Your sense of identity shapes who you are. It affects your decisions, your behaviors and your self-perceived value. Lafayette ultramarathon runner David Clark bases his identity on being a seeker, an explorer and a healthy person who would never dream of abusing any substances.
“Why would I ever want to use drugs and alcohol when I’m a runner? I’m on this journey finding the center of me, the soul of me,” Clark says.
But he wasn’t always this way. Clark overcame a dark past to be where he is today. It’s a path he details in his bestselling book Out There: A Story of Ultra Recovery, where he talks about regaining his life from the hold of addiction.
Clark had his first experience with alcohol at age 13; from then on he continued to struggle with alcohol on and off for years. In the late ’90s, despite being a successful businessman with a wife and twins, Clark was still medicating himself with alcohol and pills. By the early ’00s he had lost his business and the anchor that was keeping his balance. He bounced around to several dead-end jobs, taking anything that would allow him to continue his destructive lifestyle. He was 34, 320 pounds and desperate for hope. He slowly realized that, if he stayed on this path, his kids would have to figure out why their father drank himself to death. On Aug. 5, 2005 Clark finally got sober.
“I can think of a hundred other mornings that should have been my last day,” he says. “But there was just this sense, this awareness, this consciousness that I was so far down the rabbit hole that one more step might be too far.
“I was passively attempting suicide. I’d take seven painkillers at night, drunk out of my mind, before I went to bed. I was trying to kill myself, but I would say, ‘Eh, worst case scenario, I don’t wake up. You know, roll the dice, whatever.’ I was in the place where I was giving up.” Clark pauses, his voice slightly cracking and tears glistening in his eyes. “I didn’t like that. I didn’t like what that said about me. I didn’t like what that meant for my kids. So I just knew it was that time to fight. But I don’t know why. I’ll never know why. It was a brief window, and I had to take it.”
In Out There, Clark writes in depth about that first day of sobriety — the shaky withdrawals and the uneasy feelings of change. In the following days he finally used his gym membership, which had gone 10 years untouched. He got on the treadmill and ran… for 15 seconds. Then he walked, and ran again for another 15 seconds. He continued to build that time up to a minute of running, then five, then 20, then miraculously evolving to his first marathon on the first anniversary of his sobriety.
It was through recovery that he realized, in order to make lasting change, he had to alter the concept of who he thought he was. His addiction had grown out of an identity crisis, which Clark says is usually at the root of any addiction problem.
“Somewhere I had just developed this picture of myself,” he says. “I’m the fat guy. I’m big Dave, and I’m the tragic drunk. I’m the guy that’s just going to drink and drink and drink — that’s what I do.”
But he wondered if it was all a lie. He questioned if that was actually his own truth or just a predetermined notion and self-fulfilling prophecy. He then figured out it was up to him to decide who he wanted to be. So as Clark’s legs became stronger, so did his sense of self-worth.
“The cool thing about destroying your life is it becomes really easy to abandon your concept of self,” Clark says. “Maybe I don’t have anything figured out. Maybe, just maybe, I’m not a 320-pound alcoholic by accident. Maybe it’s me that needed to change, not just my thought process or my daily activities.”
Clark determined who he wanted to be: a good human being. No longer did he want to be manipulative or always in need of control, he wanted to be authentic, honest and pure.
Another test came for Clark when he was diagnosed with a herniated disk impinging on his sciatic nerve and a bulging disk potentially hitting another nerve, which led to spinal surgery in 2008. Along with crippling physical pain, he was advised to stop running. But Clark wasn’t buying it. He had come too far to give up now. After doing physical therapy and slowly building up his mileage, Clark started thinking why run 26.2 miles when you can run 100?
“I wasn’t seeking [ultramarathons] in terms of the act itself,” he says. “It was more like this is going to teach me something about myself that I don’t know. And it might not be something I want to learn. This might be beyond me — I might quit or it might be too painful or difficult. And I have to be OK with that if that’s what it turns out to be. But for the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid to find out. The truth was more important to me.”
In his first ultramarathon, the Boulder 100 in October 2009, he found out that was he was almost there, completing 71.17 miles out of 100. But even attempting this task was a feat within itself. It was evidence to how far behind he had left his addiction. Instead of drowning his feelings, he was putting them to the test.
“I know there’s going to be parts of the race that I think, ‘What the fuck is wrong with me? Why do I do this? This is so stupid,’” he says. “But to willingly put yourself in that place, knowing and trusting you’re going to figure it out, is a great gift from living your whole life, for years, where you couldn’t get yourself to do anything uncomfortable. Where you’d do anything — drink, use, eat — to not be alone with your thoughts.”
