Ariana Kelly: AT ELEVATION • Cleaver Magazine

Ariana Kelly
AT ELEVATION

In mid-June after my sophomore year at Yale, I took a Greyhound bus from New Haven, Connecticut to Boise, Idaho for $59.00. The ride took three-and-a-half days, during which two people were kicked off in Ohio for smoking pot, and another three in Nebraska for being belligerent drunks. In Wyoming, a passenger died after slipping into a diabetic coma without anyone noticing. By that time most of the bus was legless, having passed around a bottle of room-temperature vodka for hours. It was four in the morning when we finally pulled into Boise. I’d have to wait another several hours for my friend Katy to pick me up in her Mazda station wagon she filled with a dollar’s worth of gas at a time. We were that broke.

That’s why, after spending a day recovering from the trip at Katy’s parents’ house, where we would be living, both of us hit the streets of downtown Boise looking for work. Though I only had one hundred and seventy-three dollars in my bank account, I wasn’t worried. I didn’t need to be. It was the late nineties, I wasn’t paying rent, and within a few days I landed positions as a barista, a waitress and, with Katy, a “sous chef” at a fast-food pasta restaurant. “We’re really putting our Ivy League educations to work,” we liked to say, usually when we were leaning against the red linoleum counter, mindlessly filling circular to-go containers with Italian vinaigrette to kill the dead time, which there was a lot of because the restaurant had at most two customers an hour.

In any case, we weren’t really interested in putting our Ivy League educations to work, not yet. We were living together out west so we could run at elevation and prepare for our upcoming college cross-country seasons. While Boise rests at two thousand feet, it’s in driving distance of the Sawtooth range, which has dozens of peaks over ten thousand feet where we could train our bodies to exist on very little oxygen, then luxuriate them in an oxygen-plush atmosphere when we raced at sea level on the East Coast. Katy and I shared a kind of crazy, first-love, obsessional devotion for long-distance running harbored since we were freshmen in high school growing up across the country from one another, she in Idaho, me in New Hampshire.

I wasn’t recruited, but I understood that my athletic accomplishments had helped me get accepted to Yale, filling out the sketch of a promising young woman from distressed circumstances doing everything possible to succeed. That’s when the ideal college applicant was “well-rounded,” accomplished in several different areas as opposed to being “pointy,” an afficionado in one. No doubt I benefited from the interpretation of affirmative action that favored applicants from impoverished rural backgrounds. I still remember the morning I took a long walk in the farmland surrounding my boarding school’s campus, trying to collect myself before I checked my mailbox for the proverbial letter that I believed would dictate my future. Peering into the glass front of my box when I was sure no one else would be in the mailroom, I saw a thin, emaciated envelope and prepared myself for disappointment. When I read that I’d been accepted, I raced out of the mailroom, up the stairs to my guidance counselor’s office, and begged her to let me use her phone to call my parents. This achievement would mean as much to them as to me. Acceptance to Yale meant acceptance into the elite.

Without thinking much about what else I could do with the time I would spend training and racing—three to four hours in the afternoon, another ten to twenty on the weekend—I walked onto Yale’s cross-country team, immediately got injured and decided, after nine months in an orthopedic boot and daily visits to the physical therapist, that I wanted to be an Olympic runner. Going straight from high school, which had felt as pressurized as Hollywood depictions of Wall Street, I’d started college and immediately become addicted to the intense athletic schedule, which filled every moment of spare time and gave me a sense of belonging and purpose, even though I’d had the sense starting from my senior year in high school that what I needed wasn’t ways to fill my time but time itself. Though only four hours from my home in New Hampshire, Yale might as well have been the moon in terms of psychological distance.

When I arrived in New Haven on a hot, muggy day, what I’d ostensibly chosen Yale for—its famous literature and theory department—faded to the background. The genuine curiosity and drive I had brought to my studies in boarding school, in public school before that, and on my own in the woods, transferred solely to running. I became addicted to the chemical high long-distance running induces, but the deeper dependency was to the feeling of immediate approval that came with finishing first. More importantly, winning races only required me, not anyone else. I was utterly self-contained, in need of no one. I was always hungry but elated by my hunger, always tired but energized by my fatigue. I’d never learned how to ski or skate—too expensive, too time intensive, too whatever—but in running I came close to the effortless gliding those sports embodied. Before a race I went through an elaborate purification ritual, shampooing with special shampoos, washing with special soaps. If I could have sacrificed a hecatomb, I would have. I wanted to be utterly empty, utterly clean—and then emerge from a race covered in the mud and the snow and the brush I ran through so I could see what had happened to me. My mother, whose parents had prohibited her from doing anything athletic for fear that she would suffer a permanent injury or die, lived through me, clapping and screaming so hard at every race that her hands were black and blue, and she lost her voice from cheering.

