My stomach drops. Time slows down. I freeze like a bunny, hoping the moment will pass if I just don’t move. The hand glides up the thigh. The straying thumb and forefinger pinch the ass. My brain fuzzes. I can’t process all these emotions at once. Anger. Fear. Humiliation. Resignation. I’ve been fair game in the office since I began my PhD program in biology 17 years ago. I thought it would get better as I moved up the career ladder. It didn’t, it just changed.

One might imagine that I have similar experiences during my 25 years of running. After all, I’m always the lone woman running with a gaggle of men. But it doesn’t. Never. What’s the difference? Why do I feel helpless as a woman in science, but in control as a runner in an equally male-dominated arena?

First, let’s address the theories that cannot explain why I’m more likely to be harassed in the office than on the trails.

1. The type of men that do science are different from the ones that run. I don’t buy this. They are pretty much the same men, from similarly educated backgrounds, just placed in different contexts.
2. I behave/dress/speak differently in the office. If anything, I’m less inhibited on the trails.
3. I’m more decorated as a runner so garner more respect. Not really. It’s hard to compare, but I get about equal media coverage for science as for running.
4. I have Aaron to protect me. So, when’s the last time you guys ran with Aaron?
5. I don’t socialize as much with runners. If anything, I socialize more with runners.

In reality, one word explains why men behave differently towards me in the office versus on the trails: Hierarchy. It all comes down to power.

Women runners have freedom to self-negotiate. Men are not saints. Neither am I. We work it out like school kids on a playground. No one holds anyone’s leash. It’s the power imbalances in top-down organizations that create bunnies and wolves. For historical reasons the upper rungs tend to be filled by men. I never get harassed by men who are equal or below me in the office hierarchy. It’s always supervisors. It makes sense. The greater the power imbalance, the fewer options I have and the greater the costs of fighting back.

I don’t mean to idealize runners. There are bad eggs in any community with a spectrum of personalities. The difference is the bad eggs don’t arbitrarily occupy rungs on a ladder from which to rain down grenades on underlings. Of course this happens all the time in professional running, and the history of abuse of women runners by coaches and other authorities is long. For that reason I never joined any organized track clubs or coaching systems after college.

And I don’t mean to downplay the risks and abuse women runners experience in the public arena. Running around the globe I’ve had catcalls, taunts, knives brandished, beer bottles thrown at me. Running in DC’s parks on my own I’m constantly aware of threats. But the threats are from strangers. In my 25 years of running I have never felt threatened or harassed by a runner I know, even as an acquaintance, in the way I do at work. No one feels that sense of entitlement.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that predators in the office would probably be harmless on the trail. It’s a luxury that I always have have a safe place to return to. It helps me fling myself into the fire at work, spinning the roulette wheel each day to see whether I get monster. Most days not.

The sixth WUS Beer Mile embraced quality (and legality) over quantity. Previous venues have included the old St Alban’s cinder track (a bit long at 500 meters, and highly illegal), Martha’s mother’s house (a bit long at 0.3 mile to get around the block, and inconveniently located in the suburbs), and the upper portion of Soapstone Valley Trail (uncertain length, narrow and tricky footing for a beer mile, and once again, highly illegal). In the five years since the last beer mile, WUS has suffered the dual calamities of a global pandemic and a tidal wave baby boom. Each has taken a significant toll on WUS attendance. But WUS is a tenacious little bugger, and just when we thought it might be time to throw it on the undertaker’s cart, it moaned, “NOT DEAD YET!” and people started to show up again.

To capitalize on this small bit of momentum, Martha hoped that a Beer Mile in a perfect venue would bring back a bit of the magic of the halcyon days of yon. But the Soapstone Valley trail is under construction. Try as we might, we struggled to come up with an alternate venue that 1) provided a (roughly) quarter-mile course, 2) would be accessible in the city, without driving, for WUS regulars, and 3) wouldn’t lead to any sort of legal issues, should the Po-Po (who tend to frown upon drinking in public) arrive. Bonus if it was close to someplace we could congregate afterward. We thought and thought until we could think no more! (To be honest, it didn’t take that much thinking to arrive at that state.) Just when all hope seemed lost, we realized that, like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, the answer had been with us all along! Our house! Less than a quarter mile from the usual WUS meeting spot, it would be fairly accessible to the regulars. Our large two-car garage backs to a very lightly-used alley that is, by chance, exactly an eighth of a mile to the street. Drinking could be done on our private property, and post-race congregating could happen on the back patio! It was all too perfect!

The first WUS Beer Mile, in 2011, attracted 30 or so runners, and just about as many gawkers. Later editions usually attracted at least a dozen or so runners, and maybe half as many gawkers. But in these trying times, it was clear that attendance at this Beer Mile was going to be extremely light. Would there even be enough runners to hold the race? Such troubling thoughts occurred to us! How sad it would be to have to call off the event! What a stain it would be on the honor of WUS not to be able to muster even enough runners/drinkers to hold a proper Beer Mile!

But intrepid runners Trevor, JLD, and Luke arrived, ready to race, excited to know that they would all be assured podium spots. Sue and Bella the pup came, and were assigned traffic control duties–manning the one blind corner that would be troublesome should a car happen to roll into the alley. Grandma Jill was ready to dominate the quarter/quarter event (one quarter of a beer, and a quarter mile run), and Bjorn was looking to dominate the three-and-under division (taking sips of water, then running an undetermined distance back-and-forth in the alley).

Runner	Lap 1	Lap 2	Lap 3	Final	Notes
Trevor	1:57	4:08	6:17	8:24	Led from wire-to-wire; bodes well for Big Summer!
Luke	2:13	4:34	6:47	8:55	First Beer Mile; Came from behind to take silver
JLD	1:59	4:26	6:55	9:40	Managed to stay on the podium!
Martha	3:12	6:33	8:56	15:52	2.5 Beer/Toddler Shepherd Division
Bjorn	5:58	???	???	15:52	Three-And-Under Division
Grandma Jill	5:58	N/A	N/A	5:58	Quarter/Quarter

After the run, we congregated on the back patio over Vace pizza and (yes) more beers. Though there was some concern at the beginning of the evening, we all agreed that the event had been a wild success! Prizes were distributed from the highly curated collection of random objects Martha found around the house. Trevor and JLD went for the kids toys, while Luke chose the book-and-DVD multimedia package, seeming determined to find a way to play the DVD despite lacking a DVD player. (His fierce determination that moved him into second place quashed any doubt that we might have had about his resolve!) Martha, Grandma Jill, and Bjorn got an unexpected prize when Sue offered to hook them up with tickets to a children’s National Symphony Orchestra concert “Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs” at Strathmore Hall on Sunday. Bjorn celebrated with an hour-long dance party that mommy occasionally joined.

Perhaps the biggest prize of the evening went to Martha’s friends, Josh and Jess, who showed up late to gawk and eat Vace. When none of the victors took the random autographed baseball that we found in a secret compartment of a bed that conveyed with our house, and has been sitting on a shelf ever since, Josh offered to try to figure out its provenance. Being a journalist who hosts a popular sports podcast (Hang Up And Listen), he was able to post a few pictures for his vahhhst Twitter following to sort out. They made quick work of it and determined the ball was signed by the 1964 Chicago Cubs, including two Hall of Famers. Even Grandma Jill has heard of shortstop Ernie Banks. To his credit Josh tried to return it, but there are no take-backsies in Beer Miles. It just goes to show: You never know what wondrous, unexpected treat you’ll bring home from a WUS Beer Mile! (Just ask the Beer Milers who won the year Martha attended a pork expo.)

