Carpe-ing a Couple of Diems [Full]
My first 100-mile race
This was by far the most I’ve learned from a single continuous experience, and I hope some of it will resonate with you. If it does, hit the “like” button, share, subscribe!
Hello and welcome to that time I decided to dip my toe in 100-mile races. Head first.
I wrote this race report in 2021, so it’s obviously not a recent experience, but it will be new to you. The omission of the race’s name is on purpose, which I hope you will forgive.
Table of contents
Introduction: Dumber Things Have Been Done by Smarter People
§1 Me & the Mountain
1.1 Suffer Well
1.2 Meet Lady Longlegs
1.3 Melinda Mae
1.4 Wild Things, Wild Places
1.5 Unstoppable Forces, Immovable Objects
1.6 Whose Feet Are These?
1.7 My Madness—My Method
§2 Me & the Others
2.1 Time Is Only Weird When You Perceive It
2.2 I’d Rather Be Hallucinating
2.3 The Paradox of Daylight: The Things We Miss When We Can See Everything
§3 Me & the Clock
3.1 Training Hard Got Me to Where Hard Training Becomes Irrelevant
3.2 Let’s Not Talk Again Sometime
3.3 Friends in High Places
3.4 ‘A Horse, a Horse, My Kingdom for a Horse!’
3.5 Light the Fuse and Get Away
The End
introduction: dumber things have been done by smarter people
The anxiety that had me hoarding weather apps on my phone wasn’t so much about temperamental mountain weather as it was about treacherous footing and/or hypothermia caused by same. Thankfully, with an hour to go before the 8 p.m. start, the rain had already thinned to a drizzle, and the forecast (all seven of them) was for clear skies tonight and the next couple of days.
I’d never had to check the forecast for the next couple of days. But if any 100-miler warranted a 50-hour cutoff, it was this one: 11,000 meters (36,000 feet) of elevation gain, remote and rugged terrain, high altitude. On the plus (?) side, there were only eight aid stations at which to lose time.
As for reasons not to sign up, there was the nearly threefold increase in duration between my longest race to date (17 hours) and this weekend-long monstrosity. A huge leap, until you look at the even huger “run-up” to it: The sheer volume of training this race would require was in striking disproportion to what I could pull off without injuring myself.
But I really, really wanted to run it. It was my dream race, my fantasy ultra goal from back when my longest run was a half-marathon. So when I signed up, I adjusted my perspective: I wasn’t going to train for a race; I was going to train as much as I (safely) could. The result was that I showed up at the start healthy, and 100 percent ready for, like, 60 percent of the race.
❝Being ready meant being able to answer in the affirmative that all-important question: Is it worth it?
—Matt Fitzgerald, How Bad Do You Want It?
I’m going to spoil the ending now because this isn’t about the ending anyway: Late that Sunday night, I did cross the finish line—as the slowest runner to complete the course. One hundred miles of relentless climbs and merciless descents, 50 hours, 10 minutes of sleep. No crew, no pacers, not even music to distract me or keep me awake. I had gazed into the abyss and it had spoken to me with the voices of a hundred sitcom characters (more on my auditory hallucinations later).
✚ ✛ ✙
Before I continue:
This was a dumb thing I did, choosing this race as my first hundred. It was an emotional decision—one I do not regret, and hopefully you will enjoy the story that came out of it. But I do not wish to glorify gratuitous risk-taking or parade my struggles on the course as fodder for inspiration. The fact that I finished a race I had no business starting should not be interpreted as a testament to the power of the human will, but merely as evidence that sometimes people do stupid things and get away with them.
So, should you start feeling inspired while reading this, respectfully, quit it.
Now on to the stupid thing.
1. me & the mountain
1.1 suffer well
Train butt off: Done. Spend months studying course: Done. Show up in best shape of life: Done.
Arrive at start last-minute because packing is too hard: Double-done.
✛ ✙ ✚
I wish we’d drive faster, but it’s not my car’s suspension we’re decimating over the wet cobblestones (and we’re already flirting with the speed limit). I’m in the passenger seat, frantically patting my pack for anything unzipped, untied, or unfastened. The eight-liter Salomon ADV Skin is surprisingly light for everything I’ve stuffed into it, but it’s bursting at the seams. I’ve never run with so much stuff before. Warm- and cold-weather clothes, food, light sources and batteries, a first-aid kit, and various other pieces of equipment—everything fits but barely. And it took forever to pack it, which is why we’re running late.
We arrive at the start with just enough time for me to receive my mandatory GPS tracker, along with the silent scowl of the volunteer handing them out. IT’S TOO MUCH STUFF!, I want to shout at him, but of course, it’s my own fault I didn’t start packing sooner. While wondering where I could possibly put the tiny blinking device, I realize two of my pack’s pockets remain entirely unused.
“Ten, nine, eight—”
Well, no time for reorganizing now. It’s 16 minutes after sunset as we pass with little fanfare under the inflatable arch.
There are only about 50 of us trotting through the small town’s streets, and I’m convinced I’ll be the one to suffer the most. I can’t imagine anybody here is less fit to run this race. It’s oddly comforting to know that all I need to do for the next 50 hours is suffer well—because what greater ambitions could I dare have?
The drizzle that used to be rain is now indistinguishable from mist. As we exit the town and funnel single-file onto the steep forest singletrack, I’m careful to avoid the drenched vegetation flanking the narrow trail. I don’t want to get wet because I don’t want to get cold, because I know that, once allowed in, the cold will be harder to keep away. I am, however, diligently wetting my insides. Chilly-and-drizzling doesn’t compel me to drink water like hot-and-sunny does, but I know hot-and-sunny doesn’t have a monopoly on dehydration.
I mentally pat myself on the back for paying attention, but my overeager brain is tripping over the line between being smart about this completely new experience and greatly overthinking it. “Don’t get cold”: that’s a thing. “Stay hydrated”: also a thing. “Blink longer as a preemptive measure against sleepiness”: not a thing (as far as I know).
The first aid station is a welcome respite from both the lulling monotony of climbing and the nerve-racking threat of being poked in the eye by a trekking pole. My own pair are still collapsed and secured onto my pack, but I’m going to deploy them shortly for the final and steepest part of the 1,700-meter (5,580-foot) first climb. They are a recent, almost reluctant purchase. I’ve been strictly bipedal for most of my life, including during races, and have been rather set in my ways—but not so much that I wouldn’t do a complete one-eighty for a chance to save some effort on the ups, spare my knees on the downs, or, as will be the case, keep my head above my ass on ice-coated boulders.
