The Mindful Runner by Gary Dudney

Author:Gary Dudney
Language: deu
Format: epub
Publisher: Meyer & Meyer
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

I even talk to all the dogs I meet along the way to occupy my mind.

Night in the Mark Twain National Forest

My experience at Rio Del Lago certainly taught me that you can fall deep into a mental sinkhole but still make it back out if you stay open to some help from outside. My ultimate experience along those lines came in another 100-mile run, also deep in the night, this time in the Mark Twain National Forest in south central Missouri at the Ozark Trail 100-Mile Endurance Run. I was with my long-time running buddy, Rob Mann, and as we were running along through the dark forest, I realized that I had “gone dark.”

On paper, the Ozark 100 didn’t appear to be such a formidable challenge beyond the fact that it was a hundred miles long. The forested terrain was rolling but the elevation change was not dramatic. There were no mountains and no steep rocky climbs. This was central Missouri, not western Colorado. The early November race date promised no high temps and no brutal sun. And yet the race harbored a few notable surprises.

Foremost was that the entire one hundred and two miles of singletrack trail was covered in about three inches of dead leaves that obscured the many rocks, ruts, and roots that formed a constant tripping hazard for almost the whole race. It didn’t take long to learn that you had to adapt to the trail by slowing down, spreading your feet wider than normal, running a little more upright than usual, and sort of probing forward with a flat foot strike for almost every step of the way. The closer you got to imitating a running duck, the better, but you were still tripping and falling all the time no matter what you did.

The race began in five o’clock darkness at a rather non-descript trailhead on a non-descript country road. The forest closed in around us as soon as we started running. There was nothing out there except trees for most of the way. Civilization was not very evident along the entire course. After running all day, a pitch-black darkness descended at six pm and didn’t let up for the next thirteen hours. You felt lost in the midst of nowhere. It was like the light had left the world and was never coming back. From time to time, you’d pop out of the forest onto a deserted stretch of blacktop or an empty jeep road, but that would only serve to highlight the loneliness. Then you’d be back in the forest. There was something of a Blair Witch quality to following the trail at night. Shadows constantly jumped around you in a black and gray world. Myriad green spider eyes were shining up at you from the forest floor. With the trail hidden under the leaves, you had to guess which opening in the trees was your route.

The endless night was made worse by a section of the course where the aid stations were spaced far apart.

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