The birth of a monster

Reflecting on the self-imposed trauma of endurance racing

Mont Blanc as seen from the French-Italian border at dawn on August 30, 2013. A beautiful start to one of the worst days of my life.

I was blind. It was two days before my eyesight failed, but I was already blind. My headlamp illuminated the GPS device, clutched so tightly in my rain-saturated neoprene glove that water pooled around the screen. The place where we stood in ankle-deep mud was marked with one point on the map. The next was a straight line directly up a veritable cliff, gushing with rain runoff. Small rocks tumbled down the slabs with an unnerving clatter.

“Is this the way?” my teammate, Ana, asked with a squeak.

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. I hoisted my body three feet higher onto a grassy shelf and still saw no discernable handholds on the cliff face. “I just don’t know. I really don’t know.”

The night was so black that there was no view beyond my headlamp beam, except for a sparkling procession of lights along the slope. The roving beams were everywhere, seemingly in all directions. These were other “runners” looking for the way. The GPS track betrayed nothing. It told me where we were and where we wanted to be, but nothing about the intricate and crucial route-finding that needed to happen in between. Perhaps an experienced mountaineer could parse out this puzzle, but I was far from an experienced mountaineer.

Other “runners” nudged up behind us. We were blocking what they had decided was the way. Without a second thought, I began blindly scrambling up the slope. My neoprene gloves clutched clumps of wet grass and bits of shale. My balloon-like, circa-2013 Hoka Mafate shoes skittered on the wet rocks. The slope only became steeper. My motions became more desperate. The “runners” who had forced my hand were breathing down my neck until they weren’t. At one point I glanced backward and no one was following me — not my two teammates or anyone else. When I looked up, droplets of rain ricocheted from the cliff face into my forehead. When I looked down, all I could see was the abyss, yawning and eternal.

It became clear that the limestone slab I had scrambled up could not be reversed. It was far too steep. But above my head, the slab was nearly vertical. I was clinging to it by friction alone, with neoprene gloves and clown shoes. The dread that swept over me at this realization was unlike any I had experienced. This dread was warm, vibrating, almost peaceful. This dread was certainty. I was going to fall.

My mind felt strangely calm as I reached a hand into the darkness, groping for anything to hold. I found a grassy clump, grabbed a handful, lifted a shoe, and planted my foot into a higher position on the slab. When I followed with my other shoe, I felt a strange unevenness beneath both feet. Tiny rocks. I was hovering over empty space, clinging to grass, and balancing on marbles.

My mind stayed calm as my body froze. There was nothing left to do. Nothing but wait to fall. It would happen as soon as I moved my feet. Like many mountaineers and non-mountaineers before me, I wondered what it would be like. Would it hurt? Would it be instant, like turning off the lights? Just then, a yellow light appeared from above. The headlamp beam was glaring, blinding me.

“Help?” I murmured meekly. I kept my left hand anchored on the clump of grass and walked my right hand up the wet slab like an itsy-bitsy spider until it met a ledge. For what seemed like several seconds, the headlamp didn’t move.

“Please help?” I said again with more force. “I am stuck.”

The headlamp lowered and I felt a hard yank on my right arm. The person then grabbed under my left armpit and bear-hugged me onto the narrow ledge. I was as helpful as a dead seal. My legs remained useless and dangling, still gripped by the peaceful dread. I gained purchase with my knees and staggered to my feet to meet my savoir. His face was hard and unsmiling. His eyes were so dark that by headlamp they appeared to be all pupil. The rest of him was wrapped in a dark green poncho. He was alone. His teammates, like mine, were missing.

“Thank you,” I murmured, softly, because I knew if I said more I would burst into tears. He nodded, turned, and continued marching up the trail he had found. Despite the chaos at the bottom of the cliff, there was no one else around us. It was eerie, that this man was there when I needed him, and that he was strong enough to lift me. The trail itself was barely anything: a scree-strewn notch in the cliff, lined by thin cables anchored to the wall with pitons. How had he found it?

As I staggered and he disappeared from view, I began to wonder if any of this was real. I hadn’t slept in 40 hours; I was already doubting my sanity. But later, after I had reconnected with my teammates and they confirmed that I scrambled up a rocky slab they were unwilling to climb, I saw the green-poncho man leaving the mountain hut in the rain. I waved, but he didn’t see me.

