Running

by Cinthia Ritchie

It’s past midnight and I’m running down Flattop Mountain, the air milky grey with the Alaska twilight, the moon fat and full and hanging in the sky like something ripe. I leap over rocks, hurl myself down small ridges. All around is silence, an immense and penetrating silence that fills my chest and hums my veins until I can taste it in my mouth, linger it against my tongue

Once I saw a wolf up here, late at night, the dog and I running in the green darkness, and we froze, all three of us. I grabbed the dog’s collar, held tight. The wolf lifted its head and loped off through the brush, its stride smooth and achingly graceful. I wanted to follow, wanted to feel my own stride even out until it became lush and primal, until I lost all sense of time and logic, until wildness wept through my veins.

On the way down, I tore up the mountain, scree and mud flying as I ran, my hands clenched, tiny cries escaping my throat and lifting up in pure and terrible glory.

Growing up on a farm in northwestern Pennsylvania, I ran through the fields and pastures, down the hilly dirt roads, across the marsh and through the narrow, cold creek. Arms outstretched, eyes slit against the sun’s glare. I ran in cheap Kmart sneakers, kicking them off in mid-stride, the grass warm and dry against my bare heels, calloused tough and hard as an animal’s. Sun hot, air smelling of hay and dust and sweet cow manure. I ran because I loved the feel of wind on my shoulders, loved my hair scattering my face, loved the wisdom of my knees instinctively bending to absorb the shock of rocks and hard, narrow gullies.

I ran because my father was dead, my mother was angry and there was a new man in the house, his ugly, scarred hands pressing against me at night. But mostly I ran because the sun was wide, the corn was high and the mud in the creek was cool and forgiving on my hot, scratched feet. Each afternoon as the shadows stretched and the poplar trees darkened and the air stiffened with pollen, I sat on the bank and offered my feet to the water. When the coolness hit my skin I arched my neck and stared up at the cruel, blank sky. I didn’t yet understand how pleasure or pain could overpower and transform you before wearing you back down to your own small self. But I knew that Jesus washed the feet of beggars, that God was dead, that the words the priest spoke each Sunday cut against the round, female heat of my own body. I knew how to make myself small, how to stay quiet and look the other way, how to be a girl, yes. But mostly, I knew how to run.

I am afraid of so many things yet when I run I am fearless, gutsy; determined. I wind through trails covered in bear scat, my bear bell clinking against my water belt. I love being out in the woods and mountains, love the solitude, the birch trees glowing like milk in the twilight. Often, I see foxes and wolves, loons and eagles, moose and lynx and bears. Each time I suck in my breath, slow my pace, that childlike wonder, that thump of wildness inside my chest.

Sometimes as I’m running I thank the bears and moose for allowing me to run through their territory. I devise little songs I sing and these soothe me, keep me company, because it’s easy to fall to fear. Once, I encountered a sow with two cubs and my dog took off after them as I helplessly shouted for her to return. Then a growl like I’d never heard, a fierce and wild cry as the sow charged my dog. It was a fake charge and my dog held her ground as I stood paralyzed by fright, my bladder releasing, the bear turning and heading back toward the woods with her cubs. I collapsed on the trail in the mud, sobbing, the dog whimpering, both of us scared yet strangely exhilarated. Because to see such fierceness, such wildness. To see it, feel it! To be there

Mostly, though, I see bears as they slip off into the woods, I see the backs of their haunches or the jut of their snouts as they peer out from the trees as if wondering who I am and why I run through their trails without ever once stopping to snack on grass and berries. A few years ago, running in Kincaid Park before dark, I heard a rustle, glanced over and in the woods parallel to me a sow and a cub ran, all three of us loping along, lost in our own world, our own thoughts. I don’t know if that bear saw me. Her gait never altered and for a few seconds I ran along with her, hundreds of yards separating us yet it was as if we were running together. I quickly veered off on a side trail, picked up my pace and put as much distance as possible between us. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, when I’m restless and worried, I remember running in the same direction as that bear and I feel a twinge inside my chest, a thump that is as fierce and persistent as hunger.

There were years in my adolescence when I didn’t run, years when I was too depressed or angry to run; years when I thought I didn’t deserve to run and instead I walked, a moody, introverted girl with sun-bleached hair, cut-off denim shorts and bare feet. I rode my horse deep into the woods, sat against an oak tree and read books about sex and dying, the only subjects that interested me. Sometimes I smoked the cigarette stubs I picked up from ashtrays around the house but most of the time I chewed on my hair, that grainy, horsey taste, and how it filled me up.

That’s a lie, nothing filled me those years. I starved myself down past eighty pounds and when that didn’t work, swallowed a bottle of pills, crept behind my bed and waited to die. I sought nothingness, blackness. I wanted to escape from my body, that burdensome shell that locked me inside of my life. I don’t know how many pills I swallowed before the colors began, but they came and flashed inside my eyelids until my hands felt calm and blue and real.

