I don't know if you've ever reached for that caressing touch of a mountain trail when it calls, but if you have, you may have also, like me, scratched it and pulled it and chewed on it until you could taste its bark and its mercury and its smoke.

And i don't know if you have ever heard in the silence between hearbeats that voice when it reaches out for you. i heard it faintly on a trail in chamonix and it asked me that i stop looking for a reason to do what i do. "why am i in chamonix when i'm not even racing?" but the voice doesn't answer that question. it has more important things to say.

So here i attempt to capture that voice, knowing i will fail because it isn't really a voice, as i said it is more of a caress, a gentle force that touches your skin and opens your pores and infuses you with the wordless knowledge of salt.

But if it was a voice, i think it would say this:

You're here now, so devote yourself to this feeling, for no reason other than you have known it to be true. honor it because you have it, and work at it with the discipline and dedication you know you have reserved just for this purpose. this purpose of purposes that has, it is true, no real purpose. but what if we could redefine purpose under the same rubrics wild animals do? what if we measured time with a ruler, like a botanist tracking the growth of 1mm of moss over the course of many decades? we took the morning train to a nearby town on the tuesday of utmb week to run a route that we knew would keep us from the bustle of chamonix until at least 3pm (god forbid), and we chose this not as a missed opportunity but as a fertilizer of all opportunities, an unmeasurable enhancement of life in general, and all that would come after.

The one and most natural thing to do if you find yourself in chamonix for utmb week is to look around and stop wondering why or how so many of us have dedicated so much time and money and energy to this thing. stop wondering now, the answer is self-evident, we're all here and that's the why and the how. why is taste? why is moss? would you ask such a thing? as a bird flies and a rock erodes, you run trails. You don't need a reason and you don't need permission. you're here and this here-ness suffices, is cosmic truth, is the beginning and end of what you're here to do.