In Boise, Katy and I attempted to take our regime to the next level. We ran one-hundred-mile weeks. We completed excruciatingly painful speed workouts. We reduced our diets to the bare minimum of what we needed to survive. We drove to the mountains to run at elevation. In the last two weeks of the summer, we traveled with her parents and brother to their family cabin in Montana. We were in Big Sky country, where speed limits are suggestions and glaciers still play a prominent role in shaping the landscape, even as they are melting. The afternoon we arrived Katy and I went out for a walk on the vast plains that dead-ended a few hundred miles away in a mountain range. After five minutes we encountered a family of grizzly bears lounging near the river that ran alongside their property. The area was teeming with mountains lions too, we were told, which made running a dicey proposition. “Mountain lions will track you from half a mile away,” Katy’s father told me, “and when they attack they’re not going to leave anything for us to mourn.” At dusk he taught me how to fire a gun, an old rifle whose kickback shocked my ears and left a bruise on my shoulder. He tossed can after can into the cobalt sky, instructing me to train my sights and steady my hand.

In another two years, after graduating, Katy would be in her second year at Yale Law School, and I’d find myself commuting to my work as a barista and receptionist over Colorado’s Loveland Pass, a twelve-thousand-foot-high road that contours the Continental Divide. It’s one of the highest mountain passes in the world and one of the only to stay open during the winter. Bordered by ski areas—Loveland to the east and Arapahoe Basin to the west—it’s popular with backcountry skiers and snowboarders. Steep ascents, narrow chutes, wide-open bowls, all without trails, lifts, or patrols. People who went out in search of fresh tracks had to herringbone up what they wanted to ski down. Towards midnight stands of people lounged by the guard rails of the pass, casually leaning against their skis and snowboards as if they were loitering on a city street corner, waiting for rides home. On certain nights when the spirit moved me, I’d pull over to loiter with them, breathing in that sparest of air, trying to get clean from the inside out.

At Yale it was routine for female students, whether they were runners or not, to go away for the summer and come back in the fall looking like they’d spent three months in a concentration camp, reduced by the violent efforts at self-improvement many of us undertook. Born wealthy, poor, middle-class, black, brown, or white, many women there felt a universal mandate to disappear themselves; disappearing was an integral aspect of excelling. That September I returned to school as a junior visibly lighter than when I left for Idaho, having put myself through grueling diets and training regimes for the past twelve weeks. The more I ran, the less I ate, and the more ecstatic I felt. In conquering powerful sensations of hunger and fatigue, I felt in control of my world, superior to my peers who satisfied their hunger rather than withstanding it.

When I competed in my first race, I dropped two and a half minutes from my time. I crossed the finish line with no one else remotely in sight behind me. In the following weeks, I kept dropping more time, winning more races. It was intoxicating to be so good at something. After practices I spent long hours submerged in ice baths to help my muscles recover faster. Once a week I stood on a scale in front of my coach. I’d been told that I couldn’t slip beneath 105 pounds or else I’d be pulled from racing, though everyone knew this rule was never enforced. My coach even described me as being “too sturdy to break,” which I internalized as an insult because I wanted to be what society wanted women to be: delicate, fragile, breakable.

Not only did weight loss improve my running performance, it also made me visible to people who had formerly looked right through me. The hollows beneath my cheekbones, the shadows cast by my collarbones, the suggestion that I was more of an x-ray of a person than a person—all of that made me enormously appealing to both men and women, but especially men. I looked haunted and thus like I would do dangerous things. I did do dangerous things.

After our weekly race, someone on the team would host a celebratory party which always involved a keg, a crate of Franzia, and a bevy of cheap liquors. For the first time I wasn’t drinking alone, sequestered in a dorm room; I was drinking with other others and that, along with the fact that so many of the students spent their weekend evenings this way, made me feel normal. In boarding school I’d been too frightened of losing my scholarship to drink more than a few furtive sips, but in college I started consuming regularly. I’d done what I’d set out to accomplish—changed my trajectory and arrived at an Ivy League school—but the journey had been stressful in ways that were beyond my abilities to articulate or understand at that time. Once I became an elite runner (the symbolism is almost too apt), I drank at parties to celebrate winning a race, using my victories as an excuse to get dead drunk. For someone who weighed barely more than a hundred pounds, I could consume an astonishing amount of liquor. I didn’t learn until much later that alcoholics tend to be people who can withstand the effects of alcohol better than other people. Later still, I realized that my most constant companions during all my travels, literal and figurative, had been drinking and running, the one making the other necessary, the one making the other possible.

