Everyone is Our Runner
A retrospective on crewing and pacing at Canyons 100
I was breathlessly leaving my friend Mal (WERUN co-creator, strong af runner, and overall just a great person to have in your life) a voice message the day after her 100-miler—I think I get really excited and talk fast or my heart rate goes up or something as I try to form all the thoughts inside my head into a coherent message. These last few months I have been practicing karuna meditation to cultivate compassion for myself and others, and the morning after her race I had an insight as I was meditating and thinking of Mal who just ran Canyons 100-miler. The insight was this, while I was crewing and pacing her (along with our friend Stevie, also a WERUN member, and Mal’s husband and two dogs) nothing else mattered. In the sense that we created a container of which the focus was to get her to the finish line. Take care of her needs— whether that be nutritional, emotional, mental, physical. Our world from Friday, April 24 to around 1:30pm on Saturday, April 25 was to care for this one person. However, in caring for that one person, we were also caring for ourselves and the other runners taking on 100 miles.
A snippet of the message I left Mal (‘likes’ not omitted), “And I think a lot of that was like a whole day just not even focusing on all the bullshit of the world you know what I mean? And like it was focused on taking care of you yes, but like seeing the race as a whole and then being there with like Edgar and Stevie and then also Corinne and then running into Chloe and just like this little community that we have…there’s no way you could’ve done that alone. And being able to do that and support you helped me be a better person in a way. Even if it was only for, you know, 25 hours or whatever.” The point that I was trying to make here in my rambling message was that by showing care and compassion towards people we care about, we are able to show care and compassion towards ourselves and people we may not know well, such as other runners at a race. And with karuna meditation, you can one day, possibly, show care and compassion for people you may not even like. Of course this doesn’t all happen overnight—much like with training for an ultra. It takes years of practice and cultivation to run long distance. The same could be said if we want to break through the bullshit of the world and want to create something better. It can be so easy to be apathetic and go on with business as usual. But to want to do better and be better, that takes work.
I crewed Mal for the Cool loop which was about 12 miles in the middle of the night. A few minutes before she arrived another runner came in and her crew didn’t have a chair for so they asked if they could use ours. Of course, I said. However, and I hate to admit this, I was a little annoyed at them asking, thinking to myself, this is our chair for our runner. As if it was a zero sum game. Fast forward a few hours and as we headed back into the aid station at Cool everyone was cheering as we were running down the chute. I almost started crying. They don’t even know her, I thought. And yet they want her to succeed. We connected with Stevie, who paced Mal from 75 to the finish, and we started refilling Mal’s water and nutrition, changing her shoes, and getting her ready to head out. As I was preparing tape and bandaids for her poor little toes, a man next to us asked if she would like an herbal pain relief spray on her foot. He called it “foot weed” and once he sprayed her feet the pain was instantly gone. Another person set a towel down for her to rest her feet…these strangers were offering what they had to care for our friend. As I type this I can’t help but get tears in my eyes because I think of how the dominate culture has created a world that has, at times, shaped me into a person who gets annoyed if a stranger asks for help when my focus is only on my friend, my runner. I acted as if we didn’t have more to offer, when in reality we had plenty. I acted as if I didn’t have the capacity to care for more than one runner, when in reality I cared about all the runners out there. Again, compassion is a practice just like running and it is work to cultivate the goodness both of these practices can bring into the world. This is how trail running can save the world.
Community care is one aspect of the work Women’s East Bay Running Union is committed to. This could include community building events, gear lending library, runner support…all of which are actually part of crewing and pacing during long distance races. If we can become more expansive in our definitions of what running community and culture can be, we can become more expansive in seeing how the skills and knowledge and care we bring into running can shape our world beyond the run. Sure Mal was our runner at Canyons, but a day of crewing, pacing, spectating, and cheering showed me that every runner out there is our runner. And if that is true, can we actualize that we are a community enacting interdependence on and off the race course? I think we can.
