Note: This is just my take on Saturday, September 23rd. It overlaps with other folks’ experiences on that day. I speak for no one but me, make no guarantees on the accuracy of anything but the rhinoceros. I believe everyone who’s posted a report by now is in some kind of collective denial about that and I’m here to tell you rhinos happen, one happened on Saturday.

Let me set this up proper-like. It’s late spring, and the sun is going down on Bill, Steve and me as we make the long hike up from Rucky Chucky to Drivers Flat, another long run winding down. We’re talking shoes or somesuch, or maybe I’m telling about my Massanutten DNF…again, I don’t know. Steve pops out with this: “Sarah’s running Rio Del Lago.” Back east, they call it a New York Minute, but hereabouts, it’s that split second between what that guy said just then and what anyone who knows Sarah or her sister would say, which is this: “Anything. Anything at all. Whatever she needs. Crew, pacing, cheering, training company, cookies, water holding. Anything.” We didn’t know it then, but sister Elizabeth was planning to do the race again as well. There’s a light comes off those two. It’s fun to stand there in it, all lit up and whatnot. We wanted dibs on that, Bill and me. UR was in gratis.

The plan changed quite a few times along the way, but by race morning, our assignments were: Bill crewing and pacing, with me and UR crewing, but also being available for emergency pacing. I got to the race well before the start and in time to take this marvelous picture of everybody before the long day made its intentions known—whether that be settling in full and unkind, or lifting a body up, buoyed across the miles. There’s good people in this world and there’s bad people. Sometimes you can’t tell by looking at folks, and to be honest, I don’t know everybody in the picture all that well, but I think when you look at that picture there, you’re looking at five good ones.

Now, there were a lot of pals running SNER/RDL. Of them all, Derek got to Rattlesnake Bar first (mile 12), followed by Paul, then Shane. Naturally, given that she was one of my two charges for the day, Elizabeth got by me without me even seeing her. I spent the next two hours wondering what the hell’d happened to her. What happened to her was she was having a fast day. I caught Sarah though, watched her drink an Ensure she wasn’t all that confident would stay down, worried a bit that she’d already had to take some Excedrin. Everyone looked strong, everyone smiling. Well, everyone except Derek. I gotta tell you, my mother used to hide a dime in the Christmas pudding, and some lucky one of us boys picked through that foul cake and was at least a dime richer for it. The other three of us would look at our plates, that nasty cake broken apart and scattered amongst our consolation pennies, hearts full of cakey dime envy. Being Jewish, Norm has no Christmas pudding to work with, so every year, instead of a dime, he hides an angry, poorly fed rhinoceros somewhere on the course. Lucky Derek! He found the angry rhino, and wouldn’t you know it; that rhino was fiercely territorial! He was like Jim from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, wrestling that rhino, and also a bit like MacGuyver, tucking his disemboweled bits back in and securing them with empty GU wrappers and a ballpoint pen. Never seen anything like it. What can’t you do with GU? Miracle stuff, that. (Alright, I made that up--everyone knows that at four foot two, Norm cannot hide a rhinoceros anywhere. Helen had to help him. The rest is true, I swear. Here’s how you know: You’re reading it on the internet, and everything you read on the internet is true. Plus, there’s pictures: Picture 1 and Picture 2.)

Rolled on up to Maidu (mile 20-ish) and watched the same procession moving through. Whatever suffering they’d done a mile previous on Cardiac Hill, it was not showing on anyone’s faces. Sarah was smiling like everyone else, but said she did not like that hill, not either. Not at the beginning, neither the middle bit, nor at the end of it, which came much later than a body’d properly want. I share that opinion. I think we should all have a moment of silence in quiet condemnation of that damn hill.

Shuffled over to the Auburn Dam Overlook (mile 22.) Bill and I have split up, each crewing for a sister. Elizabeth’s having herself a day, and is banging out miles enough that no one’s saying 24 hours because no one wants to jinx anything, but the thing we’re not saying is the thing we’re thinking, which is that Elizabeth’s sneaking up on a sub-24 maybe. Sarah pulls in and is not feeling well. The food on hand isn’t agreeable, but she thinks chicken soup might work. I get a text message from Steve, who is doing the soccer dad thing with the kids. One game down, one more to go, and will soon be on his way. Out of voice range, Steve can still text, is king of texting. Chris is not even a pawn or a serf of texting, quite sucks at it, in fact. Still, I’ve got instructions to get him to pick up soup on his way in. I tried to text it. Really, I tried. I tried to text this: “She needs chicken soup. She’ll kill us both if you don’t get soup. I don’t want to die.” (DISCLAIMER: Sarah never threatened anyone’s life. In fact, she may have saved one that day. I just added that for dramatic effect, because I haven’t told enough lies since the rhino.) What I actually sent via text message was this: “.”(CLAIMER: This ain’t a lie. I actually texted a period to Steve. Ask him.) Defeated by technology, I needed to manage this on my own, no safety net. It’s 88° out and she wants soup. Soup is my job right now. I’m all like “Soup! Soup! My kingdom for a cup of soup!” Turns out, what Richard III needed was a 7-11. He’d’ve been just fine if he’d had a 7-11, because I bet a 7-11 back then would sell horses. I know this because I was ready to give up my kingdom for something, but I didn’t have to because I stopped at 7-11 and they had the very damn thing I needed, which was damn soup. Magic. Got the soup and then got my hairy blue butt on down to No Hands bridge (mile 26ish). Steve may damn well be King of Damn Texting, but the soup throne? That thing is effing mine.

