Five feet
Building something I cannot fully see yet.
It was about 5:00 in the morning when I got onto Reedy Creek Trail. It was really quite. The kind of quite that only happens in the middle of the dark woods. Sort of like absence.
Umstead in March is a particular kind of alone. The trail is familiar enough that my legs know what to do before my brain catches up, rolling and hilly, and the kind of terrain that asks for patience more than speed. On this morning I was out there four hours by the end of it. Gloves on. Tights. A long sleeve shirt I hadn’t needed in a week, because two days ago it had been in the eighties and now the temperature had dropped back down to near freezing, reminding me that winter wasn’t finished. My headlamp was casting about five feet of light in front of me. I didn’t see another person the entire morning.
I am in the thickest part of the training block for the Zion 100 kilometer race next month. Sixty-two miles through the southern Utah desert, a place I have wanted to run through for a long time. But Zion is really a stepping stone. What I am actually building toward is the Javelina Jundred in October, one hundred miles in the Arizona desert. Finish Zion and I earn a lottery ticket into Western States, which is the race I want most. Sub-nineteen hours at Zion gets me that qualifier. So when I say I am training, I mean I am out on a dark trail at five in the morning, alone, building something I cannot fully see yet.
My head, somewhere around mile seventeen, got stuck on an argument between two thinkers I had stumbled across recently. Sartre and Camus. And the argument goes like this.
Sartre says this training block is a project. That every choice I make, the alarm, the trail, the suffering I keep voluntarily signing up for, is lacing up a new version of myself. You are not born with a fixed identity or a pre-assigned purpose. You arrive, and then you build. The life you construct through your choices is the only meaning there is.
Out on Reedy Creek in the cold and the dark, I felt that. Nobody is making me do this. Nobody is grading the result. I chose Zion and Javelina and the particular kind of long hours that comes with building the endurance needed for these long distances. Sartre would say those choices, stacked one on top of the other, are quietly writing a “self.” That the person I am becoming is a direct consequence of what I decide to do when there is no audience and no applause.
I ran with that for a while.
Then somewhere in the middle of that, my mind left Umstead entirely.
I am standing at a start line in the Utah desert. It is 5:30 in the morning and the dark here feels different than the dark back home. Bigger. The red rock walls rising around me are invisible in the pre-dawn but I can feel them, the way you feel a room even before your eyes fully adjust. There are other runners. Headlamps scattered like low stars across the canyon floor. I woke up a few hours ago in a small hotel twenty minutes outside the park, tumbleweeds drifting through the parking lot in the quiet. I made my rice, jasmine with soy sauce, the same thing I always make before a long effort. I ate it slowly and thought about the hundreds of mornings that led to this one. The dark miles at Umstead. The long runs out of Bridgeton on trails nobody has ever heard of. All of it culminating into this moment, standing in the desert waiting for the race director to count down.
Sartre would say this is the project made visible.
The gun goes off and within the first hour the sun begins to rise and I understand immediately why people talk about this place the way they do. The light comes in sideways, painting everything red and orange, the canyon walls catching fire in slow motion. The course winds along slickrock plateaus, the terrain dropping away on both sides into nothing. Each footstep deliberate. Each step a small negotiation with gravity and red dirt and whatever my body decides to say about it.
Then Camus pushed back.
Camus says the project is a lie I tell myself to make the miles feel less empty. His argument is that Sartre’s move resolves too cleanly. You find the uncomfortable fact that life has no inherent meaning, and instead of actually facing it, you immediately convert it into a sort of construction project. Problem found. Solution applied. Camus thought that was a flinch. A way of making the discomfort manageable rather than real.
What he wanted was for you to look directly at the fact that none of this adds up to anything predetermined, and keep going anyway. Not because you convinced yourself it leads somewhere. But because you choose to move inside the contradiction without softening it. He called it the absurd. Not a wound to heal, but more of a condition to live inside of.
I pushed back on that too.
Because if you know nothing means anything and you go out anyway, what are you actually doing? Just enduring? That starts to sound like giving up with better wording. I did not want a philosophy that asked me to feel the void. I wanted the ladder. I wanted to believe the miles were adding up to something.
But the problem with the ladder is that you’re only as good as the next rung. If the project is the only thing giving the miles meaning, then the moment a rung breaks...a rolled ankle, a sidelined season, a race that doesn’t go your way...the whole structure collapses. Sartre gives you the tools to climb, but he doesn’t tell you what to do when there’s nowhere left to go but down.
I pictured mile forty at Zion.
The heat by then will be unforgiving in the way that only open desert can be. No trees. No shade. Just red dirt and exposed sky and the sun pressing down on my back like it has something to prove. I have spent months preparing for this in sauna sessions back home, baking myself in the early spring Carolina heat, trying to teach my body in advance what is coming. But knowing a thing is coming and standing inside it are different. At mile forty I will not be thinking about Western States. I will not be thinking about Javelina. I will be thinking about the next step, and then the one after that, and whether I have enough water to reach the next aid station.
That is the most honest version of the Camus argument I can imagine.
Not the philosophical version. The practical one. At some point on that course the project disappears. The ladder disappears. There is no construction happening at mile forty in the desert heat. There is just a body moving through space, choosing to keep moving for no reason that would satisfy a philosopher, and every reason that would satisfy anyone who has ever pushed past the point of comfort into something that mattered anyway.
By mile twenty-seven, my legs were starting to bark at me and Camus was making more sense.
Because I do exactly what he is describing. The training block leads to Zion. Zion leads to Javelina. Javelina leads to Western States. That story is useful. It’s a sturdy ladder that gets me out of bed at two in the morning. But underneath it is the question I kept circling...Would I still do this if the ladder were taken away? If there were no finish line, no lottery ticket, and no “version 2.0” of myself waiting at the end?
I know my answer.
I would.
Not because I am disciplined or wired differently or built for this. But because running is not the vehicle for something else in my life. It is the thing itself. It has changed how I process pain, how I make decisions, how I show up for the people I love. Strip away every race on the calendar and I am still out here, because the person I am when I run is the person I am trying to be everywhere else. I cannot separate that from the person standing here right now. I would not want to.
And that is where I think the argument between them quietly ends.
Maybe Camus is not arguing against building. Maybe he is arguing against needing the building to justify the showing up. The run does not need Zion to matter. Zion does not need Western States to matter. But I am still going to run Zion. I am still going to run a hundred miles in October. Not because meaning demands it. Because I choose it, freely and fully, without needing the universe to co-sign the decision.
And there is probably a version of Sisyphus out there somewhere with a GPS watch who understands both of them.
I picture myself somewhere in the back half of that canyon course. The relentless heat. My legs carrying the memory of every dark mile at Umstead, every long run out of Bridgeton, every morning I chose to get up when the alarm started beeping. Each footstep not a march toward meaning but something quieter than that. Proof of a choice made freely, repeated until it became a life.
The finish line is out there somewhere past the edge of my headlamp.
I am not ready to see it yet.
By the time I got home the sun was up and Felicia and Dakota were already at daycare and work and the ordinary rhythm of the day was in full swing. I took a quick shower and logged into my first meeting. The person on the other side of the screen had no idea I had just spent four hours alone on a dark trail, working something out that I still haven’t fully resolved.
And I’m not sure I’m supposed to.