It is a long way between places. The desert spires and rock walls grow in size as the day progresses. They are red the way rust on weathered steel is red or like old nails jutting up from the earth’s core, and they cut refined silhouettes across the horizon, increasingly so as the sun begins to set. Scale is everything, size and distance and time across it. When the winds arrive and the dust and sand begin to stir, all the pieces start to move.
The morning of the fourth day dawns – “the Expedition Stage” and approximately 52 miles over the shoulder of the La Sal Mountains, which we have been chasing on the far horizon since crossing into Utah. The 2009 winner and course record holder, a Navajo Native American, scatters corn meal on the ground and recites a prayer for strength. “Run with beauty” he says, and by beauty Navajo philosophy might include strung out and hallucinating. It is more way of being than appearing. An invocation to the powers that be brings the race out of its raceness, and we are instead off on a religious quest of sorts, a noble unraveling of point A to point B. It’s more than just a road anyway, or it becomes as such.
It’s been over 100 miles now since Colorado, when midday on a Monday at the Kokopelli trailhead 25 runners lined up wearing clean socks and fresh faces which, within the week, will fade like distant memories, replaced by someone lying passed out on the ground, someone else drifting away in the currents of the Colorado River fully clothed, another with both blistered feet bandaged to the lower calf, and someone who after eating a watermelon, begins, in some sort of heat-induced frenzy, wiping their face with the rind. Fifteen will finish.
The Kokopelli trail is named for a Hopi fertility god and flute player representing the spirit of music and the coming of rain, among other things, and most recently an adopted symbol of the southwest. It follows roughly along the Colorado River from Loma, Colorado, to Moab, Utah, crossing deep dust and graduated mesas into remote canyons, across dry riverbeds, and past a thundering waterfall which lies thousands of feet above a canyon bounded by tall buttes. For as long as the sun sits in the sky, the heat is never not ferocious. No cloud appears until the fifth day. Every business has gone out of business. Simply being out here demands some kind of explanation.
“Don’t think about the blisters. Don’t think about the searing heat. Don’t think about the pain. Don’t think about the 52 miles to the finish.” One runner is talking to himself before the start. Temperatures that day will hover in the low 100s. Someone says 105. “Don’t think about the 51 miles to the finish… Don’t think about the 50 miles to the finish…”
The day’s climbs are shattering. They last first for five or six miles miles, broken by a step descent into the boulder fields of Cottonwood Canyon, then again for another 12 to 15, finishing with six miles on asphalt, heading downhill into the early morning. Bright, glowing cow eyes appear on either side of the road from behind the shrubbery, their cowbells rattling.
Day two, we had traveled 39 miles across what seemed to be an ancient and deserted parking lot, overtaken by wild grasses. It was vast and exposed. People underestimate it. “We do this every year and people finish,” the race director had said before the start of the race. “They’re not on their hands and knees crawling to the car.” The stage would end with several miles of pavement which, at intervals, burst into flames. One by one, the tendons in my feet begin to tear apart at the bone. My lips are dry and cracked and I have accumulated layers of salt like the ocean floor. Seven runners drop that day.
“I threw up then curled up on the side of the trail and took a nap in the shade,” someone says, “with like drool coming out of the side of my mouth.”
“I’m never running again,” someone else says. “I’m never going outside again.”
The first stage was approximately 19 miles, the third nine, and the last day will be 26, for a total of 148 miles. “You will experience,” we are told before it all begins, “highs and lows you never knew existed.” No one has ever ended up in the hospital “except for the guy whose finger fell off.” At the finish line of one stage, he tripped and fell and dislocated a finger.
Two sweepers follow along on their bicycles behind the runners, traveling at cut-off pace. If you pass a water drop and want to go back, you cannot because, most likely, the sweepers have swept it away. If you see them, you are in bad shape. If your fingers start cramping, you have lost all hope. If you lose the trail, it’s desert for hundreds of miles in all directions. It will be a long time before you are found.
“I keep meaning to get them some grim reaper costumes,” the race director says of the sweepers.
One advantage to multi-day stage racing in the middle of an expansive and inhospitable plain is that there is no need to clutter up the mind trying to figure out what to do next. The farthest ahead anyone needs to think is five feet. This is what there is to do next: drink water, eat electrolyte salt capsules, stay on the trail. There is nothing to buy. There is nowhere to go. Just stumbling along in the wilderness wondering why can’t every day be like this.
Desert R.A.T.S. ends in the Slickrock parking lot, named for the trail that attracts maybe the majority of visitors to Moab – mountain bikers drawn to its sandstone rock faces. Cyclists are passing on the road. “How far are you guys running?” one asks. “Twenty-six miles,” I say, failing to mention the previous 122, although we must look far more weather-beaten than a marathon. “Oh, a marathon,” he says. “Well, no wonder there are so few of you.” The ground temperature measures 140 degrees.
Running demands a kind of forced equilibrium that fails to accurately describe the violence which takes place within. At the cellular level, all bodily proteins have been replaced by buckets of sand. Past races accumulate like tree rings. The hardest? The hardest is always the one that’s under foot at the moment, or just passed. There is much that is difficult to remember. There are some things that stand out: the sound of a car horn in the middle of the night announcing the last runner to cross the finish line, the taste of oatmeal and wind-swept sand, someone saying “I just remember being snowed in for three days lying in my sleeping bag covered with drift and only a plastic bag filled with my own urine to keep me warm and this doesn’t seem so bad,” the mesh-roof planetarium tent with a view of the Milky Way, and the occasional lingering desire to still be out there in the desert, dehydrated, sore, dirty, and utterly exhausted, lost but not lost inside some insane digression buried deep within the faintest trace of a larger purpose.