Bill rolls in and says Elizabeth’s doing great up on the Cool loop. He’s got his cooler full of magic drinks. We wait like three wise men with our gifts of Soup, Magicdrinks, Ensure. Well, really it’s just Bill and me, but though he is technically absent, Steve is by now fully implied, threatening as he is to arrive soon. Sarah comes in a little later than we’d expected because she had come across a young runner passed out on the trail, and had stayed with her until a horseback rider came along to get the girl out. We were yapping about everything going on and the problem Sarah was having with food, trying to sort it out. She needs to sit in the chair and collect herself. I know what you’re saying to yourself. You’re saying, “You damn fool! Give her the soup you were being such a drama queen about!” Well, sure, the soup’s obvious to you guys, but I have the attention span of Daffy Duck on crank, so you know I had to think of everything else before my mind spun round again to soup, which it did, and she got the soup. And there was even a spoon, so it wasn’t just soup for her to hold and look at; it was soup she could eat. I’m smart like that. Someone else might have just showed up with soup. Me? Soup and a spoon. You might say I’ve got soup skills. You have a soup crisis, just call me. I’ll get you through it. I think I’ll teach a soup certification class down at the community college.

Sarah picked up a bit, leaving No Hands Bridge. That’s good, because she was about to scratch her nose on the endless steepness that is K2. That’s not a hill climbed, it’s a hill survived. And it plays mind games on you while it’s smacking you around, because it’s got a gazillion sucker summits. Bill and I zipped up to Cool (mile 30 through 37.) Steve texted us again, asking if we wanted anything from the golden arches. We texted back: “x97.*#” This cryptic thing meant: “Nah, we’re cool.” Get it? We’re cool. He he he. That’s some humor there. We were cool in Cool. Double entendre. He he he. Gawd, someone should write that one down. Those folks at the Cool Chamber of Commerce need to put that on a sign or something—you know, right up there with the Kiwanis and Lion’s Club thingy as you come into town. Steve arrived with two of the three kids, got out of his car and said this: “You text like crap, man.” I couldn’t really think of anything to say to that, so I just held up the spoon. Shortly afterward, MamaSarah came in to the aid station to start the Cool loop just as Elizabeth had wrapped it up. They both looked good, seemed on the beam.

We hung out there a while, the aid triumvirate (and kids), jawing sagely about this thing or that, full of knowledge and wisdom, solving world problems from the comfort of camping chairs. We’ll make good old men, I think. Came time for Bill to mosey on down to No Hands for Elizabeth’s return engagement with that particular aid station. Sarah came back around, even asked for the tuna sammich we’d been keeping on ice. This was a good sign. She’d been struggling to get calories in all day. Seeing some enthusiasm for food of any kind was like seeing Tigger get the bounce back in his tail.

Back to No Hands, with Sarah here expressing some regret over that tuna sammich. She had some things to say about that sammich, did Sarah, said them quietly under her breath on account of the kids, you know. I don’t know if it was precisely here that the wheels started to come off her wagon, but it seems a likely spot for it. I only really knew that trouble which had been brewing on this food thing was starting to come to a boil. Still, you never can really tell with ultras. You can go pretty far down into the barrel and still come up all giggly, if a little dusty for it. It could yet be that she’d rebound with a case of the giggles. For all the food trouble, she was just about ten minutes behind schedule, and the cut-offs were not even on the radar screen yet.