1.2 meet lady longlegs
High up on the mountainside, I can’t tell where the mountain ends and the sky begins. The amorphous darkness is disorienting in an outer-space kind of way. The headlamps up ahead seem to have floated away into the inky firmament, or else this thing we’re climbing is seriously steep.
Since I can’t see how much farther it is to the top, I wait for the wind to tell me. Sure enough, it picks up when I get close. Once the terrain stops sloping upward, I know exactly where I am: On a saddle connecting two peaks, one to the north, one to the south. In front of me to the southwest, all the way down in a deep glacial valley, lies a tear-shaped lake. Near the lake, the trail joins a small river to twist and bend with through the valley.
More than three hours into the race, it’s time to wake up my downhill legs. I keep my poles out in a vaguely menacing way, occasionally stabbing the ground with them to help steady my uneven footfalls. It’s a steep, bumpy, grassy slope, which I’m descending uncomfortably sideways until I reach the lake and the grade mellows out. The small river to my left will be a close companion from here to the next aid station, 10 all-downhill kilometers (6.2 miles) away.
I lose the waterlogged trail several times among the many rills and rivulets that crisscross it, so I try to copy what other runners are doing. Hop, swivel, sidestep. Slip, shuffle, hop again. I’m surprised there are still so many bodies around me. Their presence spoils the experience of night running a little bit, but none of them are eager to chat, which allows me to regard them as a moving part of the landscape. I take note of one woman whose pace matches mine almost exactly, except she’s much better at following the trail. I call her Lady Longlegs (self-explanatory), or Legs for short. She’s accompanied by a man who can’t be her pacer because this race doesn’t allow pacers.
1.3 melinda mae
Halfway down the descent, I notice a vague unease has quietly crept in and unsettled my previous “suffer well” attitude. I’m suddenly impatient, rushing through terrain and thought alike, wanting to get somewhere rather than be somewhere. I stumble, miss a turn, drop a glove. It takes me a while to figure out what’s wrong. There isn’t much that could be—my legs are still fresh, my mind is still clear, and nothing hurts yet. The race has barely begun.
Oh God, the race has barely begun.
Months and months of training and studying maps, and I’m just now beginning to comprehend the immensity of where I am and what I’m doing. I think I’m going to be sick.
My brain, helpfully: “Don’t barf on your shoes, you have to spend two more days in them.” Okay, that’s not not helpful, I guess. But it doesn’t make me feel less overwhelmed. “Then how about a good metaphor for tackling impossibly big tasks?”
❝Have you heard of tiny Melinda Mae, Who ate a monstrous whale? She thought she could, She said she would, So she started in right at the tail.—Shel Silverstein, “Melinda Mae,” in Where the Sidewalk Ends
Good one, brain. We’ve got a stubborn person, a “whale” of a challenge, and, of course, the winning approach of breaking down the challenge into manageable chunks. It’s almost too on the nose: Melinda Mae is clearly about ultrarunning.
Except, tiny Melinda’s big accomplishment doesn’t sound all that inspiring now that I’m munching on my own “whale.” Daft, unhealthy, no fun at all—that’s how it sounds. And how much time do you think it took her to finish her meal—a month, a year? Nope, 89 freaking years, and the meat must’ve spoiled at some point, so she ate spoiled whale meat for 89 years. All because she thought she could and said she would.
Just as I did.
“Well, that was no help at all,” I mutter to myself as I drop the same glove for the third time. The urge to hurry, to keep busy, is masking the fear that my suspicions have been confirmed: My hardest training hasn’t been enough, I’m already losing the mental battle, the whale is simply too big, and WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THAT GLOVE.
All races have lows. Most are less dramatic than they feel at the moment, but is it at all surprising that working hard for something makes us vulnerable? Training—investing effort—is emotional. I remember how overjoyed I was when I found this one big hill (I live in extreme flatness) in a forest an hour and a half from my house. It was not an attractive place. Nobody went there because of the mosquitoes and the nonexistent trail. The deer that came to drink from the creek at the bottom and I were the only ones who appreciated the hill’s bounties. I would spend hours at a time going up and down as the forest around me grew darker, in secluded training of mind and body, the mosquitoes always there to make sure I didn’t get more than a minute of rest.
That’s what eventually pulls me out of my low—remembering my boring, unpoetic training. Working hard for something does make us vulnerable, but it also makes us stronger.
I finally take the time to stuff the errant glove into a pocket with a zipper.
A moment later, the mechanical hum of a hydroelectric generator cuts through the mountain’s rustles and whooshes, announcing the second aid station.
1.4 wild things, wild places
Aid Two sits at the intersection of the race’s figure-eight course. This is where we have access to our dropbags—first now, then a second time about halfway through the race (when it’s renamed to Aid Five). The inside of the nondescript brick structure is the size of a small-to-average kitchen, so the atmosphere is rather intimate. Crouching over my dropbag cheek by jowl (ahem, literally) with half the butts in the race, I grab what I’ll need for the next 20-ish hours. The sunglasses call to mind the comfortingly inevitable sunrise, now a mere five hours away.
Shortly after leaving the aid station, I have to pee. The dirt road bends just often enough to provide equal parts privacy and the thrill of being caught with my pants down. Getting into position is not unfussy, what with all the layers I have on, and I have a feeling the whole preparing-to-squat thing will get very old as the race progresses.
Business done, I resume winding up the dirt road, excited to be on the second big climb of the night. Now that we’re nearly seven hours into the race, I feel significantly more “in” it. I guess I came here for the big numbers, and I’m becoming increasingly more immersed in and receptive to the experience as I tick off the smaller ones.
A brightly lit cabin (no humans in sight) marks the beginning of the steepest part of this climb: 1,280 meters (4,200 feet) of gain over 7.2 kilometers (4.5 miles). A dense pine forest covers most of the slope. I’ve been alone for a while now, or believe I have. The night is at its darkest as I sneak among the trees, not a traveler just passing through but a nocturnal mountain creature whose home has always been the woods. I’ve never quite been able to recreate the calmness of being alone in the mountains at night in any other setting, yet the feeling is one of instant and effortless belonging.
A bunch of other mountain creatures’ headlamps appear not far ahead as the forest thins out near the end of the ascent. We’re never as alone as we think, are we? I manage to pass a total of eight runners up the windswept slope before we crest the ridge.
