Sunday is my 44th birthday. Regardless of the number, this never fails to be an unsettling sentence to write. Not only am I a 40-something person, I’m officially in my mid-40s. So strange!
Not that I’m one to agonize about getting older. No, I understand that aging is the goal. Every day is a gift. It’s just the passing of time always carries a quiet kind of grief. Time is life’s one valuable commodity that only ever decreases. No amount of striving or fierce determination can turn back the clock. Every day spent is a day we’ll never earn back. Those days are just gone. The memories that remain are just ghosts that flicker and then fade, often before our days have even run out. Little parts of us continue to die even in the span of our own lifetimes. How can anyone not feel melancholy about this?
Late August has always been a melancholy time of year for me. As a child, the drawn-out days of heat and unstructured time left me feeling unmoored. Nobody cared about my late summer birthday. All of my school friends had already celebrated their milestones. They were away on last-gasp summer vacations or distracted by back-to-school activities.
One birthday stands out as particularly gloomy — my 12th. I was heading into my first year of junior high as an unexceptional seventh grader who had managed to alienate most of my friends. It was the usual girl drama — I distanced myself from my true besties to hang out with some cooler girls who then dumped me. That’s more or less how I left sixth grade into a long, lonely summer. But I knew a handful of girls — mostly from my church — who would still show up for a party of mine, so I planned a day at Magic Waters in Draper, Utah. At the time — 1991 — Magic Waters was the “budget” water park, just a stone’s throw away from the state prison. It had three large slides that would absolutely not meet modern safety standards. They were insanely steep with splintered fiberglass and loose bolts that guaranteed deep bruising, scratching, and next-day stiffness even in limber 12-year-olds. Everything else was hard concrete and pool water that would burn skin and eyes after 30 seconds of contact. The day started out searingly hot and then thunderstorms moved in. No one shut down the slides as lightning flashed overhead. As 5 p.m. closing time approached, a small grass fire erupted in nearby Corner Canyon. We stood at the top of the death slides and watched flames crawl up the slope as black smoke licked the gray sky. This seemed an inauspicious start to my adolescence.
Have birthdays gotten any better for me? Honestly, it’s hard to say. Although I will technically spend my 44th birthday at home in Colorado, I’ll probably look back on it as “the birthday I went back to California for nostalgia and punishment.” Beat and I lived together in the Bay Area from 2011-2016 (he had lived there since the late 90s.) He still needs to occasionally return to Mountain View for work, and I tag along when I can. It doesn’t technically feel like a vacation to visit a place you lived for five years, but it does have a gratifying nostalgia quality that almost feels like turning back the clock. You can’t go home again, it’s true, but it seems that the more time passes, and the more you forget, the more you cling to what remains.
For this six-day trip, we stayed with our friends Liehann and Trang. Although they now have two kids and two cats, it still feels like not a lot has changed since we left more than seven years ago. Liehann is even trying to convince Beat and me to sign up for the Race Across South Africa with him, a campaign he started more than ten years ago (and to which we have both already succumbed — me in 2014 and Beat in 2015.)
Liehann let me borrow his RASA bike, which is basically my bike — a Moots Mooto-X YBB — but slightly larger with a rigid fork. Because of my sore hand, I haven’t ridden outdoors in almost two months, but I went a little nuts with this bike. Beat and I rode up Black Mountain with Liehann the day after our 50K run. The following day, I took the bike on a 32-mile spin around South Bay trails when I had intended to just go spinning for an hour, but then became comically lost on South Bay trails (as it turns out, memory begins to form gaps after seven years.) On Tuesday, I decided to revisit my old trail-run training grounds at Rancho San Antonio Park, unintentionally committing to a loop that was considerably longer and harder than I remembered. Attempting to run, I also realized that the toe that I sprained during the 50K hurt quite a bit. Also, it was 91 degrees. All of my memories of California are somehow so easy, breezy. This wasn’t that at all.
On Wednesday, I had one more morning to relive the glory days. Liehann asked what I wanted to do and I blurted out Mount Umunhum. Mount Umunhum — Ohlone for “the resting place of the hummingbird” — is a 3,500-foot summit that is one of the highest in the Santa Cruz Mountain Range. It was closed to the public the entire time I lived in California, which gives it a kind of mystical quality. I had, at most, five hours to spare before my work shift started, and that included driving to and from a trailhead. I was going to ride the paved road — it’s steep and hard enough — but Liehann convinced me to start at Kennedy Trail.
“It’s just one extra bump,” he reasoned. “And then you can climb on dirt.”
I parsed out a route on Strava and it was only 27 miles — that shouldn’t take more than four hours, should it? Even if it does have 5,500 feet of climbing. And it’s not like I haven’t ridden these fire roads through Sierra Azul before. But it’s been seven years. I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten all of it. I’d forgotten how it feels on a hot day in August, with 95-degree temperatures baking the dirt and dust hanging in the stagnant air. I’d forgotten what it feels like to have unbroken streams of sweat cascading down my legs, pooling in my shoes. I’d forgotten what it feels like to have a hundred black flies swirling around my face as I grind up a 20% grade at 2.8 mph. I’d forgotten the endless rollers on the ridge, all too steep to ride up and too painful to ride down. I’d forgotten that after the ridge tops out, there’s a long down, down, down, followed by an equally steep climb up Barlow Road. Even after you top out there, you still have four miles of what becomes interminable singletrack that is not steep but feels that way because your legs are toast and you’re completely out of water. That’s right. Bone dry. Two liters won’t go all that far in Sierra Azul.
