The Obstacles are the Way

1

Air travel has always been a kind of salutary purgatory for me, a layover space of life when I begin to ask the best questions, whose answers, though often insoluble, nevertheless induce a kind of higher mind thinking, at least if the jetlag hasn't gotten the better of it.

I’m somewhere thirty-thousand feet over the western plains. My guess was the Dakotas. I opened the Alaska app and in fact I was just north of Casper, Wyoming, a semi-straight four-lane highway intersecting our flight path, completely empty. There in case of an Eisenhower emergency, I suppose. 

I’m sat just above a massive turbine, it’s rivets not quite perfect matches of each other yet still holding strong, still showing signs of man’s interventions as much as we want to make machines out of the whole of us.

What do I want to do with my time? 

Looking down on those long accents of dirt road, I fantasized, for not the first time, of what it would be like to take my favorite bike on a forget-everything adventure, land the plane here instead, and ride away like it was my job, into the sunset on my favorite chain-driven stallion. 

Am I in the wrong mind when I try to put the fantasizes out of it?

The plane is making an effort to duck under a looming patch of gurgling jet stream. The bobbing turbine to my right perhaps a concern to my brain stem without the frontal lobe’s assurance: the gentle flapping of this machine wing is a feature. 

I look across the earth from above again. 

The etchings of ancient water paths tattoo evidence of an old geology, some lined with plant life, whether alive or dead, I can’t tell from here by it's shade that's not quite green, not quite brown. It bears the same pattern as a skin pricked with a lightening shock. 

More steady now. 

I open my laptop to get some more thoughts on the page. The Logos and the Pathos chassé on the page, dancing to the rhythms of the love for my human craft; I’ve missed making this deep acquaintance with the Muse. Ninety minutes of flight time vanish; time moves differently up here and my thoughts eventually touch earth again. 

I remind myself that I’m here to race, that the way I most want to spend my time is doing the thing that I’m already here to do, that my thinking and planning and logic brain can actually be dismissed for the next few days for a job already well done.

2

My body was finally willing to relent from its sleep at the overripe hour of 8:41 AM. A flight across the country into a new timezone is sometimes what it takes to at last allow a part of me that’s been so active to go dormant; a frog who has at last had the chance to jump from near-boiling water. 

They say sleeping in a hotel makes it more difficult for one to be well rested as you’re in an unfamiliar environment, but the compounding factors of a four-in-the-morning wake up, the soft ebbs and flows of an Atlanta rain against my sixth floor window, and the decision to travel with my Pluto pillow lulled me into a comatose a few weeks overdue. 

I had about ten minutes to make my way to the lobby and catch a ride on the hotel shuttle to get back to the airport for my rental pick up. The driver, a dark-skinned man whose accent left me wondering about his origin story, set a laugh-at-anything tone in our half-length bus that I found oddly nostalgic from the days of being land-ferried to and fro between undergrad classes and the lower quad.  

My trip east toward the unassuming town of Newberry stretched itself out from a projected four hours to nearly nine. A stop in Covington at one of those coffee joins that follows the naming standard of [noun] & [different noun] added to the time substantially, and pleasantly, but a detour at hour seven of the day’s travel to avoid a hurricane-collapsed bridge was, at that point, an unwelcome obstacle. 

And as well, my plans to find a nice trail along the Savannah river outside Augusta was thwarted thrice due to uncountable battle fallen oaks and pines across the greenways.  

Arriving at last to the Newberry YMCA, twenty minutes past the sun's quitting time, I found the visqueen-domed pool open for business. A mile and a half of laps later, I was almost feeling like a human again. Two chicken breasts from the Sprouts rotisserie would have to do for road dinner tonight. 

It came time to find me resting place for the evening; two weeks prior, I was notified that my Days Inn reservation was inexplicably cancelled, my money promptly returned to my account and my lodging plans promptly returning to square one. The local hotels were all otherwise booked, but I did come upon an Air B&B listing about twenty-five minutes outside of town—a red cabin in the woods a bit more designed for the fishers, hunters, and ghost watchers among us. 

About 48 hours ago, I packed my freshly charged headlamp into my duffle. My host notified me that the power was still out at the cabin. A proper Walden adventure this would be for me. But as I arrived at an overlooked fact that bedding was not included in this reservation, some of the romanticism dissolved as the reality of forty-five degrees set in at midnight under a full beaver moon sky. While I’d packed a few pieces of cold weather kit, a camouflage hoodie, two pair of moisture-wicking socks, and five t-shirts patch-worked into a facsimile of a blanket were but pointer fingers in the dike of a South Carolina November night. 

And yet. I did manage a good four hours of pitch black sleep bookended with half hour naps. Had I a mirror, I don’t think I would have detected fatigue bags tugging at my eyelids by the time 3:30 rolled around. Still cold, on the verge of shivering but only just fore of the threshold, I did several rounds of breath work to get the energy flowing, while the wilderness fauna was still silent asleep, save for the stealth song of a great horned. 

Four AM and fully awake, I conspired a trip to the Waffle House on exit 74. Early though it was, I was ready for a meal. 

The four song trip into town from my Thoreauvian abode saw me past two small herds of white tails, a little surprised to see me up so early. When do deer sleep, anyway?

The tell-tale highway sign of the south’s favorite 24-hour plaid pancake restaurant was missing only one letter in its illumination, reading “Waffle H-use.” Three miles down the road, an unlikely opera house rounded out Newberry's sense of self. 

I angled my Elantra toward the empty parking lot, my feet by now feeling markedly less numb. 

