Why Dead Flowers?

Mile eighty-five, and your legs have stopped negotiating. They’ve moved past bargaining into something closer to refusal. Your pace has fallen to a walk, and somehow every step feels like it’s bringing you closer to quitting instead of closer to the finish. The next aid station is further than you thought. Your stomach turned on you hours ago. You start doing the math you know you shouldn’t: how many miles are left, how many hours that is at this pace, how easy it would be to sit down and let someone drive you back to town. Few people want to feel that, let alone talk about it, but this is when trail and ultra running is closest to its purest self. Everything extra has been stripped away, and what’s left is you and a question.

At its core, running is an exercise in suffering. Running as far as you can, as fast as you can, is simple—but far from easy. Sometimes it just hurts. It’s not all about suffering, though. That’ll always be part of it, but not in the macho, David Goggins sort of way. More in the way that running asks a lot of you, and in return gives you a kind of clarity that’s hard to find anywhere else.

For a lot of us, including far-away pipe dreamers like me, running is an expression of dreams and desire. It’s no coincidence that at the root of all suffering is desire, about as human a feeling as there is. That’s always stood out to me as part of why running works so well as a metaphor for life. It’s also why it connects so easily to ideas from psychology and philosophy that people have been chewing on for centuries, and maybe why it can feel so cathartic, even freeing. Whether it’s going well or not, many of us feel closest to ourselves while running.

All of that desire leads to a question worth asking now and again:

“Why not me?”

I don’t mean it in a cocky way. It’s the question that comes up when you’re scrolling through results from a race you’ve only ever read about, or watching a friend cross the line of something you didn’t think regular people could do. Most of the time we answer it for ourselves before we even really ask it: not enough time, not talented enough, not the right kind of person. I think it’s worth sitting with a little longer than that. Many of us are closer than we realize. Dreams don’t have to be just that.

Dead Flowers is a place to explore that question. Some of it will be my own reflections on the dreams that led to the relationship I have with endurance sports now, and on the runs and races that keep testing it. Some of it will be photos and what they mean to me, since a picture from the middle of a hard day usually tells a different story than the one at the finish. Some will be about races and where the sport is heading. And a lot of it will be about my friends: people close to me who asked that same question.

The name comes from “Dead Flowers” by the Rolling Stones. A dead flower is past its bloom, but it’s still beautiful.

Running has a similar effect on people. Over enough miles, it takes the pace, the plan, and the image you had of yourself at the start line. What’s left at mile eighty-five isn’t pretty, but it’s true. That stripped-down version of you is who actually finishes; it’s the one worth getting to know.