I can’t see very far around me, but the top feels like an inhospitable place. And sounds like the inside of a vacuum cleaner. The frigid wind blusters and bites, each gust stealing more of my body heat and my calmness. There’s something about cold wind that sets off a hundred wailing alarms in my homeostasis-loving body. Urgency upon urgency: self-preservation on top of physical and mental exertion.
I hurry to get off the ridge, but the ridge is not in a hurry to be gotten off of. I can only manage a gingerly shuffle over the wobbly rocks that keep trying to slip out from under my feet. Upon closer inspection, I discover the rocks are covered with an uneven, thin film of ice—frozen dew, or perhaps rain from earlier.
I deduce a connection between that and my fingers hurting like the absolute dickens, so I speed up, bracing for an imminent fall each time my feet slip on the ice-coated rocks shifting and clattering beneath them. My poles are invaluable in keeping me upright and moving fast enough to avoid becoming coated in ice myself. But after a while, I’m shivering a worrying amount, and I’ve completely lost feeling in my hands; the chilling near-gale finds the weak points in everything I’m wearing.
A wind so violent it’s difficult not to attribute a malevolent will to it.
Meanwhile, a male runner whose chosen amount of leg coverage is inversely proportional to the size of his cojones casually settles onto a slab of granite to enjoy a snack. Grins at me and says something about being in the moment. Right on, shorts dude, right on.
My calmness returns as I leave the frozen ridge behind. The shivers abate, sensitivity tingles back into my fingers. The sky to the east is brightening almost imperceptibly.
For many runners, the arrival of dawn after a full night’s running triggers an energy boost—probably something to do with the body’s circadian rhythm and psychological response to light. Luckily, this effect doesn’t seem to be diminished by my partiality for night running: When the sun comes up, my body reacts with the appropriate elevation in mood and alertness. I have made it through the first night of the race.
The first quarter of the course, as well—I arrive at the third aid station.
✙ ✚ ✛
Entering the large mountain hut that houses Aid Three, I am met by a volunteer’s enthusiastically descriptive “A woman!” to which I curtsy. We gals are few (five) and literally far between in this race. I wonder where Lady Longlegs and Not-Her-Pacer are, I haven’t seen them since the last… Oh, there they come.
The air in the common area/dining room is stove-warmed and smells of socks and cooked food—runners changing one, volunteers serving the other. Long tables and benches are being used for either purpose.
I always forget how plodding along for hours on end gradually slows my pace without my noticing, until I take even a short break and it resets my legs. So, for the first time in 11 hours, I decide to sit down. I choose a bench from the available few, one without lentil soup or hosiery on it, which has been recently vacated by somebody or something very wet. Sitting feels awkward and unnecessary, but at least I can use these few minutes to have a bite and sort out some gear. As I put away my headlamp, the thought that the race is a two-nighter and I will need it again briefly registers in the back of my mind but fails to fully compute. For now, I’m focused on getting to the next aid station—by my estimation, about nine hours away.
Nine hours through the most rugged, remote, untamed section of the course. No water, no cell service, often no trail, no feasible “out” except “through.” A whole lot of rocks.
I step out of the pungent coziness of the aid station and into the coldest part of the day. The sun is steadily gaining altitude in clear skies, and soon the mountain will warm up again.
1.5 unstoppable forces, immovable objects
Off I go up the third big climb of the race. The off-trail portion doesn’t start for a good couple of hours, which for me pass in solitude and mounting apprehension. I haven’t seen this place I’m going to first-hand, but it’s been made infamous by the chilling stories of those who have. What can be so horrible about it?
Toward the end of the so-far-excellent trail, I pass a runner who’s having some gastrointestinal issues but seems upbeat and focused on resolving them. Smiling through the trots while mixing caffeine pills with Imodium has to be peak ultrarunning.
And then the trail is no more. There are only giant piles of giant boulders, splotchy with brightly colored lichens and mired in waist-high shrubbery with crooked, grabby, unyielding branches. The going is maddeningly slow and hurts my shins, the sole respite a sad-looking, dried-up lake. I take my time walking across its cracked bottom before diving back into the rocks and shrubs to scramble up toward an unnamed saddle, followed by an unnamed peak. It seems mildly incongruous to me that we would claim all of this as ours to name, only to leave out random parts of it.
High up on the moraine slope, moving parallel to but just below the physical ridgeline, I start slipping again. In the shade of the ridge, the ice patches that have formed on the rocks during the night haven’t yet melted. I notice the ice is thick and milky, whereas last night it was thin and transparent.
The other difference with last night is that I can now see where I’m going much better. Arguably a good thing, except I can also see where I don’t want to go, but would if I were to fall. The steep slope ends unnervingly far below, into the gaping maw of a deep, undulating valley that smothers everything in penumbral green. I try to picture the glacier that made all of this—snailing along, deforming under its own weight yet still reaching its tongue greedily forward, dragging with it its ever-increasing load.
❝For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either.
—Blaise Pascal, Pensées
I get now why this section has the reputation it does and why past participants in the race warned me about it. Their words cautioned of treacherous terrain, but it’s their voices that have always betrayed what I now recognize in myself: an overwhelming sense of isolation and inadequacy.
Funny, isn’t it? The vastness of mountains usually evokes a feeling of empowerment, of freedom. But what kind of freedom is it when the path I’m following is basically the only one my fragile body can handle? In every direction but one, I can’t be—the boulders are either too big to climb over, or they lead to a precipice.
This is the real mountain: forbidding, pathless, soulless save for the soul we sometimes like to ascribe to it. Unstoppable forces coexisting with immovable objects.1 Far from the calm sense of belonging on last night’s forested trail, here I feel like an anatopism—removed from where I fit and function best, a squishy, short-lived being in a land of fierce, ancient giants.
But yeah, so, anyway, rocks slippery, falling bad. I am once again saved by the engineered miracle of carbide—the poles’ little tips bite into the granite where my shoes simply slide off, and so I remain upright. The squishy being has some tricks up her sleeve.
✚ ✛ ✙
It’s just past noon when I reach the top of the climb. As I poke my head over the edge of the topmost boulder, I’m greeted by a standby rescue team, who have been stationed there by the organizers in case any of us require, well, rescuing. Good news, bad news: The bouldery climb is over, but a bouldery descent is about to begin. At least the midday sun has finally done away with the ice.
I’m still clutching my poles as I begin carefully picking my way down the furniture-sized rocks. In hindsight, the poles were more a hindrance than a help, as they prevented me from using my hands. Instead of putting them away, I’m flinging them back and forth from hand to hand, both at once or one at a time, spinning them around behind my back, under my leg, over my head. I look more like a spider that’s lost four of its limbs than anything actually born with four limbs.
