Towards, and what I found I was carrying

In Forrest Gump, when people finally ask him why he has been running back and forth across America for three years, they expect an answer worth the miles. A cause. A message. A woman. Forrest gives them nothing: “That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run. So I ran to the end of the road. And when I got there, I thought maybe I’d run to the end of town.” No particular reason. He just kept on going.

The film is lying to us, gently. Watch what it shows rather than what he says. Forrest laces up the moment Jenny leaves. He isn’t running for no reason. He’s running because staying still, in that particular week of his life, was unbearable. We project a purpose onto him because we can’t quite accept that a person would run that far away from something. We’d rather believe he was running towards.

That gap between what a runner says and what a runner is doing turns out to be the oldest question in the sport, and psychologists have a proper name for it. Andrew Elliot at Rochester calls it approach versus avoidance motivation. Are you moving towards something you want, or away from something you can’t sit with? His decades of research land on an uncomfortable finding. Two runners can cover the same distance at the same pace, and the one running towards comes home built up, while the one running away comes home hollowed out. Same miles. Opposite men.

So before the Gower, if you’d asked me, I’d have given you a clean answer. I run towards.

I run to see parts of the world I’d never otherwise see. To stand in nature and be shown things no person could have built. On the Gower that meant the coastal path with the whole sea stretched out flat to the horizon, the ferns, the grass cropped short and strange by goats and horses until it looked deliberate. I run because being strong later in life isn’t optional, and the body you’ll want at seventy gets built in your forties. I run for the plain challenge of finding out whether I still can. Whether I’m still someone who does hard things, or just someone who used to be. And, if I’m honest, I ran this one so I could talk about it from the inside. So that whatever I said about it afterwards would be earned.

Every one of those reasons is a towards. And for the first half, the Gower rewarded the lot.

Day one was the beautiful day. The up and down, the interesting terrain, the wildest stretches, the views that made the climbing worth it. That isn’t just good luck with the route. Psychologists since Mihály Csíkszentmihályi have called it flow: the mind goes quiet and absorbed when the challenge sits right at the edge of your skill and the world keeps handing you something new to meet. Novel ground, a climb, a view opening at the top. The miles disappear because there’s nothing left over to notice them with. Day one, I was in it.

Then day two took the beauty away.

The second half was more path, more tarmac, more of the same thing repeating. And I struggled, far more than the difficulty alone could explain. I understand that part better now than I did at the time. When the terrain flattens and repeats, flow collapses. There’s nothing new for the mind to hold, so the mind turns and looks at the one thing left, which is how much everything hurts. The suffering didn’t arrive because the second half was harder. It arrived because the second half was emptier, and something has to fill an empty mind.

At 97km, three kilometres from the finish, everything came due at once. The tendons across the fronts of my feet were swollen and half sprained. I’d taped my toes so I wasn’t standing on the little one with every stride. My soles felt bruised straight through, which was the price for all the strength training I’d told myself I’d do and hadn’t. This is where the route stops being scenic and becomes the thing Haruki Murakami writes about in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” The pain, at 97km, was not up for negotiation. What I did with it was the only thing left in my control.

And here is what I hadn’t expected. What no view or finish-line photo will ever show. With the beauty gone and the mind scraped empty, the thing that flooded in to fill the space wasn’t the sea or the goats or the challenge. It was my son. Everything he has had to be brave through. The appointments, the fear, the things that must have frightened him and that he faced anyway, at an age when you shouldn’t have to. Standing on a tarmac path with my feet failing, three kilometres from a finish I’d chosen freely, I found myself measuring my discomfort against his. It did not survive the comparison.

That’s the part the research half warned me about and half couldn’t. The studies keep drawing a line between two kinds of good. The hedonic, which is pleasure, comfort, the nice feeling. And the eudaimonic, which is meaning, the sense that you’re doing something that matters, and which very often arrives through difficulty rather than around it. An ultra is almost pure eudaimonia. Minute to minute it can be miserable, and people still rank it among the most meaningful things they’ve done. I understand why now. The misery is what clears the room. And into the cleared room comes whatever you’re actually carrying. I set out running towards the views. Somewhere on the second day I found out I was carrying my boy.

I knew there was a marshal posted just outside the final kilometre. We’d passed him on the way out. In my head I’d built a monstrous climb between me and him, a steep hill I’d have to drag myself up before I earned the sight of him. For what felt like thirty-five minutes but wasn’t, I climbed towards a hill that was mostly in my mind. Then he simply crested the brow, far sooner than I’d braced for. One kilometre left. Just the one. And I’d already run that exact kilometre three times before in previous legs, so the moment I saw him I knew, with the flat certainty you rarely get in life, that I was going to finish.

That’s where it caught up with me. The relief, the marshal arriving early like a kindness I hadn’t budgeted for, the downhill instead of the climb I’d feared. And underneath all of it, still, my son. It came out of me on that last descent.

Psychologists would tell you what I collected at that finish line was self-efficacy. Albert Bandura’s word for the belief that you can do the hard thing, and the fact that its single most powerful source is having actually, once, done a hard thing. That’s the honest version of what an ultra gives you. It doesn’t rewrite your character on the trail. It hands you evidence about yourself that you carry into everything after. I’d wanted to find out whether I was still someone who does hard things. I have the self proof now.

But that’s the tidy answer, and I’ve learned to distrust tidy answers about running. The whole sport is thick with them. The Pheidippides story we all know, the messenger who ran from Marathon, gasped “we have won” and dropped dead, is very likely a legend stitched together five hundred years after the fact. So I’ll resist tidiness and tell you the true thing instead.

I went to the Gower running towards. Towards the sea, the strength, the challenge, the right to speak from experience. Every reason was real, and every reason held right up until 97km. Then the beauty ran out, and the mind emptied, and I found out what I’d been carrying the whole way without knowing it. Not running away from my son’s battles. Running with them. Carrying, for one afternoon on a coastal path, a fraction of what he carries every day, and finding out I could.

Forrest stops mid-stride when whatever he was running from has finally worn itself through: “I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll go home now.” Mine didn’t work like that. The run didn’t empty me out. It showed me what was already there.