Dealing with Demons On a Halloween Eve Trail Run

Last Fri­day night was Hal­loween Eve. With­out coin­ci­dence, I found myself run­ning away from demons on the trail in pitch dark. It turned out to be good prac­tice for  exor­cis­ing the demons that play havoc on your mind while you run near exhaus­tion. At least that’s what I’m writ­ing it off as. Let me explain how this dance with the devil on Hal­loween Eve came about.

I have orders from my phys­i­cal ther­a­pist to spend over an hour on the trails every day (she’s a keeper!). So, I have been rack­ing up more trails miles than I have since I was climb­ing ‘14ers’ in the Sierra Nevada moun­tains nearly two decades ago. Last week I got in nearly 28 miles on the trails. And since I still can’t run much, that totaled a lot of hours.

Not want­ing to skip time on the trail just because it was after dark last Fri­day night, I headed off to a local State Park. By the time I got into the park and under the thick canopy of oak and red­wood trees, I needed to turn my head­lamp on. While the moon was bright enough to guide me in some clear­ings, for the most part I was in the thick woods so needed to have my head­lamp shine the way for­ward. If you’ve ever used a head­lamp in the woods at night you know how it lights up a cir­cle of the envi­ron­ment well, but makes it impos­si­ble for your eyes to see any­thing beyond. It’s a weird expe­ri­ence, as if you are in your own light bub­ble trav­el­ing along the trail.

In actu­al­ity, I prob­a­bly would have run into a tree if I didn’t have a light on my head. One of the trails is closed and as I trav­eled along it I found out why: there were still sev­eral large trees lay­ing across the trail in sev­eral loca­tions, blown down by a big storm last month. There were also numer­ous exposed roots and branches and other debris strewn across the trail. It would not have been pretty run­ning smack into a fallen tree!

Because my back and phys­i­cal sta­mina are still on the mend, it didn’t take me long going uphill before I was feel­ing some fatigue. My mind began to play tricks on me in the dark. A series of rather dis­turb­ing ‘what –if’ ques­tions popped into my head: What if the moun­tain lions that have been spot­ted in the area actu­ally become more active at night? What if run­ning through the State Park when it’s closed was a Fed­eral Offense? What if drug deal­ers are grow­ing weed here and trigger-happy with any­one stum­bling onto them? And what if teenagers were out on Hal­loween Eve look­ing to scare the liv­ing day­lights out of someone?!

I real­ized that the sit­u­a­tion pre­sented to me a unique oppor­tu­nity to prac­tice con­trol­ling my mind on runs. I’ve heard that on ultra-distance runs like the West­ern States 100 and Bad­wa­ter races run­ners begin to imag­ine all sorts of things. On these runs, being men­tally strong is as impor­tant as phys­i­cal sta­mina is. So, I stepped back, held the door open, and encour­aged these thoughts to enter my mind. There was only one prob­lem: when you let wild thoughts in, they turn into much big­ger beasts that set up res­i­dence, mor­ph­ing into what feels just like reality.

With every snap of a twig or rus­tle of leaves real fear began to creep into me. I envi­sioned guns being held to my head, gob­lins jump­ing on my back, and moun­tain lions claw­ing at my flesh (I knew those movie scenes would come back to haunt me one day!). I tried to push them out of my mind but they leave a lot harder than they come in. I found that it was espe­cially dif­fi­cult to calm my mind dur­ing the uphill por­tions of the route, when I was exert­ing myself the most.

Then my heart stopped as I rounded a cor­ner and saw eyes peer­ing back at me no more than 15 meters down the trail. I slowed my pace, but for some inex­plic­a­ble rea­son, kept mov­ing towards the beast on the trail (prob­a­bly being too tired to bring my for­ward momen­tum to a halt). As I approached I real­ized it was indeed a wild beast. As it jumped away, I saw that it wasn’t the scary, fero­cious moun­tain lion that my mind was imag­in­ing, but rather a deer. A large one, but no real threat.

To get my mind to stop pro­ject­ing worst-case sce­nar­ios I con­tem­plated putting some music on. I quickly real­ized that cut­ting off half of the senses I had to use to pick up on approach­ing dan­ger wasn’t such a smart idea. Besides, my mind would no doubt make up all sorts of sounds in the absence of real audi­tory feed­back. I tried think­ing of my fam­ily, but the image of their smil­ing faces quickly turned to visions of them cry­ing at my funeral. I real­ized that try­ing to think my way out of a grow­ing fear wasn’t going to work.

Instead, I began to focus on my envi­ron­ment and run­ning. I felt the warmth of the air quickly turn cold as I entered a ravine. I lis­tened to the soft, rhyth­mic taps of my feat as they danced on the trail. And I paid atten­tion to my breath­ing and to every move­ment in my stride, mak­ing sure I was mov­ing effi­ciently and smoothly as pos­si­ble. This strat­egy actu­ally worked pretty well. While I still had moments when the ‘what-if’ visions crept back into my head, I was able to promptly show them the door by being present.

As I approached the end of the trail loop I came across a group of three moun­tain bik­ers. Talk­ing with them I found out they too had won­dered if they were com­ing across park rangers. I warned them about the fallen trees ahead and inwardly enjoyed how good it felt to be around humans again. As I headed out of the park to my car, I took stock of what I had learned:

• Fear becomes real­ity quite quickly if you don’t do some­thing about it.
• The more phys­i­cally depleted the body is the wider the door opens to let demons into the mind.
• By lis­ten­ing to your body and focus­ing on it, the mind’s demons can be slain (or at least put to sleep for a bit).

Hope­fully my phys­i­cal and men­tal sta­mina will con­tinue to strengthen so I won’t see these demons until much, much fur­ther down the trail next time.