One hour later, the moraine abruptly ends, however unbelievably. I’m sure it will haunt my dreams, but for now, I’m safely among trees, on a proper trail, and I’m actually running.
1.6 whose feet are these?
It’s been six hours since I left the last aid station, and it will be a few more before I reach the next one.
Pause, widen eyes. I’ve finished entire ultramarathons in less time than it will take me to get just from Aid Three to Aid Four.
Unpause, push rising panic back down. It sure is nice today—sunny, not a breath of wind. Below the treeline, it’s getting toasty, even in the merciful shade of the pines. I try to remember why I thought I could get through this section on just a liter of water.
Oh, that’s right, I didn’t. I was supposed to fill the empty soft flasks, which I’d brought for this very purpose, back at Aid Three. I guess I’ll just have to ration the few drops I have left.
✛ ✙ ✚
As the descent continues, I’m witnessing the gradual transformation of the mountain: from defiance—in its evergreens—to acquiescence—in its oaks, beeches, and hornbeams; from austerity—in its sunbaked moraines—to playfulness—in its soft singletracks.
Eventually, the mountain recedes: Rooftops peek through the trees, then pavement replaces the dirt underneath my feet. Three hours flew by while you were reading the previous paragraph, and here I am in the tiny village where Aid Four is located.
Reentering civilization is… jarring. All those straight lines clustered in one place. But there’s water here, which I ran out of despite my rationing.
A young volunteer ushers me into what looks like somebody’s home. In the yard, in the shade of a long wooden awning, there’s a row of tables with—picture a Viking feast. To prove to myself that running out of water never really constituted an emergency, I decide to eat something first and then drink my weight in liquids in a casual, not-at-all-desperate fashion.
Next up is taking care of what I believe are five or six blisters on the bottom of each of my feet. After sequestering myself a courteous distance away from the tables, lest I spoil somebody’s appetite, I bare my tootsies to find zero blisters and a whole lot of wrinkles. My shoes and socks feel dry, but I guess they’ve been damp from dew throughout the night and morning, and the skin of my feet has become macerated. So that’s what that feeling of walking on embers was. Huh. I could’ve sworn it was five or six blisters.
I look at my feet cluelessly for a few seconds before putting away my blister kit. How do you treat foot wrinkledness? Trick question: You’re supposed to prevent it. Having thoroughly let John Vonhof down2, I put my socks and shoes back on and hobble past the tables and out onto the street.
The next section is two-thirds mellow climbing, one-third mellow descending—completely runnable stuff, if not for the sum total of all the other stuff before it. Either way, mellow-anything feels good after 20 hours of extreme-everything.
The last scattered houses disappear behind me, and the pavement turns back into dirt. The mountain is moving back in, gentle and tame as can be. Spring after cold spring that were nowhere to be found on my way to the village are now popping up everywhere, glinting in the sun and purling deliciously. Gradually, the warm afternoon sobers into a chilly evening, and the sun sets on my first full day in the mountains. My damn feet are killing me.
1.7 my madness—my method
I had no sleep strategy before the race. Having no experience with events of such duration, I figured a predetermined sleep strategy was a shot in the dark at best. Moreover, much like adhering to a rigid nutrition plan or exact pace, it would’ve just added unnecessary complexity (and potential failure points) to an already challenging endeavor.
So I decided to wing it—the damning proof of an ultrarunner’s overconfidence and/or inexperience (very much the latter, in my case). I would just sleep when sleep called, hopefully within minutes of an aid station (which would be very lucky, considering the average duration between them was five and a half hours).
It’s past my bedtime. Extremely past—I’m coming up on 36 hours of being awake (including before the race). The wide, lazy turns of the trail have been lulling me to sleep for hours, and now so is the swaying cone of light from my headlamp.
Thus, it is here, halfway through the race and nearing Aid Five (previously Aid Two), that I devise my sleep strategy: “Take a nap at Aid Five.” Had I planned the same before the race, I would’ve spent the last few hours desperately awaiting the sweet descent into oblivion. Now, the wait has barely begun before that familiar hum of the hydro-generator disturbs the quiet night.
§2 me & the others
The last time I was at the dropbag aid station was also during the night, so it’s safe to assume its existence is conditional on it being dark out.
A lone volunteer greets me at the entrance, her voice cheerful but hushed so as not to wake whoever is under the pile of blankets in the corner. An early drop-out, apparently. Early as in “one of the first of many” (more than half won’t finish), not early as in “after a short time” (26 hours is not a short time). Whoever you are, person in corner under blankets, I commend you for your effort, and I thank you for not snoring so I can nap.
It’s quiet and warm inside, a bit bleak on account of the body in the room—perfect napping conditions. Just need to sort my stuff first. My tired brain struggles a bit with the order of operations, but eventually I get what I need from my dropbag, drop what I don’t, take a big swig of the cold, day-old espresso I have in there, and then take great pleasure in fluffing my pack into a pillow and burying my face in it. My head plunges underwater immediately.
Ten minutes later, I wake up to the sound of voices. A whole bunch of runners have arrived all at once and are creating a ruckus. Among them—what do you know—The Lady of the Long Legs and her companion. She’s sitting quietly off to the side, nursing a cup of hot something, staring into its bottomless depths.
My nap has chilled me to optimal getgoingness. The caffeine should be kicking in any moment now, too. Time to go.
2.1 time is only weird when you perceive it
It’s been three hours since the second night of the race began. In my mind, the next morning was always the final milestone before the finish. I get through the dark hours, I get through the race.
✙ ✚ ✛
You know how, when you wake up, you have no sense whatsoever of time having passed while you were sleeping? It’s a non-time to you—not even empty, just nil. When you wake up, you simply resume perceiving time from the last moment you were conscious, inferring some has passed, but never having experienced its passage. It’s like watching a time-lapse, where sleep is the intervals between the frames.
And you know how, especially if you wake up at an odd hour, your sense of how long you’ve been asleep can be wildly inaccurate yet linger long after you’ve looked at a clock?
Waking up in the middle of the night has confused my brain. Even though I only snoozed for 10 minutes, I feel as though I’ve lost the full three hours since nightfall. The second night of the race is now eight hours long instead of 11. It’s the “time-lapse” effect of a three-hour nap without the restorative effect of a three-hour nap.