Hellgate 100k++ Saturday, December 11, 2021 12:01am. Fincastle, Virginia

Results

The Race I Promised My Mother I’d Never Run

No one was more shocked than my husband when I announced my plan to run Hellgate this year. For more than a decade the Wussies have been needling me about when I would join Aaron at his signature event. Hellgate begins at midnight in December and winds 100+ kilometers through southern Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains, often at subfreezing temperatures and over loose ankle-breaking rocks hidden under piles of leaves. Aaron is one of the “Fearsome Five” who have run the race every year since its inception in 2003 (the streak is now at 19). It’s not just a race for him, but an end-of-year purification ritual.

But just the mention of Hellgate made me shiver. Every winter I dreaded watching Aaron limp off to his green Jeep Wrangler and drive off to the madcap race that destroyed him. When I started dating Aaron in 2011 he was unknowingly infected with Lyme disease. His suffering came and went in waves much like the COVID-19 pandemic. He developed strange symptoms like heart palpitations, skin peeling, rashes, and bursitis in his heels. We had no idea what was wrong with him. By 2013 he struggled to get out of bed in the morning. In the weeks leading up to Hellgate I would shake my head and warn him, as his medical expert girlfriend, of the risk of permanent damage to his system. But I knew not to stand in his way. To take my mind off his suffering I would join friends on bourbon-fueled trots along the Bull Run trails at the VHTRC Magnus Gluteus Maximus 50k fatass. The party ran all afternoon at Hemlock and every time my mind drifted back to Aaron struggling to stay upright somewhere in southern Virginia I just drowned another swig of bourbon.

Aaron eventually got his Lyme disease diagnosed and treated, with a little help from an infectious disease expert girlfriend who bulldozed through an incompetent medical system. (If another doctor tried to pull on me that Aaron was just getting old and can’t run long distances anymore I would have punched them in the face.)  After six weeks of doxycycline Aaron recovered from the acute symptoms of Lyme, but continued to experience bouts of exhaustion, chronic heel pain, and skin peeling. It did not help that he was overworked and overstressed, juggling a day job as a software engineer while launching a new technology start up. I was nervous about starting a family, fearing the sleep deprivation and stress of raising a baby would trigger a relapse.

But in 2018 our son Bjorn arrived, with bright blue eyes and platinum blonde hair. After years of me watching Aaron suffer, the tables turned and Aaron had to watch me come undone. I’m not sure what is worse, to be the sufferer or the helpless onlooker.

Over the Baby Bump

I knew starting a family would be a challenge. I was trying to do something few women pull off. There are few female scientists in my field to begin with (I study computational biology, a cross between molecular biology and computer science), even fewer who are group leaders, and exceedingly few who have young children. The mothers who do survive in my field do so because they have extra supportive bosses. I had the opposite.

I lost my job as a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health in October 2020. I had worked there 12 years without incident, led a highly productive team, and was particularly valued when the pandemic hit because I use genetic data to track SARS-CoV-2 evolution. So my dismissal caused a stir, internationally. The community of infectious disease epidemiologists is small and tight-knit and the big name professors in my field offered to write letters to NIH leadership to protest my termination. Against signs of resistance, my boss had to cover his tracks fast. So he made up stories, falsely claiming I was terminated because I was in trouble with HR for harassing colleagues. I waved my spotless HR record around like a white flag to clear my name, but leadership looked the other way. People rise through government ranks by stepping on women, not sticking out their necks for them.

Suddenly I understood why so many American women quit science, especially after starting families, and my sudden unexpected job loss launched me towards the door. I told Aaron I wanted to move to Scandinavia, where my ancestors still live and mothers are supported with maternity leave, free child care, and tend to stay in the workforce. But being a distance runner for the last twenty-five years helped me understand the natural cycles of downturns, as I chronicled in an essay called “Over the Baby Bump” published earlier this year in Science magazine. Here’s an excerpt*:

“I realized I was in danger of repeating a past mistake of quitting prematurely instead of giving myself time to adapt. Twenty years ago, I was a promising high school distance runner, with a boyish frame that helped me capture title after title. But during puberty I temporarily got fleshier and slower. Dieting and intense workouts only accelerated burnout until I gave up and quit, feeling broken. Years later, I dusted myself off and began trail running in the mountains. When I finally joined the college track team, I raced faster than ever and proved I did not need to be a flat-bodied pixie, I just needed time and space for my changing body to adjust. I have not stopped racing since.

I’ve learned, twice now, to keep lacing up. The pandemic was my tipping point as a working mom, but I survived by reaching out to savvier women who gave me perspective. I’ve now secured a better position at another branch of NIH that maintains my research independence while offering greater job security. This fall I’ll be heading to my new office just as my toddler begins his first day of preschool. Other kids will surely push him down and snatch his toys. But I’ll let him know the same thing happens to his mom, and we dust off, redirect, and embark on new adventures together.”

* I had to do a fair bit of sugar-coating to fit my essay on the one print page Science allotted me. More details about my struggles as a high school runner are available in previous blogs, as is the trauma I experienced during the pandemic.

There’s a Book For That

Getting canned taught me several lessons. First, I discovered how strength I derive from distance running carries over to everything I do in life – my career, my family, my friendships. Getting pushed off a cliff by my boss temporarily made me feel weak and helpless, but this just drove me to get stronger. Being a female scientist does not get easier as you advance. You either quit or get tougher. Ultrarunning offers a path forward. And I knew just the race.

The second lesson is that women trying to do difficult things need support, sometimes quite a bit of support, and asking for help is not a sign of weakness. After I lost my job a group of amazing women scientists rallied around me and Zoomed every week until I was back on my feet with a new job. People are generally happy to help, especially when you’re a person of action and they get to be part of the rebound (that’s not what I meant, you dirty reader!).

I also learned that you can pay for help. There are specialized therapists with PhDs who can mend your brain the same way an orthopedist mends a broken leg. I discovered in pregnancy there are experts for virtually everything, even pelvic floors, and hunting for the right expert can end a lot of suffering. New moms needn’t resign themselves to living with anxiety and depression, or wearing pads the rest of their lives.

I also learned there is a body of scientific literature on nearly every topic. One day when I was trying to figure out why my boss soured on me I googled “People who ruin your life” and discovered books and scientific studies on the ~10% of Americans with known personality disorders (borderline, narcissist, psychopath, etc.). Suddenly everything added up. My boss’s behavior fit a well documented pattern. Before you freak out about the possibility that 1 in 10 of your friends and family are psychopaths, recognize that most people with these disorders (including my boss) are highly personable 99% of the time and easy to work with. They selectively target people (often their spouses). But they cannot be effective liars/manipulators unless they are charming and win people to their side first. Last thing, if you begin to worry that you might one of these personality disorders because sometimes you charm or play victim cards, don’t worry, the defining feature of these conditions is an inability to be self-aware or self-question.

The third lesson I learned was that I picked a good husband. When I fell off the cliff Aaron had to mop up the bleeding. Between the pandemic, the toddler, and the boss from hell, our marriage was seriously stress-tested. It passed because I learned how to follow Aaron blindly each time I slipped into darkness. I learned to trust him. So when he said I could finish Hellgate, even without much training, I just nodded.

Still, practically speaking, I was scared shitless of Hellgate and needed one more thing: a friend I could depend on, even when things got messy, the type who holds your hair back while you puke.

Normal social support evaporated during the pandemic. But you never know who in your vast social network is going to rise to the occasion when you need them most.

