A month or so ago, a woman named Rochelle Frazeur posted to the ultra list seeking people to help crew on a 200 mile run she was planning to do. Having never crewed, and preparing to ask some of my own friends to crew for me, I figured I needed to throw my hand up/hat in the ring and offer whatever clueless services I might be able to provide. Much to my surprise Chelle responded positively, and a week or so later I found myself on Team UltraChelle.
I volunteered to drive, to run, to bike, and to lance the occasional blister.
We start at 8pm on Wednesday and end at around 11am on Saturday. We don’t come off the trail. We don’t futz around. We just move inexorably forward (and least she does; I hope to hell I can).
So, I’m beginning to prep up (aside from running and buying little bits here and there for my bike), and feeling pretty good. One of the things that got me thinking in a not quite, but possibly could be nervous way, was what sort of schedule we were going to need to manage in order to get Chelle across the finish line, and her crew where they needed to be. For the two of us (Tom and I) who will shadow her the entire time, I was worried about rest and the like. Then, just the other day, I received an email from Chelle, that among a number of juicy bits of information, had this beaut:
We’ll rest every 6 hours for 20 min. and 45 min every 24 hours.
For 60 hours!
Education has begun.
For many years now I've left a trail of flecks across the Internet. Just begun novels; explorations of culture, music, writing, food, the future, mountains, long distances, shallow oceans, deep canyons; oddly-composed music; even more oddly-constructed poetry; impassioned editorial; strident analysis, and a slew of images, sounds, and scribbles. Most of this has passed into the aether, waiting only for some semi-sentient algorithm to pull it from obscurity twenty years hence. In the meantime, there is this lodestone, gathering what it can.