Divine Timing

It was 2 am and I was laying on a bed in my friends in laws house realizing tomorrow was going to be a tough run. It was the end of my training season. Last two races in one weekend and a bit of overtraining syndrome was flaring up and there was no hope in hell I was going to sleep. I’d taken CBD, magnesium and had a cold shower before bed. None of my tools were helping. I felt doomed but I was just going to do it anyways. I had dragged a friend with me for her first trail run ever and I decided, in that moment, I would crawl over the finish line before I gave up. It’d be hard but it was only 13km or so. And the 20km race I was planning for Sunday was out. This was going to take all I had.

We showed up to rain and a biting wind that rattled your bones. I jumped around and paced back and forth to stay warm.  And low and behold, a familiar bully of mine was also there, glaring from a distance. It turns out high school doesn’t end for some, and I have encountered individuals in the racing culture that aren’t great at supporting others. And (for lack of a better word) are frenemies at best. I raised my arm to wave, but a darted stare and whispers to another made me walk in the opposite direction. Fine. Ill pretend I don’t know you. The event felt icy both emotionally and physically.

I huddled together with others in the corral. Happy to suck up peripheral body heat from strangers. There’s a warning announced to all runners that this caustic weather was due to a storm last night and there were felled trees on the course. Oh jeez, this is starting to take on biblical proportions of difficulty.

“Be careful don’t jump over the tree! Just walk. 3… 2…1! Let’s go!” yelled the RD.

Boom. Race starts. I am a slow start to begin with and (because of the cold) on the first decline my thighs jammed up. I felt nothing from the waist down to my ankles for the first 3km. We passed the aforementioned tree taking over the path and I watched three people try to jump over it and fail. They would have also failed listening skills in kindergarten. Eyes and ears this way children. I fully stopped to straddle it. I wasn’t going to tempt fate and there was no way I was hurting myself (more) today.

By the 5^th, 6^th, and 7th km I was feeling warm and full of 300 mg of caffeine. I chatted with people, and cheered on the 6km runners as they passed and was generally feeling good. It was the last 3km where things got weird. Certainly, many friends of mine have mentioned hallucinating during 100 mile and 200 km races. I scoffed at them: I’ll never do that to myself I thought.

I read somewhere that a monastery in the Himalayas has a group of monks that run 100 miles with no training. They meditate for hours days before and then scramble over the world’s worst trail run. As a meditation enthusiast, I get that running intersects with my seated practice. I even started calling training my running practice. And I think about those monks when I am pushing hard on my distance runs. But I wasn’t thinking about them that day and I didn’t feel like I was doing anything that warranted a metaphysical experience.

But anyone who runs distance knows that somewhere between pushing passed what you think you can do, to accomplishing what you never thought you could, the euphoria sets in and you lose touch with reality. And I was floating over the course, out of my body, full of adrenal, three Lara bars and pre-workout. I felt invincible in an unrealistic Icarus flying too close to the sun kind of way. I was just eyeing up a hill 250 meter and debating charging up it when I felt someone running beside me. I looked over to my right, dreamily, and in a semi-conscious way I saw the spitting image of my uncle Darren circa 1980 something with his blonde flowing hair and motocross gear. The weird part: my uncle had recently died in a car accident.

My heart was heavy since he died, even three months later. It felt disingenuous to say I was close to him. When he died one thing that got me through the service was feeling more grief for his kids and my aunty then I did for myself. My life was going to go back to normal, they were forever changed, and it was totally unfair. In a completely unhealthy white-knuckle approach: I didn’t even feel like I had the right to cry. But I had always felt like he understood me, on a deeper level, and he certainly came in clutch at a challenging time in my life. I moved in with him and my aunt when I was a troubled 16-year-old. He just got me. He spoke to me like a person and an equal not just some kid. I never realized until he died how much that meant to me. Him and my aunt saved me. I don’t think I would be here today without that change in scenery and support. They showed up for me.

And here he was showing up for me again one last time at km 11 out of 13. I distinctly felt/heard him say slow down…for your heart. Odd, I hadn’t been thinking of him. And I didn’t get it, I felt fine. But I wasn’t going to second guess this familiar apparition. It was just too* weird to shake off. So, I slowed down, crawled up the hill at a walking pace and bear hugged my friend at the finish line.

I’ve had weird experiences before, everyone does, a moment of déjà vu, seeing someone in a crowd that recently died, you question your sanity a bit, you pause, and the feeling sticks to you and never really leaves. It’s part of the mysteries of life: we don’t understand it, but there is something much deeper brighter and bigger out there. I appreciate these experiences, but I don’t dive too much into the why part: I let it all go. And, after a few snotty cold tears before the finish line, I let this one go too.

A week later, on the phone with my mom, my uncle’s sister, I told her in a you-wouldn’t-believe-this kind of way what transpired.

“Hold on a second…” I said “… let me check my app and check my BPM at that point.”

It turns out, Uncle Darren was right, my heart rate had spiked over 184 bpm. The highest it was throughout the race. Not a good time to sprint an incline, and a bit too high in general for me. That connection I had always felt as a kid for my favorite fun uncle was affirmed: and my Uncle Darren truly was looking out for me, one last time. Apparition, delusion, God, angel, ghost, I have no idea what I saw. But it became one more experience where running brought me closer to something: closer to feeling a part of something much bigger than myself.