The Midnight Miles

On pacing FKTs – and helping friends – when shit gets real dark.

When we saw Danielle’s headlamp bobbing through the dark night, she was finishing her 78th mile of the day – and still had at least 64 to go before she reached the end of the Kokopelli Trail – a 142 mile trail that travels from Grand Junction to Moab.

My good friend Danielle was gunning for the Fastest Known Time on the extra-long trail and she was on pace to get it – but just barely. There wasn’t much room to slow down during the extra-long October night or on the grinding ascent up into the La Sal Mountains – a range of peaks that had towered over the desert in an ominous disruption to the flat horizon all day.

“Girl! You’re doing it!” we cried, as she ran into the makeshift aid station we had created on the westward side of Dewey Bridge. Her crew swooped into NASCAR pitstop mode – refilling her pack with water and food, stuffing it with extra layers for the chilly night, and snapping her poles together to arm her for the upcoming climb into the mountains.

I zipped up my own layers and slipped on my hydration pack. I was going to pace her through the next 40 miles – through a long stretch with no crew access and a lot of darkness as we ran straight through the night.

“I’m ready when you are!” I called, as I flicked on my headlamp and started jumping around to warm myself up.

I was physically ready to go and mentally aware that the going was going to be tough. I’ve run through the night during my own extra-long runs and it’s real rare for the miles between dusk and dawn to be anything but treacherous. The length of each mile feels like it grows by at least ten-fold once the sun goes down. It is easy to mistake every trailside leaf as a pair of glowing eyes. And a burning desire to sleep often takes a crowbar to my ability to remain upright.

“I’m ready!” Danielle hollered as she swooped down to kiss her dog Petra goodbye. We all cheered over the fact that Danielle still had energy for canine canoodling and then Danielle and I jogged off into the darkness.

“You’re doing so great,” I told her. “You are moving strong and steady. You’re doing this.”

My job as pacer was to keep her moving, to keep her eating and drinking, and to try to keep her spirits up – as she confronted the inevitable lows that accompany a 142 mile run through brutal terrain.

For a while, it was an easy job. Danielle kept moving strong and was chatting with ease. We talked about boys and puppies and serenaded the quiet desert with power ballads as we ran past stegosaurus-shaped rocks and the towering shadows of canyon walls.

But, as the miles stretched on through the black night, the lows started to hit. And they were as dark as the midnight sky that swallowed us whole. Which is exactly what should be expected during such a monstrous run.

Danielle was closing in on 100 miles but still had 50 to go – which is math that’s hard to spin into comforting numbers when your legs and brain feel like they’ve been plowed over by a bulldozer. Having run five 100 milers myself, I couldn’t imagine finishing one and running an extra five miles, let alone close to fifty. One summer, my 100 mile race was rerouted to a 104 mile course due to wildfires and I thought the extra four miles was the rudest thing the race director could’ve done to us.

But the mileage math was far from the only issue that started bellowing at Danielle.  

Her hip was throbbing from a fall on slickrock and a twinge in her shin was screaming for relief. “Is it time for more advil?” she pleaded, with the desperation of a third-grader who’d run out of allowance money and really wanted some sour patch kids.  

And the climb was relentless, with no breaks from the grinding ascent up into the mountains. The temperature had plummeted to a bone-chilling degree and Danielle had run out of layers to combat the aggressive cold. And the mileage chart we were relying on as our distance guide was a sick joke. A stretch we expected to be 17 miles was actually 25, with an 18 mile climb thrown into the middle of it for an extra handful of salt in the wound. 

As we kept climbing and she kept confronting lows, the FKT started to slip from her grasp, “Am I still on pace?” she whispered. Her shoulders sagged toward the ground with heavy defeat. Her body vibrated with cold. My heart sank as I knew the honest answer was just going to make things worse.

Danielle was hurting in a dozen different ways and I didn’t know how to help. Her pain was palpable. As obvious as the biting air. I desperately wanted to find a way to make it go away, but I felt powerless to fix any of the unsolvable issues that she had run into.

I kept talking, offering promises of an eventual dawn and praising her bottomless strength and grit, but I had no idea what to say. I raked my head for any combination of magical words that might help Danielle, but I knew that if I were in her shoes, very little would offer me any relief. What she was running through was simply the worst. And unless I could find a way to gift her with a fresh pair of legs or fast-forward to mile 142, nothing I could say was really going to improve her dismal reality.

