Part I - The Loop I Couldn’t Leave
I left the Eifel at sixteen. Over the years since, I’ve lived in more than twenty countries. But the Eifel was always the place I returned to between everything else, and when I did, I found myself running the same loop, over and over.
Looking back, I think the predictability was the point. There was a lot to process that had nothing to do with running — my parents, my own past, friendships from childhood that had never had the chance to grow into anything more than that. The loop didn’t ask anything of me. Same turns, same junctions, same signposted reassurance every time. Maybe that’s exactly what I needed from it then: one part of life that required no decisions at all, while everything else did.
Sina has a way of showing up steadily in the parts of my life that ask the most of me, and the Eifel marathon was just the most visible instance of something she’d already been doing for a while. It took finishing that marathon with her to make me notice what the loop had stopped giving me. And “finishing” undersells how close I came to not. Three kilometers from the end of the 27, my legs were fine — it was everything above the neck that wasn’t.
Why do I always fuck up at the end. I always start shit but never see it through. That was the loop playing on repeat in my head, and it didn’t sound like doubt, it sounded like a verdict. Sina talked me through those last three kilometers. I don’t think I’d have made it across the line without her voice doing the work mine couldn’t.
That wasn’t a one-off. Looking back at some of the harder years — the moves, the unsettled stretches, the times I was more lost than I let on — she’s been a constant in a way I don’t think I fully credited at the time. The marathon just happened to be the moment that made it visible, three kilometers from a finish line, in a voice I couldn’t argue with even when I wanted to.
I’ve since run several ultras, some of them without her there at all. But on the harder stretches, it’s still her voice I hear more than my own — which feels like the right way to put it: not that she carried me once, but that she’s been carrying me for a while, and the marathon is just the place I finally noticed.
That finish, and the doubt before it, was also the first time in years I’d run a route and felt like I still had a question left to answer. She’s the ultra runner between the two of us, not me, and without her pull toward distance and difficulty — and honestly, without her pulling me through plenty that had nothing to do with running — I don’t think I’d have looked twice at what was waiting barely fifteen kilometers from that same loop I’d run for years.
More on that next — Continue reading in Part 2: Running Off the Map
A note: Sina beat me to publishing. Turns out the split runs the other way from what you’d guess — I’m the one who ends up writing the research, while she’s the embodied experience behind these stories, including most of the running. She’s already shown what that looks like over on Painting the Path: A Body Moving Through Nature’s Artr — her first piece for Lozania Lifestyle. More from her soon!
Written by Ingo@Lozania-Lifestyle.de