Giorgia, me, and Ana at the 10 p.m. start of PTL in downtown Chamonix.

“Why? Why did you let me sign up for PTL?” I lament to Beat, still, even after 11 years have passed, and even after he’s survived enough finishes to prove it’s not the death vehicle I perceive it to be.

Beat will counter that it wasn’t his idea (I remember this differently. He was the one who came up with our cringy team name, “Too Cute to Quit.”) He will remind me that he was honest about his first PTL experience, and “you read Steve’s race report” — referring to a friend who’d also completed the event in 2012. And this is true, but you don’t know what you don’t know. You can’t understand what you can’t understand.

Sometimes I miss the hubris of my early days of endurance racing — the “You can do more than you think you can,” school of thought. It pushed me toward incredible experiences, exciting adventures, beautiful memories, and a better-defined sense of self. But endurance racing also pushed me too far. Limits are only fun to chase until you find them. When you surpass your limits, the consequences can be long-lasting.

And so I stumbled into La Petite Trotte à Léon in 2013, having only a handful of longer ultra finishes behind me, and no mountaineering experience to speak of. I’d finished a truncated version of UTMB in 2012 and became hooked on the majesty of the Alps. What’s bigger and better than UTMB? PTL! 185 miles with 80,000 feet of climbing in 136 hours or less. It doesn't sound that difficult, does it? It sounds doable, at least. A great, grueling challenge, one that's sure to test physical and mental limits — but ultimately doable, right?

A woman I’d met during a stage race in Nepal in 2011 wanted to form a team. As I recall, Beat orchestrated this match-up, though he still insists it was my idea. Ana was from Spain. We were friends, I thought. We’d spent time hiking together in Nepal and she practically crewed for me in UTMB after she had to drop out with an injury. That she spoke little English didn’t occur to me until a few hours into PTL, when I had been made the defacto leader of our team and it was too late for regrets. I suppose that our early friendship was based on experiences, not conversation. She wanted her friend Giorgio, a 25-year-old Italian man, to join the team as well. I didn’t know him at all. Why not?

So here’s what I had in PTL: Youthful hubris. No experience. Two teammates who were essentially strangers to me. An enormous language barrier. Navigation of long distances with a rudimentary GPS track that drew straight lines between distant dots rather than real-world routing. Technical terrain. Terrifying exposure. Befuddling route-finding. Rain. Sleet. Cold. Bulletproof frozen snowfields. Limited access to food and drinking water. Almost no sleep.

The race also had 80,000 feet of climbing in 185 miles, but that isn’t what made it hard. No, I would learn too late, the stats that made PTL look awesome on paper didn’t matter one bit.

Here are a few of the things that happened during the four days and 120 miles I was able to survive on the course:

• It had been 40 hours since I awoke — roused from a jet-lagged snooze the morning of the 10 p.m. race start — before my teammates and I arrived at Point Percee hut, a tiny climbers' refuge. It had taken us 26 hours of almost nonstop motion to cover 37 miles. My adrenals were empty after the terrifying near-death experience of going off route on the technical climb to Col de l'Oulettaz. I was certain I would have died if the man in the green poncho hadn’t saved me, and intended to tell no one about it lest I reveal myself to be the weakling I was. Ana did some math and determined that we had no time to sleep. Giorgio and I demanded sleep. The refuge had no beds. Giorgio sweet-talked the proprietor, and we were stuffed in a narrow loft where the luggage goes. There was only room to lie flat on our backs, nose touching the sloped ceiling, feet and shins dangling over the edge. And yet, we all slept. For our 30 allotted minutes.

