Belay Off
Opposite page: Jack Boler hangs out after the race with friends he made while running. Far left: Sam Verplanck, Jesse Crowell, Mary Jantsch, Jack Boler, and Maggie Dillon post after the race. Sam and Maggie, coursemates, met up with the runners at the end of the race. Left: Mary’s tongue speaks for her feet as she makes her way through Delhi. Mary Jantsche
packs for the very first time and walked into the Himalaya. I saw it in the people who lived in the mountains we passed through. I saw it in the mother of my home stay, who would come down from the hills every day after cutting grass with a stack so big it looked like part of the hillside was moving. I even saw it from the earth as massive boulders clenched the steep mountainsides like that last baby tooth unwilling to fall from your gums. Maybe we hadn’t been hitting the pavement, but I had been hit with something much stronger. India had become more than just a place where gigantic tectonic plates waged war on each other to challenge me. It was finally my turn to exercise the power of mental fortitude that I had been developing throughout my course, and in the rather flat landscape that is New Delhi, I would face my biggest mountain yet. There was a day toward the end of our first backpacking section wherein we gathered around an old sit-pad with the word SMART thickly imprinted in it with a Sharpie. Goal setting. On the day of the race, Jack, Jesse, and I set our own specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely goal. It was simple: never stop running. Our goal was shorter than the tool itself, and though it became a lot harder around kilometer 18, I’m proud to say, as my throbbing toes and knees could attest, we all met that goal. Though our fellow runners didn’t know what to think of the three westerners chanting “NOLS” around kilometer five, or why we began offering feedback to everyone around kilometer 10, or even why we apologized to LNT every time we threw the water bottles to the ground, they did know we were giving 100 percent. We made new best friends among the other runners as Jack and Jesse took to motivating any runner who even looked like he or she was thinking about walking. I learned more about the lives of strangers than what’s probably normal during a race and got a running tour of the monuments of Delhi people travel all this way just to see. Indian college bands that had passed the tryouts performed along the sidelines of the course, and one in particular helped me through a time when I thought my legs were going to fall off. It’s possible I was delirious and dehydrated, but as I began the last, longest kilometer of my life, I met eyes with the lead singer. He had taken his eyes off his cell phone only for a second, as he was using it to look up the lyrics of “Summer of ‘69” by Bryan Adams. I was pulled in a hundred differ-
ent directions, but mostly, I wanted to just stand there and laugh at the situation I’d found myself in. Foot after foot, though, I continued on, leaving that scene where I like to imagine that band is eternally playing Canadian rock songs. And then it came. Boler and Crowell had just crossed the finish line and were there waiting for me with smiles bigger than their faces. Twenty-one kilometers later and we were all still standing. The thought of that kind of distance before my NOLS course would have just made me laugh in disbelief. Post-NOLS, however, it wasn’t
On the day of the race, Jack, Jesse, and I set our own specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely goal. It was simple: never stop running. even a question. I was certain in our ability because of our determination, our grit. We looked at each other trying to understand how we just conquered the last two hours. We were giddy, we were ecstatic, and we could hardly move without our muscles screaming at us. It was a beautiful thing. NOLS had given me that sense of power in mind that I knew I would finish what I had started. The three of us would fall asleep in a rickshaw in the middle of Delhi later that day, but in that moment, at that time, I felt alive.
Spring 2012
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