On August 6, ultra-marathoner Will Laughlin ran 200 miles nonstop to raise awareness and support for Daraja Academy, a girls’ boarding school that serves the poorest of Kenya’s poor. The journey was a personal test of fitness and mental willpower for Laughlin, and a public declaration of support for a group of people — Daraja’s founders — who have made enormous sacrifices to serve Kenya’s future. This is Laughlin’s reflection on his 200 mile, 50+ hour journey that included over 30,000 feet of elevation gain and loss and only 90 minutes of sleep. You can follow Laughlin’s blog and learn about Daraja Academy at www.ultrawill.squarespace.com.
Sleep
When I wake up, I’m staggering sideways like a drunken crab through the night mist, my feet scuffing the double-yellow center line of Highway 14 as I cross it. I stop where I wake in the middle of the highway and lean over, putting my hands on my knees for support, and take a moment to gather myself, letting out a hoarse groan that no one is around to hear. “This is a disaster,” I say out loud, and shuffle back to the relative safety of the two-foot wide shoulder I’ve strayed from numerous times tonight.
A few hours earlier, a tractor trailer failed to see — or at least to heed — my headlamp and reflective gear and bore down on me at 75 miles an hour with its passenger-side wheels on this same narrow shoulder. At the last moment, I lept into the dry canal that borders the highway, to be rescued a few minutes later by a perplexed Army officer in full battle gear who spotted me as he drove by in his Humvee.
Unlike most of the runs I’ve done, the greatest hazard I face in these 200 miles is sleepwalking into the grill of a truck. As an adventurer, there’s no glory in death by traffic, so I’m determined to avoid one. Once back on the shoulder, I feel myself falling asleep again and decide, this time, to do so lying down. I cross to the north side of the highway where the shoulder is slightly wider and is bordered by a tall berm. Finding a scrubby little hollow in the berm, I curl up in it with my head on my praying hands, and fall asleep on the crackling weeds that serve as my bed. Just 20 minutes later, I’m up again, relatively fresh, moving forward instead of sideways down the south shoulder of Highway 14.
Sleep, I’m discovering, is something I don’t need in great quantities, but I desperately need in small quantities. Short, high-quality catnaps are the key to surviving this kind of run, as my spontaneous roadside slumber taught me. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered this key a bit late in my run. This is my second of two nights up and I’ve wasted enormous amounts of time sleep-running sideways or staggering catatonic at two or three mph.
After being profoundly refreshed by my roadside nap, I determine to take 5–20 minutes of “sleep” (eyes closed, feet up, no human interaction) at every checkpoint where I feel especially drowsy. This approach greatly improves my pace and mood for the remaining 100 miles of my run, and adds up to a scant, but precious, 90 minutes of rest by the end.
Renewable resource
“I think it’s a stress fracture,” I say to my wife, Beth, as she pulls up beside me in the support vehicle. It’s that deep black time of night just before the sun starts to tease the eastern edge of night away; I’ve just completed a seven-mile downhill “sprint” that has left me limping badly. “It’s throwing everything off and I’m just hammered. I’m trying not to actually break the foot and it’s exhausting.”
Beth looks me over quickly, doing her intuitive assessment of whether I’m “hurt or just hurting,” as she puts it later. She’s the ultimate crew member because, as a former world-class athlete, she understands my passion to finish and as my wife, she knows how and when to push me.
During a stage race in the wilds of Northwest China in 2007 I was hit by a double-whammy of amoebic dysentery and Ghiardia on the last big day of the race — a 50-mile run through the Gobi Desert. I had been racing for first place until partway through this day, when I lost the lead pack after ducking repeatedly behind bushes. Arriving at Beth’s checkpoint, I sat down and relaxed, taking a big drink of water.
“What are you doing?” Beth asked.
“Oh, just taking a break,” I wheezed. “I’m so sick, the race is over for me. I’m just going to finish.”
She cocked her head and put her hands on her hips. “We came 6,000 miles to the middle of the Gobi Desert to race. You’re here to race.”
She was right. So I got up and raced as best I could for the balance of the day, losing several places to come in sixth place overall, but feeling good about my efforts under the circumstances.
“Hang in there, Will,” Beth says tonight as I hobble in the dark next to the support vehicle. “We’ll talk at the next checkpoint.”
Just 15 minutes later she’s back. “I talked to Shannon,” she says. Shannon is Dr. Shannon Sovndal, the doctor for Garmin Slipstream’s Tour de France team and a friend and supporter from Boulder. “He said to put on your man pants and finish the run. Anything you break, he can fix. I’m just the messenger.”
“He said that? Man pants?”
“Yep.”
We share a chuckle over Shannon’s choice of words, and then Beth zooms off again into the darkness. Taking a deep breath and exhaling white steam, I brace for pain and start running as straight as I can, ignoring the stabs of pain in order to regain an efficient stride and resume an acceptable pace. Shannon can fix a broken foot, I think, and I experience an immediate paradigm shift. I’ve been running conservatively, stingily, out of a sense of scarcity.