By then I was living on less than three hours of sleep a night and fewer than six hundred calories a day. The problem with trying to become better is that no sooner do you achieve one state than another, fleeter, more perfect version of yourself begins to float ahead of you, the mirage for which you’ll cross any length of difficult terrain to reach. If I didn’t run at least ten miles in a day I’d lock myself in my room until night gave me the opportunity to reset and start again, running twenty miles to make up for what I’d lost the day before.

As I continued to win races and drop time, I lost other things besides body weight, including my tolerance for ambiguity. I’d stay up for days on end earning As on all my papers and tests, or I wouldn’t show up to class at all. I’d attend to my family and friends with manic intensity or completely isolate myself, not bothering to return their calls until someone became concerned enough to search me out. If I didn’t feel like I could do something superlatively, I didn’t do it at all. Many years later, I learned that a common term for this kind of all-or-nothing thinking is cognitive distortion and that it’s often a symptom of anxiety and depression, but at the time I had no language for it, and thus could not escape from or diffuse it except by drinking. I had read John Parker’s cult classic Once A Runner and agreed completely with the sentiments of the long-distance runner protagonist Quentin Cassidy: “Running to him was real; the way he did it the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free.”

Running is real. In comparison to the mercurial world in which they occur, distances and times are incontrovertible and unchanging. You can measure yourself against a time and achieve personal records that are inviolable to everyone but you. To run a 16:20 5K, a 9:05 3K, and a 3:40 1500 is to have a certain part of your self—your lightness, speed, ability to endure—quantified, made fact and recorded somewhere, even if only in your own memory. Running was particularly vivid in comparison to the dot.com boom happening at the same time I was running hundreds of miles each week, losing inches from my body mass. Between the fall of 1995 to early 2000, the stock market rose 400 percent. Some of my classmates were becoming wealthy enough to retire before they left college. The world that was emerging as I graduated had invisible but enforceable rules I had no idea how to navigate.

At the end of my junior year, after my roommates had left for the summer, I found myself on the floor of my dorm living room, unshowered for three days, drinking a bottle of amaretto and unable to move. I’d run as hard as I possibly could and ended up 43rd at Nationals, not a shameful finish, but not indicative of someone Olympic-bound. At my best, I was very good, no more, yet getting to that level had required me to give up most of my friendships, all my mental focus, and a fair amount of my physical body. My natural gifts only took me so far, and I would need to narrow my life to a finer pinpoint to achieve anything more. Good was not good enough, not to me. I took no pleasure or pride in it, only shame that I wasn’t better.

Through the open windows I could hear the maintenance teams mowing the lawns, deadheading the flowers, and sanitizing the buildings, making way for another tide of ambitious students. On the floor, staring at the ceiling, I tried to form this simple thought in German, which I was studying for my Literature degree: Ich werde nie die Olympischen Spiele erreichen. I will never reach the Olympics. Ich werde immer allein sein. I will always be alone. In that moment the dream of greatness I had been pursuing became just that, a dream, as worthless as currency from a country that no longer exists. In a few hours my father would be arriving to help me pack and drive me back to New Hampshire.

For many people, running is part of a healing process. They take it up to deal with grief, work, depression, addiction, aging, or other ailments. We know the science of what happens to the body when endorphins are released, the “runner’s high” that often translates into people feeling more energized and grounded in their own lives. For me, however, running was part of the original wound. I loved it like I would love a life companion on whom I was dependent for everything: happiness, meaning, and stability. I loved it too much, held onto it too tightly. I was completely, utterly, irrevocably addicted to it. Once, I ran past a group of teenagers who were smoking on a corner. They yelled good-naturedly as I flew past: “Damn, girl, stop that. Don’t you know running is bad for you??”

“I’ve tried to stop, and I just can’t,” I yelled back, not joking at all.

Ariana Kelly is the author of phone booth (Bloomsbury, 2015), and has essays, poems and reviews out or forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, Bellingham Review, Vol. One Brooklyn, Bloodroot, Hobart, Salon, Lit Hub, The LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her essay “Challenger” was selected as a notable piece in the 2020 Best American Essay Anthology, edited by Katherine Schultz. She is a 2023 recipient of a Jack Hazard Fellowship, awarded to help finish her manuscript, a memoir titled Lay Me Down Like a Stone.