Sensory Deprivation

I was asked to participate in a team relay run. The run was something like one hundred and twenty miles total, through the desert, in March. I was put on a team with some people I knew, some I didn't, and I was given an eight mile leg which I was told would probably take place around midnight.

And I kinda did what I always do when I somehow end up in an organized run, I sort of trained, sort of didn't, and then when I was waiting for my teammate to pass me the baton, bouncing from foot to foot to stay warm on a windy, desert mountain pass at 11:34 pm, I immediately regretted not taking my commitment more seriously.

My teammate came running in, I grabbed the baton, and I was off, sprinting down the dark highway shoulder. A support van followed me, driving with their hazards on, straddling the white line. I could see enough by their headlights that I didn't really need my own light.

I was in the middle of nowhere, alone, with only my thoughts. In the distance were the lights of a giant city, but where I was, there was only the one highway. No streetlights, no side roads, no buildings, nothing organic in sight with the exception of my gloved hands. Just me, the van's headlights, and the black, black pavement.

I also did not have a smart watch. I still don't. I have a Timex I bought of Amazon that keeps the time okay but often rearranges the date for me. I did have some headphones, and some poppy workout mix that I had put very little effort into selecting.

I figured I was going to do about ten minute miles. Which meant I would be out there for eighty minutes, or an hour and twenty minutes, depending on what calculation my brain was currently perseverating on.

I realized very quickly, I could not look at the ground while running. I guess I normally look down and ahead of my feet, but due to the weird effect of the moving headlights on the pavement, I quickly developed nausea. So I had to keep my eyes on the city lights on the horizon, but that made me feel so tired. I couldn't believe how much effort it took to keep my gaze up.

But when I looked around, there was nothing but darkness. The ground was dark, the world above me and beside me was dark. Only the shining city was light, but it was too far away, and not really getting any closer, to be real.

My music was subpar, but I couldn't change it without taking my phone out of it's running band, and I couldn't really do that because I was carrying a baton, which I had death gripped. I was terrified of dropping it and losing it in the inky abyss.

And speaking of running... How was I so out of shape? I looked at my watch. It was the only thing I had that marked movement of any kind. With no landmarks to base my orientation in physical space, I had to trust that time still moved where I was. I saw I had only been running for half an hour. That was three miles. I had another five to go.

But I hurt. My brain. My body. My lungs. My emotions... They all hurt. I was running so hard, and yet, I was still mired in the nighttime of a lonely mountain pass, not getting any closer to the city.

Maybe I wasn't actually going anywhere. Maybe I was in a kind of sensory deprivation tank. Or maybe an alternate reality. Maybe I had been kidnapped by aliens and they were experimenting with the limits of a human mind. What happened when you put someone in the dark and told them to run as fast as they could, toward a goal that never got any closer? Did they go insane?

Was I going insane?

At one point a woman passed me. She was fast, way faster than me, and I immediately felt even more out of shape than I had already been feeling. She was the only person I'd seen since starting, and watching her disappear into the darkness before me, I wondered if she would be the last person I ever saw. I wondered if she'd even been real. Was she a NCP? Was she a hologram? Was I real? And then I knew, I would never make it to the next baton hand off point. I was going to forever run on this mountain pass.

A few minutes or hours later, lights behind me shifted. I realized the van was moving up. They were leaving me!

But they didn't, they rolled up beside me. A woman sat in the passenger seat. She was one of the sag wagon people on our team, but I had never met her.

"You want some water?" she asked.

And I nodded because talking to her, taking the water... That meant I was still connected to people.

"You need anything else?" she asked.

I glanced at my watch. I had been running for about thirty-six minutes. I knew I would regret the question, but I said, "How many miles have I run?"

And I prepared to be crushed, to know that I was going to be in the perpetual pain cave of darkness for maybe the rest of my life.

"You're over five in," she said. "Less than three to go."

I had closed my eyes. I opened them and stumbled because it was real dark and weird and I was still running next to a van on an open high way in the middle of the night. But I recovered. I did not stop running.

"I've gone five?" I managed.

"Over five. You're in the home stretch."

And with that, the van slowed and dropped from my vision, and I was once again, alone, running at the city which never got any closer.

I almost missed my hand off point. I reached an intersection, which was jarring as it was the first thing I'd actually seen since I started running. I'd known I had to take a left turn prior to the baton hand off point. I saw the left turn; a runner was rounding it. I set my eyes on it, and dug deep.

"YO!" someone screamed.

I looked to my right and saw a cop standing on the dark street.

"You should go that way," he said.

I followed his arm and saw, not twenty yards in front of me, a screaming mass of people. The baton hand off. I sprinted in and crashed into our next runner. She looked offended, which was probably fair, but recovered and shot out of the chute.

"Whoa, were you just going to run the whole thing?" my friend asked, who was trying to pull me out of the mass of caution tape and cones I'd crashed into.

"I didn't see you all," I said. "I thought I had to take a left."

She looked at me like I was crazy. There were hundreds of screaming people on the sidewalk. But for me, they'd appeared in an instant.

"They changed it," she finally said. "And you were a lot faster than you said you'd be. You were supposed to run tens. But you were running sub 8:20's. You're a sandbagger."

But I felt like I'd been taken from Earth by aliens and then brought home and dumped, completely unceremoniously, back into my life. No one knew I'd been gone but me.

No wonder I felt like I was running the most difficult ten minute miles of my life. And no wonder I was running fast. I looked back at the mountain pass. It was just a wall of black.

I shivered, and someone handed me a coat. I took it, and turned my back on the pass, walking toward my waiting teammates.

They were real. They had to be.