Well, we drove down together, me and my pal 'Snack (Sarah). Her middle son was sick, so Papa Steve was staying home, minding the fevers and snotflow and such, else he would've made sure we reached the start, even with all the yapping and jawing. As it was, there was no one in the car to say, "left turn here" or "no, that way, Sarah" and "would you please just shut up for a second, Chris." What we do is, we talk, and it's enough in my book that no one gets hurt, so I'm the last one to fret when a lesser priority gets overlooked—something like navigation, something like time. You have to take the long view of things, I always say; consider what’s important in life. Starting times and starting lines are sometimes approximate things, and to my mind, we’d managed the whole thing admirably if not precisely. We took a gamble on a right turn when it seems a left would have been the ticket. ‘Snack said it was the directions to blame and I said, no, I think it’s cursed Fate, and she said back to me that it was both the directions and the damn fool navigator, and I said the directions were handwritten by the pilot and not the damn fool navigator and shouldn’t we just go get breakfast now that we find ourselves almost certainly in Stinson Beach and not Muir Beach. What ‘Snack did then was, she demonstrated some of that multi-tasking mothers can do but which men can only envy--she ably negotiated the hairpin turns along Hwy 1, all the while responding to the damn fool navigator’s impudence--and this response left me rubbing my left cheek and wondering which hurt more, the cheek or the part of my head what had bounced off the window on the side opposite ‘Snack. I multi-tasked in my own way, which is to say I was able feel inside my mouth to sort out whether or not I’d lost a molar and at the same time mumbled yes ma’am and sorry ma’am and no ma’am in response to the things which were being then said to me about what a damn fool navigator may or may not say. Had it been April, we would have been at the right place and the right time for the start of the Muir Woods Marathon, and I felt that this was industrious on our part, maybe even clever. Alas, it was December and not April, and as such, we sat in all our cleverness and industriousness, and in all our chattiness right there in an empty parking lot. And here’s what’s okay about that: Life has a pace to it and we aren’t always in charge of that pace and sometimes it gets too damn quick and sometimes you have to stop and smell the roses and not get any stressed about you being any more than approximate. I think approximate is okay with some things if the cost of being otherwise is to quicken a pace which really deserves relaxing, maybe even requires it. This was one of those things, I’m sure of it. And ‘Snack never did hit me. Not either. I made that up because I do that sort of thing.

So we arrived at the start a full 30 minutes late, and fretting about that this much: none at all. Well, maybe a little bit. Somewhat sheepishly, we collected our bibs and stuffed them in our pockets, told Wendell & Sarah (co-RDs) we’d partake of the a la carte menu today--some of these miles here, but not any of those ones over there. Officially we opted for the DNF and not the DNS, but really we were a DNC (Did Not Care) or a STSTR (Stopping To Smell The Roses.) We shuffled off with no other purpose than to run some, and maybe only as far as was necessary to see some of the folks we’d come down to see. And that’s just what we did. Wandered out to the Tennessee Valley aid station and said hello to Jim and got ourselves updated on who was where and was anybody uncorking a fast one or not. And we ambled out of there thataway too and got up another hill and said oooooh at the view from the top, whereupon we had another choice of left or right and we waited to see if anyone came along. When I say we were bovine, I don’t mean it in the sense that we two runners are fat at all, but in the sense that we had about as much a sense of purpose as any cow I’ve ever seen, which is to say very little at all. Really, no urgency to speak of. And so we didn’t chat with some runnersby up there so much as we chewed the cud with them. Then we went right, figuring right wouldn’t be wrong twice in the same morning. It wasn’t. I believe it was somewhere along that stretch where we solved the problem of world hunger, but it now escapes me, other than to say it had something to do with Hummers and dinner plates, which have increased in size over the years and the new set Missus an I’ve got don’t even fit in our dishwasher and that dishwasher isn’t but six years old. I don’t remember the specifics of our plan, but I assure you, were it put into effect, we would be sharing one of them Nobel prizes.