The next thing I remember is a cold, white light in my eyes and a doctor’s breath in my face as he forced the tube down my throat to pump my stomach. Imagine the violation, the taste of rubber, the choke of it against the larynx, the sudden ugliness of consciousness returning, along with the flawed hands, the insubstantial chest. The body is puny but it wants to live, will fight to live. It is fierce and animal; it has little sympathy for the mind. I tried to kill my body and it called my bluff, called me a liar, and I was. I never wanted to die. What I wanted, what I needed and longed and wished was for someone to show me the beauty of my own body, of wonder of my own strength.

As soon as I got out of the hospital, I started to run. It was winter and cold and dark, and I had never run seriously before. This was back before the running movement, before you saw people out jogging, before there were stores devoted solely to running shoes and gear. Still, I must have known or sensed that I needed to move, that motion would keep me safe. Each night I laced up my cheap sneakers and headed down to the basement with a portable radio and, with the Top-40 station blaring, I ran around that concrete floor, in that dusty and mildewy basement, running around the pool table and the ping-pong table, past the workbench, the shelves of canned goods, the old couch in front of the fireplace and then back to the pool table, over and over, forty and fifty and sixty times, until my mind cleared and my breath burned and I felt, I thought: Yes, now I can make it through another day.

What I love best is distance running, fifteen or twenty or twenty-five miles. I love the challenge and the pain, love the fight between the body and mind, love the various moods that flood my head. I can be young again, wearing a plaid dress on my first day of school. I can be old and dying. I can be fighting my way through childbirth and that helplessness that leads to giving in, to letting the body open up and show the way.

Distance flattens me out. It wears away my ego. Usually I run alone. I prefer it that way. I love the solitude, the miles stretching out ahead of me. I love the way my head locks tight within itself and how for the next two or three or five hours, there will be nothing but me and my terrible mind. What I love most is the moment of holy terror, when things fall apart and my chest aches and my legs stiffen and my mind becomes a dark space without shadow, and I struggle and fight until I want to quit more than anything in the world.

But I don’t. My pace remains even, though effort increases. And right when I’m sure that I can’t go on, that I must (I must!) stop, my mind unfolds, it’s like magic, my mind opens and I’m somewhere new, somewhere deep and wordless and primitive, someplace where I’m totally and purely myself, in that space before language or time. It’s like sex, when it goes on and on and on. It’s like the color green, the smell of rain, the way a lover’s fingers curl inside your mouth. It’s like licking the moon.

In high school and college, I ran competitively, training each morning over dark country roads where no cars passed and my breath rose white in the air until I understood the true meaning of loneliness. Back then, I felt no love for running. I ran because it was something I excelled at, something that came with little effort. I was fast, yes, but mostly I had endurance. I could start off a pace and hang on, no matter what. I wasn’t smart or kind or particularly good looking, but I could run. I had the body for it, and the feet. It was how I identified myself, and all my friends were runners; it was my whole world.

That came crashing down the end of my sophomore year in college, when I hurt my knee. At first the team coach shot me up with cortisone and I ran regardless of the inflammation, regardless of the pain. Each meet I gritted my teeth and raced, my knee hot and fiery so that it was as if I were on fire, and sometimes deep in a race, as I flailed and fought, I imagined flames blazing up my leg. Finally my knee gave out in the middle of a meet, and I lay on that track staring up at the sky, my eyes blurred with pain. I was sure my life was over.

There are places along the Lost Lake Trail down in Seward that are haunted by voices, places haunted by the past and the rain and the steady sound of my breath as I run through. I hear these whispers each time I run the Winter-Summer Loop, two miles straight up the mountain, followed by a mile through the valley and four glorious miles of downhill. The trail is so wet and muddy that I often lose my shoes, and as I lean down to pull them out, I smell the ground, old and pungent and alive; when I lick my hands the mud tastes slightly salty, like blood. The climb is rough and arduous, and no matter the weather, I strip down to a sports bra, the cold air soothing my hot, damp shoulders.

The voices come to me halfway up, teasing my ears like wings, like the flutter of moths. As I run higher and higher, they follow until I feel companionable and safe, as if someone is running behind me, though there is no one around but the dog. Sometimes I even imagine these people, a woman dressed in clothes from the 1920s and a man holding a hat in his hands, his forehead slick with sweat as he tries to explain something to me, but I’m too far in the future to hear. These voices or people or ghosts follow until I reach the creek before the first clearing, and as soon as I clear the water, there is only me and the dog and the mountain, and if I turn, a far-off view of the small town of Seward, the bay stretching out in silver-blue shadows. The voices never follow up the next brutal hill or through the small strand of spruce or along the final hill. I don’t know where they go or why, I only know that they leave as near the top, wind hitting my face and the sky opening up.

When I reach the forest service cabin, I stop and eat a sports gel, sip from my water pack, pet the dog, and then I’m winding through a valley so perfect and still and immense that always it stuns me, and always I feel tears in my eyes and always, I reach down and grab a leaf, a piece of bark, a small stone, and place it in my mouth, a rough and gritty communion. I lodge that bark or pebble against my cheek, where it is moist and dark and secretive, and I keep going.

