There's an image from Ragnar I don't think I'll ever lose. Night fell over Soldier Hollow, and from camp you could see huge sections of all three trails climbing across the mountain in the dark. Then the little lights began appearing — one, ten, fifty, hundreds of headlamps, runners spread across the mountainside like fireflies. Every tiny light was a human being out there doing their own hard thing. It was magical.
Then the mountain got angry. Rain, mud, wind, hail. Eli — because apparently shirts are optional when you're a lunatic — ended up storming the mountain shirtless in a hailstorm. Jennie drew Red during the worst of the deluge. Remember that freshly cut trail from the test run weeks earlier? In the rain it turned to mud, and she slipped and fell, reinjuring the same knee she'd already had surgery on once. She kept moving anyway, and eventually came back to camp caked in mud after one of the hardest runs of her whole weekend.
Meanwhile, because we'd doubled our runners, my final loop arrived after only about four hours of recovery: Green, four miles, in the middle of the night. This is where the strange magic of commitment and Ragnar kicked in. Twenty-four hours earlier I wasn't sure I could finish one loop. Now I'd already finished Red and Yellow, and there wasn't much drama left in Green. My body hurt — fine. I was exhausted — fine. I'd also developed some gastrointestinal issues along the way that had made me intimately acquainted with basically every porta-potty at Soldier Hollow — fine. Move. So I moved, and sometime in the darkness, I finished my third loop. All three, done.
Then came Riley, waiting at transition for his final loop, Yellow. As I came in, he was getting ready to go, and suddenly he looked down and realized he'd forgotten to change out of the shoes he'd been walking around camp in all day. His running shoes were back at the tent. Two options: run back and get them, or go. He looked at the mountain and said, fuck it, send it — then ran the entire Yellow loop in his walking shoes. And during his run watched both a 70 year old granny and an 18 year girl dressed as a faerie (with sparkles and wings) run happily past him. He came back with a sore ankle and hip, which seems like the appropriate tax for that decision, and a giant smile on his face. There's a Rush lyric I love: we're only immortal for a limited time. Riley is still very much in that limited time.
Aubrey became our final runner. Twenty-five hours ish after Eli had started us off, she came home, and we'd finished every required loop. Shortly afterward, the storm turned severe enough that Ragnar finally shut the event down because of lightning on the ridges. We had raced the mountain, we had raced the storm, and somehow, we got everybody home.