This isn’t a race report. Or, if it is, it is a peculiar sort of race report. A week ago I crewed Chelle Frazeur’s second soloing of Tom’s Run, a 200 mile run from Cumberland, MD to Bethesda. I discovered that crewing and true reportage were incompatible, at least they way I was doing it, and made even more difficult by the amount of time it continues to take me to come to a deeper understanding of the 72 hours we spent on the trail together. What follows, then, is considerably more impressionistic, but in many ways more real, than a typical narrative treatment.
Wednesday afternoon. Thunderstorm lines slamming one after another into the front of the crew vehicle. Slow progress from Washington DC to Frederick MD. A call from Chelle. “Storms are bad, can you pick me up?”. Opening the door at her brother’s house, seeing her for the first time. Small, powerful, complete confidence radiating from her eyes. This is going to be fun. A real runner. A spirit warrior.
Arriving in Cumberland to clearing skies, or at least skies empty of rain. Tom, waiting. Tall, lanky, a rider. He’d ridden the 200 miles from DC to Cumberland a day or two before, learning the trail. Certainly going to be fun. Enthusiastic greetings all around. Strangers meeting, aware of how closely bound they were to one another. Happy to learn we’d be okay.
Last minute food. Chelle wrapping her toes. Tom watching. Peter watching. Noting length, width of moleskin. Filing away important geometries for later use. Half inches for smaller toes, two inches wide for heel. Gail, Chelle’s mom, nervous but secure in her daughter’s ability. Compassion tinged with bewilderment, perhaps awe. All of us watching the clock. Waiting for 8, waiting to begin the thing that brought us all together. Strangers bound.
Roger, race director, brings teeshirt to the start. “Wow”, he says. Chelle and Roger talk about why and how; Tom and Peter mixing drinks, ensuring runner, biker, and crew have the right stuff, ready to be used.
Countdown.
Chelle off and running, Roger next to her. Tom, last minute adjustments. Quick smile returned with encouraging words. Off down the trail, chasing the next 60 hours. Easy now. Adrenaline.
Early hours in the dark. Truck parked beside canal; headlamp’s siren song to gray-white moths. Map spread on warm hood. Calculating hours and minutes, days and nights. So quiet. Alone. Lamp off, ceiling splattered with incandescent paint. Milky Way through spotty clouds.
Eyes straining through the invisible. Waiting for the cackle of the radio, the rhythmic bob of the light: three on Chelle, two on Tom. Same to be true every night. Phone rings, “Yes, fine. We’re off and going. Thanks for thinking of me”.
Fireflies resolve into lamps, running towards me. Chelle, strong, wet trail already beginning to take its toll. Refill of bottles, some food. Too hot out. Packing ice into latex gloves. Runner gone. Tom finding ways to carry ice, extra food, packing. Biker gone. Contents of truck spread in the grass all around. Dark silence again.
Repack truck. Trope of the trip. Two hours until next stop. Dark country roads, post storm. Difficult going: trees down, high water. Hard right turn onto dirt. Around broken branches, carpets of leaves and seeds. Sudden stop – tree looming huge in front – partially lit in the high beams, bent then broken, laying across the road.
The sound of the engine ticking over, trying to cool down in the hot humidity of the early morning. Small flashlight, start walking. How far to the canal? Shouldn’t be more than a third of a mile. Clouds back. Long walk in complete darkness. Entire world reduced to 3 foot cone of light projecting in front of me. Hoot owls afloat. Bad night for woodland creatures.
Canal is reachable. Still have an hour. Possible to backtrack to an easier place? Return to the road, off to the right following an access sign. Road dead ends at field. Quick walk leads nowhere. Time flowing away. Back to the before. I’ll hike supplies out to the runners. Ice melts some; enough makes it – it’s still night time.
Later that night, another stop. This one longer. Chelle laying down, sleeping bag thrown over her. Shivering, almost convulsions. Feet feeling the effects of the wetness. Blisters already forming. 160 miles to go. Long time on blistered feet.
Lance and redress. Back out. Chelle first, swallowed by the trees, swallowing the path. Tom back in saddle, refilled. Away again.
