The Road to Sparta

  My crew reminded me that I hadn’t consumed anything in a long time. But as much as I needed to eat, losing your guts is worse than not eating at all. It was far better to keep the fluids I had in me, well, in me. I felt that if I ate anything, everything would come gushing out. I had a sip of water. The glass was coated with an oily film, the contents warm, as though the party was over. I nodded to Nikos and Dimitris. It wouldn’t be for another 15 miles until we’d meet again, and those were certain to be tough miles as I would need to scale 3,608 vertical feet up Mount Parthenion and cross over the Sangas Pass to reach the next aid station. Much as I wanted to rest, I needed to go. It was after midnight, and the hourglass was emptying. If only I could scoop a handful of sand from the floor and replace time.

  Dimitris gave me a shell to wear. “Here, you’ll need this,” he said. “It’s gonna be cold up there.” I thanked him, tied the jacket around my waist, said goodbye, and made my way back onto the street.

  Exiting the taverna, I noticed a runner lying on the sidewalk near a ditch. He was flat on his back with his hands folded neatly across his chest, like a pharaoh in his tomb. His crew shook their heads as I ran past. It appeared he wouldn’t be going anywhere soon, probably not at all. This wasn’t the most encouraging parting sight to behold as I set out to confront the toughest section of the course.

  There are three capitalized letters no racer wants appearing next to his or her name on any race results, and they are DNF (Did Not Finish). But in a race of this intensity, DNF can take on an entirely different meaning: Did Nothing Fatal. As I started the approach to Mount Parthenion, I wondered to what extreme I was willing to push myself to reach Sparta. How far down was I willing to plunge into the murky nadir that separates consciousness from unconsciousness? How far would I go?

  The answer was clear. Pheidippides would stop at nothing, nor would I. Death before DNF.

  26

  SHADOWS IN THE DARK

  A racecourse elevation profile can sometimes be a misleading thing. If you’re unfamiliar with an elevation profile, it’s basically a graph that marks the various inclines and declines along the route, with distance plotted across the bottom of the graph (known as the X-axis) and the elevation plotted up the left-hand side of the graph (known as the Y-axis). The slope of any climb can be calculated using rise over run. What can be deceiving, however, is that if the horizontal X-axis is compressed, the inclines appear to be more abrupt than they actually are. Normally as you stretch the X-axis farther across the page, the rises tend to taper (i.e., appear less vertical).

  Such is not the case with the Spartathlon elevation profile. The climb up Mount Parthenion is so steep that no matter how far you elongate the X-axis, the slope still points directly skyward. It looks more like something mountain climbers would scale with ropes, pitons, and safety harnesses. So how is a runner able to scale such a steep pitch? The answer is that terracing has been cut into the mountainside. Otherwise, you probably would need ropes and a harness.

  Known as Bey’s Ladder, a series of switchbacks has been crudely hacked out of the jagged precipice so that it is possible to scale the peak on foot. The work was done during the Greek War of Independence in the early 1820s and remains largely unfortified since its original construction. As I stood at the base of this towering colossus, in order to see the top I had to tilt my head so far backward my mouth opened. It seemed to jut impossibly skyward, cold and foreboding, almost evil. There were no lights to be seen on the mountain, no dim gleam of a distant runner’s headlamp, and I wondered if there was anyone else scaling this wicked, motherless rock.

  There was a man sitting next to the trailhead with an antiquated lantern; he wished me luck in Greek (kalí tíhi). On I proceeded.

  Hardly 30 paces up the mountainside the devil himself lashed out, sending a swirling downdraft of air laced with gravelly pellets hailing over me. The blast peppered my eyes with grit and coated my throat in a dusty powder. I coughed and choked, and blinked several times in an effort to clear my eyes, but blinking abraded the corneal surface and made it sting. Shaking my head, “ARR!” I growled in agony. I couldn’t see. “ARR!” Oh, how I loved this shit!