We ambled back in to see Jim and weren’t there but a minute or two before Derek came in. And he was gone again like that. Then Craig. Jenn was next after that, just a minute later, and we went out with her, even managed to keep up with her for a kilometer maybe. Then Paul zoomed up the last hill by us and then it was just a matter of a long downhill to the finish. Folks as was there know that we all of us started collecting at the finish and were jabbering a bit, when ‘Snack went back to the car to get something and came back and waved a key in front of Derek and said to him something about it being a house key and not a car key, and when we weren’t so quick as to draw any conclusions from that, she explained that it was the house key which was supposed to be inside the car and the car key on the outside of it and not the other way around, and that as a general rule, house keys do not unlock anything but houses, and that if your aim was to unlock a locked car, it was a car key you wanted. Here was another instance of approximateness. We wanted a key, had one, but it wasn’t precisely the key we needed. It was an approximate key. I don’t remember who said it first, but after some hemming and hawing, some bright spark among us suggested we call someone, and ‘Snack stood there, tapping her foot as if to say, “If my car key is in the car, wouldn’t luck have it that my phone is in there too?” We could use my phone I thought, but right then I saw that foot tapping as if to say, “Where do you think your phone is, Damn Fool Navigator?” We resolved then to use Derek’s phone, because we just then noticed it was in his hand and not in ‘Snack’s locked car. And the foot stopped tapping. We even got a signal—maybe a whole bar of it. Enough anyway to learn that GEICO was currently experiencing unusually high call volume at that moment and would we mind holding? As a simple courtesy, we’d’ve been happy to hold, but it was a matter of whether that signal would itself mind holding and really, it wouldn’t. We tried again, but the phone just then died without us getting anywhere but stuck still in that parking lot. I should point out now that Derek was wearing a beach towel in the manner of a Maori tribesman and I have to say, it’s a good look for him. Not many men can pull off a dress; those as have seen me in my kilt can attest to this. I suggest he run Western States similarly attired. No chafing. I should also mention what Derek mentioned, which is not a thing you often hear at trail running events, which is that he was going that evening to see a friend in his first ultimate fighting match.What with Derek’s phone having given up the ghost, we turned to Wendell & Sarah and they said Ranger Chad would be coming by, and if there was a man on this earth prepared for locked cars, it was Ranger Chad. Turns out he wasn’t coming by and if he had anyway, he was not equipped to unlock the car, was instead equipped only to give us a ticket for vagrancy. I have added Ranger Chad to the list of Those Who Are Shunned. If you see him, please tell him.

One of the many reasons to enjoy trail running is that the folks are friendly and there’s always an abundance of them what know you and you them. Plus, there’s this karma thing which has a way of coming round again, and as luck would have it, ‘Snack had some on its way. A lady I knew from the pacing team at CIM was there and I asked her if she had a phone and she said she didn’t have one that got any bars, but it was her friend with her who looked up and saw ‘Snack and recognized her as the EMT who’d given her son first aid at a football game some months back—something involving a knock on the head and missing eyesight—and it was this lady who had a phone with bars—ever a precious commodity in this parking lot. Sadly, GEICO was still experiencing high call volume, and even if you stood with one foot on the bumper and your non-phone hand up in the air at a 52 degree angle and thereby securing for yourself a third bar, the high call volume was still a bar too far. We tried the CHP and also the ranger station and learned our only real hope was that GEICO emergency roadside service. We retired to the heater inside the finish line tent. Shane came in and here we hit upon a solution and a phone which’d meet the need. What we did was, we called Steve and made the whole thing his problem, two-three hours northeast of us. A minute later, someone from GEICO called [i]us[/i] and said they’d be there in 45 minutes and we thought, okay, that’ll work for us. ‘Bout 45 minutes later, Bill’n me were out by the car, talking about running stuff and we see this kid tearing into the parking lot in a little Honda which was the thing we were told to expect. And that kid popped out of that little car all hopped up on Red Bull and crank and in twenty seconds demonstrated how easy it is to steal a car, only he left it with us. We all waved our goodbyes and such and I think the only people we intended to see but didn’t were Jeff, Greg and Chris, but it had been an approximate day and we were lucky to be headed back at all. It was fun, you know. Just a lot of fun, even if it meant waiting in a coldish, dampish parking lot for nigh on three hours.

Anyway, if you got this far, you’ve got more patience with compound sentences than most, and you’ve probably asked yourself the one question I was stuck on myself: How did Derek’s friend do that night in his ultimate fighting debut? He won, apparently.