The Lapointes

Aaron did 17 Hellgates without crew. But in 2020 he couldn’t get a ride to the start of Hellgate in a car of strangers and or crash for the night on the couch at Camp Bethel without breaking our six-person family COVID bubble that included our son’s three high-risk elderly grandparents. He needed a trusty chauffer. So Aaron called on his childhood friend Matt Lapointe. Matt is dependable, understands science, and was upvoted unanimously by all six members of our family bubble.    

This time I didn’t feel pity when Aaron packed his bags for Hellgate, but envy. I, the one with high social needs who was really suffering in our restricted pandemic bubble, was left behind as Aaron indulged in a weekend road trip with the boisterous Lapointe boys. Running 100 kilometers seemed a stiff price of admission for a weekend getaway with friends, especially at a time when I was barely running, depressed, and unable to get my heart rate above 150. Still, I wanted in.

When Matt returned I got to see Hellgate through the fresh eyes of a non-ultrarunner. Matt didn’t paint Hellgate as a sadistic event designed to maximize monstrous weather, sleep deprivation, mind-numbing terrain, and stupid water crossing at mile four to get frozen feet. Matt just saw Hellgate as awesome, a wild romp of an adventure against varied and unpredictable elements. He and his teenage sons were enthralled by the later sections of the course they ran with Aaron. They couldn’t wait to crew again in 2021.

Hellgate left such an impression on Matt that he resolved to pursue his own lifelong dream of running a marathon, which was put on hold during two decades of raising a three-boy family. Aaron and I became Matt’s unofficial coaches, tailoring his marathon training plan. Matt probably didn’t realize it, but he was the one helping us. During the spring of 2021 Matt was the first person Aaron and I ran with during the pandemic. My depression started to lift as we laughed and snorted on the Glover Archibald trails. By August 2021 we all did the Luray International Triathlon together. My heart rate was finally back up again.

Bring in the Professionals

I ran my first ultra in 2009 on a dare. I had just moved to DC and discovered a group of ultrarunners living next door. I joined their death-defying Tuesday night trail runs simply because I was lonely in a new city. And I liked the post-run part where we drank at Cleveland Park Bar and Grill until we started making poor life decisions. One June night I was talked into running the Laurel Highlands 50k that upcoming weekend with Keith, Amy, and Mitchell. I set a course record. After that, I reflexively shot down anyone who tried to coax me into running another ultra. Whatever the opposite of “hooked” is, I was that.

The Wussies were mystified by my lack of interest in Hardrock, Western States, MMT, or other mythic quests they dangled before me. I had the natural endurance to run Catawba and other ultramarathon fatasses when tricked into believing we were going shorter. There was an obvious gulf between what I could do physically and what I thought I could do.

The gulf formed when I was fifteen out of self-preservation. My rookie cross country season I won the state title and suddenly the screws were put in. I had a complicated home life, which I’ve written about previously. I shut running down out at the end of high school because I was mentally and physically destroyed. I returned to run on my own terms in college, earning All-America, and took up marathons in grad school. But I refused to train, wear a watch, or focus on a goal race. Aaron discovered I was willing to bumble around in the woods for hours, chatting and stopping for mushrooms and woodpeckers. I raced fiercely when the mood struck me. But as soon as Aaron referred to something as a “training run” I stiffened. That was not me anymore. Over the last twenty years any success I had at races was despite myself.   

But the pandemic gave me no choice: begin therapy, fight demons, or lose everything. It is not a coincidence that I signed up for Hellgate the month after I graduated from a 9-month course of cognitive behavioral therapy. Yes, I’m sure people find it hilarious that I regard running 66.6 miles as a sign of improved mental health.

A Fluke of Timing

Had the Hellgate application arrived any month other than October 2021 I would not have applied. I ran a grand total of zero races in 2020, when I was depressed and barely running. My depression began to lift in May 2021 after I got vaccinated and began to spend limited time with friends again. By September my son was finally enrolled in preschool, I ran Big Schloss 50k, got a new job lined up, and I completed all my major therapy goals. In early October I sent in my Hellgate application. I doubted I would be accepted, but everyone was convinced Aaron had an “in” with race director Dave Horton.

But Matt and I share a weakness for soccer. One night a new guy showed up at WUS named Vivian who played on a DC coed soccer team. I knew I was in trouble. I love soccer and only don’t play anymore because I always get injured. But I’ve had so few indulgences during COVID, I thought I could get away with just one game on Halloween morning. While I was playing I was high as a kite and it was totally worth it. I was beaming for days. But in the process I predictably gummed up the same Achilles I injured playing varsity soccer in college. The tendon wasn’t wrecked, but I did have to scratch every training run left on the calendar: Potomac Heritage 50k, Richmond Marathon, Vicki’s Death March, even the Alexandria Turkey Chase. The week before Hellgate I feared I would have to scratch my goal race too.

Show Time

On race day I had serious doubts about my fitness. I had only trained a couple weeks from late September to mid-October. The pandemic, motherhood, and losing my job had robbed my sleep and ground me down over the past two years. Given my condition, was this really the year to attempt the race that chewed up my much stronger husband?

But my Achilles was quiet, the weather was unseasonably warm, and I had much to be thankful for. Standing on the starting line in shorts, I whispered to Aaron that even if the race was a bust I was proud of myself just for lining up and starting. Knowing how much resistance I had overcome just to get there, he heartily agreed.

Aaron tried to give me some last-minute tips about the course. No one knows more about the ins and outs of the Hellgate course than Aaron. Apparently Aaron has written a detailed race report chock full of helpful details that people rave about. I have never read it. I like to run blind. (Aaron did finally succeed in convincing me to wear a watch for data collection but I refuse to look at it.) The only thing I remembered from Aaron’s repeated attempt to dish me Hellgate intel over the last few months was that (a) there were pierogis somewhere, (b) there was a big climb and then a big downhill to the finish, (c) not to stop at aid station 4 because it’s cold, (d) not to use the rocks to cross the stream because I’ll slip and fall in, (e) not to go too fast downhill because rocks move, and (f) there are a lot of leaves.

The “Cling to Trevor’s Skirt” Section

I am admittedly scared of running alone in the woods in the dark. This problem arose repeatedly during the pandemic when our WUS runs lost attendance and I occasionally found myself alone with my headlamp in DC’s Rock Creek Park, my stomach tied in knots. Aaron couldn’t join me because our good friend who used to babysit Bjorn while we ran WUS died of brain cancer this past year, yet another gut-wrenching tragedy during the pandemic. Running solo in the city’s shadowy woods brought out my worst feelings of being alone, abandoned, vulnerable, and afraid.

Soon I found myself running alone at Hellgate in the dark in a pea soup fog on a trail that no longer resembled a trail. I panicked, convinced I was lost and soon to be axe-murdered in the wilds of southern Virginia. When I finally caught up to my friend Trevor I resolved to stick with him at all costs until daylight. There were costs.

I can’t say for certain why I barfed four times at the mile 22 aid station. Maybe the puking came from hours of running in fear. Maybe it was the mysterious disappearance of my Cheez-its, which I know I stashed in my pack. Maybe Trevor’s pacing was not right for me and lesson 1 of Hellgate is to run my own race. Or maybe it was just the annoyance of running with Trevor. I like Trevor and his sense of humor. But when you’re struggling it can be hard not to begrudge a guy for whom everything seems to come so easy. Trevor continued his amazing race lottery streak this year by getting into both Western States and Hardrock. While I spent the week before Hellgate stressing to get a SARS-CoV-2 study published at Nature by day and barely sleeping while my son coughed with croup all night, Trevor and his wife sunbathed in St Lucia while both babies stayed with grandparents. I don’t know who Trevor paid off to get his life, but I want in.

