HOTS update…hour 84 . 3.5 days, 4 days of running complete and heading into the 4th night. . the update is late. immediately after posting the morning update we hooked up with carl and drove 100 miles back to pick up a drop then drove back up the course. little did we know there was a second runner only 2 miles back of our pickup who would drop after we left. now, rather than getting Read more
HOTS update… 72 hours . it does what it does and it is what it is . as i sit and watch the totals start to hit the tracker the runners jumping ahead so that i can see what they got in during the night i think about the new phase the race is entering. . a journey, like life is always changing. . with 3 days under their belts the runners that greet the Read more
HOTS update 60 hours . slow and fast . the most surprising thing about a race like this is how fast the field moves. bob has been torching the course and has gone all the way thru knoxville and is already at loudon. but bob moves fast. the tail end of the field is already past jonesborough. by morning the last runners will be in afton. (i will let you guess where bob will be) Read more
48 hours update (2) . real is too real . the third sunrise can be a time of reckoning. this third sunrise is turning into a disaster for some. after two days and two nights on the road that third morning is cruxial. only one person has reached the halfway point. the people back around the cutoff STILL have nearly 250 miles to go. . your feet hurt. you have not had a decent sleep Read more
HOTS update 48 hours . part 1: the big dance. . the bailout is not simple. there are three of us and three vehicles trying to maintain some reasonable distance from the runners so that drops can be retrieved from the road and returned to the rock as expediently as possible. . i have the simplest job in the lead vehicle. generally it is only a few runners that move to the front. someone has Read more
HOTS update 36 hours: . halfway thru the second day and things are taking all sorts of twists and turns. there cant be any bigger news than bob hearn’s morristown mistake. 5 miles past morristown it suddenly dawned on him; "oh crap. i was supposed to run the elevated sidewalks!" . and so came the thing every runner hates most. back over the 5 miles he had just run, do the missed section and then Read more
HOTS 24 hour update: . now there are 80…. . it is not my place to tell people what they cannot do. if it was i would probably have told the first two drops; "you are in over your head" . this is not an easy game. as the saying goes; "there is discomfort involved" . there are others i would have told; "you are in over your head" there have been many over the Read more
this really should be called the update at 5 hours because it has been that long since we saw a runner. the last one was bob hearn, nearing the top of the climb of the mountain on the east side of shady valley. he was being hotly pursued by john Clarke both were running at a pretty good clip (and that is a long, hard climb!) . some combination of kyle kalbus, jeff stafford, and Read more