Leg 18 begins at the St Helens High School parking lot and leads out onto a long, featureless stretch of highway. After dark, we are required to carry a flashlight, and to wear a reflective vest and flashers or face immediate team disqualification. I am so adorned. I wait for our runner 5. I bounce on my toes a couple of times to test my readiness. We high five each other as our runner rounds the corner. Runner 5 passes me the baton within the cones of the exchange, and I take off out the parking lot and down to the lonely highway.
I see an occasional runner twinkling away. Mostly it's just me: my bouncing safety flashers and weak flashlight beam metronome set against the red and white lights of traffic. My footfalls are jarring. I breath, jarred, and settle uneasily into pace down the miles of yawning highway. At an indiscriminate point, the route turns left into a poorly lit suburb.
The suburb is a relief after the highway. I come closest to joy, running, running, thinking this is fine.
But the thin lights of the neighborhood are not enough. They get thinner and farther and farther apart. I stumble on a dark rise of pavement, twist my ankle, and barely don't fall. I am not pitched over this rolling ankle into a gully of blackberry brambles on the curve where the road leads back out of the suburb. I straighten, shake it off, and run past a lone volunteer directing runners by flashlight out toward darker and darker country roads. I can not see their face. They do not say a word.
These are hilly country roads, thin gravel shoulders, ditches, and shitty, splintered, falling down fences. Are they though? Is this a hill though? What do I know. It's too dark. There is lots of brush and tall grass shadow shapes. They imprint in my swirling visual cortex. I remember grinding up the hill to the crickets and frogs screaming, maybe owls hooting? and wolves howling? It seems improbable but I probe my memory and feel quite fucking certain there were wolves. I'm running like there are wolves.
I remember the song of every second of this run... the sturm and drang of this dark wild night... of will run headward into failure. I have failed to be, to train, to become, to do, anything, right. Never again... I'll never do this again. I'm never going to do this again. I am awful. It is miserable. Nothing feels good. Nothing is good. Wolves take me. I am here to die on this road where I have no business running in the middle of the dark night. Yet by force I run and I run and I run.
Until the run, like all runs, ends. The end comes slower than I'd hoped. I see a hint of lights in the dark. Red lights. The first volunteer is a vortex. She tells me how close I am just a little ways out, but her words are a chasm of elastic space/time. I'm pulled out from the center, down, flattened, stumping along the accordion road drawing a singular note of disharmony. It just keeps goooooing and fucking going and going and going and fuck, it's still going. There is another volunteer. She calls out the team number on my bib. And some people. Someone closer to the people calls out the bib number again. More people. Lights, dark, flashers, flags, dark, lights, dark, lots of reflective shit flashing. I'm done. I have failed my way to the exchange. I pass off the baton. I am hot, sweaty, and gratified. It is quickly wicked away by the cold damp mist and thundering disinterest of the teeming exchange.
Van 2 is off running. Through the dark flattened-grass field we find our way back to Van 1, and in an act of unspeakable ironic cruelty, drive back to the very exchange where I took the baton bracelet and began my last run.
We pay a couple bucks each for a tiny towel and access to the high school's locker room. The shower heads are high-pressure, low-volume and the tepid water feels like needles on my skin. They are set to blast just under my clavicle; a height that is so perfectly inconvenient it feels calculated and sadistic. I rinse away the sweat and salt. I contort under the shower head to wash my hair, sideways, backwards, tired, and strained. I feel like I've lost a layer of my skin by the time I'm quick and done. My dry clothes feel rough. My bones are cold. I am acutely aware that I need electrolytes. I know all the symptoms of imbalance.
Out in the main hall, the PTA is selling breakfast to all the Van 1 teams. It is after 11pm, but it is sweet, cheery, and bright. They give us large warm servings on paper plates: eggs, pancakes, sausage, butter, syrup, hot chocolate, orange juice, coffee... I am so goddamned spirited about this plate of food, but after I eat a second bite I get weak. I keep trying but I can't eat. I just need electrolytes. My teammate looks me over. You need electrolytes, she says. Then we lament my plate of food together. Our eyes are so hungry, but she is full and I can not eat. We try. We nibble. We can't.
Back in the van, I pull on wool socks, a down jacket, sweatpants, a hat, and wrap myself in a Rumpl travel blanket. I drink electrolytes. I drink more. More still. I'm cold. My clothes feel rough. I sleep, kinda. The van rumbles back through the same roads I just ran and on... to the next van exchange where we'll wait in light slumber for the final Van 2 runner. I'm cold. Cold, cold. cold. cold.
Ehhgh, I think over and over. I hover into light non-restorative sleep, stirred occasionally by a faint tremor from my cold weary bones.