• I was the only person in our group who had any idea how to navigate using a Garmin eTrex. Because of this, I was also obligated to read the maps and carry the race notes that included helpful tips like, “For those who do not have perfect mountain feet, it would be preferable to go down this particularly steep rock outcrop backward.” This made me the group leader, walking in front, stopping to scrutinize a route problem, and giving my teammates instructions in my unshared language. Giorgio’s English was fine, but it worsened considerably as he grew more fatigued. It got to the point where he would look right at me and say something in Italian. When I reminded him I couldn’t understand Italian, he would repeat himself — in Italian. My Garmin showed me distances in miles and feet, and as I grew tired, the mental energy it took to make conversions to kilometers and meters became overwhelming. I would tell Giorgio we were about to tackle a “Nineteen-hundred-meter climb” when I saw 6,000 feet of elevation change on the map. It wasn’t until late in the race that I learned he would hear a phrase like “Nineteen hundred meters” and interpret that as 119 meters. And I would wonder why he became so agitated when we kept climbing.

• The PTL course is so ridiculous, Ana rarely believed my directions. We’d be walking a perfectly good trail, and suddenly the GPS track would veer off the path and onto a horrific chossy moraine. Ana yelled at me every time I changed course. “This is not the street! This is NOT the street!” I couldn’t explain to her that this was simply the PTL course. I didn’t have the Spanish words to describe the map, nor the comprehension to explain why we had to follow such bullshit.

By the third night, she’d had it with what she perceived to be my bullshit. “Not this way, that way,” she screamed as I veered off a faint jeep road into a steep gully. I was just following the track.

I kept walking down the gully. Ana grabbed my shoulder and pointed at the pinprick lights of headlamps from other racers about a kilometer away. “We go where they go.”

I looked toward the lights in bewilderment. “Ana,” I said, “Those people are on the other side of the gorge. See?” I pointed to the paper map with its tight topo lines dropping a thousand meters to a low point before continuing just as steeply up the other side. I pointed ahead. “Big drop,” I said, and made a V-shape with my hands. None of it got through to her. She was convinced we did not have to descend this gully, that we needed to walk straight toward the lights. So she mutinied. She turned around to return to the trail while I shrugged and continued down the gully. Giorgio, wordless as he had been since sleep deprivation clamped down, followed me. Eventually, Ana appeared on the lip of the gully a hundred meters over our heads. She paralleled us as we walked, screaming to show her the way down. Everything was a cliff. I was pissed off and screamed to go back the way she came and we’d reconnect eventually. She disappeared and reappeared at our side only 10 minutes later — far too fast to have returned to the point where we separated. So she must have found a way down the cliff. I suspected she’d taken big risks — she was much more comfortable with exposure than me. But it also made me think that maybe she should be the one doing the mountain route-finding. I was exhausted.

• For two days the route stayed high, following ridgelines above treeline and above the streams and fountains that I’d come to expect in the Alps. Several times I ran out of water. Giorgio and Ana did too, but they seemed to care far less about their water supply. Once I drank out of a faucet trickling into a cow trough that they refused to drink. Another time, I knelt on a snowfield and clawed at the icy crust until my fingers bled. The slush I’d stuffed into my bladder had so many dead bugs that I could feel them in my mouth as I drank. I didn’t care.

• Because the first half of the route stayed high in the limestone wilderness of the Arvais Range, there was little in the way of typical tourism infrastructure. In four days we only hiked through two villages. Most of the refuges we passed were closed. We had all planned on having access to plenty of calories to supplement what we started with, and that wasn’t the case. Because there were so few refuges, PTL had set up three tent stations that offered cots and limited food. But most of the racers had underpacked, and our team was at the back of the pack. By the time we arrived, the food was gone. And I mean gone. At the third stop, we were so desperate that I was licking bread crumbs off of otherwise empty plates as Giorgio scraped empty jars of jam with his index finger.

• After our fitful night in the luggage loft of the mountain refuge, sleep options were extremely limited. Ana — who made herself the timekeeper of the group and was determined not to miss the hard cutoff at kilometer 200 — would only consent to 15 minutes of sleep at the first stop. We were denied sleep at the second stop because it was past the cutoff. We carved out time for 90 minutes at the third stop, but the cots were so cold with a frigid wind sweeping below the thin fabric, I hardly slept. I was going into my fourth night with near-zero sleep.

