Or how I almost shit myself during a 110 KM Ultra Marathon.
Looks like mother sitting with two of her daughters.
Eyes blink….
It’s a mansion , self contructing…
blink…..
It’s a huge dinner table, bigger than a mountain, and their is a family ready to dine.
blink……
It’s a road made of the beard of old man.
blink….
It’s a cloud having a hand and fingers, playing guitar……
This was the state of my mind during the last few hours of an Ultra-marathon I ran in October 2017. It was perhaps the longest distance and time that I was on my foot. 23 hours of running (and brisk walking). No rest, no Netflix. I am a novice in the ultra running world which means I was OK with just finishing this one without DNF (24 hours was the cut-off). The run was fantastic, beautiful, and mesmerizing. Until I reached the final five hours of the run. The nightmare started…
I started seeing ‘stuff’’. These were weird. Very loosely connected to the real world, but somehow blown out of proportion. Distorted, broken, and abstract but reassembling something. Remember Francis Bacon, the artist, and his paintings? Something pretty similar to that.
I knew it was unreal: mainly because of the scale issue. I saw a lady sitting in the kitchen, only that her body was bigger than the mountains. and the kitchen was smaller than a tree. It was weird, but I loved it at the start (I never knew about race hallucination at that time and I thought this is pretty cool! Imagining such complexity in the middle of the night at 3 am? Free entertainment !!).
The best part? All that was required was a blink to change the frame. It was like a painting on slate, and the blink was all it needed to wipe off, followed by something different, totally different. A father teaches his daughter to play chess. Again everything is distorted, out of proportion, huge and complex, moving absurd (like walls having legs and they coming together to make a house).
I now knew I was in trouble. Some serious trouble. The run was inside a forest and I was running alone (in the long run, we are all alone 😅 ). I still had 30 km to go. I can’t run fast enough to catch up with the runner ahead of me and neither can I stop and wait for someone to come and join me… So I kept my pace.
But the worst was yet to come. I started stumbling. One moment I was on side of the trail and in the next instance I was on the other. And then I was back on the opposite side. I was flipping, swinging like a pendulum, all while running. I realize that my hallucination was creating trails for me where there wasn’t one. I was seeing the trail going in a direction where there wasn’t one. I knew this could get me in trouble for that forest was cutting through mountains and I was at an elevation (1500 mts), falling from which, might not be the best outcome!
But I kept running. Primarily because I was near the finish line. I had all my energy in me, my legs were strong. No sprain, no fatigue. So close to the finish line, I had no reason to quit (and I had already DNF one of my 100km, so it was a no-brainier — I gotta complete this). I knew that something is playing with my head and that I need to focus. I thought music would help and it did. But only for a while. The hallucination was overpowering all my attempts to subsidize it. It was like a shadow, growing over me. With every step, I was coming closer to the finish line. But the hallucination was also getting intense. Never in my whole life have I seen so many visuals so rapidly. Every blink created a new one.
The last 10 km was on a ‘good enough trail. Luckily, I saw a fellow runner sitting on the road, struggling with his feet (he was so badly cramped and injured after the race was over, that it took him days to start walking properly, and weeks to sit on the floor). I told him what is happening to me and that I need help finishing this race. I knew in my heart that this thing is getting dangerous and if I don’t take care of it now, I would hurt myself pretty bad (the road now had trucks and heavy vehicles passing us. We were running in the coffee estate of CCD. It was now a matter of seconds before I could get hit by one because of this stupid hallucination). The friend agreed to run (or walk) together till the end. He was right beside me talking to me the whole time. I was still hallucinating, but I was not wobbling around the road. He used to hold me and call my name out when I moved sideways without reason.
The final KM was on the horizon and I had a bit of fuel in my tank. I paced up to finish fast (there was a photographer near the finish line). The moment I crossed the finish line, I wanted to sit and cry. It was an emotional moment for me. Completing the distance was one, but doing this when my brain was on a Picasso High made this a whole lot difficult.
After coming home, I read an interesting research paper by the Badwater guys on the topic of Ultramarathon and Hallucination.
The bottom line, I should have stopped and asked for help earlier. This could have turned pretty bad and I was only lucky that it didn’t for me. For my next 100 miles, I am preparing to not face this same issue (I am mainly running at night after an exhaustive workday so as to stimulate the race day condition). Hopefully, I will be fine this time, without the art!
Happy Running!!