Generally disorienting in a non-race setting, the perceived time loss is just as disorienting now. But it’s also comforting, in a semantic kind of way: Having to push through an eight-hour night somehow seems easier than having to push through the final eight hours of an 11-hour one.
I will later learn that, just as time collapses when you’re unconscious, it stretches out the longer you witness its passing. Eight hours can very much seem like ∞. My three-hour 10-minute nap was merely the first in a series of delightful time-continuity distortions, brought on by exertion and sleep deprivation.
✚ ✛ ✙
Still confused but well caffeinated, I’m squelching through glistening mud up yet another lung-burning ascent (we’re back to extreme-everything). There’s cow poop everywhere.
As I stop to shake definitely just mud off my shoes, I notice I’m casting a faint shadow and turn around to see a train of lights right behind me. The first two belong to Legs and her partner. They must’ve left the aid station shortly after I did, and are now quietly pulling away from the rest of the group and catching up to me. Her breathing is just as labored as mine.
Climbing is my one strength (remember that hill, back in Flatlandia, that I came to know like the back of my hand?). “No way can she keep up with me all the way to the top.” Way. Two hours later, we’ll finish the 1,200-meter (3,900-foot) ascent still together, still breathing heavily, never having spoken a word.
2.2 i’d rather be hallucinating
On the way up, the course runs through a coniferous forest tucked deep into a ravine between two spurs of the main ridge. The trail shares the rocky bottom of the ravine with the rapids of a stream that spills over it and causes its perpetually boggy condition. I don’t really mind the mud, but the stream’s gurgle is (*loads a Chekhov’s gun*) irritating to my ears—in a distantly familiar way.
It’s not just the stream, or just sound for that matter, that’s dancing on my nerves. Somewhere along the way, I’ve developed some sort of hypersensitivity: light seems brighter, colors more vivid, smells sharper. And I’m pretty sure I can detect ultrasound.
In the fog of sensory overload, perceiving the familiar has become a conscious effort. The low branches across the trail throw shadows that are not branch-shaped. Rocks appear as rocks only if I look directly at them. I’m willing my eyes to see the world they’ve always seen, but parts of it keep flickering in and out of their proper definitions.
Clearing the treeline, the trail crosses the stream—now a juvenile streamlet just surfacing aboveground—one final time, then turns slightly to align itself with the most sensible approach to the ridge. On the crumbly switchbacks just below the top, I finally begin to put distance between myself and my silent companions.
The distance increases as I crest the ridge and butt-scoot down the butt-scooting portion of the descent (really, this is the only way). The two spots of light behind me soon shrink to the size of the moon, then the stars, and I’m once again alone, jogging effortlessly through what seems to be an alpine pasture. Yep, effortlessly. For at least this brief moment, my brain seems to have found a way to tune out the fatigue and the pain.
It occurs to me that it might not have the capacity for them since it’s still preoccupied with the excess of sensory information. The latter is starting to drive me a little crazy. I haven’t had full-on hallucinations yet (when are those due?), it’s just that objects are looking increasingly wrong. Is this how the rest of the race is going to be?
To answer my question, something that’s either a cow-shaped boulder or a boulder-shaped cow appears in the beam of my headlamp. With its horns, flat face, and broad frame, it certainly has a bovine appearance. But that doesn’t prove that’s also its nature.
Never mind wild apparitions—what’s making me lose my mind is no longer being able to tell bovinity from boulderness. I would flunk kindergarten so hard right now.
Just in case the thing in front of me isn’t a boulder, I apologize wholeheartedly and at length for having bothered it with my presence. Because, you know, a cow would totally appreciate an apology. I may be getting stupider by the minute, but at least I have manners. Why am I talking to whatever this is? Hard to say. All I know (and it might well be) is that my apology is sincere: I do not wish to disturb the peace of the things that were here first, be they living or mineral. Or perhaps I just wish their tranquility—the stillness of the mountain—would transfer to me, to calm my overstimulated brain.
I’m both relieved and a little surprised that I didn’t hear a response in an unfamiliar language.
✛ ✙ ✚
The term “leapfrogging” calls to mind a much more plyometric movement than applies to the occasion, but anyway, here come my new friends catching up to me again. Being alone with those two doesn’t differ much from being alone. Not a word is spoken as we enter the forest together, skid down the suddenly steep trail together, lose it a couple of times then find it again, together.
But even more meaningful than the silence is the understanding that we share no connection, merely space. Our togetherness is circumstantial. It offers little; it demands—not a thing.
Near the bottom of the descent, we cross a bridge over a small river and follow a dirt road downstream. I recognize the sounds it makes (the river does), but they’re not water sounds. It’s a melody at first, then voices—dialogues. All are loud, none are familiar. The result is a bizarre, abrasively dissonant auditory tessellation that hurts my brain.
Abiding by our unspoken agreement not to speak, I refrain from asking my companions whether they, too, hear the noise. I’m hoping against all odds that it’s coming from the aid station we’re approaching, not from the river (freaky) or the inside of my head (loony tunes). But I honestly can’t tell.
The terrain is plain runnable now, and Legs’s partner takes advantage of it and, oh wow, look at him go. She, on the other hand, is not doing so hot. We walk side by side for a minute, just walk, but at that pace that’s on the verge of running. We’re not really competing for a podium spot at the aid station, but merely trying to move efficiently. She’s the first to summon the will to run and pulls away, taking the precious sound of her footsteps with her. Without it, the volume in my head goes up. A sitcom-like laugh track has now been added to the cacophony.
Hours pass (not really) and I finally reach the bottom of the descent, where the aid station is (even more not really). Huh. My watch says I’ve traveled the distance to Aid Six, so it should be here somewhere. It’s only after the slope reverses direction that I remember: Aid Six is supposed to be three kilometers (two miles) up a climb. Sigh, expletive, up I go.
2.3 the paradox of daylight: the things we miss when we can see everything
About an hour into the climb, the mountain hut I’m looking for is easy to see. From space. The bustling, obscenely lit-up aid station stands in open defiance of what nighttime—astronomically, biologically, and symbolically—is. It takes a while for my haywire nervous system to adjust to the sudden influx of noise, light, and chaotic motion. What kind of 5:30 a.m. is this?
Inside, there are runners chatting excitedly while slurping hot beverages, and others slumped despondently into chairs that they know will be their finish line. A volunteer offers a beverage and a chair to me, as well. I wouldn’t mind taking the weight off my feet for a while, but I decline the hot tea/coffee and go for the yogurt instead. That’s a fun thing to have at an aid station. It makes me colder than I already am, but it settles my stomach, which has been queasy for the past hour or so.
