We set up our tent Thursday evening along the perimeter of a
parking lot for the ski resort where the trail race was being held. Unless you were one of the many who queued up
days ahead to buy Halo 4, the iPhone 5, or watch Harry Potters VI and VII,
chances are you’ve never had the pleasure of pitching a tent on asphalt. I certainly never had, although most of said
pitching was done by others while I busied myself eating a burrito so heavy it
broke through the paper bag and landed splat on the ground, thankfully still contained
in the aluminum foil so I could pick it right off the pavement and eat it.
In fact, my only contribution to the build was putting up
the sign that I made with our team name, Eight No Mountain High Enough.
It was hung with a heavy heart since we were
in fact no longer eight runners. Since
each team member is meant to run all three loops, we effectively had six legs
to fill. The good news was that a team
member had a friend who happened to be vacationing an hour away. He was willing to run the two longest legs
the first day, which meant that 1) runners had to be shuffled to accommodate
his availability, and 2) we still had four more legs to cover amongst the rest
of the team. So in effect, our team name
should have been Six and Two Thirds No Mountain High Enough, but that just
doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Throughout the night and the next morning, other teams
slowly filled in until we had an honest to goodness tent city that spilled onto
adjacent parking lots and off the perimeter of the grounds. The irony did not escape me that I was
amongst a group of people who paid good money to live in the same conditions as many people were forced to a few hours west in Sacramento. But who has time to
contemplate the collateral damage of the economic crisis? We had a race to run.
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