And as Clark says, his worst day of being a runner is always better than his best day as a drunk. It’s a never-ending evolution in which Clark keeps growing.
“Somewhere along the way, running stopped being about running and became about self-discovery,” he says. “I had told myself so many lies in my previous life of who I was and who I was supposed to be. I figured if all of those were lies, maybe some of the things I accepted about myself as a runner were also just self-imposed limits.”
Eventually he kept pushing and completed his first ultra, the Leadville 100 in August 2010. Soon after came another essential step for Clark: writing his book. He cites Out There as one of the most important parts of his recovery process. He wanted to write an honest account of his journey, from the embarrassing times — being the overweight guy on the treadmill — to the more shameful moments — driving while heavily inebriated. But it was through writing about these instances that Clark gained a deeper understanding of his past.
“It allowed me to simultaneously go two directions,” he says. “It allowed me to see how bad I was. It really brings you to a place where you understand how much you hurt other people and how the selfish act of being an addict affected other people — wife, kids, business partners. And it’s very painful.
“And it also allows you to see how far you’ve come. I read it, and I just don’t know how I got out. I remember how dark and hopeless it felt. It scratches some scabs off the wounds and reopens some older, deeper stuff. At the same time it helps you forgive yourself.”
This year marks a major milestone for Clark as he celebrates his 10th year of sobriety. And he’s commemorating his accomplishment with a bang, and nine other bangs too. He’s concocted his decade anniversary project called the Zen Epic Ten, in which he’ll be doing 10 events throughout 2015. So far, he’s done the U.S. National 100 Mile Trail Championship, and after he attempted to break the world record treadmill run (of which he came up three miles short at 77.15). Then he ran the Boston Marathon four times in one day — once for those still struggling with addiction, once for those who made it out, once for those left behind and once for the families affected.
For his anniversary run, Clark ran Badwater 135 across Death Valley, known as the world’s toughest foot race.
“I could write an entire book about my experience there,” he says. “It was one of the most difficult races I’ve ever done. In fact, I was literally hallucinating for seven hours nonstop. I was lying down in the middle of the road. The sleep deprivation was so bad, and my body was just trying to shut down on me. So I’d run up to the crew car, lie down in the road for 30 seconds, then get up and run. At one point, I was actually in dead last place. The race director came out and tried to convince me to quit. I ended up rallying and finishing in around 40th place, finishing eight hours ahead of the cutoff.”
A few weeks later, in his fifth event, he did the Leadville 100. His latest undertaking is to run 343 laps (85 miles) on Monarch High School’s track on September 11th, in honor of every firefighter lost at ground zero 14 years ago. Originally from New York, Clark hopes to use this opportunity to pay tribute to America and those who serve.
In the coming months he has a 24-hour treadmill run for the Addiction Recovery Center in Georgia, then he wants to run the bases of a baseball stadium for 24 hours. There’s still some wiggle room for the remaining events, and that’s how Clark wants it. He says the experience has evolved organically, crafting it as he goes along.
“I wanted to do something different,” he says. “For me, running can’t always be about going farther or going faster. That’s a zero sum game; you can never win that. That being said I always want to push the envelope, always searching for something. But the journey has turned a little more inward.”
His ultimate goal with the project is to be more present. As an addict, Clark says he spent too much time regretting the past or concerned with the future. In reality the only moment that matters is the current one at hand. Concentrating on the present is a helpful principle in sobriety and in running.
“You can’t think, ‘Well there’s a huge hill at mile 80,’ when you’re on mile 2,” he says with a laugh. “As a coach, I see it all the time when you have these ultra races with big climbs, like Hope Pass at Leadville. No one ever quits on Hope Pass. People quit right before it, because it’s the thought of going over it that kills them. It’s never the hill that kills them. Get on the fucking hill, and if you can’t get over it, then there’s honor in that. There’s no honor in quitting before you even try.”
Clark is consistently improving his mindset, finding peace in his everyday life and understanding that this will always be an ongoing process. He knows there’s no such thing as “recovered,” and he doesn’t have all the answers. And he’ll keep on questioning the answers he does have.
“Every sober year and on New Year’s Day, we get a group together to go to some peak or do some run, and [during that] I always think, ‘365 days from today I’ll have a different understanding [of myself ] than I do today’,” he says. “There’s something compelling about the person who argues emotionally with what they believe. The true genius comes from those who say, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out.’”