Thursday night, a coworker offered to sell me a ticket to the dreaded 100k Dodentocht, or “Death March”, taking place Friday night. With only 24 hours of notice, a still slightly broken rib, and zero time to prepare, I naturally agreed immediately. I had heard about the ruck a few weeks earlier but forgot about it once I tried to register and saw that tickets had sold out. Due to the march’s unprecedented popularity among European hiking enthusiasts, all 13,000 tickets were sold in just a few hours. But on Friday night at 9:00 pm, somehow I was among the lucky few on a mission to hike through the Belgian countryside for 24 hours.
K 1-10: THE GOLDEN DAYS This was by far the best part of the walk. As a seasoned New York walker, it has become a habit for me to follow the biggest guy in the crowd to save me the hassle of clearing my own path through the herds of that dreaded species who should have been wiped out by natural selection eons ago—the slow walkers. I call this the Red Sea method: the NFL player/bouncer/just really big dude parts the sea, and you follow him like your life depends on it because let's be real, in a crowd of 13,000, it does you helpless little Israelite. Around 2K I found my perfect target— a 6’6’’ monster of a man with a military crew-cut and a shoulder span three times my own walking at a competitive 4-5 mph. This guy was a pro. He dodged, he cut, he weaved, he was the perfect parter and pacer. I had found my Moses. Here’s the problem though— when you do this in the city, it's not weird because you usually only need to follow someone for 2K or so max. When you follow someone for over 10K, things get a little sketchy. I noticed he kept suspiciously glancing at me out of the corner of his eye so I took out my headphones and said “I promise I’m not stalking you, you’re just huge and convenient to follow” to which he awkwardly smiled and replied, “I noticed”. We both felt like the conversation was pretty much over there and went back to plowing through slow walkers. I lost him at the first checkpoint but ended up passing him again somewhere around 45K. Whoever you are friend, thanks for a great 10K and for not filing a restraining order. This was a truly wonderful few kilometers. Everyone’s energy was high, there were tons of people lining the streets cheering us on, every town we went through had crazy parties with booming DJ’s and lights, and most importantly, all blisters were still in their infancy. K 10-20: THE DARK AGES Something very strange started to happen about 4.5 hours into the walk. I’m generally a pretty positive person, but combine a lack of sleep with a sugar crash and the realization that you still have to do this for about 15 more hours and suddenly the mind starts wandering to dark places. One thing I didn’t realize about the walk is that a lot of the terrain was not on paved streets but actual hiking paths winding through Belgian forests and countrysides. This would have been fine except for the fact that around 15K the heavens opened up and started torrentially down-pouring, turning the dirt paths into mud pools. It had been drizzling since the starting line, but by this point, it felt like we were hiking through walls of water. I was completely unprepared for this. I was wearing a tank top, light running base layer, uninsulated rain jacket, and running leggings, all of which became completely soaked through within a few kilometers. My shoes also filled up with mud and water quite quickly forming the perfect environment for blister breeding. Soaked clothes and shoes paired with rapidly dropping temperatures quickly equal hypothermia and sadness. The temperature change was also affecting my rib quite a bit making it difficult to fully inhale. Another thing I was not expecting was the lack of lighting along the route. There I was, 1:00 am in the middle of some forest with no lights and a thunderstorm overhead limping along hoping that someone with a headlamp would come by soon. I had planned to listen to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack during the walk but it was at this point that things just got too dark to be listening to Khazad-Dûm. In this type of environment, the mind quickly spins itself out of control. I was taken back to many unhappy memories of basic training where the same feeling of discomfort and sadness was a daily part of life. From the outside it seems quite silly—you’re just walking and its a little uncomfortable, what’s the big deal? And that's true, but when you get stuck in your own head everything becomes blown out of proportion. It was only when I had to restrain myself from punching some poor girl in the throat for stepping on my heal that I jolted back into the real world and realized my perception