By Amanda Knox

I’m not ready.

Sure, I’ve trained. I did a pretty good job too, the first four of eight weeks. I ran three days a week, two short days and one long day, each week adding another half mile to the short days and a mile to the long day. But halfway through my resolve was contaminated. Excuses became more and more obscure. Dance class counts as running. Biking to work counts as running. Moving my belongings to a new house counts as running.

It doesn't.

I know this from years of training for soccer. Shooting practice, strength training, even scrimmaging was negotiable, but the running that came at the beginning and end of the practice session was not. That’s because oftentimes, with all due respect to the game, it all comes down to which team can outrun the other. 

Nothing gets you ready to run 13.1 miles like running 13.1 miles. So far in my training, in one go I’ve only managed nine. 

So, I’m not ready. And hey, that’s OK. They didn’t name the half-marathon “The NorthFace Endurance Challenge” for nothing. Once I’ll have begun the run, it’s not like I’ll have a choice about whether or not I’m going to make it. The trail makes a loop around the remote hills of Park City, Utah, and going all the way is the only way. It’s going to kick my butt, but in the mere act of making it, I’ll have kicked its butt back.

Ain’t that the only way? And isn’t that why we do this to ourselves in the first place? That is, isn’t any act of surviving a ritual reminder of the long haul that is our every challenge, that is our life? Isn’t that what Finding Nemo taught us? Just keep swimming…just keep swimming…

Over these few days, I get to observe, experience, and contemplate distance in ways I don’t usually get to in my day-to-day life in a walkable, urban environment. My marathon by foot is preceded by a marathon by wheel. To get to these special 13.1 miles and 3000ft of rise in elevation, I’ve traversed over two days 832 miles comprised of Eastern Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Utah. 

I always forget and am awed by the landscape as it exists where there is no coast. There are dry, flat stretches of nothing but weeds and tumbleweeds. The horizons are blurred by heat. Green fields are homogenous, vegetable entities. Open spaces between places are smooth straightaways or else hypnotizing hills and valleys interrupted only by jutting, crumbling rock face. My Subaru is a caterpillar on a highway of the outermost branches. The sky seems to reach farther, fall deeper.

I can only attempt to describe the feeling I get looking out at such rises and expanses by referring to the familiar. The land is an ocean as seen from the shore. It stretches out indefinitely, patched with dark and light. When there are hills on the horizon, they are like desert islands, or they are like the frozen fossils of giant waves. The sky is an ocean as seen from above. The clouds are the white crests of ever-undulating waves and the hawks are like anchovies glinting close to the surface.

Such lazy thoughts speed through me as the dry, patient miles speed below me at 70 mph.

I see the dusty hills rise around me and wonder about how it will feel look to run up, down, and around them. I wonder how long it will take, how much sweat I will expel, how soon cramps will riddle my muscles and aches my joints. 

I think the world out here doesn’t feel Amanda-sized as much as the city does. In my everyday world, feet and legs are an appropriate instrument for maneuvering the available space. In no way is that practical, if possible, out here.

Remote, inland distance is an unfamiliar beast for me, and I wonder how it is to live adapted to it. On the way to Utah, I saw low-rise metropolises that yawned across flatlands, gaping parking lots, shopping centers bigger than state-run college campuses, and single properties that had their own highway exits. Expanses between expanses.

I don’t know yet what to make of it except to note that immensity is noteworthy, useful for recalling perspective, and awe-inspiring. But we’ll see how well I feel about it after the race tomorrow.