The lone customer of the morning, I was treated with VIP service, ordered a hash brown bowl, and was granted my request of my meal to be cooked in butter rather than oil. Whether the butter was actually Country Crock, maybe it’s best I didn’t know. She handed my a styrofoam cup, holding ice water, that read “contents may be hot” and a few moments later, I received my bowl of wake up potatoes. Slipping back into my southern sensibilities, like old trail runners I wore in college but that always fit right and never really wore out, I thanked her with a “‘Preciate it, ma’am,” and my cook with a “yessir” to his questions to best refine my order.

Sometimes, the experience and appreciation of novel cultures in fact brings me back to my first; the deep south familiar at the same time, bible belt exotic. Fitting this sensation belonged to me now here in a Waffle House, an establishment whose only form change since its founding are the numbers next to the dollar signs on the menu. 

A regular arrives to order his breakfast cheeseburger—his order more being said to him upon arrival as the other way ‘round—while letting the host know that when he came yesterday, his omelette was not made “the Waffle House way,” rather a surprise to the server, as she let me know, “that man nevuh complains.” 

I took another sip from my crude-oil-based water vessel, opened up my real ink-on-paper County Highway broadsheet newspaper, and had only one weary thought: God, I’m happy. 

3

A velvet purple hat sat atop a man, who looked ready to attend a season opener at LSU, commanding a wireless microphone. 

Backlit by a 7:30 morning sun that blanketed a patch of wooded farmland with wheat-colored heaven shot, he proceeded to carry on with entertaining the small crowd of timing-chipped athletes. Someone lacking the faculty of sight would suppose differently what sort of event they would be listening to. 

After making some fun between a spectator and racer, it was in fact time to start my first off-trail obstacle course race. With no countdown, no hype train other than the fading music behind us on the podium stage, our out of place MC uttered some words that the runners in front of me interpreted as the official start, so I followed suit. 

While the majority of the race took a circuitous route which guided us through forest and farmland alike, along trails blazed really only in the last 24 hours, the first few miles or so made it seem as though this was more of a glorified, cross-country-style steeplechase than anything. Monkey bars, swinging rings, and a few miles later, and I discovered that the course itself was becoming as much an obstacle as the 30 other pre-planned apparatus. 

For what felt like at least an hour, I was having a hard time gaining much of a racing rhythm. Hundreds of longer-distance, slower paced racers who had started ahead of us were by now stretched across the course for miles, and with every other exhale, came the words “on your left” which were received with an assortment of responses, though mostly of the yielding variety.  

A river crossing approached and I found the assumption that the traverse would be made in a perpendicular manner was not a reliable one. It turned more into a live-action a bloodhound chase scene from Cool Hand Luke, high-stepping through the foot-deep water upstream for several good measures before making my gallant escape on the opposite side—or was I still on the same side at this point but just wet? 

After another hour of off trail terrain negotiation, meeting new obstacles with varying degrees of success, me and two other guys in my heat were leap-frogging each other as the diversity of our skills either had us slowing or speeding at certain legs. 

I might slip my grip on a swinging monkey bar type obstacle and have to run a penalty lap while one of my new friends had no trouble with the slippery handholds, but a few minutes later, I had the leg to catch up on the less technical portions. 

We all took notice of this clustering and I joked that maybe we should hold hands across the finish line. 

And as it last came into view, following a much higher concentration of obstacles in the final mile, I had, as many other Spartan racers that day, a decision to make as to what sort of pose or gesture does one make for the photo finish. As a clever marketing move, the final obstacle is a small hurdle over a gas fire, so everyone has a chance to update their profile pic to thwart any presumptions by fellow office workers that nine to fives were the most excited aspect of their lives. 

I attempted to recreate an old finishing photo of me at the Stumpjump 50k in the hills standing northwest sentry over Chattanooga, circa 2009, where I made my best effort to visually betray the inner sensations of legs beaten up with a full morning of rocky top navigating by putting on a 1950’s man-of-the-house smile and wave, legs soaked in mud; only this time, it was the stinging nettle scars and a frame and unshaven face fleshed out with another decade and a half of marrow-sucking life which hurdled the bark’s-worse-than-the-bite finish line flames. 

4

The next day, I spent quality time, pregnant with good conversation, with some Mission 22 associates, all of us taking part in putting some body onto the scaffolding of a dream we all share, to build an athletics team among our community, to lead them well into the salve of the process of overcoming voluntary obstacles. 

I bade good-bye and started my trip back to the Atlanta airport, but I had one last stop to make. 

Thirteen years and two months ago, I stood ashore a humble little beach that accented Darwin Wright Park on the shores of Lake Hartwell, just tucked inside the city limits of Anderson, SC—Clemson Tiger Country. Familiar in a sense, but with the dilation of time, exotic.

The park was technically closed today due, again, to a hurricane's calling card. So I parked in a space at the BK across the street and walked over, nonchalantly ignoring the closed gates. I didn't imagine much enforcement would be here of all places, on a southern Sunday midafternoon. Besides, this was an important stop; I'd come a long way.

Sounds of fall crunched under my new trail shoes—the swan song of my year-old Altra Lone Peak’s breathed it’s last chorus yesterday after the race. 

I reached down, my hands touched earth again, to marry the sand's sensation on my fingers with the remembering of an album from one of my fondest memory collections. 

I wiggled my left pointer toe, smiled, feeling the subtle rub of a clump of scar tissue there, earned on this very shore that I now stood, when I ran up out of this very river, twenty-one years young, barefoot, and wild-eyed, for my first ever triathlon, dripping wet with fresh lake water and enthusiasm on my way to T1 where my road bike waited for me, sporting my Auburn colors of my custom Kiwami suit, which hangs still in my closet back home, part of a story-telling family of jerseys, hats, patches, and medallions, bards all, making known the saga of how I got these sacred scars.