In truth, my puking at mile 22 fit a well-documented pattern. I have a history of puking during ultramarathons when left to my own devices, but tend to be a happy camper when Aaron is crewing or running with me. It therefore comes as no surprise that the arrival of the Lapointe crew turned my Hellgate around.

Lapointes to the Rescue

The Lapointe family learned pretty quickly that crewing for me is not like crewing for Aaron. The first time they saw me during the race I was turned away vomiting heavily beside the aid station #4 tent.

I waved Trevor on when it was clear I would be chair-bound for a long while. I don’t know how long I sat in that chair. But it was long enough to get 2 Ensures down, a cup of soda, and some Pepto bismol tablets, courtesy of Marty Fox. Sadly, this all would prove to be a waste of time when I threw up it all up ten minutes later down the trail.

This was an unhappy section. I was alone again in the dark fog. It was cold and windy. I kept vomiting. The long night was coming to a close and I was ever so tired. I could see no other headlamp lights in front or behind me and I kept panicking that I had strayed off course and was lost. My IT band killed. I still had so many miles to go.  

But I was always happy to see the Lapointes. Matt and the boys were eager to help at the famous breakfast aid station #5. Matt began listing off the fares: eggs, hash browns, sausage, bacon…. He couldn’t finish the list. Just the image made me queasy and I vomited in my own mouth. The terrified boys leapt backwards. But fortunately I didn’t have much in my stomach to come up. The faces on the boys made me laugh. Sometimes a hard laugh is all it takes to change the mood. “Fuck it, give me the bacon,” I told Matt, as I dragged myself off the bucket. I headed down the road with a little ginger ale in my stomach and two greasy bacon strips in my paw. “I promise to eat these!” I lied.

Every now and then Aaron suggests I take a page from Seinfeld’s George Costanza and do the opposite of what I think I should do. I decided that this was that time. Forget gels, forget gummies. Might as well try bacon. My stomach couldn’t get any worse. What did I have to lose?

I nibbled on the end. I couldn’t eat the bacon, but I liked the taste of salt and fat so I sucked on it. For the first time since puking my stomach seemed to like something. I ate a Cheez-it. I kept it all down. Small victories.

The sun was rising, birds were chirping, and the Blue Ridge mountains were cinematically enveloped in wisps of thick white clouds. How could clouds that blinded and terrorized me at night now look so peaceful from a distance in the daylight? I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now, I thought (Joni Mitchell).

I allowed my tired brain to stop fretting about whether I wasn’t eating enough (I wasn’t), what the sharp pain in my heel was (a thumb-sized blister), or whether my IT band hurt from sitting in the chair too long and getting frozen (probably). I was just content to still be out there in the woods, moving forward in the early light. The terrain changed as I approached the race’s midway point and the meandering single track became pleasantly more runnable.

At one point a man behind me charged into a stream, seeking cold water to sooth his aching legs. I laughed out loud, recalling how my friend Daniel had the same idea during British Columbia’s Fat Dog 70-mile race (spoiler alert: it only made his legs hurt worse).

Marmots Heart Pacers

At aid station 7 Andrew Lapointe officially became my first pacer ever in an ultramarathon. I loved it. Where have pacers been all my life?

The final 20 miles were the best part of the race. I learned that blisters and IT bands don’t always get worse. I discovered I can somehow run 66 miles on only a handful of Cheez-its and some soda. I learned that no matter how much pain I was in, I was content as long as I had Lapointes for company. Andrew was silent company, which was fine by me. He only had one job, which he excelled at: saying nice uplifting things to runners we passed. I had no idea what to say to people who were clearly hurting so much, and was ever so grateful to have Andrew to cover for me.

I was actually pretty nervous about Matt pacing me because I didn’t think he knew what he was getting into with all the rocks and leaves. Matt ruptured his ankle playing soccer last spring and needs surgery. I gasped every time I heard him trip behind me. Matt kept instructing me just to worry about myself. I tried. Overall, Matt was a wonderful pacer whose Monty Python lines kept my spirits high (He got better).

Aaron finished an hour or so ahead of me, but we sort of ran the last section together in spirit. Our watches later showed that we ran the final 14 miles from aid station 7 in almost exactly the same time (I was just 2 minutes faster). Breaking it down section by section we seemed to be on exactly the same pace. (Actually, all my race data from the final sections all comes from Matt’s watch. since I never noticed that my watch stopped at mile 24.)  

I was losing the race by hours, I wasn’t even top 5 women, yet I swelled with pride. I had conquered something. Not a mountain or a clock or another runner. Just myself.

Aaron was stunned when I trotted across the finish line in just under 15 hours. News was spotty along the course and the last he’d heard I was puking and struggling and likely on pace to finish just under the 18-hour cutoff. I gave him and Horton big hugs.

Because of COVID-19 we didn’t get to stick around and socialize at Camp Bethel, missing a key part of the Hellgate experience. Plenty of people were hanging out on couches and I really wanted to stick around to chat. But I knew too much about omicron.

But I’ll be back next year and probably some more years after that. No, I’m not going to start a streak or go for a set number of finishes. That’s Aaron’s thing. And maybe I won’t like Hellgate in a freezing year when my fingers don’t work. But I get why people come back to this race year after year. Every time I ran through a gate at the end of a forest road I pondered the meaning of “gate” in Hellgate (the “hell” part is obvious). Most races are just races. But some races are portals, and the version of you at the end is not the same as the version that began. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m ready to put myself through the portal again.

Final Note

I’m aware most of this blog describes my journey just to get to the start line. This accurately reflects the breakdown of my struggle: 90% just getting to the start, 8% just getting through the first half, 1.5% getting through the second half, and 0.5% surviving the road trip home (yup, I gave the Lapointe family one last scare by puking into a Sheetz bag in the back of their van, my body’s final rebellion).

Afterward

Hellgate is not for everyone. Aaron insists Hellgate is way harder than an Ironman. Most of my friends would not run 66 miles if a gun were put to their head. But Hellgate is worth experiencing once in your lifetime, even as a volunteer, crew, pacer, or spectator. There’s a strange magic to this race. Matt insists he got more out of Hellgate than Aaron or I did. Next year he promises to run all three sections where pacers are allowed. My blog is light on useful course description but if you are actually interested in running Hellgate yourself and need real intel just read Aaron’s old race report: https://blog.vestigial.org/hellgate-overview/

The Island

In Finland’s boreal forests, just above the Arctic Circle, the sprawling Lake Inari is peppered with thousands of small islands. Graveyard Island served for centuries as a cemetery for the ancient Sami, Lapland’s semi-nomadic reindeer herders. When the pandemic ends I will journey thousands of miles to spread the last of my father’s ashes around the island’s icy blue waters. Lakes were my father’s nirvana, a trait passed down over generations of Finnish ancestors, and maybe there he will find the peace that eluded him in death.

Three years ago the US embassy in Helsinki phoned our family with shocking news. A hotel maid discovered my 74-year old father’s body crumpled in a desk chair in his room. His colleagues had accepted his explanation that his stomach ailed after Korean food when he skipped his conference. An autopsy report determined otherwise. A simple surgery would have removed his ruptured appendix and saved his life. 

But my father had a history of not asking for help. He was a broad-shouldered, heavy drinking ox who rebuffed meddlesome doctors. A few years earlier I had to beg him to visit a hospital for a broken ankle flapping around after a lawn mower incident. He snarled like a bear when friends suggested an ointment for the pink fungus spreading like vines from his toes to his groin. I knew better than to try. 

Was there a flash of light in his final dying moments when he should have sought care? Or did he drift into death oblivious? Alone in his hotel room, poisons seeping within, did he recognize that he needed help? Did he finally learn if God exists, after concluding so in his recently published philosophy book, God? Very Probably?