Hours pass. Driving out of the forest, cresting hill, soft green gray light of dawn just there. Not quite here. First night blurs into the background, only the day and the next stop loom. Sleeplessness bleeds into wakefulness. Day’s only cup of coffee. Cheery when Chelle and Tom first stop, trying to impart strength. Both are in deteriorating shape. A difficult night.
By next stop, the daylight has helped. Chelle lays down. Shoes off, feet in worsening condition. More moleskin. Thursday overcast, some sun.
At one in the morning, on the far side of the detour, Brian and his daughter meet us. Ready to ride. Chelle sleeps a little, and then Brian and his daughter on a tandem go off into the night following Chelle. They push through almost to daybreak.
Friday. Hard day. Hot. Ice bath mid- afternoon. Feet refuse to cooperate. Gail brings some solid food. Chelle hungry. Liquid diet isn’t enough. Some mashed potatoes.
Talking to a highschool track coach. She fascinated with the run and with Chelle’s attempt. Wants to get her kids to run the relay next year. Husband unhappy that I’m talking with her when he finishes his own run. Too focused to care, and barely noticed. Fast turn around as night begins to fall.
Storm blown parking lot, Friday night. Brian and pooch take over for Tom. The legs between stops are shorter; Chelle pushing through them, clicking off the miles.
Three nights, no sleep. Neither easy or hard. Simply awake.
Chelle’s last long rest early morning. Sleep, massage, foot care. Watching for dawn, waiting for the final day to begin as Chelle sleeps for 30 minutes. Hard to get back on the trail, but word of the coming day’s weather inspires action in the still darkness.
Saturday morning. Familiar turf, places I’ve run. Great Falls. Still seven or eight hours to go, but roads I recognize. Chelle pushing hard, watching the sun, aware of what’s to come. More and more people aware of what’s going on. Questions all the time. Many incredulous, some simply exclamatory. “Awesome”, and “remarkable”. Cheers at Lock 10. Chelle smiling, moving on quickly, just time to brush teeth. Excitement in her wake. Tom and Brian switching off, Brian to home, Tom with some sleep loads up and departs.
Mid-morning, into the 80s already. Last stop before moving onto pavement. Chelle, feet elevated, eating. Tom standing in the trail deflecting bikers. Lots of concerned runners. “Is she okay”. Our answer, laughing, “depends on your definition”. Massage, check feet, change shoes, now the uphill stuff begins.
Hot. Pavement radiating. Going through pounds of ice. Biking back to Tom and Chelle with a better map. Turns out to be useless. Then works just fine. More teams aware of what’s going on. Deep in Bethesda, watching the people out for the late-morning jogs, looking fresh and happy. Trying mightily to neither scoff nor laugh.
Timex long ago stopped being useful to track the day, only the time between meetings. One hour seventeen minutes; start radio checks at one hour ten. It’s all rhythmic now. Mindless. Chelle’s feet start to go, and we switch to flipflops. Just a few miles left.
Packing the truck for the final time, wave goodbye to the last team waiting for their runner. Feel nothing, only the need to get to the finish line and prepare. Walking into the air-conditioned room where we’re gathering almost buckles my knees. Increasingly incoherent. Just enough to do what still has to be done.
At the finish line, waiting to hear from Chelle. Gail is there; Brian with wife and children; Roger trying to keep the place open until Chelle crosses the line. Searching for ice, trying to breathe slowly and calmly to stay awake. Alert. Phone rings. “I’m here. Come run”.
Hot outside – pushing a hundred. Slow run to the main gate. Chelle around the corner, switches hat for red, white, and blue hair tie I’ve brought. Together we begin to run towards the finish line. 200 meters out, her children join us. Roger, Chelle, Tom, Luke, Leah, and me coming to the end of the road.
Falling back as Chelle crosses the line with her family.
Brief celebration. Goodbyes. And, it’s over.
Confused. Disoriented. Not with which way to go, but what to do. Driving off seems wrong. But necessary.
There is much more I’d like to say about this experience. And I will. But for now, I’ve only got faint glimmers of what I’d like to say, and some of it requires some serious contemplation. For instance, the profound experience for me of laying down one’s ego for a stranger, to saying, “I don’t know you, but I will give to you all of me”, is so foreign in our culture as to be almost fantastic, and yet it wasn’t hard. I just don’t know what it means yet.
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 editorials, 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.