Oh Hell

Wait! Don’t avert your eyes just yet. I promise this post is rated PG. Well, maybe PG-13. For thematic content.

If not because of the swamps or the isolation or the miserable winters (which, contrary to popular notions, come awfully close to embodying my own vision of eternal damnation), the unincorporated township of Hell, Michigan, was certainly named to provide virgin-lipped Mormons a delightful sense of liberation and source of endless amusement. A trip to Hell provides infinite opportunities to speak forbidden syllables without hushed voices, hesitation, quick looks to make sure mom or dad or the bishop are out of earshot, or flashes of guilt. When good Mormon kids have been so indoctrinated by their high school seminary teacher that even eight years later they cannot see the word “ass” in any context without intoning “donkey,” a trip to Hell and the loosing of tongues that accompanies it is almost better than Disneyland. Las Vegas for Mormons. Guilty pleasures without the guilt. Just this once we can refuse to say “heck” or “dang” because we’re not swearing. We really are walking through Hell, past the Dam Site Inn (which, regrettably, is named and spelled rather innocuously after the site of the dam for which it is named, but it all sounds the same anyway).

This weekend I had my first encounter with Hell, and had anticipated the sense of liberation for months. You have to understand that six years at BYU means it’s taken me a long time to become inured to the language of the world. Although Balaam now speaks to his ass (not his donkey) in my Bible, the characters in most of the books I read, while allowed minor cuss words, still say “shoot” and “flip,” even if their spelling’s a little off. (Incidentally, my little sister gets part of the blame. In high school she would occasionally ask me to read aloud when I did my seminary reading at bedtime, and any mention of hell and damnation would be followed by a sharp little gasp from the bunk below mine. “Amy!,” she would say in genuine shock and disillusionment, no matter how many times I explained to her that if it was in the scriptures, if it was really referring to hell and damnation, it was okay to speak aloud.)

Back when I first moved to Michigan and people found out I was a runner, I was barraged with information about races to run. Although I ruled out the Dexter-Ann Arbor run (which would have been fun) because it falls on a Sunday, and the Detroit marathon because I’m not in marathon-running condition this year and besides, who wants to run a marathon in Detroit? and the Naked Mile for, um…obvious reasons, I did manage to locate the website for the Run Thru Hell a few months ago and went ahead and signed myself up for the 10-miler. Any runner will tell you that they run a race for the t-shirt, but in this case they actually mean it. I could go run ten miles on my own on a Saturday morning, minus the crowds and the late starting time and the half hour drive and the twenty dollar race fee, but if I can proudly wear a shirt with “I Ran Thru Hell” emblazoned across the front to ward volleyball on Monday night, then it’s all worth it.

So the race itself? Well, appropriately enough, it was probably my worst race experience thus far. But the nice thing about that was that the fact that I was running through Hell made any hellishness pretty tolerable.

It started out all right. Registration began at 6:30, and so I got up at 5:45, changed, grabbed a Luna bar, my driver’s license, a sweatshirt, and my MapQuest directions to the race. It was colder than I expected outside and when I got in my car I cranked up the heat for the first time in months, then popped in a mix CD, put it on shuffle, and began the half hour trip to Los Lonely Boys singing “How Far is Heaven?” (though it wasn’t until several hours later at about mile 9 of the race that I realized just how funny this was). The starting point, Hell Creek Ranch, was twenty miles, half an hour, and two wrong turns away, and I was among the first to pull in, which gave me plenty of time to pick up my race number and timing chip, eat my Luna bar, and stand in a devilishly long line for the Port-A-Potties before the 8:00 race time. By 7:50 I was hopping from foot to foot about twenty yards back from the starting line. By 8:15 I was beginning to feel claustrophobic, trapped between yellow cordons in an increasingly anxious and dense crowd of runners, with no sign of starting and an uncomfortable number of racers ambling around unconcernedly at the top of the hill by the registration tables. “Oh, they always start late,” said someone in front of me to the woman to his left. “We’ll be lucky if we’re out of here by 8:30.”

Fortunately he was ten minutes off, and the gun finally sounded at 8:20. I knew immediately that this was going to be a bad race. My breath already felt sharp and my legs heavy as we rounded the first corner, and I didn’t feel like I was going all that fast. I got better gradually (though I never reached anywhere near top form), but the race course didn’t. We were running along southeastern Michigan country roads, and every downhill stretch was run in plain view of the next uphill stretch. It leveled out a bit in the second half, but I never quite got into my stride and in the last mile I stopped caring about my time, and I was perfectly content to let everyone around me pick up the pace for the last stretch and pass me by. At the end we were herded through a snack line in which race volunteers who had otherwise been quite friendly barked at us to stay to the left, keep moving, and not take more than two cookies apiece. I felt oddly empty as I walked back to my car. There was no one to greet me at the finish line, my stomach was just upset enough that I could only force down one of my allotted cookies, the shirt was disappointing (I expected that with as many runners as there were, they’d be able to higher a better design artist), and the race route had been too long (and hard) for running fast, but too short to feel like an accomplishment. I had none of the post-race euphoria that I have experienced after every other race I’ve ever run. I stretched quickly and halfheartedly, then got into my car where my CD shuffler promptly mocked me with Michael Bublé crooning “I’m Feeling Good” while I waited twenty minutes for the stragglers to clear away and let us all out of the parking lot.

Still, I also felt oddly pleased by all of this. After all, it was a race through Hell and it would have been awfully anticlimactic to say, “Oh yeah, it was a nice race. I think I’ll run it again next year.” I mean, it wasn’t bad—it was pretty well organized and most people seemed to be enjoying themselves more or less. And I have no regrets that I did it. But will I run it again? A good response might be "when hell freezes over."

Except that, well, this is Michigan and I think it does.