The week before Christmas my mother, brother, and I flew to iced-over Helsinki to identify his body and arrange for its cremation and shipment back to the US. My mother picked up his ashes at Dulles Airport in DC and we performed the American death ritual as best we could. My father would have been pleased by the three-day fiesta: academic symposium, memorial, lobster party, in that order. 

When it came time to speak at my father’s memorial, I drew on my first decade, when I legitimately enjoyed growing up in the most eccentric libertarian family in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Family trips across the American West — and later the world — were wild misadventures where overriding my mother’s hesitations was half the fun. My father was larger than life, cruising past Chevy Chase’s mansions in his beat-up Toyota convertible with the roof down, dangling a gin and tonic on his right and an unused seatbelt on his left, daring anyone to stop the shaggy-haired libertarian philosopher-king. My father filled the family dinner table with foreign intellectuals, pumped them with alcohol, and jovially explained why all their thinking was wrong. My friends were awed by my father’s bravado, strength, and sprawling personal library in our basement. There were at least ten thousand books. With a tanned, bearded face framed by shoulder-length dusty blonde hair, women mistook him for Kris Kristofferson. I thought he was Zeus, all-knowing and all-powerful and thundering whenever he felt slighted. I flew under his radar while I was young and he was preoccupied by writing and tennis. Only later in high school did I sign up for the high school track team and everything changed.

The Gift

My father was awestruck when his diminutive, squeaky-voiced teenage daughter suddenly could not lose a race, taking the state and county cross country titles as a rookie. My dramatic come-from-behind racing style made for nail-biter finishes and Washington Post headlines. My family was mystified; no one in my family ran except after tennis balls. My father referred to it as the “miracle”. Only later did my Finnish grandmother divulge the hidden roots of my success.

One rainy November morning she watched her 95-pound granddaughter claim the Maryland state cross country title in a final sloppy sprint across a mud-soaked field to pass the favorite. It had been six decades since my grandmother had cheered her father Onni as he raced the mile as a professional distance runner in Boston. Finns ruled distance running in the 1920s and 1930s. Paavo Nurmi, the “Flying Finn”, won nine Olympic gold medals. Distance running was a family affair and my grandmother also handed oranges to Onni’s brother Laurie as he ran the 26.2-mile Boston Marathon route from Hopkinton to downtown Boston each year. Back then the marathon was still just a gaggle of a couple hundred Bostonians. 

Finns claim to have guts, referred to as “sisu”, cultivated from youth by plunging their naked bodies into freezing lakes through holes carved in the ice between sauna sessions. The underdog Finns thrashed the Soviet army in the Winter War of 1939-1940, where temperatures plunged below -50F, emboldening Hitler to invade a seemingly weak USSR the following year. Instead the Germans became mired in a bloody eastern front that allowed the Allies to pierce the west. So we can thank the Finns for bringing down the Nazis.

But Onni died suddenly of tuberculosis at age thirty-two. Laurie burned his shoes in disgust and never ran again, blaming his brother’s death on a weakened immune system that had been compromised by Finns’ notoriously harsh training regimens. Onni’s wife Martha raised my grandmother alone, cleaning bathrooms in factories to make ends meet and settling in a fishing town called Gloucester north of Boston. Martha was still living there by the sea when I was born fifty years later. I called her “Mummu”, which means “grandmother” in Finnish.

One Christmas my grandmother gave me Laurie’s vintage 1920s diamond engagement ring that he purchased to propose to his soon-to-be wife Elsa. I also inherited something else from Mummu and my grandmother. We all had an uncanny knack for finding four-leaf clovers. I have found thousands in my lifetime, also 5-, 6-, 7-, and 8-leaf clovers. I never find them when I look, only when I sense them when I’m busy doing something else, like running down a trail or riding a bike.

My initial rise as a runner in high school was virtually unsupported. My parents were so uninvolved they did not even buy me track shoes. I toed the line at my first state championship as the only runner wearing clunky Nike sneakers instead of featherweight spikes. Nor did I get much support from my team, which did not even have the five girls needed to compete as a cross country team. Old Coach Fleming mostly took photographs. Each race I was underprepared, undertrained, and looked like a deer in the headlights. At a state championship where I unexpectedly got my period and had no one to turn to, I shoved piles of toilet paper in my shorts and hoped for the best. But everything changed after I won the state cross country title.

The Self-Appointed Coach

After I won the state championship my father decided to start calling the shots. To test me against stiffer competition he signed me up for the Footlocker invitational in New York two weeks later. The only hitch was that I did not want to run it. I was mentally exhausted, my legs were spent after stepping up to hilly 5k races in my rookie cross country season, I was fighting a stubborn cold, my season was officially over, and I needed a break. My father, having never run a race himself, had no personal experience with the physical destruction caused by distance racing or the balancing act I was trying to hold.  

On race morning the Bronx barely cracked twenty degrees. My teeth chattered. One mile into the race my throat constricted and a strange wheezing sound emanated from my chest. Alone on the wooded trails of Van Cortland Park, I struggled to breathe. I peeled off to the side of the trail until I weathered my first asthma attack. I barely finished the race. When I got home I was feverish in bed with pneumonia for weeks, my longest absence from school. When I finally returned to the track I needed an albuterol inhaler prescribed by my doctor. The feeling of suffocation became a metaphor for my relationship with running — and with my father.

My father’s blitzkrieg continued while I was laid out. He visited my high school athletic director to demand he replace the doddering old Coach Fleming with a young assistant track coach with a reputation for being hard. Fleming’s light touch worked well for me, since I was already logging a dozen hours of travel soccer each week. Chronically underweight and fighting off colds, I was a risk for burnout. My father’s expectation that I attend Harvard or another elite university did not help. 

One night the ABC evening news aired a TV segment “Teens in Trouble” where I delivered a deadpan account of what exhausted teens face on a daily basis, logging long hours of school, sports, and homework under intense pressure. I spent the next day in the offices of alarmed school administrators. I fell on my grenade, explaining that the adults in my life made me exhausted, but never suicidal. I assured the administrators that I didn’t cut myself, I was skinny but not anorexic or bulimic, and my family life was stable. I was mortified when teachers took me aside after class to ask in hushed voices if I was okay. In retrospect this was an opportunity to get outside help. But no one was a trained therapist. No one knew what questions to ask. 

The Mistake

Warmer spring weather improved my asthma and the next spring I prepared to race the mile at the track and field state championships. I only needed to finish top-4 at regionals to qualify. The month of May is hot and humid in DC and billows of hot steam rose from the black track after a morning rain. A few steps into the regional race I felt my silver chain bounce against my collar bone. I rarely wore jewelry but had gone to sleep wearing a Navajo necklace with five colored stones. I was tired after staying out late with friends the night before. Jewelry was not allowed, so I immediately popped into the infield and unclasped the chain before dashing back onto the track. A line of girls in bright singlets already bobbed away around the first turn. I chased after them, hopelessly behind. What an awful way to end a season. I fought back tears. I was still dead last at the halfway point.

But passing the last-place straggler energized me. I clawed my way back into the race. I wheeled around the final lap, weaving and bobbing through a thick pack of racers. I could hear my teammates Alpha and Maduba screaming and jumping on the bleachers. I dashed towards the finish line and barely edged out the fourth place runner, earning the last spot in the state finals. I threw up my hands as if I’d won.

A race official with a clipboard sidled next to me. His large belly protruded over his belt and a cap shaded his eyes. He told me I was disqualified. I was still panting too heavily to respond. My coach leapt into the infield to clarify the decision. I had worn the necklace for only a couple steps. The only performance affected was mine. But the official stood firm. My glare could have burned a hole through him. Like my father, he had clearly never run a race in his life.

