Run or Die (21 page)

And so I fly, leaping between great blocks of stone and dodging the zigzagging path. I’m going fast, very fast, and the barometer drops quickly. I’ve run down 3,200 feet in under 15 minutes, and as I leap between the rocks at Barafu Camp, some porters and guides shout out to me, scared that I am falling down the ravines. But I’m not falling; my feet and my body are dancing with the terrain, adapting to its many contours and moving on as quickly as possible, like a rock falling from a mountaintop and ricocheting down, seeking the most direct route. I feel completely in control of my movements and enjoy myself as I have not done for some time. It is as if I could float over this terrain, as if I were skiing over snow. As if I were cycling over a track through the forest. No, I’m
even more in control than that. I play with the terrain, tricking it into thinking that I’m going to fall, but then a thousandth of a second before I do, I raise my center of gravity and jump in another direction. Everything goes by at top speed around me: The stones my feet disturb fly past my ear; the stones, walls, sand, and plants rush by under my feet. But it’s like being able to bring time to a halt and place myself in a dimension where everything happens slowly. I have plenty of time to dodge each stone that wants to trip me, to steady for a jump, or to swerve before a branch scrapes my body. I’m dancing with the terrain and taking each stride as if it were my last.

The landscape changes again, in the opposite order of my ascent, but now I don’t have time to appreciate every new kind of vegetation. In less than an hour I’m at Millennium Camp, where porters who have come to see how my record attempt ends are waiting. I hear them cheering in the distance; they are pleased it’s turning out well, and I am pleased for their sake.

I run into the camp in a cloud of dust and stop for a moment to shake out the sand that has gotten into my shoes. The porters have prepared a magnificent jam pancake for me to give me energy for the final part of the descent, and I eat a big chunk. However, I have no time to waste, and a few seconds later I’m back dancing with the rocks and lobelias that litter my path. I am enjoying this descent so much that I don’t want it to end.

I leave behind a terrain of big slopes of broken rock and move on to fast paths of huge stone boulders, to esplanades between ragwort and towers of lava and stairways of rock and mud through the wood. After the last encampment, the path becomes a continuous zigzag of muddy stairways of different shapes and sizes. My feet jump two or three steps at a time, always with enough spring to be able to swerve quickly at each turn or to overtake a group of
climbers or porters who are making their exhausted way back to civilization. As I pass a group on the right between some enormous trees, I turn around to say hello and wish them a good descent when suddenly I feel my right foot strike a root hard; it doesn’t even shift in the ground. My body hurtles forward, and my hands and knees hit the ground several feet farther on. I get up quickly, as if nothing had happened, and look to see if anybody saw me fall. Evidently they did, because the group I was overtaking has stopped a few feet behind me, and they ask me if I am all right.

“I’m fine, everything’s okay,” I reply as I run off again. My right leg and foot feel numb, and I find it difficult to regain my confident stride. I am intact, apart from some scratches on my hand and a deep cut on my left knee, and I consider myself lucky given the speed I was going. I quickly reestablish a decent rhythm, and my legs start to accelerate when I leave the trail through the woods and come out onto a broader forest track. It’s 15 minutes from here to the park’s Mweka Gate, and I speed up using as much strength as I can muster, taking increasingly longer and swifter strides. My feet barely touch the ground. My toes only act to power my body forward. I begin to hear noise. Cars that come and go, people shouting and talking, footsteps this way and that. I look at my watch.
Seven hours and 14 minutes. I’m there; one last effort
, I tell myself as I push my legs harder. When I round the next bend, the stone gate that indicates I’m about to leave the park appears a hundred feet in front of me. The rest of my team who didn’t climb the mountain are waiting for me behind that gate, along with a number of tourists, guides, and porters who have stayed on to see me come in.

As I run through the gate, I feel a huge surge of emotion, as if it were one of the biggest races I have ever run. But on this occasion, emotion doesn’t lead me to replay the moments I experienced on my ascent and descent of Mount Kilimanjaro, nor do I
feel the adrenaline and excitement of having beaten the record. Instead, the images rushing into my head are from the whole of our stay on the mountain. The warm conversations with porters, the dances every evening, the first time we climbed to the top, the ginger and hot tea. And looking around, I can see that each member of the team is reliving the same experiences. One individual beats a record, yes, but many help to make it happen.

After this adventure and so many others on various trips around the world—to Japan, Malaysia, Reunion, Argentina, Canada—it’s not the results or the records that stay with me. It’s the people I have met on the way who, as I was dripping in sweat at the end of a race, waiting for a drug test, sitting with a headlamp on in a tent at 16,000 feet, standing in a Japanese sanctuary surrounded by bonsai, or warming myself by a fireside in a stone refuge, have passed on their knowledge and experience. Together we have seen the same wondrous landscapes and shared the same emotions. Doctors, teachers, guides, fishermen, hunters, nomadic travelers, executives … all whose experiences could fill 10 books or more. The words they spoke to me and the emotions we lived together are forever etched in my memory, far more deeply than any victory or record time.

T
he landscape passes by in a blur on the other side of the window, ensuring my eyes can’t focus on any one image and thus freeing my mind to explore my thoughts. I’m sitting on a yellow-and-brown-striped plush seat at the end of an almost empty compartment in a train headed east.