These bullet points are just a fraction of the issues that arose in a scant four days, compounding upon each other like tungsten weights in my foodless, waterless, 20-liter backpack. It all fell apart on the fourth midnight, when we roused from our 90-minute “nap” (lie-down while shivering uncontrollably) to tackle yet another “119-meter” (1,900-meter) climb. I stumbled out of the tent to take a pee and noticed an alarmingly strong and sweet smell — probably dehydration, ketosis, electrolyte imbalance, the works. Convinced for the 20th time in four days that I was dying, I became dizzy and nauseated. I was wobbling when Giorgio lurched out of the tent and announced it was time to go.

As we climbed those 6,000 feet, I dry-heaved into the talus and moaned. I had been begging my partners to let me quit for days. They refused. There was a strange imprisonment in our partnership, and anyway, the course was so remote that there wasn’t anywhere to quit. There was nowhere to get on a bus or train, although I’d already told them I planned to pick a trail and follow it wherever it took me. Wherever that might be, it was better than PTL.

But now I was almost too sick to move, and climbing so slowly that Ana and Giorgio conceded that if we continued at this pace, we would not make the hard cutoff in Morgex. We crested the ridge at the French-Italian border and came upon a large snowfield — a glacier, really — that was frozen solid in the predawn chill. We were forced to butt-slide down this ice sheet. I was clutching a plastic tent stake Beat encouraged me to carry. My makeshift “ice ax” was worse than useless, forcing me to dig in my hands until my already scraped and raw fingers tore open anew. Ana spun out of control and barreled into a barren scree patch. She did not seem to care. Ana is the most stoic person I have known — except, of course, when she’s convinced “this is not the street.”

So we were all bloodied at the bottom of the snowfield, and my dizziness and nausea only became worse. I wobbled and staggered as we negotiated exposed ledges lined with the rusted iron rods of an out-of-date via Ferrata route. My butt hung over hundreds of feet of empty space and it no longer bothered me. I was beaten. I had spent all of my fear. All of my adrenaline. All of my energy. All of my hubris. My vision was now perpetually out of focus due to the eye strain of my navigational duties. I no longer cared whether I lived or died. Apathy was the only thing keeping me going. But I was falling apart.

Somewhere along what has become a familiar ridge near Mont Fortin, Ana screamed at me to “caminar más rápido” and I screamed back that they didn’t need me, I’m too slow, we won’t make it if I stay with you, leave me, just go. So they did. The rift had been boiling beneath the surface for days, and it didn’t take much to crack it wide open. But in hindsight, I’m surprised Ana and Giorgio left so quickly and without argument when it must have been clear that I was sick and low-functioning. And also because — given how bewildered they seemed when I tried to convince Giorgio to use his GPS to confirm my directions — they must have known they had no chance of navigating the route on their own.

Still, they left, And finally, I was free. The sense of relief I felt was intoxicating. But as soon as those emotions let go, my mind followed. Survival mode dissolved, and I was left with a crushing physical and mental fatigue. I became a specter locked in a purgatory between reality and dreams, moving forward because moving was all this form of me had ever known. Also, I had nowhere else to go. I stumbled down the faint goat path my GPS guided me down until it became a trail, and then a trail in the trees. Some miles passed, I think, before I looked down again and the purple track had disappeared. I zoomed out, and still, the screen was a blank slate of topographic waves and dotted lines. I was lost. I was LOST!

And that was it. The moment that cracked me forever. My psychotic break. I realize that mental health is complex and rooted in environment and genetics as much as experience. I’d certainly dealt with anxiety before this moment. But this was the first time I lost control of my faculties to anxiety. My first panic attack.

Without thinking, my body tore off the trail and into the woods. My lungs were gasping, my blurry eyes were streaming tears, my arms were pumping and my legs were running, running, running through the brush and grass, weaving through the trees, leaping over streams, with no thought for the scratches and cuts and the way a person actually becomes lost in the woods. No, my body was running, even though I didn’t want it to.

“Please stop running,” I remember a far-away voice saying. It was my voice. “Please. Please stop running. Just stop.”

My body did not stop running for a long while, although at this point there are many gaps in my memory. Eventually, I reached a road. It was a high mountain road with long, dark tunnels. I ran through the tunnels. A car approached from behind. The lights were on me, and then the car honked and swerved.

“This is very dangerous,” the rational voice said, but my body didn’t listen. We kept running.

