Noah’s TGE Journey
My alarm sounds at precisely five o'clock in the morning, stirring me from a good night's rest. As I come to, I'm filled with the dim excitement that, in less than an hour, a crew of elite athletes will be setting off on the thirty-six-hour cyclical journey that serves as the foundation of the 2021 Blood Run. This is a day that I have been looking forward to for nearly three months, and I can hardly believe it has already arrived.
The Blood Run is The Good Earth's annual ultra race. Over the next two days, we will be facilitating a series of three-, six-, twelve-, twenty-four-, and thirty-six-hour running challenges. The most ambitious participants will be shooting for at least 100 miles this weekend, and some even more than that. I am skeptical that such a feat is possible--aren't marathons the peak of human endurance? Is the body even built to withstand a day and a half of almost nonstop movement? Whatever the case, I know this is going to be a good show. I'm even planning to put in a few laps of my own.
As the runners (including me and Savannah) get on their marks, the pitch black of night barely disturbed by the waking Sun, I'm brought back to the day I arrived on the farm in June. There's a funny feeling you get when you're on the brink of something new and incredible. It's nervous but ecstatic, a kind of subconscious battle between your cautious and reckless sides. You're paralyzed by unfamiliarity, but you know you'll push through whatever it takes to endure the experience. I felt that way then, and I feel it now.
The clock strikes six, and we're off! It's a path and a landscape I've walked many times, but the circumstances make it feel brand new. It's darker than I'm used to, and I'm surrounded by (mostly) strangers, all of whom are significantly better at this than me. My surroundings are indecipherable, and I'm way out of my depth. To cope with this, I anxiously let my mind wander back to that first day. I arrived in awe of the seemingly endless span of the property, and one of my first thoughts was "I am going to get so lost here." There were animals everywhere, a giant barn with a metal roof, multiple fields ready for planting...it was a lot to take in. And my first task, sponging down the lower level of the barn with Savannah, was hardly an improvement.
I start thinking of other firsts. My first time planting in a field was nearly a disaster! The summer heat made it horribly uncomfortable to spend hours transplanting row after row of pumpkins, and I moved at a snail's pace. Watching Nancy and Savannah blaze past me only frustrated me more, adding to my feelings of inadequacy. When we almost lost the entire field to the heat, I could have cried.
My first time cooking dinner for the group was also rife with difficulty. I miscalculated the number of ingredients, forgot to prepare a side dish, and nearly had a heart attack from the prospect of disapproval. My first time weeding was slow, arduous, and left me with a wonderful trail of painful blisters across my hands. Even my first interactions with the cats weren't pretty: Felix tried to bite me because I, a dog purist, had approximately zero idea how to actually hold a feline.
In a way, these firsts, noxious and challenging as some of them were, would come to be the defining moments of my time on the farm. It isn't often that we are thrust well outside of our comfort zones. That familiar bubble in which many of us spend long stretches of our lives is a prison as much as it is a home, and in hindsight, I've come to see the whole summer as a daring adventure into the beyond. As I round the corner to the end of my first lap, I'm reminded of how far I've come since those first days when everything felt so alien to me. It turns out that when you do something once, it gets a whole lot easier.
I eventually found myself eager to take on the weeds, powering through row after row like nobody's business. I became so familiar with the layout of the farm that I could probably draw a map blindfolded. My hands became so hardened with callouses that they were practically gloves of their own! As the weeks turned into months, just as I continue to rack up a meager mileage on the Blood Run course, the difficulty starts to fade away into content.
Even after my strength peters out at mile eight (beating my PR of two and a half) and I plant myself more firmly on the other side of the tracking table, the faceless strangers whose expertise once intimidated me become friendly characters. I see their drives more clearly; their personalities shine through the deep determination they emanate lap after lap. And over the course of those 36 hours, they bring me along on their journeys. There are highs and lows, moments where I watch strength falter and moments where I witness the incredibly capacity of the human body. I see triumph and pain and the thousands of emotions in between. At risk of sounding too profound, the story of that run strikingly mirrors my own over the past three months.
Why do they put themselves through such an ordeal, I wonder? I can't know exactly what brought each of the runners to the starting line that day, but I can guess that it wasn't just for the glory. It wasn't to prove something to another person or to get an award (despite the world record holder in their ranks). I think there's a deeper force that compels us to occasionally take the path of greatest resistance. Our country, fattened off of centuries of technological progress, ushers many through a relatively convenient, monotonous life. That may be good for our survival, but is it good for our souls? We were born to struggle, to achieve, and to build from the ground up. That's why some of us run ultras, and it's why I spent this summer as a farmer.
If this reflection has seemed needlessly abstract, you're absolutely correct. The truth is, I've been reflecting since I first arrived, and I'll still be reflecting after I'm long gone. Sifting through the memories of such an important life experience is no walk in the park, and I expect that it will take a long time before I find the true kernel of meaning underneath it all. Until then, however, all I can offer are my thoughts and my profound gratitude to Nancy and Jeff. What you do is nothing short of magical, and I'll cherish my time at the Good Earth forever. And to any prospective interns: do it! Even if it's the last thing you could ever picture yourself doing, I promise it's worth it.
And so, I bid a final farewell to Pearl, Buck, Syd, T-Bone, Rex, Maria, Rita, Weird Harold, Charlie, Felix, Reinhold, Maria Theresa, Camilla, Pig Cat, the Duck Gang, the Chicken Squad, the Busy Bees, the Putrid Pigeons, the Deafening Doves, and even the mosquitoes who showed me so much love. Until next time!