When thoughts sail through my head and can find no way out, I always go for a run to free up my mind. I find that then I can see everything more clearly, and that my problems are put into perspective. Running is the best way for me to disconnect from routine and to find the solutions to my problems, which I struggle to see even though they are often staring me right in the face. I was once told that if I wanted to survey a mountain and find the best path across it, it is better not to be halfway up or at its foot, because the rocks, buttresses, and valleys will hide the other paths from sight. You must distance yourself from the mountain to be able to see it whole. That’s why now, when I’m thinking about what I think about when I think about running, I must distance myself from activity, sweat, and effort, and from the emotions that drive me.

I spend my whole life thinking about running: before I start out, I think about how I will run; when I run, I think about how it’s going; and afterward I think about how I ran. I try to control it all: my training, whether it has been too much or too little and how much I need in order to be in the best shape; the weather, if it is too cold and if it will affect my next race. I try to control my personal life: whether I will be able to see my friends that weekend or not, because I do or don’t have a race; whether my family will be able to come to a race; if dinner with the family will allow the right number of calories I’ll need the next day. I try to control my body, listen to my pulse and heartbeats and control them with my thoughts, control whether my breathing is from my chest or my diaphragm. I try to adapt my sleep to whether I need more or less rest.

Nothing is outside my control during a race; I have the route etched on my mind, I know my rivals as if they were brothers, and my body reacts as though it were driven by remote control.

Nevertheless, I often think that however much I have everything under control, however much I might think nothing can escape my micromanagement, there will always be surprises, hurdles to cross. It is at such moments when all my organization is worthless.

But I rarely look back to the past. I’ve always thought that from the moment something happens, whether it’s a problem we’d rather not have experienced or a piece of good news we’d like to enjoy forever, it already belongs to our past. I can’t harp on it or regret what I didn’t do well or what might have been, because however much I might like to have done it differently, it will never happen, and you pay dearly in competitions for seconds, minutes, or hours you spend lamenting. Competitions have taught me to find
the quickest solution to an obstacle, to confront my goals afresh, and to leave the past behind me.

The most difficult thing to control is, of course, what we can’t touch, all the ephemeral things our hands can’t manipulate. We will never really quite know how our brain works, why we are excited by some things and stressed by others. But mental control is essential in sport if you’re going to achieve top results.

How many people say they can’t sleep the night before a race because they feel stressed out? How many people in the course of a race lose heart at a mishap, however insignificant it might seem from the outside? How many people feel their world has collapsed because they got a bad result in a race for which they had high hopes?

An ability to keep things in their relative context is what has helped me avoid these kinds of late-night stresses and race catastrophes. If our preparation and training have been good, we should not worry whether we will finish well; if they have not been good, we shouldn’t worry either, because we know we
won’t
finish well. When we get nervous, when our world starts to collapse, all we can really do is try to do the best we can and hope that intuition will guide us along the right path. And a race is only a race. When we feel stressed, we should ask whether this problem that feels as if it will last forever will seem as huge in 10 years’ time or whether we will look back on it as an amusing anecdote.

It is possible to achieve a relaxed state through the body, via meditation, yoga, or breathing, or by going out for a run to let off steam, or with a night out on the town to distance ourselves from our problems for a moment and see them from another perspective. But how long will this state of calm last? How long will it take us to return to our previous state? We can achieve a state of lasting
calm only through awareness, by becoming aware of our condition and seeing it from a distance. It isn’t about getting one problem off our backs; we must change our way of seeing life.

But this isn’t the central question we runners ask ourselves nor the one people who don’t run ask us. This is only what I think about in order to be able to run faster, farther, and longer. But
why
do I run?
Why
am I so hooked on competing? I don’t know why, and I don’t know if there is one reason. I could say that I want to feel my endorphins activating when I get tired, that I long to reexperience the excitement of winning a race or seeing magnificent landscapes. I could say I run because of the feeling of well-being it gives me, because of my health, or in order to disconnect from problems. Perhaps I want to deal with longings I repressed as a child or try to belong to a group, to feel valued in something. Perhaps I do it to pursue my fate or escape my fears. Perhaps it is to rediscover that romantic glow that is lost in life today or to create a dramatic, heroic narrative for myself in the image of legends from wars or the Middle Ages, where I can be the protagonist and hero in a world where it is increasingly difficult to experience the epic.

However, I think I run simply because I like doing it; I enjoy every minute and don’t wonder why. I know that when I am running and skiing, my body and mind are in harmony and allow me to feel that I am free, can fly, and can express myself through all my talents. The mountain is a blank canvas, and I’m the paintbrush that refuses to obey a paint-by-number pattern. Running provides my imagination with the means to express itself and delve into my inner self.

I’ve always been a creative person. I tried my luck with music—playing the cello—but my technique was poor and I never succeeded in overcoming the stiffness I felt with rhythm that was
controlled by established codes. Writing gave me greater freedom, since here I had fewer technical handicaps; however, it wouldn’t let me disrupt the letters and explore other parts of my imagination. I managed to make more headway with drawing but could seldom finish anything. I always lacked the ability to reach closure, was limited by the techniques and concepts I so wanted to grasp. In the end, I chose sport because I knew the canvas perfectly and was in control of the techniques necessary to explore every goal I set for myself.

A great athlete is one who takes advantage of the ability that genetics have brought him in order to secure great achievements, but an
exceptional
athlete is one who can swim in the waters of complexity and chaos, making what seems difficult easy, creating order from chaos. Creative individuals search for chaos in order to explore all the places they can imagine beyond the frontiers of consciousness, following the irrational forces that come from within themselves and from their environment.