Hopeless Aid Station

The thing about going the distance is that it is non-negotiable; you must take every miserable, unrelenting step on your own steam—like it or not. David had his hands on his knees, dry heaving, at the foot of the highest mountain pass in the Colorado Rockies. Dry heaving was nothing new. He could handle dry heaving all day long. David’s Garmin Sportswatch displayed the elevation: 9,983 ft. 2,617 feet to the top. The saddle was 12,600 feet. Should take about an hour and a half, he thought. If he didn’t collapse first.

As his stomach eased, David stood tall and looked up at the solid face of Mt. Elbert. At the saddle of Hope Pass. David took a few tentative steps along the path, trying to figure out how he had gotten to the forty-mile mark of the Race Across the Sky at forty years of age, and the smile faded, as all the blood drained from his face.

Just a few years before, when he had run his first marathon, David had weighed in at three-hundred-fifty pounds. In those days, it started at 8:00 a.m. A few Percocets. “Blue skies,” he called them. There’d be six to ten more by day’s end. A Gatorade bottle full of Jameson. “Rocket fuel,” was the nickname for this one. Down the hatch. The rest of the fifth was in the glove compartment. A few more were stashed in his desk drawer. Then it was time to make money. What had started as a celebratory business Happy Hour at the Silver Dollar Saloon or the Manhattan Bar, was leading inexorably to death. It had been four to five IPAs. Then eight or nine IPAs. Before long, beers weren’t strong enough anymore.

Back then, David started his days numbing every miserable, unrelenting step of his journey. The cabin of his Ford F150 was filled with wrappers and bags of fast food. David had bit into half of a McDonalds sausage egg and cheese sandwich in one quick swallow, then chased it with the other half. Crumbs of the flaky croissant fell onto the seat cushion and down onto the floor mats, which were littered with filth. This was his morning ritual before waddling into the office in a foul mood. He chased the drugs with food and chased the food with drugs. Chasing an end. An out. A finish line.

When he had a sober moment, the same persistent thought always dogged him: you are exactly where you’ve chosen to be—your life is the result of your choices—and you deserve every bit of it. And on a day that he couldn’t put his finger on, the means of escape—the numbing medicine—had become his prison. And the sentence was death.

Being rushed to the Emergency Room on a sweltering August day, after collapsing early in the morning before work, the nurse had registered his blood pressure at 192 over 136. “Is that high,” he had asked hopefully. “Your cholesterol is the highest I’ve ever seen,” the doctor had said. “You are a walking stroke waiting to happen.” So, this is it, he had thought. “Finito.”

David had left the ER and met Pat at the Silver Dollar Saloon and ordered a round for everyone at the bar. If I’m done, he thought, might as well go out with a bang. The next morning, David didn’t make it to work. He woke up on the bathroom floor with a yellow coating of bile leaking out of him. And that day, for some reason, he had gone out for a “run.” It took about an hour and a half to make it two miles. David came home and slept for two days. But the twins didn’t even wake him. His wife had given up on the project long ago. This type of behavior had become normalized. He was the monster his family avoided, not the superhero he had dreamed he’d become.

“Head up, soldier,” an older man said as David proceeded down the trail. This guy had to be in his sixties, but he was moving steadily without a care in the world. The man was clicking his trekking polls on the dusty rocks and gravel like it was just another day at the office. “On your left,” another freakishly fast man said as he strode by in a blur, looking more Cheetah than man as he defied gravity, seemingly floating his way up the winding trail that lifted him like he was being pulled upward by some kind of earthen escalator. It felt like David was the only one getting crushed by the mountain.

David was deep in the pain cave and going deeper. He’d never felt this bad in his entire life. He was a zombie walking up the unrelenting incline. But David had trained for this. Run, hike, walk, crawl. It was the trail or the trash. The pain was part of the bargain. You don’t get to pick how it goes. You just get to make one decision: keep moving forward, or don’t. One foot in front of the other. Suck it up buttercup. This is life. The life of life. The price and the reward. The weighing in the balance. David knew all this. But all he could think of was putting his head down. A soft mattress and a downy pillow. An ironic thought.

Selling mattresses. It had been the perfect business. Everyone needs a place to lay their head. One mattress per person. Not everyone needed a car. Not everyone needed a house. But mattresses – it was the ultimate high-ticket item. You could buy them for $500 a piece wholesale and retail them for $3,000 MSRP with a 60% discount, and have the consumer fork over $1,200, leaving a $700 profit. All you had to do was sell them. The simplest thing in the world. In a perfect world, $200 of each purchase went to overhead, $200 went to buying new inventory, and $300 went to the bottom line. In a perfect world. A world where the economy wasn’t rocketing up and careening down like an out-of-control rollercoaster every five minutes. But this wasn't that world.