of reality was being seriously compromised by futile emotions. I was hungry, sleepy, cold, and uncomfortable, but none of these conditions gave me the right to let my emotions control me. Just because your physical environment is compromised doesn’t mean your mental state needs to follow. I whipped myself into shape and made it to the next checkpoint where I gorged myself on bananas and chocolate milk and suddenly all was right with the world. An hour and a half later, I started feeling those dark thoughts again and realized this was mostly generated by a sugar crash and lack of calories. This time I was prepared, ate a protein bar and saved myself a lot of trouble. K 20-30: THE FALSE HOPE For some reason, something clicked around 25K where I honestly believed I was practically done with the ruck. “25K? That's like a whole quarter! That went so fast, damn I GOT THIS.” Coming off of a checkpoint where I inhaled a sugar loaded waffle and cup of coffee probably influenced this mental state quite heavily. For the past few weeks, I had been eating close to a ketogenic diet which limits you to under 20g of carbs per day so this influx of quickly available energy was affecting me on a whole new level. Moral of the story: SUGAR IS A DRUG. Seriously. If I learned one thing from this walk it's just how severely something as simple as a chemical can affect your brain and twist your perceptions completely out of proportion. And just like a drug, sugar comes with its highs and lows. In this phase, I was riding that high. I was zipping through people like a speed demon, totally confident I could keep this up forever. Unfortunately, somewhere around 30K, my right hamstring blew out from an old injury and I was thrown into a dizzying spiral of doom. Just like that, all that energy that was putting me on cloud 9 turned against me and all I could think about was the pain in my leg and rib. Resolute, I pressed on determined to make it to the next checkpoint. K 30-40: THE HALLUCINATION PHASE It was at this point where things started to get a bit loopy. I wasn’t physically tired at all, but mentally I really don’t do well with sleep deprivation. I hadn’t slept for more than 5 hours in the past week and the night before I was so excited that I barely slept for 3 hours. I wasn’t all that prepared to pull an all-nighter. Though I consider myself a seasoned vet of sleepless nights thanks to my years of being an overachieving student, I notice the longer I try and pull these things the worse I am at it. Combining this with the pain from my hamstring and rib, my body decided to compensate its misery with absolute delusion. I started seeing checkpoint flags everywhere certain I had made it to 50K only to realize it was just some sad tree. That internal dialogue we all have also turned to complete mush. I specifically remember thinking about how odd the word “avocado” is for a good 5K straight. I also started making up dramatic back-stories for all the other hikers around me and after a while, I was completely certain they were true. The body is a strange and mysterious machine but it sure gets the job done. K 40-50: MORDOR Spoiler alert: I quit at 50K. I know, I know, how uncharacteristically weak of me right? But hear me out. The last 10K was absolute hell. My hamstring was so strained it was starting to bunch up at the base and with every breath, I was sure my rib was just about to crack in half. And if I had done this a few years ago, I totally would have pushed through anyway, finishing 100K with a ripped hamstring and even more broken rib. But what I’ve learned is that there are times to be tough, and times to be smart. You don’t have to be Rocky 24/7. Maturity is knowing when to push through, and also when to check your ego at the door and say screw it. I’m definitely nowhere near mature when it comes to pushing physical limits, but this was one of those times where I think I finally made a wise decision. Back at 20K when I wanted to quit because my emotions were getting the best of me? Time to suck it up buttercup. But here at 50K where I had a genuine physical problem that was guaranteed to get worse if I kept going? Probably a good time to go home. It was a question of having to recover for 2 days vs. 2 months, and since I’m currently training for the Brooklyn Half Marathon this October, I found the decision quite easy to make. So no, I didn’t get the cool metal and ruck 100K like I had wanted to. But I learned some valuable lessons about mental toughness and grit that are worth a whole lot more. The Dodentocht was definitely an experience of a lifetime.
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AuthorAmy Renne Archives
September 2018
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