anyway. Sometimes the path will be faint and you will think youve lost the way and you will be afraid. This is normal. The path will lead you on, out of your known world and into a new one, and deeper into yourself than youve ever been before.

Running is my path.

Ive run through winter, on steep, snow-packed peaks with metal spikes strapped to my shoes so I wont slip. Ive risen early to sneak out at first light in late spring, the air sweet with lilacs. Ive run high above the tree line at twelve thousand feet in late August, climbing through wildflowers and into the clouds until the world below feels like a dream. Ive run across river canyons, hurdled rattlesnakes, startled bears, and outsprinted mosquitoes in damp, boggy woods. Ive run to win and to be loved and Ive run not to be noticed but to disappear, into the forests and my own heart. Some days I can no longer tell if running is madness or the clearest kind of sanity.

When I began, I did not have a map of where I was going or how I would get there or where there even was. In the span of three months in 2010, my younger daughter was born and my father died. Id lost him once before, but this time was for good. My world flipped upside down, and the ground dropped out from beneath my feet. Consumed by grief and terrified that I was dying, too, I fumbled forward into the wilderness alone. I lived in terror of my body breaking down, but I pushed it to its limits almost every day. I had two young daughters at home who needed me, whom I needed even more. But I went anyway. I had so many questions and so few answers. All I could do was see where running would lead me.

A caldera is a large, shallow crater formed when a volcano explodes and collapses in on itself. The crater at Valles Caldera National Preserve, in the Jemez Mountains, is not one crater but seven, strung out like pearls on a necklace, nearly thirteen miles across, a staggeringly huge sea of grass that dwarfs everything within it.

A week before the Jemez Mountain 50 Mile Trail Run, a friend of a friend named Jacob, whod run the race before, sent me a message on Facebook. You need to keep it together in the caldera, he warned, because the climb out of it is brutal. Youre going to be pulling yourself up by tree branches. Its like a sick joke.

On the morning of the race, my alarm went off at 3 a.m. I dressed in the darkened bedroom so as not to wake my husband, put the kettle on for instant oatmeal, drank a glass of vitamin Cspiked water, and was out the door by 3:30. It was still cool, the black sky gleamed with stars, and the highway north was empty and lonesome. When I pulled into the starting line at 4:30, the night hadnt brightened one bit. My heart whomped against my ribs and goosebumps pricked my bare arms and legs; how I longed to be home, snug with my family in our sleeping house. Then the race director shouted Go! and my legs began to churn and there was no turning back.

I picked my way through rocky arroyos under my headlamps dim beam. Except for the narrow cone of light illuminating the ground beneath my feet, I could see nothing. It is difficult to gauge speed when you run in the dark. You have to go more slowly to avoid falling, but without visible landmarks, just colorless, indistinct shapes lunging up at youtrees, boulders, sharp turnsyou feel as if youre careening along at a reckless velocity. Sensory deprivation creates the illusion of speed.

As the sky gradually lightened to dull gray, the objects around me became recognizable. I was on the side of a rugged, dun-colored canyon, steep and treeless in places, forested in others. The sky appeared cloudy, but there were no clouds, just the absence yet of sun, the eastern horizon whitening on its way to blue. When the sun rose, an hour later, I whooped with joy; daylight was a shot of optimism straight to my heart. Far below, the canyons puckered and wrinkled, slouching downstream to the Rio Grande.