Ultrarunner races for clean air at the Snowflake 50KI moved from Atlanta to Western North Carolina hoping to escape air pollution. After running on smoggy city streets for eight years, I was looking forward to breathing clean mountain air on daily trail runs.

Unfortunately, WNC’s air has become just as dirty as Atlanta’s. During the summer, it’s often more hazardous to hike in the Smoky Mountains than to walk down Peachtree Street. To make matters worse, air pollution lingers longer in the mountains, smothering trees and trails in a year-round blanket of smog.

Oxygen-gulping runners like me are particularly vulnerable to air pollution. Running increases tenfold the volume of air inhaled into the lungs. Runners also tend to breathe through their mouths while running, bypassing natural pollution filters in the nose and sinuses. On bad air days in the mountains, exercising outdoors can do more harm than good.

So I faced a simple choice: I could do all of my running on a treadmill, or I could help clean up the air.

The best way to help, I decided, was to start a running team that promoted the Canary Coalition, a grassroots clean air movement in Western North Carolina. To do so, I had to drop my Nike sponsorship – and all of the free shoes and gear that went along with it. Now, instead of a Nike swoosh, my home-made running singlet displays a giant yellow canary with its arms folded boldly across its chest.

The Canary Coalition is named for the singing birds carried by coal miners into underground shafts. When the canaries stopped chirping and died, miners knew the air was dangerous and quickly got out of the shaft. Today, we are the canaries, choking on pollution from coal-fired power plants throughout the southern Appalachians. Fourteen coal-burning plants in North Carolina — and dozens more in surrounding states — spew thousands of tons of nitrous oxides, sulfur dioxide and mercury into the air each day.

It was fitting that I made my Canary debut last week in West Virginia, the capital of King Coal. I was running the Snowflake 50K, a 31-mile trail race through the Blue Ridge mountains in the heart of coal country. The two-loop course followed old mining roads in Kanawha State Forest, not far from a coal factory that ranks fourth nationwide in toxic air releases.

Acid rain drizzled down at the start. Sixty-four runners — ranging from a 14-year-old high school freshman to a 75-year-old grizzled veteran — took to the trails. Near the front, several runners were slip-sliding down a muddy slope. I hung back for the first few miles, waiting for my wet feet and numb legs to warm up.

I started passing a few runners on the long climb up Four Mile Mountain. Like many other mountains in West Virginia, part of Four Mile had been strip-mined by coal companies earlier this century, leaving behind a bare, flattened hilltop.

Heading down the back side of Four Mile Mountain, I cruised past a mustached man wearing a gray T-shirt. Now only two runners — a couple of high school kids — were ahead of me. They seemed unfazed by the cold wind and pounding rain. I finally lost contact with them around the six-mile mark.

“Take it easy,” I told myself. “You have 25 miles to catch them.” But I was already setting my sights on a third-place finish.

The trail was marked with orange survey tape strung from tree limbs every half-mile or so. But slanting rain and lashing winds had ripped the orange tape off the trees, and once I wandered off course. Finally I found my way to the first aid station, where — to my surprise — the pair of frontrunners had stopped. They were just running the first seven miles, then cheering on their dad the rest of the way. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, I was in the lead.

I followed what was left of the orange tape up steep, twisty singletrack. I couldn’t get any traction and had to pull myself through the slippery mud using tree trunks and exposed roots. Near the top, I crawled on all fours.

The trail emptied out onto another old mining road. I got back to my feet and, for the next two miles, slogged through more shoe-sucking mud and ankle-deep water. Soon I could hear the squilch of footsteps behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the gray-shirted runner gaining ground.

With 19 miles to go, it was Gray Shirt versus the Canary.

“Go Tweetie!” shouted a woman walking her dog in the rain. Another onlooker applauded the bright yellow bird on my chest. For the first time since I moved to the mountains, I felt good about what I was doing. When I was running for Nike, I was just another pair of legs. But now, I was running for a cause other than myself. It gave me incentive to train harder and run faster. Every person I passed would see the yellow flash of the canary and think — if only for a moment — about the air they breathed.

Gray Shirt arrived right behind me at the next aid station. Even though I wasn’t hungry, I forced myself to eat. I chewed a sticky peanut butter Powerbar as fast as I could, while Gray Shirt slammed Dixie-cups of defizzed Coke. We left the aid station together. Side-by-side, stride-for-stride, we matched each other down the waterlogged mining roads and washed-out trails.

“What’s the bird on your shirt all about?” he asked on a long downhill section.

“Clean air,” I sputtered.

His eyes narrowed. Rainwater beaded along his mustache. “I try to stay away from politics.”

I wanted to explain to him that clean air is not a political issue. It’s a basic necessity for anyone who breathes on a regular basis — especially heavy-breathing runners. We runners are obsessed with split-seconds. We focus compulsively on form and fluid intake to gain a few ticks on the stopwatch. Yet we’ve neglected the very air that powers our performance. Who knows how many PRs are hampered by unhealthy air?

Instead of sermonizing, however, I decided to give him the bird. I pushed past him on the narrow trail, and for the next five miles, he had to stare at the canary on the back of my shirt.

Halfway through the race, at the start of the second loop, I knew it was time for the canary to take flight. I glided up Four Mile Mountain, while Gray Shirt faded. I hurdled logs, forded creeks, and scrambled up mudslides. My stride was smooth and steady as the falling rain. When I started to think about slowing down, I shut off my mind and let my legs carry me through the soggy forest. Before I knew it, I had floated across the finish in 3 hours, 42 minutes, winning my first race as a Canary.

Afterwards, I sprawled out in the grass and looked out across the flat-topped, strip-mined mountains. Though the rain was poisonous and the air was clogged with carcinogenic coal pollutants, it still felt good to be there, to be outside, making contact with the real earth. It was feeling that no treadmill could ever simulate. I breathed deeply and took it all in.

(Will Harlan writes about the outdoors. He can be reached at wharlan@hotmail.com)

 

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