  Untying the shell and pulling it onto my body, I plunged into the tempest, hurling myself across stretches of loose scree, ascending serrated boulders, and navigating vast deposits of talus and shale in the moonless dark. The incline sharpened. The route became more precarious, the switchbacks tightening and weaving along the very precipice of the ledge, the pathway underfoot rough and uneven, making it difficult to identify a landing place for my foot that wouldn’t crumble and break away under my weight. The pitch was frighteningly sheer, near vertical at points, and one misplaced footstep could send a runner free-falling off the mountainside. They say no runner has ever died climbing Mount Parthenion, but there’s always a first.

  Upward progress was extremely slow and arduous. Each step needed to be executed with a measure of exactness. Even then it was quite harrowing, especially when you considered the potential ramifications of a stumble. On several occasions I nervously hesitated and slid backward, overcompensated and jerked flat to the ground desperately gripping the earth, heart pounding. I glanced downward, and what I saw was not reassuring. That distant light of the well-wisher’s lantern at the beginning of the trail was nearly directly beneath me now, as if I’d risen in an elevator to the top of a tall building and was looking over the ledge at the street below. One stumble, and the resulting plummet would almost certainly prove terminal.

  Pheidippides would have had a bit clearer picture of the overall terrain. We know from Herodotus’s account that the moon was approaching fullness when he undertook his historic run. Of course, this was well before the advent of flashlights, so he wouldn’t have had the direct spotlight a modern headlamp provides.

  Another blast of frigid air came hurling down from the darkness above as though the gods were angry. I tucked my head deep into my chest, rolling my shoulders inward, hoping to protect my eyes from the barrage of sand and spray that rained down. Fistfuls of pebbles scattered across the barren rock, popping sharply against the hard surface and ricocheting down the mountainside. My fingertips were growing increasingly numb, and each new gust of the cold, heartless wind seemed to increase the deadening sensation.

  Between flurries of wind, I tried to maintain some semblance of forward progress. Each new step was slow, deliberate, and unsteady, but I did my best to remain persistent. I badly wanted off this godforsaken mountain. Step by labored step I plodded onward, confining my focus to the immediate terrain in the 2-foot radius before me, trying not to slip, muscles twitching. It freaked me out to look down at the deadly drop below. Startled, I sensed a presence nearby, as if eyes were tracking me. I turned to my left, and there, sitting on a trailside rock, was indeed a man. His dark and shadowy outline melded eerily into the mountainside. I tried to inspect him as best I could, but his body was monochrome and amorphous, making it nearly impossible to discern. Who was this man, and what was he doing here?

  “Is everything okay?” I asked, looking at him sideways like a bird, not wanting to shine my light directly in his face.

  There was no response. His eyes were hidden within the recesses of their sockets, and I couldn’t tell where his gaze was fixed.

  “Do you need help?” I questioned.

  The whites of his eyes flashed before me, and the pupils were tiny slivers, like those of a goat. His face appeared angry or annoyed that I was asking him questions. Still, he offered no response.

  I felt uneasy, as though I was intruding upon his space and should go. So I said goodbye and continued moving. No salutation was offered in return.

  When I eventually reached the summit, there were two volunteers sitting around a small portable heating unit warming their hands. “There is a man down there that may need help,” I informed them. They both looked at me curiously. “I tried to ask if he needed assistance, but he didn’t respond.”

  They both just cont
inued staring at me. “Did you hear me?” I asked. “There’s a man down there,” I said, jerking my thumb in the air pointing down the trail.

  “There is no one else down there,” one of them finally offered.

  “Why, yes, there is. I saw him.”

  “You are the only runner on the mountain right now.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked him, puzzled.

  He held up a walkie-talkie. “We’re keeping track.”

  “How could that be? I saw someone, I tell you.”

  They both just looked at me, shaking their heads, saying nothing.

  Was that whole thing a hallucination, I thought to myself? Was he not real? Had a contorted outcropping in the rock’s surface briefly anthropomorphized before my eyes? Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure myself.

  “Are you positive there’s no one else down there?” I asked one last time.

  They both just continued inspecting me, as if looking for signs of exhaustion-induced psychosis, but saying nothing.

