Waybound Series #2: The Chase

There’s a moment in Annie Dillard’s short story The Chase that has stuck with me, because of how deeply it “lives in the middle.” A group of kids throws snowballs at a passing car. A man gets out. He chases them. This is no ordinary adult. He runs not out of rage, with total commitment. He chases them for blocks, across fences, through backyards, over snowy roads. They had to fling themself at what they were doing, to point themself, forget themself, aim, dive. When he finally catches up, he doesn’t scold or punish. He simply stays in it. Dillard writes of the awe she felt—not fear, but reverence: “He could only have wanted to catch a kid, and he had caught one.”

What she’s describing isn’t just a childhood memory. It’s pure presence under pressure. It’s the rare experience of being so inside a moment that nothing else exists. Not the past. Not the next corner. Not even yourself. Just the chase. I’ve come to believe: trail and ultra running, at its best, is about that too.
The Chase as Total Engagement. Ultrarunning is full of paradoxes. We chase finish lines knowing that they’ll disappear the moment we reach them. We chase time, even as time becomes warped by fatigue and terrain. We plan, pace, and prepare, and then somewhere deep in the race, when the sun is setting or the trail turns vertical, those carefully laid intentions begin to dissolve.

But maybe the most compelling chase is the one we can’t see. The one that Dillard captures so perfectly: not the chase of something, but the chase in something. The immersion. The demand. The visceral aliveness of giving yourself to effort without reservation.
In the late stages of a race, when the edges fray and the ego dissolves, you can find yourself no longer running to win or to finish; you’re running because there is only this. This next step. This descent into town. It’s not strategy. It’s not spectacle. It’s the chase that strips you to your most elemental self: a body in motion, committed to the moment.

Dillard understood that beauty. Her awe wasn’t in winning the chase, but in the purity of effort it demanded. It wasn’t about the outcome; it was about being met—by someone who ran as hard and as seriously as the game itself required. In ultra and trail running, we meet that same force: in the land, in the night, in our own limits. And when we rise to match it, when we stop holding back and start giving ourselves over, the chase stops being a metaphor. It becomes a state of being. Fierce. Focused. Alive.

The Danger of the Wrong Chase.
Not all chasing is the same. Some chases invite presence. Others distract us from it entirely. Much of modern running culture urges us toward a different kind of pursuit: one rooted not in aliveness, but in proof. Times. Rankings. Gear. Validation. We chase external markers of success, not because they hold meaning in themselves, but because we’ve been taught they confer it. We accumulate races like résumé lines. We compare splits, curate Strava or Instagram posts. In this version of the chase, the question shifts from How does it feel? to How does it look?

It’s easy to get swept up in this. There’s nothing wrong with setting goals or celebrating performance. But when metrics become the measure of meaning, something essential begins to hollow out. The run becomes transactional. Effort becomes calculation. We run with half our attention; one eye on the trail, one on the data. We scroll through our achievements before we’ve even cooled down. Somewhere in that split, something vital is lost: the joy of being fully in the run while it’s happening.

Dillard’s metaphor of the chase was sacred because it wasn’t a performance. The man chasing her didn’t care about who saw him or what he’d gain. He was committed to the moment, not to the metrics. When we forget this, when the chase becomes about image, brand, outcome, we end up running through mountains without seeing them. We race past rivers we don’t remember crossing. We feel more panic than presence. The trail becomes a stage, not a relationship.

In this wrong kind of chase, wonder evaporates. Play becomes pressure. What began as exploration becomes a grind. Perhaps worst of all, we forget why we started. We lose the thread that brought us into this strange, beautiful sport: the desire to move freely through the wild, to feel our limits and expand them, to run not to prove, but to participate. Presence isn’t found in chasing faster. It’s found in chasing better, in the quality of our attention, our effort, our love for the land we move through.

Trail Running as Play with Consequence.
What Dillard’s story reminds us is that play isn’t the absence of seriousness; it’s the expression of full seriousness. The man chased them not because he was playing around, but because he cared. He committed. He entered the world of the children with total integrity. That’s what made it sacred.

Trail and ultra running can be this too. Not just performance, not escape, but the sacred seriousness of play. Where every climb, descent, stumble is part of the game. The only way to play well is to play fully. Not halfway. Not checking your phone. Not waiting for conditions to be perfect. Just in it.
That’s what the chase means to me now: not the pursuit of outcomes, but the embrace of effort. The deep surrender to the unfolding moment. The joy not of what you’re chasing, but of how hard—and how honestly—you chase it.

We Run Because We Are Caught.
At the end of The Chase, Dillard reflects not on triumph or punishment, but on awe. “It was an immense discovery,” she writes, “pounding into my hot head with every sliding, joyous step, that this ordinary adult evidently knew what I thought only children who trained at football know: hat you have to fling yourself at what you’re doing, you have to point yourself, forget yourself, aim, dive.”

That’s what many of us find, too, on mountain switchbacks and sunlit ridges. That you can give yourself over. That you can run like that. Not just to get somewhere, but to meet something. Or maybe to be met. Maybe what we’re chasing is not a finish line but a kind of clarity. A kind of nakedness. The experience of being caught; by the moment, by the land, by the body doing exactly what it was made to do. Maybe the real secret is this: We chase, not to catch. We chase to feel what it means to be fully alive in the running.

There’s a rare kind of joy in remembering that this—this body, trail, breath—is enough. That you don’t have to wait until you’re faster, stronger, thinner, or more certain to give yourself over. That presence isn’t the prize for getting everything right—it’s the invitation that’s been here all along.

To really run like that, is to let go of the chase for perfection and step into the fullness of the chase itself. Not passive. Not easy. But awake. Committed. Participatory. It’s an act of attention. Of love. Of wild seriousness, like Dillard’s running man pounding across a frozen yard because the moment deserved it.
This is the kind of running that changes us. Not because it makes us better athletes or helps us check a box, but because it returns us to what matters. It reminds us that the trail doesn’t necessarily need your performance. It needs your presence. Somewhere beyond the split times and summit photos is something more enduring: a way of moving through the world with reverence, curiosity, and grit.

Many of us come to this through winding paths. Through burnout, injury, doubt, or the simple feeling that something’s missing. You don’t have to run alone to find it. There are others pointing themselves, forgetting themselves, aiming and diving into this. If you’ve forgotten what that feels like. If the miles have grown heavy with expectation or too tangled in numbers, know this: you can begin again. You can return. The path is still here, waiting. All you have to do is step into it.