Can the King of Ultrarunning Conquer a Race as Short as the Marathon?

Raised on the edge of Phoenix, Walmsley excelled on the high school track team and in cross country, earning a spot at the national 2007 Foot Locker Cross Country Championships and the attention of college coaches. In June 2012, during his senior year at the Air Force Academy, he reached the N.C.A.A. Division I championships, finishing 12th in the 3,000-meter steeplechase, an event run on a course featuring four hurdles and a pit of water. Then, in the eyes of the running world, he vanished.

In reality, he had been sent to Montana, assigned to the unenviable position of Air Force missileer. The job meant driving almost three hours from Malmstrom Air Force Base outside Great Falls to facilities scattered around the middle of the state. It meant taking an old elevator several stories underground and then logging a 24-hour shift in a claustrophobic capsule. Walmsley and his fellow officer would trade off between sitting at a Cold War-era computer terminal and trying to get some sleep. If the president made the call, Walmsley told me, he and the officer would have to insert a key and then turn four knobs, simultaneously, launching an intercontinental nuclear missile.

Two months into the job, Walmsley was charged with driving under the influence. He was taken off alerts as punishment, he says, which meant his fellow officers had to pull more shifts to pick up the slack. Even after he was reinstated, Walmsley was still barred from driving on base. He became a notorious Malmstrom character — that one guy lugging his heavy bag full of missile manuals through the snow. Then, at the beginning of 2014, an unrelated investigation into illicit drug possession turned up evidence of a widespread cheating scandal on the base. Officers were sharing answers to the proficiency tests, which every missileer was expected to ace each month. More than 90 officers were implicated in the cheating scandal, either for looking the other way or for actively cheating, as Walmsley admits he did. He hadn’t been the mastermind, but he wouldn’t be missed either.

Everyone on base figured he’d be discharged and didn’t want to be stuck holding a lease, so Walmsley wound up living by himself in a rundown place in the town of Black Eagle, across the river from Great Falls. He would spend nights alone, drinking, stewing over what a life outside the Air Force would look like. He would break things — “usually a lamp” — and perseverate on what seemed to him a streak of awful luck. He’d been a good kid, a high achiever. And then he arrived in Montana, and everything went horribly wrong. If he was kicked out of the Air Force, what would he be? Maybe, he would sometimes think, it would be easier — for him, for the loved ones he had shamed, for everybody — if he ended it. “There’s just a numbness of not caring anymore,” Walmsley said. “You start justifying it like: There wouldn’t be the disappointment anymore, either. Maybe some of the negative parts would go away.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/magazine/ultrarunning-marathon-olympics.html?emc=rss&partner=rss