(And what | learned from it.) BY ASHLEY REAM

Four years later, the words “mile 17” still mean for me the point at which

it occurs to you that this thing, whatever it is, might not be worth it. It’s the crossroads and the low point rolled into one. It is the point where you most want to give up and the point where you have to decide not to. It’s amazing how many things, things that aren’t ultramarathons, have a mile 17.

C ALICO, CALIFORNIA, January 20, 2008—The Calico Trail Run 50K, mile 17.

In the beginning

I wasn’t a born runner. I had made it through high school and college without ever joining a cross-country team or so much as taking up recreational jogging. But in my mid-20s, the metabolism of a hummingbird I had taken for granted had abandoned me, and all the hours I had spent tapping out novels on a keyboard— five books written before the first one was published—hadn’t exercised anything but my typing skills, leaving me bereft in a series of fluorescent-lit fitting rooms with a stack of ever-larger jeans.

Preferring a challenge to endless hours on an elliptical machine, I signed up for a 5K before I could run a mile. By the time spring turned to summer, I was hooked. The 5K became a 10K became a half-marathon became a full, and before I had even crossed the finish line of the 2007 LA Marathon, my first, I was thinking about running an ultra.

The romance of it appealed to me. It felt powerful to be able to cover seemingly inhuman distances on my own two feet. It felt primal to go off road and sprint into the mountains with the rattlesnakes and the coyotes. Leaving the ordered streets and prim sidewalks behind felt like going rogue. I liked saying to people I met at cocktail parties that I was going to run “an ultra,” a race so rarefied that almost none of them had heard of it.

Besides, my knees were killing me. The constant pounding on hard asphalt for road races had resulted in chronic patello-femoral pain, the far-too-cavalierly named “runner’s knee.” I had spent weeks in physical therapy and hours with ice packs strapped to my legs, and I had purchased corrective braces and therapy equipment to use at home. By the time I ran the LA Marathon, I was doing almost an hour of physical therapy each night to counteract the pounding I did during the day.

I was logging hundreds of miles on the asphalt path that winds down the beach from the Pacific Palisades south through Santa Monica, which smells like money and fresh roast coffee, and past Venice, California, which smells more like patchouli and hot dogs. The path took me past the famed Muscle Beach, past a theme park on a pier, past homeless encampments and tattoo parlors and surfers and sailboats bobbing in the Pacific. I ran surrounded by flocks of pigeons that competed with the seagulls for discarded scraps and met the occasional pelican, enormous creatures above all that petty bickering. It was good for my soul, but my joints were paying the price.

By comparison, trail running was like bounding across pillow-top mattresses for 30 miles. Once I had switched my long runs to dirt and traded in flat bike paths and an ocean view for mountains with mule deer for company, all of my previous repetitive stress injuries, including the “runner’s knee,” melted away. My therapy equipment collected dust.

My body rejoiced. I had never been a fast runner, only a determined one, and the longer the distance, the more endurance and bullheadedness were prized over speed, which suited me just fine. I had found my sport.

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A Participant drop bags being loaded near the start line in the historic ghost town of Calico.