The volunteer then attempts to make small talk, and it quickly becomes apparent that the amazing conversational skills I possessed when talking to the cow/boulder have since taken a spectacular nosedive. Just as well, because the floor is beginning to feel like quicksand.
As I prepare to leave, I notice Legs and her partner eating on their feet near one of the tables. I find myself excited that they’re going to continue (because who eats standing up if they’re going to drop out?). With a final, over-enunciated “thank you” to the volunteer, I walk out of the aid station to begin the five-kilometer, 19-degree ascent to the course’s highest point.
With the silence returns the cacophony. Conversations, laughter, sometimes music. This time I know they’re not coming from the aid station—that’s well out of earshot. I also know they’re not real voices but ambient noise that my brain interprets as signal. Still, the noise has to originate from somewhere. I stop, quiet my breathing, and concentrate on the world around me. There’s no flowing water nearby, no wind whistling in the trees. Not a single decibel of sound for the voices to morph from: they have taken a life of their own. A thousand TV shows playing simultaneously, with only myself as the unwilling audience.
Lamentably, the in-house entertainment is not engaging enough to counteract my sleepiness. My eyelids have drifted to mid-eyeball level, seemingly permanently, and any attempt to lift them merely causes my eyebrows to rise.
✙ ✚ ✛
It’s often at nighttime when the plainer things win the bid for attention (for what can compete with the splendor of the mountains on full display?).
I may forget to look more closely while luxuriating in daylight, but now close looks are all I have: a short bit of trail, the trailside shrubs, the dust in front of my headlamp. I watch the tiny particles dance and dash and sparkle, illuminated by the artificial glow that barely filters the predawn murkiness. Does dust ever settle in the mountains?
Transfixed by the hypnotic closeness, I push my grainy little spotlight up the slope. Beyond its halo, the world fades to black. I am thus a threshold between light and darkness; I’m liminality in motion.
And I am also in a threshold state myself: I’m neither fully awake nor fully asleep but suspended in perpetual hypnagogia—the state between the two. Time is a single moment stretching indefinitely. My thoughts escape from me, my vision blurs, I drift away from my physical body. A feeling I’ve experienced every night of my life now feels like torture. It’s so tempting to let my eyes shut all the way.
Tempting… Eyes shut…
I wake up with my feet in the air, butt to the sky, and face full of shrubbery. A split second of confusion, then I almost have a heart attack: Several human heads are floating above the bushes to my right. To my immeasurable relief, they turn out to be firmly attached to human bodies (one of which has very long legs).
The runners stare at me as they move past, probably wondering who hung laundry to dry here with a person still inside it. For ego reasons, I make a production of fumbling with my drawstring: Nothing to see here, this is how I always dive forward and bend over a bush when I need to use the bathroom. I wait until they round the switchback before dragging myself back onto the trail. Either day breaks soon, or I do.
An infinite half-hour later, pale incandescence backlights the horizon and brushes against the mountaintops at just the right angle. The alpenglow. Champagne- and marigold-painted granite and marble. Masterful command of attention.
Then, long-awaited yet flaring all too suddenly, the crescendo: Skies ablaze, mountaintops erupting in molten orange and pink. The sun finally rises.
And not just rises, but rises for the second time since the race began. This is it: The final milestone before the finish. My mind clears. Time resumes its flow.
I haven’t yet reached the top of the ascent for the full 360-view, but I have a solid 180 degrees behind me as I dig my toes into the final stretch. I turn around to take it all in—and stumble backward at the realization that most of the course is not only behind me, but it’s behind me: Stretching before my eyes are the peaks and valleys, metaphorical and literal, of the past 35 hours.
Months and months of training and studying maps, 35 hours on the course, and I still haven’t fully grasped the immensity of where I am and what I’m doing. Had little Melinda Mae, when she had eaten 70 percent of her whale?
✚ ✛ ✙
Among the casualties of extreme fatigue: thermoregulation. I’ve never felt so cold in my life. The ferocious, omnidirectional wind that pummels the exposed mountainside pushes my exhales back into my lungs, setting off the wailing alarms again: Move, leave here, save yourself. The reptilian part of my brain is increasingly the smarter one.
Face numb, teeth achatter, I reach the summit and begin the descent toward Aid Seven. On the sunlit, windless slope, early winter quickly turns into late spring. I stop to shed some layers, then stop again for what’s got to be my hundredth bathroom break (I stopped counting around the same time I stopped waiting to pull up my pants before getting back on the trail) (calling it a “bathroom break” at this point only emphasizes how long it’s been since I’ve seen an actual bathroom). In short, progress is slow and bumbling.
On top of that, the trail is difficult to follow because there are so many of it—slaloming tracks diverge and converge over the entire slope, skirting nonexistent obstacles. I haven’t seen Legs since my embarrassing human-laundry moment in the bushes some hours ago. She was always better at picking out the trail.
As I get to what from above appeared to be the bottom of the descent, I discover there is an equivalent to false summits: false bottoms. Instead of reaching the aid station, the trail widens and continues to descend into a forest. My watch could’ve saved me the disappointment, except it keeps adding distance. I haven’t run as far as it says, and so I’m not as close to the aid station as it says. For some reason, this feels disproportionately disheartening.
I know the reason: It’s one of those lows that I’ve already had a bunch of and have learned to accept and take in stride. I mean, it’s normal to be cranky—I’m more sleep deprivation that person at this point, my stomach still feels weird, and everything hurts.
So I embrace, as they say, “the suck,” and continue to shuffle toward the aid station. Its position is reliably fixed in space, so if I keep shifting mine in the right direction, physics will eventually bring us together.
§3 me & the clock
3.1 training hard got me to where hard training becomes irrelevant
There are plenty of chairs at the aid station, but having my legs together and locked straight is all the sitting I need. Even the embers inside my shoes don’t bother me as long as I stand perfectly still. I feed my rebellious stomach another pacifying yogurt as I inquire of a volunteer about the long climb that I’ve been looking forward to for hours—surprisingly for this late in the race, going uphill has emerged as the most alright type of going. The climb is a “monstrous” one, apparently.
As I leave the vicinity of my unused chair and start swinging my poles up the hill, I feel as if time has been turned back by hours. Not a lot of hours, but some. What a miraculous indulgence, simply to stand without moving a muscle.
