Sierra Nevada Endurance Testing Grounds
by John Stamstad, part 2
Sleep deprivation is a pretty fascinating thing. Everywhere I looked, inanimate objects were moving, even the rocks, they just kept shifting around. The big rocks looked like tents, I mean they looked exactly like tents. I would stop and go up to them, usually say, “hello is anyone home” and have to touch it before being convinced that it was rock instead of ripstop.
The mind also has an interesting way of coping with stress. I was starting to get a couple of blisters but in my head they weren’t mine—they were someone else’s. The one on my right heel belonged to a girl at the office which is even stranger because I don’t work in an office. I kept getting mad at her, “would someone please tell her to stop smashing that blister, it hurts like hell!”, or “my god do I have to stop and bandage that for her again? Can’t she do anything herself?”
I stopped a little further down at Evolution Creek and slept for an hour. When I picked up my permit at the ranger station a couple of days before, the rangers gave me the scare talk about bears. “You can’t go out there without a bear canister”. “You have to camp only where there is a bear box”. Well, I needed to sleep and this was the spot. I put my pack with the food about 10 feet away from me and just piled some good throwing rocks next to my bivy bag. If a bear wanted my food he wasn’t going to get it without a fight—my food was my lifeline. I slid into my mylar bag and slept for an hour without even needing an alarm clock to wake up. My body was totally in tune, I told myself to wake in an hour and despite the obvious serious fatigue, I did.
Evolution Creek can be a treacherous crossing so I wanted to be fresh. Dave Horton had to cross this stream in June when he was doing his PCT record run and the water was up to his chest – it was a life or death effort.
I awoke to cold air and a colder stream crossing but felt very happy to have cold, knee high water. It always makes things easier to think about someone who has suffered more.
Climbing up Silver Pass, just past Muir Ranch, I was overcome by the feeling that I had been there before, everything seemed familiar, I felt like I knew the route. I spent hours thinking about how you could have an intense feeling of deja vu even though you know you have never been there before. Here is the theory I came up with: I had researched the route, read stories about it, and saw photos, so I had a lot of info about it. What if I had a dream about it months ago that I never remembered at the time. Where do those dream memories go? They can’t disappear completely. Maybe it’s the subconscious memory of those dreams that you don’t even know you had that can lead to deja vu……
I started having some pretty serious back and neck problems at the bottom of Silver Pass. I think the bouncing of the pack irritated an old cycling injury (I had a couple of mountain bike crashes that I lead with my helmet—compressing vertebrae in my neck and right between the shoulder blades). It was a wrenching dull-and-sharp-at-the-same-time pain. When those vertebrae go out of alignment I am just plain miserable. I was chewing ibuprofen like they were M&M’s. I’d have to stop and with a lot of work I could do some chiropractic on myself and get everything back in line. I started doing pushups, because that would pop them back into alignment, but the last thing you feel like doing on a 200 mile non-stop run is to drop and do 30. I also tried hanging from a tree to put some traction on my back and stretch things out.
That night my sleep deprivation induced imaginary friends came out. I had about 4 alter egos who would help me problem solve, that way I could concentrate on running and they would take care of the other details. It sounds a little crazy to write about it now but at the time and in that state– which is like being a live character in a dream world– I didn’t think anything of it, it seemed logical. And it was actually very productive. One of them suggested that I wear the pack facing forward on my chest. I remember thinking, “Man why didn’t I think of that”. It worked like a charm for my back but the downside is when you wear your pack on the front you can’t see your feet, which means you trip a lot and have to go slowly.
Then my shoes started falling apart. They had completely split right at the crease between the toes and the foot. They were both wide open and in this terrain they just filled with sand. But it is not just sand, it is volcanic sand which is a lot like crushed glass. Not good for the feet. My toes would keep popping out of the shoe completely and I would have to stop and get them back in. And then I would have to stop every mile of so and dump out the rocks and grit. Don’t even get me started on the blisters. The little rocks were making divots in my skin and becoming embedded.
I tried taping the shoes closed but the athletic tape I had just didn’t work very well. If I had brought duct tape I might have been able to close them, but then sealing your shoes with duct tape is just going to cause more problems because they won’t breathe. The only downside of being a product tester is that sometimes you play the role of guinea pig, and you only find out about issues when you are halfway through a 220 mile run in the middle of nowhere. That shoe issue was fixed in production so at least I didn’t suffer in vain.
My back was getting worse. It got to the point where the instant I put the pack on my back, my neck would completely seize up. One of my imaginary friends told me that the whole thing was psychosomatic– I was creating the pain in order to avoid something else, that I was being self defeating. If the trail couldn’t break me then I would do it myself. I didn’t want to believe this, I didn’t believe it, I felt like my pain threshold was higher than it had ever been and that I was totally focused on the goal and what I was doing. It isn’t like I haven’t had any experience with discomfort. I once rode my mountain bike 80 miles with a broken collar bone and separated shoulder, and that was a pleasant afternoon compared to this.
Another friend came to my defense, sort of: “The pain is real, you are not creating it. The military is. They made this pack to intentionally torture you, to see how much pain a person can take. They are recording all of your measurements. They are going to use this data for interrogations.”
Hmm, that would suck. It took me a couple of hours to convince myself that that was probably impossible. When you are out there all alone, different rules apply and you don’t take reality for granted.
