Desert Gothic

Dan Buck

4 9 Dan Buck Vitus Hajek, the Czech, my greatest threat, trails by seven or eight miles, and in my ears there’s the throb of a million hearts. Mile marker 135. I run unaccompanied along a desolate stretch of America’s loneliest highway, Nevada’s I-50, which halves the state horizontally and now, at midday, at 101 degrees, ripples like waves of exhaust. The soles of my race flats leave gummy imprints on superheated pavement while a punishing sun reduces my vision to gauze. In the distance, I see only flat road, and beyond that a hallucinogenic dot where the road dissolves between two mountains . The finish line might as well be a cliff at the end of the world. 50 D a n B u c k We are a group of twenty-eight. We are soldiers of the road, janissaries of conquest and pain. We are twenty-eight of the world’s most hard-core long-distance runners, and by midnight, forty-two hours into the forty-eight-hour, two-hundred-mile Marathon de Sade, most of my opponents will faint, collapse into death crawls, and quit—their French, Bolivian, and Moroccan bodies depleted beyond reason. I have paced myself in the middle by design. The key to a race is control. Always begin at the back; always lead from behind. I will overtake the rest after midnight, striking before dawn. My headlamp will spotlight a challenger’s swaying ass within a blueblack backdrop. My strides will enlarge. I will engulf the ass, bury it behind me. I’ve been here before. According to my doctor, right now a multilingual network fluent in adrenaline and endorphin argues among leukocytes, discussing whether I am experiencing euphoria or agony. My lungs are tight and airless. My will is serious as a knife. But as epic as I know I am, I grow irritated by thoughts of the Czech who follows. There was a fight in the motel room several mornings ago, and my mind tunnels around the memory: Vitus’s pouty frown, his bubble-wrap lips, the moping click-click of his argumentative tongue. Over the past decade, I’ve cultivated the philosophy that 26.2 miles is for the weak, reserved for weekend amateurs and secretaries without a hobby. These “marathoners” lace up the latest pair of wave-technology, mall-bought Mizunos, safety-pin bibs to their chests, and, through jackhammer breaths, nearly die trying to qualify for Boston. As I wrote in my best-selling memoir, Über-Dan (Simon & Schuster), “The entire spectacle is, if not a laugh riot, at least fairly cute.” Two years ago I ran Boston with a stress fracture in my foot. Each wobbly step shot lightning rods into my tibia and upward through my femur, terminating as nauseating spikes in my stomach . Still, I was able to jockey for twelfth position, just behind a wafer-thin Kenyan. D a n B u c k 5 1 In the small, elite, insular world of ultradistance running, I lead the pack. Raised in rural Texas, thirty-three years old, sixfoot -four with 3 percent body fat, I have a master’s degree in molecular biology, legs that reach to China, and a smile born for heartbreak. My face has graced the cover of Runner’s World five times. Over the past several years, I’ve placed first, third, and first, respectively , at the Mojave Masochist 100, the Baja Six-Day Death Chase, and the Colorado 250 Coronary. The only superior runner I have named in print is that descendant of Greek gods, Yiannis Kouros, who blasted away 635 miles in six days. I have been running so long that I know little else but the road. Each morning, at five a.m., I awake moving. Toes cracked, I shower, kill a pot of coffee, and destroy forty miles as a warm-up. I never cool down; I am relentlessly on. I aim for perfection through mutilation. If it hurts, I make it hurt more. I strive for distance. I test how long my muscles can flex and release without disintegrating. I jog up to sixty, slam into the wall near eighty, break through at one hundred. Nothing slows me. Nothing weighs on me. Nothing until now. In this war, I stop for water every five miles and provisions at every twenty. The numbers count. My crew arrives hours beforehand to mine the course. The twenty-four-year-old twins, James and John, lash...