By Miriam Beyer

Spill #1: I was having fun. About an hour and a half into my first trail race, I was feeling everything I’d wanted to feel at the Boston Marathon a month earlier: Light and lithe, with easy legs and good spirits. Boston was the whole reason I was here; in the 80-degree temperatures that cloaked Patriot’s Day this year, I hadn’t had the race in Boston I’d wanted. I was bounding Bear Mountain to try to cash in the spring marathon training I still felt I had in me. I needed to feel spent. I needed to feel destroyed. And I needed a challenge that was as different from Boston as possible. This gnarly trail marathon promised to deliver.

I was hopping from rocks to roots to boulders, through muddy creeks, feeling alternately like a frog and an antelope. Loving it. Sensing my new trail shoes become progressively, gloriously wetter and filthier. Enjoying the rhythm of a trail race, new to me, where sometimes you’re close to other runners and sometimes you’re alone. I’d passed the second aid station, around 9 miles in, where I discovered exactly how delicious flat Coke is when you’re running. I’d downed four paper cups of it and packed a few Saltines in my cheek for the road. I was approaching the portion of the course I knew; the week before, Ben from the North Brooklyn Runners and two of his friends had given me a preparatory preview of this section, one of the more intense on the route. It had been a very good introduction, and I knew I was in for scrappy climbing and Oh-Shit descents. I sucked salt from my soggy crackers and began the trek up.

I was in a shifting group of about six runners, and we crested a hill and skimmed across flat rock. A small stone structure was built into and opened onto the ledge. It was peaceful, and if I’d been hiking I would have stopped here for the view. As it was, I approached the edge and looked into a plummeting trail of jutting roots and slick rocks. Oh-Shit.

I started down with the fellow runner I’d begun to (very un-creatively) call Mr. Gray (he was wearing, ah, a gray shirt). About halfway down I got into a groove and started descending faster, moving ahead of Mr. Gray. When the hill leveled at the bottom I stretched my stride and leaped toward a small creek, after which another hill rose. With the momentum of the downhill in my legs, I lunged ballet-like across the water; I remember thinking to myself that I felt very graceful. My left foot nailed a slippery rock on the other side and I bit it. Mr. Gray crossed the creek in one beautiful step and asked if I was okay. I nodded. Humbled. He and BlueTank and No-Shirty-Small-Waisty passed, and I shook out my ankle and carried on. Sniffed. I definitely needed another Coke.

Spill #2: I got my Coke at the third aid station. In fact, I got six of them. Then with a chivalrous (or cruel) sweep of his hand, Mr. Gray had ushered me ahead of him up the next scrambling climb, and I was now moving steadily along a grassy ridge at the top, nearing BlueTank ahead, feeling generally light and sprite-like. When it happened, BlueTank heard it. Or maybe he heard my bellowing. I can’t tell you exactly what I said but it rhymed with this: “Buck. Buuuuuck. Bit! BIIIIIT!” Pounding the ground for emphasis. “Bit! Bit, that hurts.” BlueTank doubled back and came to me. “Are you okay?” I’d fallen on a rock on both knees and now I pulled off the trail, blessing kind BlueTank to continue on. He did. Mr. Gray passed. Four more guys passed. The self-assurances began, out loud: “You’re okay. You’re okay. Just keep moving.” I obeyed, after a few more select bucks and bits. I didn’t notice the blood running down my knees until—

Spill #3: The problem with falling, for me, is that once it happens, I become worried that it will happen again, and then it does happen again because I’m worrying about it and not concentrating on what I should be concentrating on, which is my footing. Spill #3 was exactly this. I was worrying about falling and so I fell. The trail was dark dirt now and both knees were moon pies of mud after I went down. I wiped away the dirt and noticed the bloody right knee puncture from the last fall. I washed it with water from my bottle and squeezed to see how deep it was; yep, okay, I didn’t need to see that. I asked myself, “What is the worst that can happen here, Miriam?” I decided the answer was that I could lose a lot of blood and faint, at which point someone would surely pass and find me and bring me to aid. Not a bad enough (or probable enough) scenario to warrant stopping. Onward.

Spill #4: I had just hopped a fallen tree and was thinking about that scene in “Dirty Dancing” when they’re dancing on a log. The song from that scene, “Hey, hey baby!” came into my head. I fell sideways as if someone pushed me and remembered that yes, no, trail running and daydreaming don’t really go well together. The side of my thigh took one for the team. At the final aid station I had seven Cokes. And oranges. After each orange I exclaimed with drama, “Mmm, YUM!” and the aid table volunteer very graciously put up with that.

Spill #5: My three final falls all occurred in the last four miles. Around mile 22 I was running alone, talking freely out loud to the trees: “Oh, you’re pretty. You’re very pretty. You! You are so tall and green!” I approached a gradual decline dotted with uneven rocks and kind of laughed and said, again out loud, “Oh yes, you are going to fall here.” I fell like a somersault in gymnastics class: Down, tumble, up. Checkmark. Next.

Spill #6: Next was: I came around a tight turn and my right leg slid out behind me, seizing up in a death cramp. “No! NO!” I squeezed my calf with both hands and commanded, willed it to release. In a small miracle it behaved; all things were feeling close to cramping now. Tom from the Reservoir Dogs and I had been working together for a good part of the past hour, and he came around the turn and peered at me on the ground. We laughed. “I just can’t seem to get it together right now!” I looked at my Garmin: Two miles to go. I realized, quite startlingly, that I hadn’t really looked at, or cared about, my watch since I’d started. I’d been consumed with the decisions of the terrain, not paying any attention to pace. Interesting. Freeing. Tom and I sloshed through a slurping creek and then down a steep hill by a waterfall. It really was very beautiful.

Spill #7: The mountain couldn’t let me get away with it. Couldn’t give me a fall-free last half mile. Had to take me down on the dark pebbles under the tunnel, just before we emerged onto the road and the finish arch. Tom didn’t fall! New neighbor Black Shorts didn’t fall! I may have gotten hand scrapes in this fall, or I may have gotten them in Spills #1-6. At this point I didn’t care. Green grass and picnicking finish-line spectators were visible. We turned the last corner and I repeated the thing I had said—and meant—to myself about 100 times over the previous miles: “I really don’t think there’s anything I’d rather be doing. I really don’t think there’s anything I’d rather be doing! There’s nothing I’d rather be doing! Than running through these woods!”

The One Thing I Did Not Spill: My post-race beer. Not a drop.