I should have just turned around sooner, but I can be weirdly goal-oriented at inopportune times. I was cooked on top of Mount Umunhum. Truly cooked. I had no food, no water. I had 12 more miles to go and at most an hour to wrap up this ride. I thought it was mostly downhill, but I didn’t remember.
It was mostly downhill, but I was so fully cooked that I could scarcely pedal the flat section along Guadalupe Reservoir, let alone the meaningful 500-foot climb up Kennedy Road to wrap it up. That climb wrung a few tears from my withered body. I honestly started to fret about heat stroke and wondered whether I should knock on the door of one of those $10 million homes and beg for water. Seriously brutal. And seriously, California, what’s up with all of the heat and hills? This isn’t wanted from you at all.
The week started so innocently in the Oakland hills, where Beat and I headed on Saturday morning for the Redwood Trail Run 50K. The morning was bright and clear, and the excitement was palpable as a large crowd gathered for the start of multiple distances. I started out slow and near the back, knowing the first five miles were mostly downhill and rather steep at times. There are so many things I’d forgotten about the East Bay. I’d forgotten that the cooling fog only applies to the land closest to the coast. Once you’ve climbed above the marine layer, you’re as sun-baked and heat exposed as any other community in inland California. I’d forgotten that these trails somehow maintain the hardness of concrete even while kicking up gratuitous amounts of dust. I forgot that even with the presence of enormous redwood trees, there isn’t a loamy mile to be found — but there are a ton of roots. I’d gone in not expecting this race to be all that difficult. I thought if I had a good day, maybe I could even finish in the low six-hour range. But this was not that race. Not at all.
Temperatures climbed into the low 90s. We descended steeply and climbed steeply and shambled along the ridgeline fully exposed to the sun. I can’t stand the taste of electrolyte drinks but I was sucking down watered-down Lime Skratch like it was the nectar of life, which it was. It got to the point where my 1.5-liter bladder was barely getting me between aid stations. Beat, I presume, didn’t drink nearly as much as me and started experiencing bad muscle cramps. There were times when he could barely walk. I didn’t manage to pass him but I was never far behind.
I kept my pace tediously conservative. Even then, it was too much. I felt lightheaded at a pace that would have felt painfully slow back home in my high mountain air. Still, I managed to pass quite a few people on the hills. At one aid station, I met a woman with a 50K bib who looked to be in my age group and left about two minutes before me. To keep the motivation up, I decided to make it my goal to pass and stay ahead of her.
I had one good surge where I could see her ahead of me for a while, and then I started to unravel. My footing got sloppy. I took two big stumbles that didn’t result in a fall, but they did put me in the bushes that were almost certainly brimming with poison oak. I had to pee badly (yes, I did consume too much water) and didn’t want to poison oak myself so I shambled along with an aching bladder until I reached a park toilet. During the final five-mile loop, I finally caught my toe on something sharp and took a flailing fall into the concrete ground — instinctively holding up my injured hand that has been such a pain in the ass this summer, so I landed flat on my arms and knees instead. Then I was bruised and sore and overheating and so angry. With myself, of course. Because why do I keep putting myself through these things? My old body doesn’t want to hit the deck anymore. Can’t I take up something lower impact? Swimming, maybe? If only I didn’t have that debilitating water phobia from my misspent youth.
I never passed the woman I was trying to race. She finished something like ten minutes before me. And Beat finished two minutes before me — he was hoping for something much better as well, but it wasn’t a bad result for cramped wooden legs. As I shambled up to the table, the race director handed me a medal — first in my age group! As it turns out, the woman who beat me wasn’t in her 40s. She was 50.
And there’s something else — a coaster for being the third woman overall! I wasn’t expecting that. Yes, these are small races. But still. As it turns out, all of us were having a hard day. Me, the 50-year-old who beat me, the 20-something ladies I passed, the hiker who saw me fall and called out in a Scottish accent, “Oi! You need a bandaid?” He was sweating buckets, too. The trail is hard for all of us, no matter how much youth or experience we have on our side. Life is going to grind you up and eventually spit you out. If you’re one of the lucky ones, it’s only going to get tougher. That’s the goal.
Birthdays are our reward for arriving at the finish of another grueling year. Congratulations, we get to do it all again, only older and with more scars! But really, birthdays are a gift. Birthdays are enough.
P.S. If I did ask for a birthday gift, it would be to run one more of these 50Ks. Every year, Coastal Trail Runs gives out Blazer Awards based on a point system, and I’ve somehow been successful enough in two races to be in second place! When should I go back?
Happy Sunday birthday to you. You still stumble better than a lot of us run. I'm sure whatever things you'll do in the next decades, you will find ways to make them adventures and you'll still be telling us great, inspirational stories about them.
As my Dead friends say, "just keep truckin' on".
Happy early birthday!!