The weekend was long, it was muddy but overall it was beautiful. We rolled into Tiger Day with the expectation of being inside, we were, and it was totally fine. My classroom is usually pretty chaotic on days like Friday but because we were set up and ready to roll, it was simple for me to just let the students run the booth and I was there mostly as crowd control. It is funny how these days can bring things back into mind from previous years, how I would go home after and talk about how crazy it was and how I was glad it only happened once a year. This would be a theme for the weekend.

I left work and because I already decided I wasn’t going up to camp in the cold and rain, I went home and ran 5 miles and then didn’t go out and climb but went home and packed my gear for the weekend and tried to wind down as best I could. I had a few offers to come and see a show but I knew that if I went out, I wouldn’t be able to wake up at 3:15 am like I had planned so I could get on the road and drive the hour to Lake Murray. I’d never been up there before but didn’t realize it was so close. I set three alarms this time, the last scare before the Dino Valley race of waking up to the Waze app pinging me to leave wasn’t going to happen again. I managed to try and sleep, maybe got 1 or 2 hours of actual sleep, and then got up and headed out to the race.

This was the first 100 miler I’ve timed so I wasn’t sure what going overnight with just my car would look like, I brought a sleeping bag and some changes of clothes and all my gear and just hoped things would be ok. It was pretty miserable when I got up there, the rain from the previous couple of days had saturated the ground and the footprints from volunteers setting up had pooled and created a nasty looking soup around the pickup area. I set up the timing gear and got things up and running, put some garbage bags on the boxes to keep the moisture out and things were off to a start at 6 am. I saw Ben lining up and a couple of other friends from Denton who were running the 100k, things were pretty optimistic at the start and we expected things to go off without a hitch.

The rest of the morning went by with few issues, on my side that is great, until the first 30k runners came in the wrong direction. The rain and wind may have knocked down some flagging or there were arrows missing where they needed to be, the danger of having locals or runners familiar with a trail mark a racecourse for runners who have never been there before and don’t know the ins and outs. That plus a completely new race made for some confusion as that race finished. I think I handled things well with communicating the needs of the RD with my scorer back in Austin. After that hiccup, things settled into a rhythm and runners started coming in and out of the timing point with some regularity.

As the day and night began to wear on, I swear I was hit with a “magical thinking” moment because I was working the race and had a brief “and then I’ll go home and everything will be fine and normal.” But the thing is, it is a new normal at this point. The flash of tired and stretched thin brain flashing back to a different time and place was so bizarre and shook me. It shook me to the point where I had my first real “what the fuck am I doing” moment. I knew it was from lack of sleep and just being emotionally drained from the week before and I know how to deal with those moments at this point. I ate something (I ate a lot this weekend actually), I drank some water and then I went and stared into the bonfire that I was tending as the chill of darkness fully settled in.

Runners in the longer distances started coming in, I saw Ben come through and pick up David as a pacer through the bleak hours. There was the runner that came in with almost no training running 100 miles thinking it was possible to just come out and do it because he’d read a book about someone doing it. His feet were macerated and he was totally wrecked and when he went out for more, he made it until about the end of the turnaround (100 yards or so) and came back totally crushed. I decided to go and sleep a bit in my car and ended up sleeping until 5 or 6 am as the number of runners dropped down into the single digits. Ben timed out and another acquaintance came in as the final runner around an hour before the final cutoff. I packed up and drove back listening to My Favorite Murder.

The musical at work is next weekend, I’m timing another race and I’ve made up my mind to take that next Monday and probably that next Friday off because I need a break from the grind. I’ve gone the whole year without taking a day and I know that there are plenty of people dealing with their own shit but I need to deal with mine too. So I will.