From No Hands back up to the Auburn Dam Overlook. Still well ahead of the cut-offs, but now we were watching them. When she got into ADO, she said the struggle had gotten into her head. Some of us spend most our time running with muscles and blood and tendons. Others of us spend the time all up in our heads, wandering. You have to mix it up a bit, I’d expect. But no matter which we are, I bet we each of us at some point do a little dance along the edge of an abyss, shouting questions down into it. For me, it’s the whole point of 100s—the opportunity to peek down into the lower layer. It’s a gamble though, because sometimes whatever’s down there is awake and shouts back. I don’t know if Sarah’s one kind of runner or the other, but when she came into ADO the second time, I’d’ve laid odds she’d just got shouted at by one of those dark things. I’ve been shouted at before, and it’s no fun. Watching her come in, I got to feeling worried and helpless. Steve and I had talked about how and when he’d join her on the trail, expecting to do it later on, but we quickly put together the gear he’d need, and she left ADO with as fine a pacer as has ever graced the trail. I know this firsthand.

You can tell a lot about the tree by looking at its fruit. Likewise I suppose, kids’ll tell you something about their parents. I spent the rest of Sarah’s race with two really wonderful and sharp-witted kids. I wasn’t expecting that to be the highlight of the day for me, but it was. We rambled over to Maidu to catch their Ma and Pa one last time before they ran the gauntlet all the way to Rattlesnake. They came in, went out again, and then me and them kids got to talking about what terribly not-nutritious thing we’d indulge ourselves in for dinner. Five pound bags of Snickers? Laffy Taffy? A large box of jelly donuts? What would get us to puking quickest, make our faces filthiest?

I have to tell you what DIDN’T happen. Because they’re young’uns, we didn’t drive into Auburn to have dinner at a biker bar. While we weren’t at the biker bar, we didn’t smoke cigars and challenge the Auburn Chapter of The Unholy Lizards of Hell Biker Gang and Accounting Club to a game of pool, didn’t call them yellow-bellied cusses and all suck-egg mules. The pot wasn’t Happy Meals all around, and when Daughter didn’t run the table, she was NOT accused of being a pool shark, and she never had to do some weird kung-fu thing whereby she got one of those Unholy Lizards on the ground, crying as she didn’t pinch his ear. The Young Man did not then win over the gathering tattooed and snarling crowd with a rousing chorus of the theme song from Barney. No one in Auburn that night heard a gang of biker accountants singing, “I love you. You love me. We’re a happy family…” and so on. I was not arrested for bringing two minors into an establishment of that sort. None of this ever happened, because Sarah and Steve’d kill me outright if it did. Any rumors you hear, newspaper accounts, youtube.com video footage, etc., anything like that is entirely fabricated. It didn’t happen.

No, what did happen was, it was a Saturday evening, about 7pm, maybe a bit later, and we did math, food, astronomy. Naturally, a man of my disposition left in charge of two of his friends’ kids turns his thoughts to math. We did math. No lie. Math. Runner’s math, though. It was fascinating, and now the Younguns are well-versed in 5K, 10K, 50K, 100K and their imperial system conversions. When I got it wrong, they rolled their eyes, corrected me. At no point during the math lesson did I trip and fall on my face over a dark and unexpected curb outside race central. Two children did not laugh their skinny little kid butts off at my parking lot faceplant. We moved from math directly to food, because we never won any Happy Meals at a biker bar. We had to choose from three fast food joints. My kids can never agree when faced with this kind of choice, but we had a unanimous decision on Chez Bell, purveyor of fine and altogether authentic Mexican cuisine. We came up with a new phrase: Taco Sludge. We believed this what was given to us from the drive-thru window, and it rocked our notion of what constitutes authentic Mexican cuisine. Rocked it to the core.

From there, we had to mosey on over to Rattlesnake Bar, to wait for Ma and Pa. They needed to get there by 10pm to beat the cut-off. I predicted 9:30ish. It was still Saturday night, and the O'Connor School of Great Tedium was still in session, turning now to a study of the heavens. Mind you, I grew up in a light-polluted place, couldn’t make out the Milky Way much as a kid, but there it was up above, stretched out all sparkly-pretty across the sky. How it is that the Milky Way loses out to Gameboys, I don’t know, but it did. I didn’t get anyone’s full attention til the thing I was looking for finally showed up. Dim and far, and zipping past us at something approaching 17,000 mph, a satellite carved a brief arc across heaven itself. That got ‘em. Well, mostly Daughter, and mostly just for a minute. Her brother pointed to his own eyeballs, mentioned something about glasses and resolving things like specs of light up in the sky. He looked anyway, maybe hoping it was just bright enough, but it wasn't, and he turned back to his Gameboy. I looked up and saw another one headed in the opposite direction. Some of it’s just space junk, I know, but it’s fun to watch it all pass through the zodiac. We had our own constellations to look for down here on the firmament, and at about 9:30, we wandered up to the aid station to watch for lights moving in the dark at a rate well less than 17,000 miles per hour. I told ‘em we were looking for an arrangement of two bright lights above two green ones. Lights at an ultra get to telling their own story, and sitting in enough nighttime aid stations, we get to know how to read them. Lady behind us wondered to her little girl if an odd combination coming down the hill was someone named Grandpa. I kinda casual-like said, no, that’s a coupla trail sweep horses. She didn’t believe me, but unless Grandpa’s a palomino or a paint, she was wrong. She didn’t look horse-faced enough to be right. She was altogether pretty. Those sweeps came in, set up and noble on a pair of gorgeous and well-mannered mounts. They were going to wait there until it was time to start reeling folks in. It was 9:48 when we saw the lights we were looking for, and they were telling their story and that story was coming to an end for now. Lights should point down, but these were more down, more tired, more hurt. I think maybe Sarah could have left that aid station, could have made the next one at Horseshoe Bar. To get to the one after that though, she’d have to cover the worst section of the trail, deep rutted track that gets you sideways almost, and boulders you need hands and feet to cross. There’s bones out in that stretch, and things that look back at you with carnivorous intent.