We were back on a trail for a little while. Somehow we’d found a way off the road. We kept looking at the GPS and not understanding it. The purple line never returned. The afternoon light began to fade. We stumbled into a village. It was a familiar place. Pre-Saint-Didier, Italy. Less than five miles from my beloved Courmayeur. “Take the bus,” my voice said. My body stumbled to a bus station with a bench. We squinted at the sign. The last bus was at 6 p.m. Sunset meant it was later than 6 p.m. There would not be a bus until tomorrow. My body sat down, and that was the end. That’s how I remember it: Sitting on the bus bench, staring into the middle distance, thinking and feeling nothing. It was the end of all things. There was nothing left.

Some hours later, I don’t know how many, a group of PTL volunteers in a van found me. It was fully dark. I must have slept, but it’s just as possible that I was awake and catatonic the entire time. I was still sitting up and wearing my backpack when I “came to.” I was surprised to see the van. We’d felt abandoned by the race organization the entire time. Why were they coming to my aid now? They informed me they’d been searching for me for several hours. My teammates showed up in Morgex without me, in violation of the rules. They’d arrived minutes before the cutoff and had been allowed to continue after some schmoozing from Giorgio. Shortly after they left, a resident called to report spotting a runner wearing a PTL bib in the tunnels near La Thuile. So they set out on a womanhunt, probably because they didn’t want a vehicle-pedestrian accident on PTL’s record.

Thus I was saved and driven back to Chamonix as my teammates continued briefly beyond Morgex. They made it as far as the next pass when something happened that scared them enough to turn around. I never coaxed many details out of either Ana or Giorgio. All I know is “Giorgio slipped on the dangerous pass.” I got the sense that he was mildly injured but badly rattled, and whatever Ana witnessed made her lose her stoic nerve.

Giorgio recovered just fine. We keep a light acquaintance on social media still.

As for Ana, we lost touch. That rift between us never closed. I’ll never know what she was experiencing and she’ll probably never understand how much I struggled with stress, vertigo, and anxiety. The language barrier was just too wide.

As for me, my physical recovery amounted to six months of wearing reading glasses. A week after returning home to California, I still couldn’t focus on close-up details. I scheduled an appointment with Beat’s optometrist, who diagnosed tearing in the ocular muscles caused by severe eye strain. The doctor prescribed reading glasses that I wore until the muscles healed and my vision was clear again. It still is.

As for my mental recovery, it’s ongoing.

I share all of this now because I spend a lot of time bitching to family and friends about PTL, but I sense that they don’t understand the depth of my feelings. They think it’s this hard race that I tried once and DNF’d, so of course I’m sore about it. Beat returns to PTL nearly every year and they vaguely understand its danger, so of course they expect me to worry about him. But these are shallow emotions, and they only scratch the surface of the trauma inflicted by PTL. It’s one of the most traumatic things I’ve experienced, second only to losing my father. I realize this makes me incredibly privileged because I chose to participate in this experience. PTL was optional. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And I didn’t understand what I didn’t understand.

I love mountains. And yet I fear them deeply. And this is how it should be. But sometimes I wonder if I had taken the time to get to know the mountains, to learn how to navigate them naturally rather than leaping blind into the hellfire … perhaps mountains and I could have a more peaceful relationship, more skewed toward joy and less toward a constant battle to overcome anxiety. I admit I breathe a sigh of relief every year when the first snow dusts the peaks of Colorado. Phew. Mountain season is over.

Endurance racing is such a strange beast. Some say we seek it out because our lives are too easy, too comfortable. We yearn for a time when hard lives made hard individuals. We want to be badass. We want to be strong. We get hooked on the dopamine reward. We want it to be harder, stronger, longer, and we keep pushing the limit. We push until we stumble over the edge and fall hard into the truth of ourselves. We are weak and frightened. We’re not even strong enough to control our own minds. We are tearing blindly through the woods, sprinting through dark tunnels, begging ourselves to stop running. Please stop. Please, please stop.

I sometimes wonder where my mental health would be if I’d never stumbled on endurance racing, never tried to use it to snuff out my shadow side that proved most resilient. Maybe I’d have considerably fewer scars on my psyche. But I’ll never know. My life would be too different to imagine such a scenario, and I’d no doubt be a different person altogether.