Business has a way of consuming life. It had started with one store. Then, that wasn’t enough. David had added another store and then another store. Pretty soon he was running eight locations. Nearly ten million in sales. The money started pouring in. It proved he had broken the cycle of poverty. David had known what it was to be homeless, living in his Dad’s old Ford truck as his father drove him and his brothers from town to town as a traveling salesman.

The family didn’t have an address then, so David couldn’t go to high school in the district and had to go for homeschooling. David vowed to never go back—to never be poor again—to never be hungry again—to never want for anything. The money was never enough. Never enough to fill the emptiness inside. And neither were the meals or the booze or the pills. As the bottom line grew, the whiskey and the pills grew with it. Then became ubiquitous. One day David’s accountant came in and asked, “What happened last year?” David had been shocked. “What do you mean?” The accountant looked at him curiously. “Are you serious? You’re losing your shirt. A couple more months like this and you’ll be out of business.” David hadn’t even cared. He wasn’t going to be around much longer anyway.

David reached the section of the trail where the switchbacks ended, and a long staircase of boulders led upward at a ridiculous twenty-degree angle. Flies buzzed about and took bites off his skin as he hiked steadily uphill. There wasn’t enough strength to fend them off and tackle the incline at the same time. One step, then another. Uneven footing. The breath came in shallow. His head was light. The dappled sun burned through the gaps in the pine trees.

Before long, David came to the bridge where the runoff from the peaks of Mt. Elbert and Quail Mountain streamed downhill. David dipped his water flask into the river and tasted the cold, clean, crisp water. There was no need for Iodine or a straw. At this altitude, the water from the snowmelt only came from a mile or so off the mountain peak and flowed steadily downhill, there was no bacteria and no standing time to fester. It was the cleanest water on earth. As David drank, the dry, coated feeling in the back of his throat calmed down. But the doubts also crept in.

Marge came up from behind him. “Hey David,” she said. “I’m struggling,” he said, shrugging. “Wouldn’t be Leadville if you weren’t,” she said. “The black dog is waiting at the front gate for me,” he said. “Where else in the world would you want to be,” she asked. Nowhere else. That was the answer. Nowhere else. Desolate as he felt, being here, now, at this moment, he was full. The two of them chatted back and forth as David pushed with every ounce of strength to keep moving uphill. Glancing down at his watch he saw that he had passed 11,000 feet. Only 900 more feet to the Hopeless Aid Station out in the Meadow. Then 700 feet beyond that on winding switchbacks to the summit.

The hail came down in sheets. A rumble of thunder warned that the mountain gods still held dominion over these little ants scuttling about on the folds of the mountain slopes. The mountain gods could crush them like bugs anytime they wanted. This was their domain. And they were indifferent to the sorrows and aspirations of mortal men. The struggling of men against nature was undignified. Their very existence was pathetic. But the mountain gods might still bend if the resolve of the men was strong enough. David gripped his plastic shell jacket and shivered. You are going to give me this now, he thought, questioning God. Okay. Fair enough. Let’s have at it then. The pellets of hail were solid, and the air was exceptionally dry. They coated the soft sand and loam and gave traction to the dusty sections. The small beads of ice crunched as David’s trail shoes dug into the pristine dirt, crushing the little pellets into the soil.

Just as the hail stopped, David came to the cathedral of Aspens. His eyes welled with tears. Wow. To be here, observing the face of the mountain, through the sloped cathedral, leading to the magnificent altar at the footstool of heaven. All the millions. All the accolades. All the highs he chased. Such cheap, foolish trash compared with this.

Just ahead was the clearing, and at last, David traversed the tight single track into the meadow of Hopeless Aid Station, at the very top of the Rockies. The top of the world. Blue and yellow tents were set up and people were barbecuing out in the field. There must have been a dozen Llamas and their handlers, who muled all the supplies up the trail. Runners sat in folding chairs under the tents eating Ramen and drinking hot tea. A few chanced a burger. A few others laid down in the grass on mats and took quick dirt naps. David felt like he had arrived at the gates of heaven. So this was what it was like, he thought, to arrive.

“You aren’t there yet,” Marge said. She was just ahead spooning down huge bites of Ramen and sipping the warm broth. “Oh, a smile. How about that!” David lay down and looked up at the sky. Just 700 more feet to get up to the summit. David was all but assured to get that far. Then it was just about five more miles to the turn-around, then he would turn back and climb back up and over, then it was forty more miles to the finish.