  I stood there for a moment longer thinking about it, but I knew I had to get down off this mountaintop. My toes had grown numb, and the tips of my fingers were purple and tingly. Perhaps the cold air blurred my vision, or the grit in my eyes, though I don’t think so. Maybe it wasn’t a hallucination after all; maybe it was a ghost. Who knew how many men had perished on this mountain during the war. All mountaintops are sanctuaries of the gods, but this one was also a grave, with ghostly spirits haunting its crevasses and crags. I wanted out of there.

  Quickly I spiraled down off the back side of the summit, following a narrow, rocky pathway that was a bit less relentless than the face of the mountain had been, though still quite unstable and tricky to navigate. The apex of Bey’s Ladder crosses the main Artemision Range between Mounts Kaequria and Mavrovouni. The top of the pass peaks in 3,608 feet of nearly sheer vertical rock. Part of the reason the Spartans were able to so successfully defend their territory is that there was no easy way for an enemy to launch an attack. Crossing these mountains on foot was too perilous and impractical for an army to undertake, and the nearest port was 25 miles from the main city and situated in a notoriously hazardous section of coastline. A naval fleet would have to risk their lives just to reach the shoreline and would be in no condition to put up a fight once they got there. Sparta was virtually impenetrable and cut off from the outside world, which ultimately proved to be both good and bad.

  Now that I’d been running for more than 100 miles, the steep downslope was utter torture. My once capable quadriceps, those arduously conditioned and thoroughly trained muscles that lined the front of my legs, screamed in agony. I pushed the pace nonetheless, attempting to make up lost time. My accelerated cadence wavered on the verge of destruction. For if a muscle were to cease and cramp at this moment, a severe tumble was the inevitable outcome. It was a reckless thing to do, but truthfully, my mind was becoming fatigued and increasingly careless, which can be a perilous combination during a race of this duration. Slowing would have been the prudent thing to do, but instead I sped up.

  In doing so, I passed several runners along this downhill section. Some of them used hiking poles to brace themselves; others shuffled along sideways, like a crab scurrying away to safety. No words were exchanged between us. It was too intense to disrupt the focus of a fellow runner.

  In scarcely more than a mile’s distance from the summit, the course plummeted some 1,800 feet (that’s higher than the Empire State Building) straight down and over fragmented stone and loose gravel. The rugged pathway eventually deposited me in the remote outpost of Sangas and then proceeded onward toward Nestani along an undulating, potholed road that rose and fell over the outlying foothills. My crew was waiting for me there. It had taken nearly 5 hours to cover those 15 impossible miles.

  The air was damp and chilly when I arrived. A slight mist hung in the valley, and dew had formed on the surfaces of nearly everything. They offered me a seat, but I didn’t want to sit for fear of never being able to get back up. “Beware of the chair,” as they say in ultrarunning circles. I took my headlamp off and massaged my temples. The aching was bottomless, inescapably infinite. If my crew harbored any previous doubts that I was unraveling, they now knew with certainty that such was the case. Slowly, bit by bit, I was disintegrating into fragments.

  “Can you eat?” Dimitris asked.

  I shook my head no, too exhausted to answer. I looked around. Everybody appeared tired and heavy-eyed, even the volunteers. The whole atmosphere was drowsy, and I wanted to lie down, to disappear into a quiet slumber, but I knew that would be the kiss of death. I shook the cobwebs from my head and readied myself to depart.

  “You’re going to leave?” Nikos asked.

  I shook my head in affirmation, again too tired to offer up any words.

  “It will be light soon,” Dimitris offered. “Though it’s still pretty wet and cold; I think you ought to keep the shell.”

  “When will I see you again?” I asked.

  “In Tegea.”

  “Okay,” I said, and headed out. I had no idea where Tegea was. I wasn’t sure if it was even in the same hemisphere, or cosmos. My world was slowly deconstructing, until there was nothing left except the primitive act of putting one foot in front of the other and repeating that action over and over again. Remain on course, I told myself, and just keep putting one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other. There are two ways to cope with pain. One is to put your head down and grunt through it. I didn’t know the other way. With my head lowered, I trudged forward. I didn’t have to go fast, I just had to go.

