I'm not sure why, but I've been thinking a lot about this article I wrote a couple years ago for ultraRUNNING
on the connection between poetry and ultra. It being the winter slow season, I thought I'd dust it off and reprint it here.
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It'd finally taken complete hold of me, and I had to surrender. My slow-man
shuffle pattered on a few more strides, fell to an amble, then reluctantly to a
complete stop. The new quiet - no more wind, no more
tchonk tchonk of
shoes upon gravel - brought into deep relief just how hard I'd been
breathing to hold a snail's pace. I stood there looking over the
rolling hills and jagged peaks, feeling the still, warm air envelope my skin,
and knowing all too well the time had come. Running on fumes
for miles, my stomach had finally had it. I looked up and down the path
to see if anyone was coming, bent over and with hands on knees, and threw up a few
times; then, like legions of ultrarunners before me, sipped a little water,
smiled at the scene, and started the halting shuffle to the next aid
station. My final thought: I need to write a poem about this.
I've yet to write that poem, but it's certainly not because it's an unworthy
image. While bonked and barfing isn't a state most folks would call
poetic, in many ways it's
the poetic moment: being stripped to the
core, resisting what it is we need most (calories and fluids) and with miles to
go before we rest. It's the human condition laid bare.
And this is one of the things I love most about the long life in the
backcountry. It is rich with such moments: some are beautiful, some are
ugly, some are just plain base. But what unifies them all for me is their
offering the opportunity to better see the universe and our place in it if we
just take the time to reflect a bit. If poetry is experience distilled to
a point of transcendence, then ultrarunning is surely poetry personified.
I've written countless poems on my long backcountry runs - first lines
anyway - most of which, without pen or paper or digital recorder, are siphoned
from my mind and lost back to the ethers, ready to be captured and formed by
the runners that come after me.
Still, I've managed to secure a few moments in words - the
melancholy I feel running by abandoned mining sites; being surrounded by yellow
butterflies as I traverse a ridge; crossing the stark shadow line as the trail
snakes up a steep valley in the early morning.
It's always hard to do justice to the experience on the
trail -- to perfectly convey that feeling, that thought, that vision you had
barreling down that 3,000 foot descent at mile 83. It never really comes
out exactly how you'd hoped. But perfection really isn't the goal.
It's understanding. The same reason we all run ultras: To connect
to ourselves to nature and to others; to have transcendent experiences.
Poetry captures that and can actually do it one better, by sharing it with the
world.