After the initial steep incline, the slope lets up a little as the forest falls behind. The eight kilometers (five miles) to the top will end up taking me three hours, but right now I’m not paying attention to distance, time, or a future of any proximity. All I’m consciously doing is resisting the urge to lie down on the warm grass and close my eyes.
And then there are the voices. I know many people flinch at the prospect of being alone for such long periods of time, but for me, escaping the crowds of the city is very much part of the allure of ultrarunning. Except—what a cruel trick—I seem to have brought the crowds with me.
If I had imagined any form of desperation befalling me during a 100-mile race in a remote mountainous area (and I had), a desperate need for quiet was not it. No amount of training could’ve prepared me for this. All those hill repeats just made it so I could get over enough hills to reach the point where hills are the least of my concerns. This “monstrous” climb could be twice as monstrous for all I care. Climbing’s not that hard. I just want to climb in silence.
Can it be that all this chatter is just the sound of being a human? An echo of all of humanity in an ever-present broadcast that a rested brain can easily tune out, but that sleep deprivation amplifies to a roar?
To regain some sense of control over my own person, I decide to finally heed the ardent pleas of my upset stomach. Throwing up seems like a solid reset option, plus, who knows, perhaps it will scare away the voices. Unfortunately, despite giving it my emphatic all, I only manage to produce a few impotent dry heaves and some excess saliva (yes, ultrarunning is gross). The voices are unfazed.
3.2 let’s not talk again sometime
Step after tediously identical step, I reach a meadow with a kiosk-sized, oddly colored boulder inexplicably in the middle of it. This is what’s called a glacial erratic—incidentally, the exact two words I’d use to describe my pace and cognitive function, respectively. As I come around the boulder, I notice a familiar pair of legs stretched out beside it. My old companions start gathering their scattered belongings as I shuffle by, and catch up to me a few minutes later.
Our unspoken not-speaking agreement stands. Hours and hours I have spent running either next to or close behind/ahead of the woman I keep calling Lady Longlegs, and I have no desire to learn her real name or where she comes from; she’s perfect the way she is. But I’ve learned to read her stride and catch the nuances of her silence: She’s tired now, yet flowing, using the terrain as much as her own power. Her perseverance seems awesome to me—in that disused meaning of the word. Does she think about the enormousness of her feat, or realize she’s among the rare few who would even attempt it?
A lightbulb moment, a flash of a mirror; and suddenly I’m certain beyond all doubt: our leapfrogging ends here, and I’m the one ending it.
It took 40 hours and carefully watching myself and a couple of strangers struggle for me to gain the ability to see: The longer you’re in the race, the less doubt there is that you belong in the race. Nobody still out here after almost two days is an impostor, including my undertrained self. The Lady and I—and her partner, and all the others currently on the course, and little Melinda Mae—we’re all strong enough to stick with our “whale,” even though we’re damn sick of it.
It feels like permission. I harness what’s left of my mental faculties to mobilize what’s left of my physical strength (or possibly the other way around) and slowly pull away from the couple. I should’ve gotten their contact information. We could’ve spent hours not talking on the phone.
3.3 friends in high places
To the uninitiated, the final section of this ascent is a gut punch (or any punch of your choosing). After two hours of climbing in a pretty much straight line, a ridge with a prominent saddle appears in the path of that line a short distance ahead. Nothing to the left or right suggests we can go in those directions, while the saddle—picture a ridgeline with a giant bite taken out of it—looks very much like the logical end of the climb. An easy end, too, by the looks of it (well, mountain-easy).
But then, uh-oh, we’re veering to the left as “left” suddenly becomes an option. Logic and ease slowly disappear behind my right shoulder as the manicured trail crashes into a towering, barely traversable heap of rocks choking the narrow chute between two near-vertical walls. Bam!, gut punch.
This is the kind of steep that makes your neck hurt when you look to the top, which is your body’s way of telling you that you don’t want to be looking to the top. The sound of my heartbeat pounding in my ears blends with the rest of the noise in my head. New voices join in, as well—it takes me a moment to realize they’re not hallucinations but actual sound waves traveling through the air. There are people here. I look up (ouch, my neck) to see two more runners, a man and a woman, clawing and grunting their way up the rocks.
The man stops to catch his breath as I get near. They exchange a few words in a language I don’t understand, and she pushes on without him. The two of us reach the ridgetop together and begin the equally steep descent on the other side.
This one talks. I can’t understand a single word, but I think she’s trying to ask me something, pointing at her watch and then down the slope. After an exhausting yet futile pantomimic exchange, I give her a sheepish thumbs-up, hoping it’s a yes-or-no question and the answer is “yes.” I miss Legs and her noninteractive presence.
We get down from the ridge, just barely, onto a terrace-like valley with a gorgeous lake that takes up about half of it. Jagged peaks the color of gunmetal rim the valley on three sides. Their proximity is unthreatening: I know the trail traverses straight through the valley—lush green on one side, cerulean blue on the other—before dropping further down the mountain. There isn’t much climbing to be done anymore.
I’m saying it as if it’s a good thing. It’s not. My feet hurt a lot more going down.
Near the lake, an ice-cold spring provides the last drinkable water before the final aid station. Chatty continues on without stopping, which I think is a mistake. After baking in the sun for three hours on the climb, we’re only about halfway through this leg of the course, and I’m not running out of water twice in a single race. I drink from my cupped hands, splash my face, and finally top off my soft flasks before jogging after her.
You would think sprawling face-down on the ground would be a more fitting reaction to the past 40-something hours, but no, I’m jogging.
Faster and faster as we cross the valley and plunge down a set of pebbly switchbacks, where I overtake my new friend. I don’t know how to say “good job” in her language, so I give her my goofy thumbs-up again. It’s ultrarunning—you can’t go wrong with goofy.
Loose scree has never been my strength, but for some reason, I’m full-on running now, ignoring the burning pain in my feet because you don’t need feet when you’re flying. At the bottom, I make a sharp right, zigzag across a river by hopping over the larger stones jutting out of it, and continue up a gently inclined rocky singletrack. I keep turning my head, but nobody’s following me—not across the river, not on the singletrack, not over the boulder field along the shore of a placid lake.
After the lake, I continue up a short ascent (30 minutes barely registers as anything on the scale of this race) made up of talus and shrubbery. I can’t remember the last time I climbed something that didn’t take me hours.
At the top, thankful for the small breeze in the otherwise still, heavy air, I turn back one last time. Nobody’s coming.
