Jeremy was suffering physically too, his itb and knee were hurting so that he has to stop and stretch every 10 minutes. From what I could gather he probably had worse physical damage than me but was not suffering from any of the "purpose" issues. If one of us were going to call the meat wagon from that cafe you'd bet your life it wouldn't be him.
What the hell am I doing here?
Everything was a chore, stepping up a kerb or watching out for a car passing, a fly or branch in the road. I was having an extended stay in that odd place ultra running takes you. The place where you genuinely believe that no one on earth has suffered like you have. It is a dark and deluded place, when you stop to think about just how deluded and self centred it is you just feel much worse.
I don't belong here.
I would like to think I am usually friendly to people but on entering the cafe all I could think of was "I hope the waitress doesn't ask me any questions, I just want a fucking breakfast".
The cafe was nice, it was a Monday morning, I think it was Monday morning. There were a few families and a group of bikers making a start to their day over breakfast, it all seemed so perfect.
We had a few looks, or it might have been smells. Both of us reeked of sulphur and ammonia. I guess that's what happens when you run 260 miles in the same clothes in saturating humidity. And when you only discover after 250 miles that you should rinse the salt off your clothes as much as you can otherwise it eats into your skin. The salt had well and truly pac-manned into my groin.
I've done some tough races like this before, I know the drill. You start off in great spirits as yourself, racking up the miles. You hit a series of walls that at some point will force you to change your approach, your goals, your outlook. You might have to deal with this in a novel way, thinking on your feet in times of stress.
If you finish you can derive satisfaction from the trinket and the notch of "another ultra marathon finish", but the most valuable part is knowing that you had to become something different in order to get to the end, that somehow you became an improved human and you can take that improvement forward in your life. Ultra marathons change you, but the changes usually happen near the end.
But what if that change happens before the race even starts? What if you have to approach the entire race as the "new" you? That's what happened to me here, at first quite empowering, now it was just disorientating.
