Fighter's Mind, A by Sheridan Sam

Author:Sheridan, Sam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2010-03-10T05:00:00+00:00

IT NEVER ALWAYS GETS WORSE

David Horton. (Courtesy: David Horton)

There is magic in far-running. There’s an aura, a mystique around the Paiute Indians, who could somehow make a hundred miles in a day across the Mojave, or the Japanese “marathon monks” of Mount Hiei, who cover a route of forty-nine miles every day for months on end. Today’s ultramarathoners run races of more than a hundred miles in the desert heat or southern forests. These are mysterious, mythic figures covering such immense distances that mere mortals tremble in uncertainty and disbelief. It can’t be, but it is—and so often dismissed, with a shrug or a shake of the head, into the realm of modern legend, half-believed, incomprehensible.

I remember as a child reading about colonial New England and Canada, of the French coureur de bois (the fur trappers, the “runners of the woods”) making fifty miles a day in the winter, wearing snowshoes, and then wrapping themselves in bearskin and sleeping under a tree. It sounded outlandish, that they could be so different from us, so much tougher.

I took a Wilderness EMT course in New Hampshire in 2002 to help my Wildland Firefighting career. One of the instructors had been an Ironman triathlete. I had asked him about the absurd thing that was an Ironman race—to swim 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles, and then run a marathon. He had laughed at my attitude. The common attitude, I could never do that it.

“You don’t know how fast you are,” he said. “I ran my first half-marathon, and then a little while later ran my first marathon—in the same time. It’s all mental, all in the push.”

I fought fire with a guy who’d been a Division 1 cross-country runner, and he’d said with a shake of his shaggy head, “It’s all mental, dude.”

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