Promise Land 50K – Rachel Toor

I had one question about this race:  where was the D?

I asked the race director.

“There is no D!” he said.

“Why not?”

“THERE JUST ISN’T!!!” 

Like Owen Meany, David Horton is a man who speaks in capital letters.

So it wasn’t the Promised Land from which we were running and to which we hoped, after some 30-odd miles, to return.  It was the Promise Land .  It didn’t make sense to me.  There should have been a D. 

Or maybe not.  Maybe it was like Disney Land ; this was the Land of Promise .  Of promises.  What were they?

First I was promised that I was going to love the course.  Since it was the unbiased, Meany-like race director who made this promise, I was skeptical.  I didn’t like the only other Horton event I’d run, the Mt. Masochist 50 miler last October.  Sure it was well organized. Sure it was filled with good people I’ve met before at other races, many of whom I’m glad to count as friends. Sure I had fun. But I didn’t like the course.  It bored me.  It was long, yeah, but not tough, not technical.  Just long.  This race would be different, I was promised.  It would be beautiful. Promise kept.

Then I promised Sophie Speidel that we would have fun.  I met Sophie at the Masochist and we hit it off for a number of quality miles.  It didn’t hurt that she’d read everything I’d written and said smart (read: complementary) things about my work.  It didn’t hurt that she was fun and funny.  It really didn’t hurt that she suggested we share a hotel room instead of camping out in the mud at the campsite with a D.  Sophie left her husband and three kids at home; I left my seventeen-year old mutt Hannah in Durham with an exboyfriend, and we determined to have a Thelma and Louise ultra-weekend – with a happy ending.  Promise kept.

Horton had promised to help a runner coming in from the west coast find a ride from Raleigh-Durham to the race.  He called me and asked if I would drive the guy.  He’d never met him; said he didn’t know anything about him except that he was 31 years old and wore a size large shirt.  I said yes.  When I spoke to the guy I asked him if he was interesting.  Dead silence.  I explained that I didn’t want to spend three hours in the car with someone who had nothing to say. More silence.  Kidding, I said.  Oh, he said. I drove the runner to the race; he tried his best to keep up conversationally but we were working with limited material here.   Afterwards I’m sure he must have promised himself to thank me for acting as his chauffeur, I’m sure he must have intended to make the customary offer of gas money.  But some promises get broken, even at the Promise Land .  I promised to try not to hold the boorishness of one ultrarunner against the rest of the group.

I promised myself not to go out too fast.  This was made easier by the fact that Sophie was stopping every couple of miles to take photographs.  She was like a tourist at Disney Land .  Sophie whooped and hollered her way through the race, running strong and smooth. I sent her off halfway, knowing that it wasn’t going to be my day for a fast time but could well be hers.  I slogged along, motivated by the promise of a Patagonia messenger bag – the perfect accoutrement for a back-to-schooler like me.  (I will be moving to Missoula , MT in early July to attend an MFA graduate program in non-fiction writing.) I wanted that bag. I needed that bag. I had only to finish in the top five in the women’s race.  I promised that I would not leave without a bag.  I had to run the last mile in 6:30.  I got the bag.

Apparently, some of the boys from my training group back home had promised themselves that they would beat me.  I spied my buddy Steve Leopard running ahead of me at around mile 20. He kept looking over his shoulder.  I was wondering who he was looking back for.  Me, it turns out.  He didn’t want me to beat him.  He came on another of our friends, Stephen Fraser, whom I thought would be a shoe-in for the “Fastest Fat Boy” (he’s 6’4” and just made the weigh-in). Steve warned Stephen that I was thirty seconds behind.  Stephen didn’t care. His mass-to-volume ratio did him in; he melted in the heat and I passed him on the way up after the waterfall.  At the top of that last climb, I passed the guy whose email address is “Fastleopard,” who professed to be worried about Stephen and hung out at the aid station for a while.  Finally, on the way to the big downhill, I caught my last homeboy, Chris Shields, who’d run the race last year in 6:15.  Wasn’t going to happen this year, he said. I slogged ahead and I beat them all, beat back their promises to kick my butt. Even though I didn’t think I was racing against them.

I had promised my friend Jeff that I would make it back to Durham that night to attend the party celebrating his upcoming nuptials.  I didn’t want to drag myself away from the languorous post-race hangout scene.  Seeing friends from the West Virginia Mountain Trail Runners club, meeting new people from the Happy Trails posse in northern Virginia, chilling with my homies (who, having beaten them, knew that now I owned them), eating frozen fruit and Boca burgers – it was just divine.  But a promise is a promise, so I got in the car and headed home – only to find that drinking champagne, chased by margaritas (lots of electrolytes) and then shots of tequila, is a fine way to recover from a fine race.

There was no D.  But there were lots of promises made and kept.  Were I to be on this side of the country next year, I’d promise to do it again.