I realize that all of my races have involved some degree of holding back, of protecting my body from “real damage.” But in this moment, with permission from my ballsy doctor, I realize that my body is actually a renewable resource. What a luxury to be able to spend it completely — it will grow back! As I run with this new freedom, the pain is still there, but it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s just pain. I’m going to spend everything I can, like a game show contestant on a timed shopping spree. What I spend, rather than how fast or far I go, will be the measure of my success. I smile. I’m moving again.
Wherever I go, there I am … in theory anyway
“Yo, Willy,” says Skip as he pulls up beside me in the second support vehicle in the middle of my second night of running, “whatcha need, brother?”
“What’s my ETA?” I ask grimly, concerned about my slow pace that night.
“Estimated time of arrival is approximately 1,730 hours Saturday at the current rate of progress,” says Skip, a security contractor who frequently lapses into a staccato, monotone Militarese.
“Freaking 5:30 PM tomorrow? Shit.”
I’m angry and frustrated by my slow pace and this news shocks me completely out of the moment. I’m imagining people at the finish, the media, other racers, looking at their watches and shaking their heads. I imagine crossing the finish line in the dark to the sound of crickets. I imagine another full day of pain in the heat of the day — something I had not counted on. I want to quit.
“Okay, Skip, here’s the deal. I’m hallucinating a lot. I keep seeing houses and people and animals that disappear. I made friends with a couple of foxes that turned out to be tufts of wheat grass. I’m exhausted. I’m sleep running. I’m slow. I don’t want to spend another full freaking day running. I think I need to sleep for a few hours and then we need to have a meeting. We need to discuss if I should finish or not.”
I’m slurring like a drunk, but Skip hears clearly that I might quit. He looks suddenly frightened. Wisely, he redirects.
“Keep going to the next checkpoint which is just 1.5 miles; we’ll refuel you and send you to the next checkpoint where you can confab with Beth.” He zooms off, not waiting for a reply.
When I finally catch up with Beth, she hands me the phone. “It’s Ray,” she says. I almost start crying. Ray is my good friend and coach, a man who knows how to keep going. He has run the entire width of North Africa — 4,500 miles — in 111 days and holds the world record for traveling to the South Pole on foot.
“Willy. You’re struggling.”
“I’m so slow. This stress fracture thing has thrown everything off. I’m running crooked and slow and I just don’t want to finish in the middle of freaking tomorrow freaking night,” I say.
“Willy. You have a serious injury and that throws things off and creates exhaustion, so it’s going to be tough. But you can do this. You are as fit and prepared as you can possibly be. Stop thinking about time. You’re distracting and discouraging yourself with that focus. Stop looking at your watch. Just keep going. Finish tomorrow morning tomorrow night next week. Finish.”
“Okay. Thanks bud.”
His words are like water and immediately cool the fire of frustration I’ve been stuck in. I let go of the finish, of my obsession over time and of my own unrealistic expectation of a certain kind of finish. That kind of forward projection piles up the anxiety and burdens me with 200 miles of imagined pain. With Ray’s permission, however, I return to the present, where each moment’s pain is manageable and where all that’s required is one more step.
Love
“Are you Will?” the woman asks from her van window.
“Yeah.”
“It’s him!” she shouts to her teammates. The van pulls over and 13 people pile out and cross the road to run alongside me.
“Want a cookie?” one asks.
“Want some water?” another offers.
“We think it’s great what you’re doing. Crazy, but great. How do you say the name of the school? Da-ra-ja? Is that right?”
I’m relieved that with my sunglasses on they can’t see my tears.
Team Monkey Love cheers and shouts and pats my sweaty back, then jumps back in their van to keep racing. This is the first team I’ve seen during the whole race, and now, with “only” 70 miles to go, I’ll have lots of company as more and more teams catch up with me. One group of women approaches Beth and me at a checkpoint and stuffs money into my hands. “This is for the girls of Daraja,” they say. A convoy of National Guard soldiers pulls over to cheer and shake hands. One of the soldiers calls me Chuck Norris.
Soon each checkpoint is full of other racers who stop by to ask what it’s like to run 200 miles and why I drink Coke and eat bacon and what this Daraja Academy is I’m running for. At about mile 150, I’m chatting and happy. I look at my crew, a group of friends and family who have lovingly exhausted themselves on behalf of this peculiar project of mine. They look hammered after 40+ sleepless hours of doting on me, tolerating my moods, enduring my shifting demands.
Now that all these people are asking about the school, Daraja comes into clear focus for the first time since starting the run two days ago. I picture the young women of Daraja hunched over their desks in their crisp blue uniforms, concentrating, smiling when a teacher comes up to check their work, oblivious to this mass of strangers who are cheering for them and praying for them and loving them from 9,000 miles away.
No kidding — my legs don’t hurt anymore. I’m not hobbling. Finishing is no longer a question. I’m running now. Is it the Red Bull I just downed? Is it the vitamin I (ibuprofen) that’s kicking in? No. All these people are bringing the school back into focus for me, and I’m inspired by how inspired they are. Finally, three quarters through the race, I’m not running for a time, or against pain, or to achieve a goal. I’m running for love.
And man, is that some fuel.