My friends.  What follows is a piece I constructed specifically for my friend Eric who is running his third Leadville 100 this week.   But, you are welcome to enjoy it on any of your endurance races or workouts.  I had in mind a modern, endurance sports version of a Pilgrim’s Progress or Dante’s Journey or any other spiritual journey metaphor you like. 
Those spiritual journeys that strip away the dirt and fluff of life and lay bare the soul.  It’s a bit of performance art, an endurance poem or prayer and I hope it makes you think, or, even better, makes you feel. 
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Breath deep the gathering Gloom
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Is everybody in?  Is everybody in? 
The Ceremony is about to begin
Awake! 
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Let me tell you a story. 
A story not about a runner but about a soul.  The core of a transient being that strives and learns and grows and fights is the soul – the spirit, the essence, that thing which is unbreakable and infinite within each of us. 
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Picture if you will a small house nestled closely in the jack pines.  A rustic fence runs close by.  The grass is tall and wild, not with neglect, but in keeping with the nature of the place.  There is a sense of warmth and comfort and homey-ness.
This soul awakes in a comfortable, warm bed in a homestead on the edge of the prairie to the shout of bird song and glow of a rising sun.  The bad is warm and well-worn with the wakings of many morns. 
But today after many years of comfort the soul is restless.  The soul sense an emptiness.  Nothing particular, just a ghostly nag of a feeling that tugs at the fabric of the mind like a cat clawing the curtains. 
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The kitchen is warm and the coffee soothing. The wooden chairs creak with comfort.  The soul’s gaze crosses the prairie to the great purple mountains.  The one forbidding peak majestic among the rest, rising from the prairie like a great cruel master.  Restlessness and the stirrings of wanderlust climb up the soul’s spine.   
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The soul is a searcher.  The searcher could stay here behind the gnarled fence posts of day to day existence but the purple mountains call.   A whispering buzz on the wind like the cooing of a seductress – the mountains song a sirens paean that is stitched into our souls.   
The soul could stay but the searcher cannot.  To stay is to give away that unknown part of life that calls us.  To stay is to give up.  To choose an empty comfort over a fulfilling hardship is for the weak and equivocating – the cold and timid souls.  
The searcher puts on shoes and socks and wraps in skins.  The searcher stuffs some sustenance in a bag and strides forth into the dry grass of the Prairie.  Pausing at the fence the searcher is filled with the joy of adventure.  Not the completion of the adventure, not the embarking of adventure – the searcher is filled up to the brim with the ambition of adventure.  
For in the ambition of adventure is infinite possibility. 
The searcher does not know what is out there. The searcher does not know how the mountain will be climbed.  The searcher does not know how to survive.  The searcher knows only that the kinetic joy of moving forward into the unknown greatly outweighs the pain of sleeping through life.  
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Hours into the journey to the mountain the searcher is tired and thirsty.  The feet are hot and the back is sore.  There is doubt.  There are those small voices that nag and promise to forgive all if only we can turn back now.  But the die is cast and there is only one way out. There is only one way through.  That way is forward. Forward into the unknown heights of perilous adventure.  
The searcher stops to slake at a cold clear stream the cuts the prairie mounds. Stooping to splash cold water on a hot neck and head.  The great refreshment of effort and rest well earned.  The great trial not yet beginning, not yet known.  The searcher is filled with joy.  The joy cascades through the body like the cold water running down the neck and back.  
It is the joy of freedom.  The joy of tossing away constraints and