I was prepared for my father to leap into the fray, unleashing one of the fits of rage he displayed on the tennis court. But he stayed put. When I approach my parents at the fence I realized my father’s anger was directed only towards me. He slipped into economist-speak, offering unrealistic solutions engineered for a hypothetical world. You know, if you had really been thinking you would have run back to the start line to take off the necklace. I furrowed my brow, not catching his drift. There’s a rule against wearing jewelry, but I bet there’s no rule against starting a race late. I looked away in disbelief. Actually, your mistake was taking the necklace off in the first place. Probably no one would have even noticed if you hadn’t drawn attention to it. The Monday morning quarterbacking kept coming, the whole drive home. Do you have a mental checklist that you go through in your head before every race? It was a solemn dinner at home.

The Downturn

Mistakes are teachable moments and I learned an important lesson that day: my father only showed affection toward me when I won. There was not even a flicker of warmth for gutting it out when the winds were against me. His friends found it endearing when he trotted me out at cocktail parties to brag about my victories, beaming with fatherly pride. But it was exhausting to have to win races in exchange for parental affection. Behind the scenes he took little interest in my well-being. As a teenager I once called my father from a party asking him for a ride home because I had been drinking beer. He was busy watching tennis and convinced me I was fine to take the wheel.

My father and I had different views on racing. He exasperated over the unevenness of my quarter-mile splits, believing I was too tentative during my slower third lap and intentionally shoring up reserves for the final fourth lap. He did not realize that even professionals run wildly uneven splits. He pressed me to lead every race aggressively from the front and hang on to the lead until I collapsed, even if happened mid-race. “Think of it as an experiment,” he explained. “To test your limits.” I wondered if coaches had told something similar to my great-grandfather just before he died.

I never won another major race for the remainder of high school. The worse I performed, the more my father harangued me. The situation became even worse when my teenage body started morphing into adulthood in the later years of high school, exacerbating the disconnect between my evolving physiology and my father’s assumptions about what my body could do. My self-confidence nosedived as I began to blame my fleshier body for my slower times. One day I burst into tears in my mother’s office and told her I never wanted to run again. 

My father hired a sports psychologist to fix my flagging motivation. My first encounter with a trained therapist was eye-opening. He was gentle and kind. He assured me I was neither neurotic, lazy, nor timid. In fact, I was not the source of the problem. I only met him that one time. But he gave me permission to stop blaming myself. Instead, I became emotionally numbed, counting down the days until I left for college.

Fly Little Bird

My father dragged me to every elite university in the country, whether I was interested in going or not. He arranged interviews with the track coaches, even while I was counting down the days until I never had to run again. We trekked across each campus to find the main library so we could count how many of the political philosophy books he authored were in the catalogue. There was no pretense that the excursions were not really about him. 

The only college visit I enjoyed was with my older brother (no parents) to a small liberal arts college in a cozy New England town, where my brother’s friend Jamie was a senior. Amherst College was quaint and focused on undergraduate education, not flaunting Nobel-prize winning faculty. It was nestled in the pine forests of the Pioneer Valley, surrounded by woodland and farmland. I could imagine being happy in the home of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, maybe even running through the forests. 

My father made me apply early to Harvard instead. He assured me I didn’t have to go. When Harvard mailed my early decision letter in December 1998, my father did not wait for me to get home from school to open it. He snatched the letter and ripped it open himself. The single act summed up our relationship perfectly.

I did not end up going to Harvard, or Amherst, or any school on the east coast. I fled to the west coast to Stanford University. The school had the distinct advantages of (a) satisfying my father, (b) being thousands of miles away, and (c) never recruiting me to run. I couldn’t wait to exchange track spikes for flip-flops. But I never took off Laurie’s ring.

Second Act

Kicking back and soaking up rays on the laid-back west coast was supposed to make me feel relaxed. A Stanford degree was supposed to make me feel secure. Instead I felt listless. I had scampered west like a frightened deer, driven into a corner. I did not belong there.

Everyone assumed I lost my mind when I left Stanford after my first year. My stunned California friends thought Amherst was a community college. Confusing Maryland and Massachusetts (too many little east coast states), they were convinced I was returning home to mend a nervous breakdown. I didn’t bother explaining myself to anyone. I twirled Laurie’s ring around my fourth finger and for the first time did what I wanted.

There is no experience as liberating as dashing at top speed through fields and woods just for the thrill of it. I became the fastest distance runner on the Amherst track and cross country teams, finishing All-America at Nationals. 

Night at the Colobus

The next summer my father celebrated his 60^th birthday by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with me and my brother. A few days before our climb, my brother and I were playing the “flaming sambuca” game with friends. You dip a finger in sambuca to pass a flame around the circle. Whoever loses the flame must drown their shot glass. Afterwards we picked up my father and headed for the Colobus nightclub on the outskirts of Arusha. I did what any carefree 21-year old girl does at clubs: dance, let others buy drinks, try not to get molested. I was oblivious to the fact that my father spent most of the night brooding alone at the bar, feeling ignored and slighted. No one wanted to converse with him about politics. So he drank and stewed. By 3am he was slurring his words and could barely walk to the car. In the parking lot he erupted. I had treated him like an old man. I had not welcomed him into the circle of young people I was dancing with. I had made him feel “like shit”. I slunk into the back seat of the car and let my father take a turn screaming at my brother while we drove home. I never went from drunk to stone cold sober so quickly. I had witnessed his explosive eruptions at many friends and family members, but this was the first time it was directed at me. 

Years passed before I understood the source of my father’s explosion and how deeply he dreaded turning 60. The Kili climb was designed to prove his virility and youthfulness. But he was anxious. What if he failed? Such doubts had plagued him for some time. Unbeknownst to me, he had treated performance anxiety with alcohol and antidepressants since his twenties. As a graduate student at Princeton he was treated by psychiatrists for panic attacks. When he began teaching at city college in New York City he found his own solution to public speaking nerves: scotch. Alcohol calmed him better than any therapist. Until it didn’t.

Adulting

The following summer I landed a summer internship in Moscow at the US State Department. My father insisted on tagging along and renting an apartment in Moscow for the entire summer. I objected. Moscow is a rough city. He couldn’t even read Cyrillic. I was overruled. Fortunately, the US embassy’s many layers of security made it impossible for him to visit me unexpectedly. But I had recurring nightmares of my father drowning me in a friend’s pond scattered with lily pads in upstate New York. The sunlight at the water’s surface faded to black as I was pushed to the pond’s floor, with icy fingers around my throat, entangled in the long, thin roots of the lilies.

White Knight

I spent my early twenties globetrotting across Australia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Europe, carving my own path. But by age 27 I had settled in DC for a postdoctoral fellowship. Back in the family orbit I began to regress. Until I met Aaron.

Aaron and I dated for a few months before he announced there was a problem. He opposed my intoxicated father driving me home to DC after Monday night dinners at my parents’ house in Chevy Chase. I was confused. Drinking and driving was normal. In my earliest childhood memories I am sitting shotgun while my father drove with a gin and tonic in his hand. Even today, the scent of gin reminds me of breezy summer car rides. The Monday car ride was designed to be my quality one-on-one time with my father to talk politics. I relayed Aaron’s objection to my mother, but neither of us acted.

But Aaron stood firm and eventually my mother took the car keys. She was unwilling to drive away the first nice Jewish boy willing to put up with her moody daughter. Eventually I decided that Aaron was not being stubborn or difficult. I was just witnessing something novel: protection from someone who cared about me. A few years later my father passed out driving home from a DC party, drifted across the double lane, and crashed into a fire hydrant on the west side of Oregon Avenue. He was still passed out when cops arrived. 