David got up to his feet and wound his way up the switchbacks. The rocky terrain of the mountain saddle was barren, desolate, and pock-marked like the surface of the moon, with big gray concrete-colored granite rocks and a healthy layer of dust. Little chipmunks danced and leaped along the sides of the trail, frolicking with their two-legged friends. A marmot sunned himself, his head on a swivel, watching the strange parade of men who had ventured up to his home on foot for some incomprehensible reason. David’s legs grew heavy. His pace slowed. Striding gave way to plodding. Enthusiasm gave way to despair. The tank was empty. David gasped for air. One false summit gave way to another. His hamstrings stung. Stepping up on a six-inch high rock was unimaginably tough.

Dave saw the blowing prayer flags and the cairn marking the summit. There were a host of bodies like literal angels standing above and looking down on him, as he summited the final staircase into the heavens. Standing at the top of Hope Pass, in between the peaks of two mountains, David threw his hands in the air and exclaimed “Hooah!”

Marge had made it up just ahead of him. She was standing by the prayer flags, hands on hips, her white hair blowing in the jet stream as the shadows of the clouds moving on the conveyor belt overhead sailed along on their course. “Almost halfway,” Marge said. David hated it when people said that. But this time, he didn’t mind. “I’ll see you in about three hours,” David said and started rocketing downhill like a man possessed.

The five miles down only took about fifty minutes and then Dave was at the halfway point of the race. The ghost town of Winfield. He had made it in thirteen hours. Without even taking a break, he called out his race number to the race official and turned right around. If he could get back up and over in three hours, he’d have more than twelve hours left to complete the final forty miles. There were still two hours of daylight, so David knew that if he could get back to Hope Pass before sunset, he could easily navigate the way back to town in the dark, with plenty of time to spare.

That was when the wheels fell off. Hiking back up the steep 1,200-foot ascent out of the valley back from Winfield, David lost the ability to make forward progress. He sat on the side of a cliff and rested, the brutal late afternoon sun bearing down like a blowtorch. The mountain gods seemed to reside just behind the jagged peaks, laughing mercilessly at the plight of these feeble beings reaching foolishly for the heavens. Laughing at him specifically. He dry heaved again. Yellow bile poured out of him, and he left his mark on the reddish-brown rubble along the high mountain pass. The hallucinations started. He saw a moose that wasn’t there. Then he saw the old David sitting right next him. The three-hundred-fifty pound addict. That rounded beach ball of a face with the acned skin full of red blotches and those bleary bloodshot eyes. The apparition wheezed and coughed. Not today, David thought. Never again. David reached over with the last of his strength and began to strangle the ghost. The glazed, doped-up red eyes widened as his hands wrapped around the thick sweaty neck. David clamped tightly and watched the face redden and the big swollen arms swatting at him. One meaty paw grabbed at his face and a finger went into his sweaty eye socket. David held on and kept choking the apparition until at last the life drained out of the eyes and the body of the fat wasted creature became limp. Then the apparition vanished, and David was all alone.

The words of the race founder came to David’s mind. “Inside each and every one of you is an inexhaustible well of grit, guts, and determination. When we were mining in the Climax mine all those years ago, at the end of the tunnel was the face. Hard, solid rock. Miles of it. Our job was to punch a way through. And the truth is at the face. All of you will reach it in this race. You have to dig deep. Face that truth. And you’ll never be the same if you do. Like those old miners in the days of old, all you have to do is reach inside that inexhaustible well and dig deep.”

Marge was coming up behind him and said, “What you doing up here? Dirt nap?” David laughed and said, “Just gathering steam for this last climb, that’s all.” David got up and summited. After the summit, David started running again as the sun set below the high mountain peaks. And he kept running by the light of his headlamp, through the cold Colorado night. Emptying out every evil thing inside. It was life or death, and he was leaving nothing on the trail.

Thirteen hours later, David crossed the finish line. Ken’s wife Merilee placed a medal around David's neck. David looked around and everything looked different. He stared at the faces around him and the fanfare of the finish. David saw the world with the fresh eyes of a baby. Everything was new and unfamiliar. Strange and wonderful. So this was what it was like to be reborn, David thought.

THE END

-- In memory of my friend, David Clark, a real-life Superhero (and based on a true story). David picked so many of us up at our lowest moments out on the trails and inspired so many in his short but impactful life.

** https://www.leadvilleherald.com/leadville_life/gtlo/article_ff2a4614-3d7e-11e1-8c2b-001a4bcf6878.html

** https://www.amazon.com/Out-There-Story-Ultra-Recovery/dp/1499721196