I had been in a very similar pair of shoes just a few weeks ago – on my sixth day of running the 460 mile stretch of the Oregon PCT. The day had surprised us with a punishing alpine storm – our many layers of gear were no match for the violent wind and penetrating rain that assaulted us for hours and hours. The terrain was grueling – full of volcanic boulders, wind-whipped ridgelines, and icy snowfields. And the rocky trail had triggered an angry tendon in my shin that was aching with every step into the soggy earth.

Toward the end of the “day” – at approximately 4am, I couldn’t even cover a mile of downhill terrain in less than 30 minutes. I was falling asleep while walking, tripping over rocks that shot lightning bolts of pain up my shin, and spitting F bombs into the crisp night air as I watched the tenths of miles tick by at a glacial pace.

My friend Eric was pacing me through that entire 60 mile stretch of the PCT and he was trying very hard to help me through the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day of running. He lied with the smoothness of a seasoned con man as he peppered me with compliments and encouragement. “You’re moving really well, Emily!” he cheered, as I tripped over a pebble while practically moving backwards I was going so slow. “Nice work,” he called, after I told the trail to go fuck itself.   

While I greatly appreciated his efforts, there wasn’t much he could say to improve my horrendous running situation because he couldn’t offer me what I really needed: for it to be over. For the painful miles to end. For the sweet relief of wrapping myself in warm clothing while moving exactly zero feet.

But it did offer me a very meaningful kind of support that he was out there with me. That he was willing to endure violent storms and my achingly slow pace and 22.5 hours of wretched terrain to support me through a very hard thing. The only thing that could’ve made that day any worse, would be to face it alone.

That support was not unlike what I’ve recognized as some of the most loving support I’ve received while going through so much personal loss this year – my mother, my dog Brutus, my cousin Seth, my sister-in-law Jess.

Nothing anyone can say to us can make the grief we feel in the face of such monumental and unfair loss any better. It is just fucking shitty and heart-crushing to have someone so special ripped from our lives. That kind of loss slams us with a howling pain that nothing can ease. There is no pill that can take the edge off such deep grief.

But it does offer us a very meaningful kind of support when our friends are willing to show up and be there for the worst of it. I will never forget the friends who called on the day my mother died, knowing they were careening straight into a really tough conversation. Or the people who sat with me in the hospice home during my mom’s final days. Or the friends who keep showing up with backyard pizzas and running shoes and loving messages as the barrage of bad news and hard losses has remained relentless for our family.

No one can take away the kind of pain I’ve felt this year. This grief is not erasable. But when the world crashes beneath us, it is comforting to look up and see a reminder of the love that persists through our greatest suffering. To feel supported while we are breaking down.

Danielle has been such a steadfast friend in this way. She is always there with phone calls, and heart-emoji-flooded texts, and running dates on my most unbearable days. No matter how low I am, she is ready for any stage of my grief to be there for me – Sad Emily, Angry Emily, Quiet Emily. “Show up however you need to,” she’d reassured me, as we made plans for the Kokopelli Trail.

And now we were on the Kokopelli Trail and I was so stressed out about what to say, what not to say, and what to do while she trudged through her own knee-deep pain. She was facing a different kind of darkness, but it was a very real darkness, and while I was scrambling for a solution to help her, she had gifted me with so many beautiful examples of how to support a friend through real shitty times.

It never matters what she says or doesn’t say, the power always lies in her act of showing up.

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As I kept moving through the dark desert with Danielle, it struck me that maybe it was okay that I didn’t know exactly what to say to her as she faced the shittiest stretch of her run. Maybe it was okay that nothing I could say or do would take away her pain and suffering as she trudged through those terrible miles.

Maybe the best thing I could do was to keep marching forward with her. To feel her pain pulsing beside me and stay right there by her side.

While it felt like I was doing nothing to help, maybe just being there was everything. I know it has been everything to me.

Little whispers of a tangerine sun started to crawl across the dark canyon that surrounded us, delivering the dawn I had been promising Danielle for hours. The sun wouldn’t be able to erase her pain any better than I could, but it would burn over us as we kept moving forward together, a reminder of the powerful light that shows up on our darkest days.