For years after I had my son, I didn’t run. I worked out at the gym. I swam. I biked. Sometimes, rollerblading around the inlet in the summer twilight, I’d pass a runner, watch his or her legs and think: Why run when you can roll? I’d feel haughty and self-important and I’d go too fast down the next hill, as if to challenge myself. Yet later that night, I’d feel loss rising up from my stomach, and after my son went to bed I’d sit in the quiet living room with the dog and cats and stare at my legs. Some mornings I’d even decide to run again, and I’d tie on my shoes and take off but I could never find a rhythm or joy because, face it, beginnings are tough and I was impatient and life was hard enough without struggling through three or five miles of pain.

That changed the Fourth of July I was sent down to Seward to cover a news story on the Mount Marathon Race, a brutal 3,022 foot climb with sketchy handholds, slippery footing and ankle-deep scree. The night before the race it rained and I slept in a leaky tent, and I huddled in a ball, wet and cold and depressed because a few years earlier, my sister had died of an eating disorder on the Fourth of July, and all I wanted to do was rock back and forth and weep

Maybe it was lack of sleep or maybe I had a hint of a fever, but as I climbed those steep cliffs to the halfway point on the mountain the next morning, I felt renewed. The rain cleared and the air was fresh, and up so high I could see out over the bay and the harbor, the boats tiny and snug. Later, as I shot photograph after photograph of women running down the mountain, muddy and bloodied and punching their fists triumphantly in the air, something opened inside to me. My head swirled and the bright light flashed behind my eyes and I heard my sister’s voice, low and sardonic and husky from too many cigarettes; it was as if she were right there beside me. “What happened to you, Cin?” she asked. “You used to be so brave and fearless.” And it all came back, those summer days of running through the fields with my bare and tough feet, and how when I fell down I got right back up and ran again. I felt a stab of grief so deep and pure that I cried out, not only for my sister but also for that fierce and wild girl I had once been. Why had I given her up so easily, so carelessly? Why had I left her so far behind?

After that, it was as if there were a hum inside of my chest. All winter I worked out at the gym and when spring came, I began running again, a few miles at first, each step awkward and clunky so that my knees shook and ankles ached with effort. Soon I was up to five and then eight and finally ten miles, and the next Fourth of July I stood at the starting line of the Mount Marathon Race with three hundred other fierce and gritty women, and when the gun went off I was running again, running up Fourth Avenue and Jefferson Street to the base of the mountain, where I pulled myself up over roots and fell and cried and sweated, leaving a trail of blood over those cliffs like something holy, an initiation or a communion.

I collapsed at the finish line and the woman ahead of me threw up on my shoes. I sat there, and the sky was blue and the air shimmered with heat and the blood from my knee dripped down on the pavement, and I was so happy that I couldn’t stop smiling.

During a mountain race out on Knoya Ridge a few years ago, a young man collapsed and died. It was an overcast day in late spring, the air damp and moody. About thirty of us lined up at the start and ran through curved and wooded trails that slowly evened out the higher we climbed. Our pace slowed and sweat ran down our backs, and during one fierce ridge I leaned down and rubbed my fingers in the dirt and stuck them into my mouth, just to have something to taste. Up above the tree line the world opened and breeze picked up and there was nothing but silence and mountains and a stuttered line of runners.

A small group huddled near the finish, and a woman yelled that someone was hurt, to please go around. I thought of broken bones, bruised legs, the usual running injuries, until I saw the fallen man’s face, slack and blue and unmoving as a woman leaned across his chest and uselessly administered CPR.

We gathered around him, all of us. We took off our shirts and windbreakers and covered his body, and then we stood sentinel, we stood near the top of that mountain, surrounded by valleys and sky and clouds, in that place of unimaginable beauty, and nothing moved but our breaths and the flutter of windbreakers across the youn man’s stilled legs.

After the rescue crew arrived, after the hellish arranging of the body over the stretcher, after the lift-off and the final silence, after the run back down the mountain and the days and weeks that followed, I read in the newspaper that the man had been just 22 years old and had had a pre-existing heart condition. I knew even then that I would never forget that day, not only the young man’s death but everything else, too: The clouds pressing close, the silence, the mist of cold air rising around us.

Often when I run I think of how it would feel to die in the mountains. Part of me rejoices, not because I want to die but because I’m running over rocks and my arms are outstretched and my breath comes hard and I am totally and completely in my body. Yet each time I run I can feel the persistent and inevitable possibility of my own death, and behind it and before it and probably even because of it, so much fucking life.

Cinthia Ritchie writes and runs mountains in Anchorage, Alaska. She’s a former journalist, two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, recipient of two Rasmuson Foundation Awards, a Connie Boochever Fellowship and residencies at Hedgebrook, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and Hidden River Arts. This essay, which won our essay contest, later appeared in The Best American Sports Writing 2013.