✛ ✙ ✚
In one unhurried, absentminded motion, my hand again wanders to the tiny pocket of my pack near my collarbone. For the thousandth time, my fingers find the stubby antenna of my inReach Mini sticking out of the pocket, pointed at the sky as the manual advises. I brought the satellite device for worst-case scenarios, but feeling its friendly chunkiness on my palm has become a source of reassurance as I made my way through some truly wild places.
No more such places remain. I can turn off the device right now—I don’t, but it would be perfectly safe to do so—as the remainder of the course doesn’t deviate from the touristy trails of the lower altitudes, and cell coverage abounds.
I keep running wherever I can, slowing to a hike only when I’m out of breath. There are five hours until the cutoff.
3.4 ‘a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!’
I spot the final aid station from atop a small escarpment. The slope below is littered with shrubs and scarred with the hairpin turns of the trail twisting around them. I do not have the agility to run down hairpin turns; however, I also don’t have time to walk a perfectly runnable trail. So, much like chasing a wheel of artisanal Double Gloucester set loose down a steep hill,3 I descend the only way there is: no control, no caution, no chill.
I reach the aid station in one piece, although a little flustered and with more twigs in my hair than I normally like to wear. The volunteers don’t seem at all bothered by my appearance but offer to feed me instead. No time for that. Yes, I’m sure, okay, gotta go.
The descent continues down a wide, much less steep gravel road. I look down to see whether I haven’t lost my shoes somewhere—it feels like I’m running barefoot, every sharp piece of rock piercing the bottoms of my feet. The pain makes my ankles twist and my knees buckle, and I keep glancing at the idle chairlift overhead, wondering whether my willpower would have been as shaky as my legs if I’d gotten here during the lift’s operating hours.
The course switches back and forth between the gravel road and a grassy ski slope until it reaches the parking lot at the chairlift’s bottom station. I’m about to make a sharp left when, among the parked cars, I spot a familiar red hatchback.
My friend, whose red hatchback got us to the start, had promised to meet me at the finish and not a moment earlier. Could he have driven up here anyway? Is he sitting inside with an ice cooler full of snacks and drinks for me?
By car, the finish is a few short kilometers down a smooth paved road. The race course goes in a different direction and meanders through the woods for… the distance that remains of it. I don’t know what that distance is—my watch hit that surreal “100” a half hour ago—so I’m helplessly, hopelessly clueless about whether it’s even physically possible to make the cutoff. And I won’t know until either the finish or 10 p.m., whichever comes first.
Or, I get in that car and save myself hours of pain and effort for which there is no guarantee they will pay off.
The triple-digit number on my watch sure looks good. Even though I know it’s wrong, looking at it reminds me that this was never about running a hundred miles; my goal was to complete the 100-mile course. A distinction without a difference, perhaps, but it’s the latter that gives me the unflinching confidence with which I turn my back on the parking lot. I hope it wasn’t my friend’s car with him waiting for me inside.
I was never going to get on that chairlift, either.
3.5 light the fuse and get away
Speed equals distance over time. With the distance missing from the equation, I guess speed better equal “full throttle.”
Running as fast as you can will test your self-control on any day. Running as fast as I can now, after two full days on my feet, requires that I give up control altogether; that I surrender the last of my agency to the discomfort, let it dictate my thoughts and actions as I slip into a state of feral single-mindedness that would make me unrecognizable to regular-life me.
I’m grunting and groaning to keep awake, drooling over myself, dry-heaving without breaking stride. The voices in my head are louder and more numerous than ever, but I ignore them. My feet, which I’m convinced are held together in foot shape solely thanks to my shoes, have been hurting for so long that I’ve come to believe this is what feet feel like. I ignore them, too.
It’s so weird, I would never willingly choose to feel this way, yet I am here of my own volition.
✙ ✚ ✛
It’s getting dark. Under the canopy of the dense forest, the third night arrives early. I feel like I only agreed to two…
“A 50-hour race that starts around sunset will enter a third night 48 hours in.”
—math
Where did I put my headlamp? I chuckle drunkenly at how obsessed I was with organizing all my gear perfectly, and now everything is just wherever and in various states of stickiness.
Only two more hours. Anything can happen in two hours to render the past two days’ efforts futile. With almost the entire race behind me, I have much to lose. It’s not sunk-cost fallacy, it’s sunk-cost fact.
But instead of stressing, I find myself encouraged: What could possibly happen in the next two hours that hasn’t happened in the past 48? I mean, sure, I could fall and break something due to running with barely any light. I should stop and change my headlamp’s nearly dead batteries, but right now, the only lights I care about are the ones I see through the trees each time the winding trail turns toward the town in the valley below.
Of course the final stretch feels endless, they always do. An infinity within an infinity. I can no longer differentiate between sleep and wakefulness—am I really approaching the finish, or am I still napping at the halfway aid station, dreaming about finishing the race? Perhaps the race itself is unfolding inside a dream.
At a pace I’d normally consider a jog, I am practically sprinting as I burst out of the forest and onto a paved road. My headlamp is either dead or I’ve turned it off. So is my brain.
I enter the town on a sleepy Sunday night. Not a soul on the streets, save for a few curious onlookers. The cobblestones are wet again, I think I am as well.
The inflatable arch rises in the middle of the town square in all its garish magnificence. A small crowd has assembled behind it. The final few steps condense into a single moment, and then it’s over, I’m finally still. My mind and body are my own again. The cheers are so loud, and the hugs are so crushing. What time is it?
✚ ✛ ✙
I mentioned in the beginning that signing up for this race was mostly an emotional decision, and at least a little premature. A few more years of experience and training could’ve saved me the desperate sprint to the finish.
But then, so could dawdling less at aid stations, or investing in a pair of elastic-waist leggings (my cumulative bathroom time probably adds up to an hour, thanks in part to a stupid drawstring).
So did I lack enough training, or did I just spend too much time at zero speed?
I finished my dream race a few years early. And two minutes too late.
the end
Yes, the race was many miles, and it took many hours, and left me with many blisters. And this whole thing here is like 11,000 words. I hope I managed to convey that this experience was measured in depth, not numbers. Much, not many.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed your time here, consider sharing “Carpe-ing a Couple of Diems” or this newsletter with a friend. Then go for a nice walk and buy something small and satisfying.
Physicists/philosophers, don’t @ me.
John Vonhof is the author of a brilliant book called Fixing Your Feet—a must-have for runners and hikers.
If you haven’t heard of the Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake, this short video explains what it is (it does not quite explain why people do it):