Night Run.

"Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost."

-Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto I

I'm running up the sand dune. Well, not really running but crawling, it's too steep to run.

All day waiting on the beach, then a zodiac boat ride across the bay to the start point. It's some time after 9pm when we start. The sea, the beach, the sky, the dune are like a pastel drawing we're moving through. Pastel pinks, blues, mauve and pale yellow.

It has an 'other world' quality about it.

Night is falling in.

On top of the dune, head torch lights flicker on, like insane fire flies we head into the forest. Fairy lights strung out through the night.

I'm probably in this picture somewhere. Source: trails-endurance.com

The forest at night. The stuff of nightmares and fairy tales. The primordial human fear of being alone in the forest at night. A trail of breadcrumbs is replaced with glow sticks to lead you out. After several hours your sense of direction is lost, it's hard to orientate, up and down look the same, the torchlight rebounds back and washes out the contours and gradient, it tells you nothing about the ground.

I didn't go into the the forest 'to live deliberately' or 'suck the marrow out of life' like Thoreau. I went in to find the edges. If something doesn't scare you, its easy.

Running with my brother, some time after midnight, he is suddenly injured. We tape up his leg, and then agree that I should go on, as he is now having to walk. Leaving someone behind in the forest goes against the human instinct to stay together, stay in tribes, stay safe, don't leave someone behind. I leave him and run off into the night.

We were walking and I have cooled down quickly. The heat of the day has dissipated into the ether. I run hard temporarily to get my body temperature up. I also run hard so I don't have to hear anything apart from my breath, I don't want to listen to the sounds of the forest right now. I turn off my head torch, there's nothing, like a coal mine I once visited as a kid.

Sounds. Sounds of the forest, everything that is meant to be here at night, we are not meant to be here.

Shapes, coming across an oil field one time and seeing the nodding machinery of hydrocarbon extraction in the middle of nowhere. Another time in another forest, a tree stump looking like a native American head carved, pointing the way to go.

Movement, there is rustling, keeping looking straight ahead. Then you see your shadow cast in front of you, you see it before you hear the people behind approaching, the light bobbing light lanterns at sea. Breathe in the torch light.

Another time, running in the mist at night, the torch light rebounds off the water particles hanging in the air, no path, no direction, running by feel and memory on familiar ground.

Another time, hours alone, senses in overdrive, making sure every turn is correct, no marker is missed. Follow the breadcrumbs, follow the clues. Others were lost but somehow I made it with no wrong turns, luck.

So focused, no time for the mind to drift, no time to think or reminisce. One pointedness.

'What do you think about when running?' In moments like this, nothing, the past and future are gone, its just night and movement.

If you think too much in these moments you will miss a turning, miss a marker. You will be lost, alone in the forest at night.

And the last time. An easy circuit. This time real fairy lights hanging in the trees, and the last thing I hear is 'Running up that hill' before I wake up in another town. The circle is not complete. The final night run.

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In the distance a vague hum of a generator and artificial light. Hot soup, or ginger beer or coffee at 3am, depending where you are. You've made it. And if you don't , the horizon always glows, the dawn always breaks. Another day will begin.

There is something about night running that cannot be captured anywhere else.
Sometimes I think about running at night.

Ghosts.

I park up. The rain and cloud are closing in.

I've already stopped at the petrol station I always used to go after a run and got a take away tea and driven up here. There are two other cars in the car park and then one.

A version of me is still out there running on The Downs. A younger version.

Low cloud and rain.

There is the first version, when I first seriously tried to run a distance 9 years ago with my father, a rucksack on my back, I think it was 30 or 35k. I got lost, and it hurt, I finished it, and had that classic feeling of my legs seizing up driving back, and the next day it hurt even more.

Now I can run these trails from sense memory. I know the markers for 10k and 12k and 20k, I know the ground. The topography is etched on me.

I think of all those other versions of me still out there running, those versions would not be able to picture the older, greyer, version of me sitting here now thinking back. The younger version of me doesn't know this moment, here and now, is coming. He doesn't know how far he will run, or that he will go to terrain that scares him and run across it for days. He doesn't know about the mountains, and the trails and breaking down crying from exhaustion in tents, he doesn't know the exact moment this journey will end. He doesn't know how strong he will get and how weak he will become.

There are versions running in hail and rain. Another version is running in the early morning mist as the sun breaks through and horses run across a field, and that version smiles at how perfect the moment is. There are versions running in heat, and wind and night. There is a version trying to run the big 50 in training, with his partner waiting in the car park. There are versions running alone and seeing no one, shouting at the top of their voice and there is no one to hear. There are versions running on summer days, with the car parks full, and daytrippers and mountain bikers on the trail.

Echoes of long lost conversations. There are versions of me in the car park talking to my brother and father about GPS watches, and energy gels, and Tarahumura indians, and before ultrarunning became a thing.

I ran to break myself. And one day I broke. Broken, frozen, soaked to the bone, sitting in the car, with my heart beat banging in my ears.

Under repair.

I can't run those distances anymore. I'm afraid of those distances now.
Afraid of early mornings, sleep deprivation and creatine kinase. But maybe that version will pass into history too.

There is a future version of me that will come here with my son. We might fly a kite, like the child version of me that came here years before and remembered seeing that. My son wont know this version of me, he wont know that version of me out there running on the trail. But that ghost is out there always running.

Maybe ghosts are versions of ourselves we cross paths with sometimes, trying to teach us a lesson from the past or future.

There are earlier versions of me out there everywhere running. One is running a 5 mile fun run as a kid. Another is running from the old house to the farm, the classic out and back, he's not even a teenager yet. There's another in one of those northern towns running through an endless winter in a park next to a university, running just to run, no idea of time or distance. There's another running up that hill to the apartment in the heat to prove he's still got it and he's not even 30 yet.

There are earlier versions of you out there too, they live in memory, they are captured in landscape. There are versions of the people you meet now, you will never know them.

'What did you do up there... read a book?'
No, I didn't. I started to write one.

I thought about that version of me that will always be on that trail, the one who stepped on this trail 9 years ago.

I start the car. The windscreen wipers grind. I head back towards the towns.