Kids don’t care about DNFs. Kids just love moms, and I stood back a bit and watched a warm constellation form right there in the middle of the trail nebula, squeezing in all kid-huggy on Sarah, done. We rode back up to ADO to get Steve’s car, and they all went home to mend their runner. It was nice, seeing them all pile into the car. Screw the DNF. Family stuffed into a car beats that any day. Family’s the wild card in any deck. You draw that, you win the hand. DNF is like the three of spades or something. I mean, a four of any suit beats it.

I’d got a call from Bill earlier saying that after having slowed some, Elizabeth was still making good time. I drove down to see what I could do for her, now that her crew was pacing her. I got into Cavitt just past 11pm (mile 67), I think. I checked the board and saw that Elizabeth hadn’t come in yet. I collected myself a bit (okay! okay! I had to pee. There, you satisfied?), then BOOM, they were there. Elizabeth had slowed a bit. She’d explained back at Cool she was pretty sure she was going to crash, a week without any sleep guaranteed a crash. She was just trying to bang out the miles while she could. She’s got poise, might even define that word. And unlike at this race last year, this year she had beautiful, blisterless feet. I’ve seen my share of ultra feet, and never have seen somebody with 67 miles on such pristine feet. Made me feel inadequate, really. Bill mentioned she wasn’t eating, and we nagged her about that, given what’d just happened to Sis. Got a quarter sammich and a cup of soup into her. She didn’t rush, but she didn’t waste time either. She took care of business and was ready to go, announcing they’d be doing a fair bit of walking at this point. I moved down to Folsom Dam, and set up the camping stove. I needed coffee, and if I needed coffee, I figured they might need a cup too. It smelled really good, but I made the single worst pot of camp coffee I’ve ever tasted. I couldn’t measure properly in the dark, and that percolator makes a pretty funky cup anyway, but this was brewed evil. I was tired, my judgment gone. I gave them each a cup of evil, told them it was evil, watched as they drank evil. I am a bad man. A very bad man, dispensing evil like that.

They moved on down towards Negro Bar (mile 73), and I went down to that aid station, calculated when my runners might get in, set the alarm for 1:20am, fell across the backseat asleep. The alarm went off, I hit the button, rolled out of the truck and wobbled up to the table, gave ‘em Elizabeth’s number. Not in just yet. Looked up, and saw their lights. Bill’s was out front, turned back every ten steps or so to check on Elizabeth’s, and that didn't seem like good news, necessarily. Hers didn’t look very animated. The aid station volunteer saw that and said, “Let’s get some food in her.” I walked up to them, and Elizabeth announced that was it. It wasn’t worth it anymore. She was in too much pain. Bill and I needed to argue that for just a bit, suggest she take a quick nap—the cut-offs were so far behind her, she could have slept for two hours and still been in fine shape. But she was done, had made the decision a while back, I suppose. She was too lucid for it to be argued. I pulled up the truck, we piled in and drove back to Cavitt. Weird thing, 100s. Here we were, exhausted, up nearly 24 hours, one of us with 73 miles on her, one with 30, and we were yapping the whole way back to Cavitt, fresh as daisies. Well, we were slurring our words and I was weaving in and out of oncoming traffic, but it sure did seem like we were fresh as daisies.

Dropped Elizabeth off at Cavitt, so she could clean up and catch a few zees before driving home, then I dropped Bill off at his truck back at the Overlook. As glad as I was to be going home to a warm bed, I would rather have been sleeping in the back of my truck for 40 minutes a pop, cooking bad pancakes and watching Sarah and Elizabeth roll on through to the finish.

As I careened down I-80, I didn’t want to wake my Deanne up, so I sent her a text message: “Coming h7%^$s.a, )HouR two minu&^$.” Getting better at this texting thing. Still, I think I’d better hang on to the damn spoon.