i apologize for the lateness of this update.
with rain falling at the finish area
i chose to leave my electronics safely in the car.
.
we now have 57 finishers in,
and 24 runners still on course.
.
with 36 (now 31) hours to go
and off and on cold rain no one has left the clarion since it got dark.
runners on the approach have little choice but to keep pushing towards the clarion
it is too cold for sleeping outside!
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this is a mixed blessing for the staff.
we get to sleep in beds (the third time this week!)
and this time it might be for more than 3 hours.
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but tomorrow when the sun comes up it is going to start getting a little crazy.
then later in the day,
as the last runners racing oprah down to the wire start reaching clarion,
and the longest 14 miles
they are not going to get the luxury of a sleep break,
they will have no choice but to keep pushing on to make the finish before time expires…
.
we staffers are not expecting any more sleep after tonight until sometime sunday afternoon.
.
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one of the untold stories of the vol state is the relationships that develop between runners.
as the days go by most of the time the runners are struggling down the road alone.
but the race is not a lonely place.
participants will fall in together for a few miles,
a few hours,
or a few days.
sometimes two or three runners will find that their paces match perfectly
and they will run the remainder of the event together.
we have them come in and from their interactions assume they have known each other from childhood
only to find out they had never met before the race.
and paired up after a chance meeting at a country store a hundred miles in.
there is no better way to get to truly know someone
than to see all pretenses stripped away
by endless miles under the blazing sun.
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with paces and sleep schedules not matching,
others find themselves in “pods”
repeatedly passing and being passed by each other,
meeting in stores and angel stations
and becoming invested in each others’ outcomes.
they share tears and laughter
(because there is as much laughter as there are tears at vol state)
we end up with 5 or 6 runners accumulating at the finish over a period of hours,
as they wait for the others in their pod to come in.
nothing brings people together like shared hardship.
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sometime tomorrow night we will start seeing the final pod come in;
the pod that has been fighting off oprah for the last 10 days.
with no awards to win
nor accolades to garner,
they have stood up to pressure day and night for almost a week and a half.
but they have not faced it alone.
all the runners,
from the first to the last
have formed a bond with those around them.
the competitive among them might want to win;
but they do not want the ones they have fought beside to fail.
.
10 days on the open road have turned a collection of strangers into teammates
and family.
Categories: Vols2024