Aaron continued to contest my belief system. Our first summer dating we both ran the Highland Sky 40 mile trail race in West Virginia. He won handily but I had stomach problems and dropped out after 32 miles. The next morning I forlornly flew to California convinced I would never see Aaron again. I strolled along the beaches of Santa Barbara wistfully watching the pelicans dive, accepting that I had blown it. I was stunned when I returned to DC to find Aaron’s demeanor towards me unchanged. My mind had to do somersaults to grasp that I had not fallen off some pedestal. He was even more flabbergasted that I believed I was unworthy of him just for flubbing one race. He couldn’t comprehend my guilt and shame. 

Over time Aaron became acquainted with my father and began to grasp the roots of my curious outlooks. Whenever I started to disparage myself, Aaron would call me out for intoning the voice of my father. Disparagement came so reflexively it was nearly automatic. We referred to it as my brain chip. I set radically different standards for myself and my friends, whom I never judged based on superficial performances. Aaron helped me set boundaries with my father for the first time. My father took direction from men more easily than women. Plus, my father respected Aaron’s knack for fixing all his computer and A/V problems. Moreover, Aaron was willing to engage in political debates the rest of the family had tired of. Aaron offered himself as “fresh blood”. 

At times I tried to repair relations with my father and broach some of the difficulties I faced as a teenager. How it felt to have my legs cut out from under me. How I felt he invaded my space. But he would brush me off, never wanting to revisit “water under the bridge”, the same way he never addressed his own problems with his father, which haunted him to his last breath. When I leave this earth I don’t want to be carrying that kind of baggage. Some people will think it excessive to travel thousands of miles to dump my father’s ashes in a remote lake at the ends of the earth, but they have no inkling of the distance I’ve already traveled.

Where’s the horse?

The pandemic arrived with a Slam! My skull crashed into the dirt at Rock Creek Park Horse Center at 11:23am on Saturday, March 12th, 2020, the same day NBA basketball player Ruby Gobert tested positive for the novel coronavirus and the entire country gasped. The two events appeared unconnected at first, but I have come to realize they were not. The horses were anxious. Barn managers were fretting about the new pathogen spreading invisibly through air and surface and bickering about how to manage the oblivious weekend crowds swirling around the stalls. Should they close the barn to the public? Should they set up barriers down the lane? Do horses even transmit coronaviruses? Amid the chaos a black mare who is usually mellow instead had a meltdown.

If you have ever ridden a mechanical bull, you know the sensation of being catapulted through the air in a direction not of your choosing. Mechanical bulls are gentler than the real thing, easing you into steady rocking and starting slow before growing wilder. In real life there’s no gentle transition. The black mare bucked harder than any creature I’ve ever mounted. I never saw it coming. The first buck shot my body out of the stirrups and up onto her long black neck, where my arms clung for dear life. But the second buck came instantaneously, and I catapulted backwards in a free fall. My butt hit the ground first, followed by my skull, its left back corner slamming into the dirt with a thud. The velvet helmet saved my life.  

Stunned, I rose to my feet while the other riders circled their horses. My instructor grabbed the frightened riderless mare by a loopy leather rein flapping against her neck as she cantered. My knees wobbled uncontrollably beneath me and my legs buckled. I slammed back to the ground and my instructor wailed Stay down!

What happened next is hazy. Apparently I tried to remount the horse. I was behaving like a drunk girl at a bar, insisting that I could drive while wobbling in my heels and bleeding from my lip. My instructor guided me to a picnic table where I sat obediently and repeated the same questions a hundred times while the EMTs headed our way. Did I fall? What happened? Where’s the horse? I don’t recall any of that.   

I never had a concussion before. The disconnect between my perception and reality was surreal, like I was on hard drugs. I snapped out of it just before the EMTs arrived. It felt like waking out of a dream. The EMTs performed a cognitive test, which I almost flunked because in my stupor I thought it was funny to answer Barack Obama when they asked me to name the president of the United States. Everyone laughed when they realized it was an intentional joke. Except the male EMT. He also attested that coronavirus was a hoax. I refused to get in a vehicle with him. Instead, since I had driven the family car to my lesson, my husband had to race the jogging stroller five miles through Rock Creek Park with our one-year old son strapped in. All the barn staff gave him a big cheer when he arrived with the baby, covered in sweat. When we arrived at Suburban Hospital the waiting area was eerily empty. The nurse told us there were coronavirus patients in beds. I never got in and out of an emergency room faster.

There was no time to process the trauma. A new coronavirus was flooding hospitals in New York City and it was my job to use genomic data to trace how SARS-CoV-2 viruses fanned out across the world from Wuhan, China, and invaded Europe and North America. Technological improvements in genomic sequencing had revolutionizd epidemiology and how we track pathogens spreading and evolving across time and space, but there wasn’t yet infrastructure in place to make it easy. Everything was a learning curve for me and the team of scientists I led at the National Institutes of Health.

Then my boss did the strangest thing ever, and neither the pandemic nor my concussion could be considered my biggest shock of 2020.    

A Lie Too Big To Fail

The saying “People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one” is attributed to Joseph Goebbels. But the idea is enumerated more thoroughly in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kamf. Hitler was an evil maniac, but he was also clever and controlled in the way he exploited certain weaknesses in human thinking.

“in the primitive simplicity of their minds [people] more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation….”

I had never observed this counterintuitive phenomenon firsthand. It was fascinating to watch it play out in my office. The more unlikely my boss’s story became, the harder it was for anyone to digest the possibility that it was a complete fabrication.

My boss is not an evil maniac. But he did find himself in a sticky jam when he had to explain to his colleagues why he was abruptly kicking out a productive female scientist working on a national public health emergency right after she had a baby, without consulting anyone about the scientific or diplomatic ramifications. At first he tried little lies. She’s not as good a scientist as Cecile. She’s not a good mentor to her postdocs. Her behavior is disruptive to the office. He was tossing spaghetti at the wall but nothing was sticking. No one was buying it. Feeling squeezed, he decided to go nuclear. She’s a harasser.

Bingo. The spaghetti finally stuck. His characterization of me as a harasser was laughably untrue. But the opposing story was even harder to believe: that he would simply make it up. Sure, he was a little erratic. Sometimes he blew his fuse at his more assertive female staff, including myself. He kept karmic “balance stones” in his pants pocket to try to alleviate those tendencies. He become oddly withdrawn and antisocial, canceling our division’s happy hours and annual pic. Everyone recognized that he was particularly strange towards me. I dreaded his routine of sending my other colleagues out of the room so he could scream at me alone, making me cry, threatening not to renew my annual contract, holding my employment like a club over my head. I felt vulnerable alone in his enormous office, decorated with chandeliers and 18th century paintings. He never complained about my scientific work, only my behavior, his cheeks flushed and hands trembling, trying to contain his anger. His visible discomfort unnerved me, spreading like a communicable disease. But I never accepted his distortions. I would leave the room quaking, but his extended rants left him more relaxed, his hands tucked behind his head and his lips gently curved into a smile like a man in a post-organism afterglow. Doesn’t it feel good to blow off steam? he would ask me as I scurried out the door. I had enough close friends in the office to assure me that any time my boss told me I was abrasive and disliked he was just gaslighting me. I accepted that he was detached from reality. But I never took him for a boldfaced liar.