Running non-stop for 4 days and 5 nights isn’t reality for most people so
I just kept pounding the ibuprofen and focused all of my energy on relaxing my neck and back. Slowly I could get it to function. With a combination of relaxation techniques, and alternating the pack front to back, self chiropractic, and pill popping I was able to make progress down the trail.
I was really bummed out because I was moving so slowly. I knew when I started this trail that everything had to go well. I was on a tight timeline, I had to catch a flight and get back to work. It obviously isn’t the way to do a trail like this but I had been trying for two years to run it and this was my only opening for the year, I just didn’t have any other choice. But by getting behind schedule I knew I might have to bail at Tuolumne meadows—just 25 miles from the end. That would be devastating.
My blisters were starting to be a problem. It is hard to train for blister prep when I never get them unless I run more than 100 miles. I used some of those miracle blister packs—the ones you just stick on a blister, they magically heal it, and when you remove them they don’t stick to the blistered skin. Well in the real world it doesn’t work quite as advertised. For one, they are waterproof , which really means that they don’t breathe. I realized this when I smelled the rotting flesh on my foot. I knew I needed to get that bandage off in a hurry and get everything cleaned out. Of course all of the skin came off with the bandage exposing raw meat. I went back to my old school standby of gauze and athletic tape and that worked beautifully.
These lower passes of Gladys and Ruby Lake –lower being only 10,000 ft–were warmer but going up Donahue was brutal—40mph winds and cold. There was nowhere to hide, I just had to put my head down and go. I got over the top and I really needed to sleep, this was my fifth night and I had only slept 2 hours total. I made it down to tree line but it was still way below freezing. I decided to bivy anyway. I pulled out my space bag only to find that it had ripped apart. I didn’t have much choice so I just laid down between two fallen trees for some shelter and wrapped the remnants of the bag around me like a blanket. I woke up an hour later and realized that my legs were so cold they had no feeling from the knee down. When I moved to feel them, my hands were like clubs, so numb from the cold that I couldn’t uncurl my fingers. I couldn’t even get up to walk. After a short panic attack, and a few agonizing minutes, I was able to get some circulation and movement back and I restored calm. As soon as I could, I got moving and tried to generate some desperately needed heat. I had 7 miles to go to Tuolumne Meadows, and as soon as I hit the warm sun I stopped and lay down on a rock…….
…..I opened my eyes, and tried to figure out what had just happened. “Why are you here?” It felt too real to be a dream. I looked all over the ground to find someone’s tracks. I ran up the trail a bit to see if anyone was there. Nothing. I guess that woman was a dream. I have never been so affected by a dream. I never even have dreams…..but this whole run was starting to feel like one big dream…..I started to think about it, what did she mean ‘why am I here’…..and then of course the obvious dawned on my tired brain. She wasn’t asking about the details of my run, she wanted to know why or rather “she” was trying to get me to look at why I run. As it became clearer that I wasn’t going to have time to finish the JMT, I didn’t feel the guilty fear of being a quitter; I didn’t feel like I had failed.
It has nothing to do with running, or checking a trail off my list or setting a record. I had had traversed 200 miles of an amazing stretch of wilderness, I had learned a great deal about myself, and I had an emotional experience that I simply can’t get in normal life. I came into Tuolumne Meadows feeling incredibly alive. That is why I am here.
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John Stamstad spent 15 years as a professional mountain bike racer specializing in long distance events before trading his bike for running shoes. He is a member of the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, holds the 24 hour off-road world record and created Singletrack Ranch, a mountain bike instructional vacation company. He is an Endurance Ambassador for Patagonia and uses his vast experience as an athlete to help design their new shoes and clothing.
Behind the Scenes, part 2
by Dan Patitucci
Deep in the forest beneath the south side of Half Dome, we heard the phone ring. “I can’t believe we have service back here”, was the first thought that came to mind, much less whom would be calling, it was John. “You’re where?” …”The Tuolumne Store, I’m done, I’ll be at the store, on the side of the road, you’ll find me”.
Janine and I had run in hoping to meet John along the way so we could run out with him to the finish in Yosemite Valley. Now we were sprinting back to the car, knowing John would appreciate a timely pick up, still an hour plus drive away.
We pulled into the Tuolumne store’s parking lot right at dusk, and there, huddled amongst the boulders was a person so annihilated it could only be the result of 200 miles of running. In the shadows John lay as a dark mass, we helped him up and immediately noted the shredded shoes, filthy and torn clothing and the fact that his feet were anything but usable. “You must be ready to get out of here” I said. “I’m ready for a beer”.
A couple of hours later, after beers and fish tacos at the Mobile Mart, we pulled up to our Bishop house. John was long gone and waking him was tough, getting him out of the car harder still. Here was proof that rigor mortis is possible while alive. Once inside the house, he came up short of the bed, shorter yet to the shower, and collapsed in the armchair, displacing our cat. Once again, he was out. Here, in the light of the living room, I studied him. This was a man who had just run the John Muir Trail and had not slept much at all in 5 days. He looked the part. I have never done anything to push myself to these extremes, but I could imagine that what he felt inside his destroyed body was pure joy. I was left tremendously inspired.
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John Muir Trail Photography
To see images of the John Muir Trail, visit our great friend, and professional photographer John Dittli’s website as he has produced the definitive coffee table book on the trail.
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