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Mourning My Father With Ultra-Long-Distance Running
A million steps along a crooked path led me here
A funny thing happens after you’ve been running long distances for a while. You begin to lose perspective. It happens so gradually that you barely notice, until the day when 12 miles seems like a “short” run. When a couple thousand vertical feet of gradual uphill running spread over 15 miles is “pretty flat.”
It’s human nature to adapt, to keep moving the mark and pushing your own thin edge. Whatever you do regularly becomes routine, no matter how extreme it may appear. Ultrarunning — any distance greater than a traditional 26.2-mile marathon — is no different. In the winter of 2014, I’d been running ultramarathons for two years. I’d run and won 50-kilometer and 50-mile races. So it made sense to try making the leap to 100 kilometers.
And at the same time, it made no sense at all.
I never set out to be an ultrarunner. A million steps along a crooked path led me here. It was impossible to trace my unlikely journey back to a single moment. Was it when I was three years old and sprinted headfirst into a tree, got up, laughed, and kept going? Or when I was seven and ran my first 10K race, or when I was 15 and jogged out my back door to the beat of INXS blaring through my yellow Sony Sports Walkman? Or was it in 2006, when I accidentally ran my first marathon while interviewing the ultrarunning legend Dean Karnazes? Or that terrible December night in 2010, when my father died of cancer, three months after my second daughter was born and less than 10 weeks after doctors discovered a tumor the size of a fist on his left kidney?
In the aftermath of Dad’s death, running was not a logical decision; it was triage. He’d been my kindred spirit, a National Geographic photographer who taught me to find inspiration and solace in nature. Now that Dad was gone, I understood for the first time that I would die too. Consumed by grief and…
