retch-ed

This was originally published in The Sheet. Thanks Jack Lunch! My birthday was a week ago but make sure you give Kira a smooch for her 23rd.

Sunday, September 7th. 8am. A brisk and smoky morning in Lee Vining. I fiddled with my headphones, pressed my “Picky Era” playlist on Spotify, and started my strava. “3…2…1…,” called a voice behind me. And then, we were off. All 43 participants in the Tioga Pass Run.

The week before, my boss asked me if I wanted to do the race. “You like running,” he said. “Why don’t you give it a whirl?”

He told me he’d pay for my registration, as long as I wrote an oped about it.

“Deal,” I replied. I had no idea what I was getting into.

It was my first time up Tioga Pass. I expected to be awestruck by the immense mountainous walls, to delight in the striations of the granite walls. It’s only 4,000 feet of elevation gain, I thought. How bad could it be?

Bad. It could be really bad. I didn’t realize how steep it would be, or how much the smoke would affect me. I didn’t account for the constant stream of cars whizzing by. Within two miles, I threw up. Again, at five miles. A third, at the eight mile mark. My body was possessed by a stream of mucus. The raw skin between my thighs rubbed together so much that my legs started to bleed. I wanted to cry. I wanted to stick my thumb out and hitch-hike down the pass, all the way back home to Salt Lake City, Utah.

My saving grace was my support team, composed of my best friend Kalyn Dawes and Tenaya, the perfect, perfect dog I’ve been dog-sitting for. Kalyn is my friend whose dad almost married my mom, making her the closest thing I have to a sister. (Don’t ask too many questions. It’s complicated.) The two of them waited for me in the open-hatch back of Kalyn’s 2007 Honda Accord at every pull-out along the pass. I’d round the corner to see my friend in her yellow Black Rock City EMS sweatshirt, kicking her flip-flop adorned feet, her arm draped around Tenaya’s sandy-blonde fury body. Each time they saw me coming, they jumped out of the car and ran alongside me.

“Come on, dude, you can do this, you’re so strong,” Kalyn would say. She pushed her thick silver-rimmed sunglasses up her head and flashed me her biggest grin. Tenaya’s ears perked and her long pink tongue dangled from the side of her mouth, like come on, let’s go, chop chop, I don’t have all day.

In college, my friends and I used to joke that Kalyn was the fastest woman in Hanover, New Hampshire. Two weeks ago, she placed first in her age group at the Double Dipsea race in Marin. Her philosophy is preserve, preserve, preserve, then hunt.

“Save your energy for the first six miles,” she told me before the race. “Then bam, another one, bam another one. There’s nothing worse than getting passed.”

At mile six, I was passed by an old guy with thick, sinewy calves and a woman in green who looked a little older than me. Damn it. I was getting hunted. Cue the puke.

I found my stride at mile nine. I passed the old guy with the calves and the green girl and the couple in front of me who kept sprinting then walking then sprinting again. My eyes were burning and my legs were aching and I was out of water but I kept putting one foot in front of the other until. Finally. The finish.

I ate a pickle and grabbed a beer and someone asked me if I would ever do the run again. “Absolutely not,” I replied. Finisher after finisher kept coming up to Tenaya, cupping her loose-puppy face in their hands, telling us how much they loved seeing her throughout the race. Thanks, Kalyn and I said. We didn’t know how to say that this was actually not our dog, that her good behavior was actually none of our doing.

Kalyn and I exchanged a look. We tucked the dog into the Honda and drove away, through the gates of Yosemite National Park.

“We gotta go to Lake Tenaya,” Kalyn said. “I have these snacks in my bag, and we have to eat them.”

Okay dude, I don’t really want a snack. I thought. But I love her, so I obliged. We wanted to bring the dog Tenaya to her namesake body of water, but the signs forbid it. Instead, we sat on the grainy beach and looked out at the shimmering blue lake.

Kalyn pulled a Churro Cheesecake and two candles from her Cotopaxi backpack. She sang me happy birthday.

“Sorry I can’t be there on the real day,” she said.

I smiled and shook my head. “No no, this is all I want.”

We pressed our fingers into the sweet general-store cheesecake and licked the caramel from our fingers until we were full. Then we peeled the clothes off our bodies and waded into the water.