Hours in a Hurricane, on a Race with No Course

Before long, we began passing other racers who had missed the cutoff, limping or sitting in the dirt, heads resting on their knees. Some were kind enough to cheer us on. Dawn graced us as we forded a misting river in a line of teams with packs held above their heads. Racers hobbled onward, sleepless, blistered, thorn-torn, sodden, chilled and wounded; one later displayed to us a wrist that she said was broken, while proudly insisting that she wouldn’t leave the course. But despite all that, they all seemed more alive than they would in their everyday lives. There is a light that burns in the eyes of adventure racers after a sleepless night, which could be madness or delirium, but I prefer to think of it as a clarity of vision and purpose, a transcendence of the rational into the extraordinary — one that I could see in their pupils and that I’m sure they could see in mine. In fact, rather than complaining about the hurricane, many of the racers were already spinning self-consciously del ... Read full article.