From my perspective as a volunteer, the race went really well. No death. Only one Copperhead bite, almost everybody finished, and one team nearly cleared the course. The team that did not finish consisted of Shaun, the Copperhead bitee, and Electra, his partner, who had a wonderful Minnesotan accent. It was no wonder that Shaun was bitten, as he raced naked except for a pair of anklets that said “BITE ME” on the side. The bite did enable him to see the inside of an ambulance, the inside of a hospital, the inside of his eyelids, and Miss Deters, his fourth grade teacher. He claimed she was wearing a pantsuit made from eighteen 2 slice toasters.
Drake and Judd won the race, and they looked it. I’ve seen exhumed bodies that seemed more chipper. The crazy bastards probably hadn’t slept at all, and Drake’s description of his feet was enough to make me hurl. After Drake had cleaned up a bit he still looked like a train wreck. Normally, Drake is about 7 or 8 feet tall, while I am normally less than 5 and a half feet, but we were seeing each other eye to eye as Drake was trying to walk in such a way that minimized foot pain. After the race some people stood for the final words, while others sat in chairs, and a few were lying about, trying to pay attention to Stephanie who was surprising lucid after approximately no sleep for the past couple of days. I was looking for the Black Box to try to decipher what brought this plane down in the first place.
I would like to say amazing things about each team, each soloist, each volunteer, and the director, but frankly, everybody was amazing. A 48 hour event seems like a crazy hard length. Short enough so as to push and push with little or no sleep, long enough to be relatively lethal. It was one hellacious thing to pull off. Sisyphus, Hercules, Amelia Earhart, and Mother Theresa would have been proud. Stephanie designed the course like the wizard racer that she is. She plans the routes that she would take. She plans the C.P.s that racers might want to drop to save time and energy. She plans the course for both beauty and struggle. I know these things as I helped set some of the C.P.s and clear a few others. After setting one of the pond C.P.s, Stephanie was hoping we’d find a way into a rather steep looking gorge. Thus the knotted rope descent into the stunningly Gorgeous Gorge. Of course the course was a true body beater. Steep, long, gnarly and mentally, spiritually and morally challenging. Common attributes of a Stephanie race.
One fellow, Anthony, was on the Cumberland team as a substitute, as their regular members, Thor and Winslow, were having their hair, nails, and race-proof make-up done over the weekend. Five or six hours into the race at T.A.1, Anthony was keeping up with his very experienced partners but was looking pretty crummy: dehydrated and electrolytically challenged. He was pushing too hard for his new mates. I thought he’d be a gonner before too long, but his smart cookie teammates, Jen and Kevin, nursed him back from the Brink of Bonk. At each T.A. Anthony kept looking better, and by the finish he was making full sentences. He talked about his wife’s concern about his “no quit” mentality, his commitment to the team and about how he has always thought that Boris Karloff and Lon Cheney were way scarier than Vincent Price. He began to quote various scary movies that he had watched during the race. Then he began to sing Christmas carols in Chipmunk fashion, as if he was singing through a window fan. Soon he was singing to his bicycle, and I asked if he had a ride home.
There were two guys wearing burnt orange shirts, Steve and Mike, who always looked kinda bad but not terrible bad. They seemed to get more sleep than most. Mike, “The House”, is built as if he pushes and pulls train cars uphill for fun. Steve was a cheatin’ bastard , as his lovely wife, Carla, and two beautiful young children, would meet him at the T.A.’s, keeping up his spirits and his mental acuity much better than we could, as semi-groggy volunteers. None of jumped into his arms yelling “Daddy!”
The race was small in numbers. Was it the proximity to Labor Day? Was it the glut of September races? Was it the 48 hours? Regardless, Stephanie worked her ass off to direct this race, which would have accommodated 10 times the number of participants. She did not whine or whimper about the small turnout. She simply ran the race fully, cutting no corners. Two weeks after the race she told me that she nearly broke even, which meant “expenses only”. The multitude of hours spent scouting, meeting, calling and computing were, of course, free. However, everybody seemed to like the intimacy of the small group. We all got to know who was whom, along with personality traits, states of being, levels of pain, complications of injury, and “dreams and aspirations”. (There were a lot of the latter.), Although I was not supposed to help any of the racers, I did perform Vulcan Mind Melds with seven of the race participants. Of course I was drained a good bit, what with gathering in their discomforts, joys and dysfunctions, but it kept several from Seppuku and excessive mumbling.
One fellow, John Harris, (sounds like a rather unimaginative false name. He’s probably C.I.A.) , was M.I.A. for several hours early in the race. I was finally called upon for a “search and rescue”. As I was mentally rehearsing the application of a Bandaid and how to remove a racer’s limb that may be caught in a tree or under a rock, C.I.A. John reached T.A. 2 in fine spirits, having spent a number of enchanted hours on the ridge around C.P.8 where there was the beautiful small arch. John’s dedication to C.P.8 was full flavored, and darkness kept him in its grip. C.P.8 and the Dark had conspired to blow Smoke into John’s Navigational Cortex and the squirrelly nature of the enigmatic cliff/ridge made descent a matter of blind faith! Late in the race John joined forces with the other Soloists for a while because, as we all know, the mind goes before the body. (In my case, I need help after about 45 minutes into an “O” meet.)
One additional development of the soloists’ banding together for a while was a new language! They began muttering to themselves and each other at about hour 44. They continued to talk this way after the race, to themselves and others. It seemed to make no sense to anyone, themselves included. We later came to realize that it was mostly a comforting mumbling vibration. I have taken to the language, utilizing it while I’m on the toilet reading. It keeps my legs from going numb.
I feel like I’d be amiss if I did not mention Todd and Joe; however the photographs that Stephanie put on her website, Flying Squirrel, say way more than a thousand words. Seeing Joe and Todd sleeping in those chairs after the race tells us the sounds, colors, pains, agreements, disagreements; the smells, the drive, the confusion, the twilight, daylight and darkness of a 48 hour race. I am sure that the reasons for doing these things are many and varied. This reminds me of a story that Woody Allen told at the end of one of his movies; “Annie Hall”, I think. A man walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says “Doc, I have a serious serious problem. My brother walks around acting like a chicken. He thinks he’s a chicken!” The psychiatrist responds, “Well, that does sound very serious. Perhaps you should try to get him committed to an institution.” The man says, “But Doc, I can’t! I need the eggs!” It’s like that folks. We need the eggs.
Yours, the one who strives for mediocrity,
Bill Donnelly
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