Any time someone asks me about the 4Deserts race series, I generally point them in the direction of the documentary, Desert Runners. This is a film about four people who try to complete the Grand Slam and it does a fantastic job of giving people a taste of what the races look and feel like. However, after a friend or family member watches the film (which is available on Netflix), he or she invariably comes back to me and says, "Tina, no offense, but the people who want to do something like that, well, there must be something wrong in their heads."
In Relentless Forward Progress: A Guide to Running Ultramarathons, author Bryon Powell says, "Running a marathon is a good challenge; running an ultramarathon says something else, something about us." He argues that ultramarathoners are not super humans. We do not have an unusually high pain tolerance, nor are our muscles or bone structure built differently than other homo sapiens. The only thing, if anything, that is different about a person who runs an ultra, is maybe a certain sensitivity. Powell states that those who run 30, 50, or 100 miles at a time through the trails have a certain craving to feel connected to the earth and to their own body.
Have you ever started laughing during a run? Have you ever felt yourself begin to fly, your feet moving on their own without you telling them to? Have you ever fallen deeply asleep despite, or perhaps because of, sore legs? These are some of the feelings I have when I run. For lack of a better term, I feel alive. I won't tell you that every step is a joy or that it isn't hard. Some days I can barely push to three miles. But more often than not, once I push to three or four miles, my body takes off on its own, to its own place. It is my personal belief that most people never push past that first wall of running. To them, running an ultra, or a marathon, or a half, seems impossible. But to someone like me, it just seems like the next logical step.
When I run, I feel like I can keep going. So I'm going to run the 4Deserts to see how far my feet will actually go.