  27

  GO GREEK OR GO HOME

  Dawn is the bewitching hour during an all-night run. Alertness slips to a low, and a sleep-inducing lethargy overtakes the system. As I ran through the misty predawn dreamscape of the Arcadian foothills, it remained a fight just to stay awake, as if tranquilizers had been infused into my bloodstream and small weights quietly attached to my eyelids. Lower and lower the shades drew across my field of vision.

  Thump . . . thump . . . thump, the monotonous, rhythmic pulse of footsteps droned on metrically, like a vinyl record skipping a groove. Slowly, ever so gradually, my eyelids drooped downward, gradually darkening out what little light was left coming in. Still, I pressed on.

  When I reopened my eyes, I found myself in the middle of the road. “What the heck?” I thought. I knew better than to place myself in that kind of danger. So I meandered back over to the shoulder and continued onward.

  Then it happened again. I awoke, running down the middle of the road. That’s when I realized that I was sleep running. I was literally falling asleep on the run. I was so determined to keep going that I didn’t fall over or stop. I just continued running, willing my body onward, while asleep. How long I had been asleep and how much distance I had covered while in this state of nocturnal locomotion was difficult to ascertain (after all, I’d been asleep), but it was more than just a few short steps, and when I looked back to trace the spot of my last conscious recollection, it appeared to be quite some distance behind me, perhaps several hundred feet. Shocking!

  Even more startling was the realization that after this second bout of comatose running I reemerged feeling somewhat refreshed and rejuvenated, as though my body needed rest so desperately it had forced itself into a temporary shutdown mode to allow the cerebral network to reboot. After these two brief catnaps, I now felt a bit more coherent.

  I’ve since talked with other ultramarathoners who have experienced similar episodes of cataleptic nocturnal locomotion (i.e., sleep running). I’ve also read accounts of people in war-torn regions falling asleep in motion while trying to escape an enemy pursuer. And there are reports of combat soldiers having fallen asleep on the battlefield with one eye open, in watchful observation of potential threats during intense military conflicts.

  Unihemispheric slow-wave sleep (USWS), or asymmetric slow-wave sleep, refers to the ability to put half of one’s brain to sleep
while the other half remains awake. In contrast to normal sleep, in which both eyes are shut and both halves of the brain show reduced neural activity, during USWS only half of the brain is in deep sleep—a form of non–rapid eye movement sleep—and the eye corresponding to that particular half remains closed while the opposing eye remains slightly ajar. This phenomenon has not only been observed in chronically fatigued humans but also in a number of other terrestrial, aquatic, and airborne species, such as the swallows of California and Baja California, during extensive, transcontinental migrations in which they might go weeks or even months in motion without completing a single sleep cycle.

  As the light of the looming sunrise progressively brightened the sky, my drowsiness subtly abated. The damp chill in the air lingered thick in the lowlands, and the morning stillness idly held this mist in an aerosol-like spray that coated my skin and hair in a fine layer of moisture. I shook my head back and forth several times, sending a shower of condensation from my hair, the crystalline dewdrops temporarily suspended in the fiery flare of the rosy-fingered dawn.

  The road began to rise onto the high, flat plateau above Arcadia. The course proceeded through several sleepy villages and fertile groves of orchards, the fruit of which had been in existence since the time of Pheidippides’s own travels. Given Herodotus’s record, Pheidippides would have likely passed through this very same section of Arcadia in these same early morning hours, just as we were doing then. Would he have eaten from these same trees? To think that an ancient hemerodromos was running here 2,500 years ago fascinated me, and knowing that this was the land of my ancestral origins made the experience all the more visceral. I was connected to this place in ways I could not know. My forebears had walked these fields, tending to these very trees. The ancient Greeks believed they were of this land, soil-sprung. They hadn’t come here from somewhere else; they were autochthonous (earth-born), and this was the place of their origins, forever and always since the dawn of humanity. Formed from white rock and blue sea, my ancestors raised their families in this land, fostered their hopes and dreams here, generation upon generation coming into and passing through life in these same hills and plains that I now ran through. This was their land, and in a timeless way, this was also my land.