The harasser story worked well for him because he could deflect all criticism, shifting the blame for my dismissal from himself to some unnamed HR bogeymen. In fact, he even got to play the victim card, pretending he tried his damnedest to rehire me but kept getting steamrolled by overzealous HR team from an unknown office. Our organization’s HR director adamantly refuted my boss’s story that HR had any involvement in his personal hiring decisions, but he was also an outsider and some people wondered if he was the one lying.

Every good lie has a sliver of truth. I had recently terminated a master’s student after one year because my postdoc had given up trying to train her. She was an odd duck who threw people off by meowing at them like a cat. But scientists are all weirdos and we would have kept her had she been a high performer. She had a bone to pick with me after being terminated and filed a complaint to HR about my behavior. It was all trivial. One of the complaints was that I invited colleagues to go to the DC zoo on the day the clocks change and the animals get fed later, causing them to be unusually frisky. She was offended by what she perceived as cruelty towards animals. All complaints against me were investigated, gathering testimony from my colleagues, and dismissed. Reason prevailed and our head of HR avowed that I had a “clean bill of health”.

But women suffer from the lack of transparency in HR processes that always gives management the upper hand. When there is no transparency, upper management gets to control the interpretation of the outcome. With no “clean bill of health” certificate to frame on my office wall, nothing blocked my boss from disseminating a rumor that I was in serious high water with HR. I vehemently protested and offered to show documentation that I had an unblemished HR record with no strikes. My boss responded by inventing an even more unrealistic story: that HR secretly “cut a deal” with him not to document any infractions on my permanent record as long as he agreed not to renew my employment. Conveniently, he had no documentation of this secret deal. I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain all documents related to the complaint filed against me, including witness testimony and HR interpretation, to officially clear my name. I am still waiting. 

One reason it was hard to understand why my boss was lying about me was because he had no motive. Outwardly he was a timid, cautious boss with no stomach for high-stakes gambles. Axing a productive scientist working under him made no sense when he got credit for my success. Moreover, he was playing with quite a bit of fire. As a new mother I could have sued him for sex discrimination under the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) law. New mothers are protected from job discrimination as stringently as members of racial minorities or members of LGBTQ. The onus would be on him to provide a compelling explanation to a judge for my sudden termination. Outside witnesses would shred any claims of scientific ineptitude or behavioral problems. The timing of the onset of his haranguing of me just after I started a family was even more suspicious. Why would he risk his neck to get rid of me? It was a big mystery.

Breaking Bad

Scientists have to dig relentlessly for clues to complicated questions. I systematically turned over stone after stone until I got his motive. I can’t spill the beans with specific details, but he fits a genre (“Breaking Bad”, “Fargo”) where the nebbishy middle-aged white guy dabbles in little fibs and minor infractions and is surprised by how much he can get away with, being the average Joe type no one ever suspects. He is highly evasive but red flags get shrugged off. Darker and darker misdeeds are required to cover up prior acts, creating a spiral effect, but he self-justifies, convinced he is protecting himself and his family. When the walls start closing in, he resorts to increasingly desperate moves.

My boss effectively exploited the pandemic and the evaporation of standard communication channels, supervision, and accountability. But he also was a victim of the pandemic, which drove anxiety and paranoia through the roof and triggered his erratic behavior, just like what happened to the mare. Both were motivated more by fear than aggression. Whatever my boss feared, the prospect of me becoming a Federal employee only heightened it, fundamentally changing our power dynamic and removing his one lever of control over me, my tenuous employment status. First, my boss tried to control me using tactics that worked in the past on women: threats, lies, intimidation, yelling, gaslighting. But they only worked to some degree. An inquisitive person like myself, with unflinching honesty and a nose for liars, simply became too big a liability to have around.

The tragedy is that I was never an existential threat to him, no more than I was to the black mare who threw me. Prior to my new boss’s arrival I had steered clear of trouble for a decade. That’s saying a lot in an organization that gets the lowest scores across all 27 NIH ICs in employee ratings of “honesty and integrity of leadership” (barely 30%). I just wanted to be left alone to do my job fighting pathogens.

Moving On

A reader may inquire about my motivations for recounting this story. So I had a nutter boss, who cares? By not pursuing a lawsuit I already waived my opportunity for justice or holding my boss accountable. At this point I don’t care what happens to him. There’s nothing I can do to protect other women in his orbit. My closest friends left the office shortly after my departure.

But I have other motivations. Following the sickening Larry Nasser story, followed by the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) debacle, it feels like progress for women is slipping backwards. The NWSL featuring Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe was supposed to be poster child of women’s empowerment. So was our US gymnastics team. Women were sounding the alarm for years. Why did no one listen? I can now see how society’s blinders work and and stem from the enormous benefit of the doubt bestowed on middle-aged white men, especially in middle- and upper-class positions of authority. Our preconditioned minds fail to absorb reports from women and children that contradict the convenient architecture of “safe” and “unsafe” we use to sleep at night. Even women resist truths from other women that are unpalatable. The tragedy is that Larry Nasser, like Jerry Sandusky, was able to get away with his heinous crimes for so long *because* they were so outside the bounds of what his peers could accept in a person who looked just like them.

I also want to speak for victims of mental traumas that are not visible or relatable, which can cause further alienation. In cases of familiar traumas like death, illness, accidents, or violence, my friends have been down that road before and there is a coda for how to behave and speak. But it’s a lot harder to explain the vertigo that comes with sustained deception, gaslighting, or an attack on my sense of reality. I blame no one for having difficulty wrapping their head around my particular hardship or even victim-blaming me to some degree. Even my mother pointed out that I would have retained my job had it not been for my assertive resistance of my boss’s early distortions. But nothing is more alienating than losing a shared sense of reality with the people around you. I am lucky to have a husband who acutely understood everything I experienced, sometimes better than I did, and kept me grounded.

I also wish to convey some of the hidden ways the pandemic has side swept our lives. It’s impossible to say whether my boss would have gotten away with his ruse in a normal year or a typical office environment. But there were highly extenuating circumstances during the pandemic. Will a widespread shift to more remote work help women by limiting physical contact with potential harassers? Or hurt them by eroding accountability and their support networks? Would I have navigated normal workplace obstacles (exclusion from meetings, being condescended to or interrupted) that affect women disproportionately without daily informal chat with other women scientists around the water cooler? Women need each other as allies. I got by with virtual allies who supported me enormously this past year, but those bonds were laid over years of in-person office time.

Finally, I just believe in sharing the truth, no matter how small or insignificant. Consider it my tiny personal battle against a world buckling under an epidemic of misinformation. Misinformation is the most cynical form of attack and Americans are proving to be absurdly susceptible. National politics are hopeless, but at the very least I can preserve my own nest.

As an epidemiologist I can’t resist one last PSA: we train our kids how to respond and protect themselves from an active shooter, but not from charming sociopaths. This does not reflect real-world risks. It is worthwhile to familiarize yourself with the terminology and telltale signs of clinical personality disorders (sociopaths, borderlines, narcissists, etc.). As a scientist, I was compelled to study up so that if I ever again encounter someone who lies, cheats, and charms their way through a career in management, leaving a wake of destruction, I will be equipped. Be aware that all of us encounter people with personality disorders periodically. But we don’t realize it because these people can be perfectly charming 99% of the time. You only discover their underlying traits if you happen to become their target. Then hell breaks loose. These people can absolutely ruin your life. But if you understand how people with these conditions think and the strategies they employ to control, manipulate, and confuse, you can potentially dodge a bullet. And you can help your friends and loved ones escape too. If you or a loved one has ever been targeted I would also recommend professional therapy. Damage to a psyche is more difficult to objectively measure than a broken bone or cancerous cell, but these people really mess with head and erode your sense of trust, potentially damaging your ability to enter new relationships.