Keeping Pace: Friendship Based in Accountability and Belief

Whenever my buddy leaves me dusted while running on trails (which isn’t infrequent), I’ll try to get a feel for how far ahead of me he is by asking folks how long it’s been since he passed. “Have you seen a guy with glasses and red, curly hair like the world’s coolest youth pastor?” They always know who I’m talking about, and since we started training together again in April the gap between us has tightened significantly.

Skip forward beyond my first 100-miler wherein the same fella saw me through a very hot and dusty finish line, and we find ourselves sitting on a forest road in Idaho while a wildfire roars just a couple towns over. He’s going for his shot at a 100-mile finish, and it’s my turn to see him through it. His fiancé, mother, and I are waiting in a forested valley by a lake where the smoke is rolling above us. We saw the clock roll over 8:00 PM before we started making bets for when we’d see our guy come in. I took the middle time slot for around 9:00, but as we saw runners very slowly creeping in, and barely any of them looking good when they came through, we realized it would likely be a long time before he arrived. By the time 10:15 rolled by we were getting anxious, and there he was. The guy was just another runner at the time. He was completely indistinguishable from every other sullen, exhausted face coming down the road that night, but we recognized his voice from the faint “hey guys” he muttered as we walked along.

This is where the work began.

Efforts like these take a lot. It takes the runner a lot of miles on their feet, sometimes over a thousand in preparation for the event. It takes cold, early mornings in the mountains and long, hot evenings on the track. Multiple pairs of shoes, social events, and valuable moments with loved ones are sacrificed in exchange for the opportunity to do something incredible. The runner’s support system walks the line of encouraging their runner to get back into the mountains for more and trying to hold them back from getting injured due to overtraining, all the while dealing with the intense emotions and insatiable hunger that comes while preparing for such an endeavor. And if you’re a race director, well, if I was a praying man I’d be spending a lot of time doing so on your behalf.

Now that I’ve personally been through a handful of training blocks for large efforts, I’m pretty accustomed to it all, but I’ve never played support before. I walked into this project knowing I would end up pacing my buddy through the night. We’d put hundreds of miles in the mountains together and were intimately familiar with each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and that familiarity, I’d hoped, would allow me to be there in some meaningful way while he attempted to do something amazing.

From burning hot to shivering cold in a matter of minutes is the reality for many ultra runners as their bodies fail to thermoregulate after endless hours of exertion. We worked from timers, giving ourself just a few minutes to refill his pack, force some food into him, address any feet issues, and allow him a few quiet seconds to breathe before heading back into the wilderness.

The timer rang out, and after a little coaxing we got him back on his feet and moving down the trail. This was about to be a trying ten hours of darkness, but at least he was moving… until he wasn’t.

There are a multitude of factors than can influence how these things go, and they’re all intimately connected. The amount of smoke he had been inhaling throughout the day put more strain on his stomach than the already stressful 17 hours of jostling, and when you can’t eat you don’t get energy. The long silence he sustained while moving along the course suggested to me that he was painfully low on fuel, and being this deep in a run meant he couldn’t afford to run on fumes alone. When he did speak it was quiet and broken, and occasionally he trailed off mid-sentence as if he forgot to finish what he was saying, but in reality he was falling asleep on his feet.

The night was continually broken into micro naps where he would lie down while I set a timer for two-minutes (I actually did 2.5, as if the 30-seconds would make a difference), and stood quietly while he slept face-first in the dirt. It was hard watching him like that. The situation played out a handful of times over the night, and it reached its apex on one switchback where he had stumbled and essentially fallen asleep mid-fall. He caught himself as well as he normally would during a stumble, but it had seemed that the instant his body hit the ground he’d fallen unconscious.

What does a friend do in a moment like that? A year of immense effort had culminated into him so exhausted he could barely walk without slipping back into sleep while another 30-miles stood between him and the finish line. Would he, in this half-conscious state, misstep somewhere down the trail and injure himself? Would the next time he falls asleep be on an upcoming ridge, alone and without someone to notice as other, equally-exhausted runners passed by?

For all my concerns there was one thing I knew to be absolutely true: that guy was willing to fight until his body absolutely could not do so anymore. It’s comforting to have a friend beside you on something as massive as running 100-miles, but what’s more important is them holding you accountable to your own potential, and that was the only thing I could see us doing. I would set another impromptu timer, and the moment it went off we would do whatever it took to get him moving again. As many times as this needed to play out and for as many miles as required to make his dream a reality. He’d tell me how fast he could manage to make the downhills, and we locked in at about a 12-minute-per-mile pace for as long as we could. Hours and hours, miles and miles went by in a blurred series of rising and falling along the trail. Even in that state he was driven by his mission to reach the finish, and as long as he kept that spark alive I knew he’d keep moving forward.

We left each other shortly after dawn, and I was admittedly relieved after nursing a leg issue all night. Pizza and black coffee for breakfast, or as much of each as he could manage, and we all waved him off back into the mountains. The morning sun had seemed to renew some of his coherence, and I think every one of us felt better watching him leave into these final two segments of the course.

He finished mere seconds under 31-hours and placed with the top 30 racers. Over half of the racers never crossed the finish line. Friendship, in its purest form, to me seems to be a catalyst of sorts. A welcoming presence that raises your own standard of yourself. It’s an energy of forward motion and relentless pursuit of better with frequent stops along the way to appreciate the wild ride. It’s an unrelenting faith in one’s ability to succeed in their own mission, and a promise to stand beside each other along the way. Maybe it’s just finding well-intentioned folks that are as crazy as you are.

Whatever it is, it exists in abundance in the adventure-sports community.