The Outlasters

Sarah Kaufmann staggered into her pit-stop and sat down gingerly.

She'd been sick to her stomach for the last three laps and, because of that, she'd had to stop twice out in the desert to steady herself. Though she was wrapped in a sleeping bag, and though she'd been straining physically for hours, she was cold and shivering. It was 3:30 a.m., and passing out seemed to be her only healthy option.

And then she rode her bike fifty more miles, five more hours, three more laps. “This is so bad,” she said. “Harder than it's supposed to be,” she said. And then she rode her bike fifteen more miles, two more hours, one more lap. As she neared the end, her brother Dave and I held out a makeshift finish line. She broke it (barely); she was done.

(Credit: Rob Strong. For more excellent visual documentation of this race and other things, please visit BlogStrong)

24-hour solo mountain bike racing is questionable at best, idiotic at worst. Doctors advise against it. Dentists advise against it. Onlookers shake their heads at the pain of the racers with an equal mix of admiration and contempt.

Racers themselves say “never again,” say “this is so stupid,” say “I can't go on.”

Staying upright becomes the paramount challenge. They transform from racers to outlasters, winning only by attrition. Riders drop by the dusty wayside in tears and frustration after two or eight or nineteen hours of riding. And someone else wins.

For those who finish, or come close to it, much has been lost: fluids first and foremost, but also balance and sanity. It will take them a month to recover fully. They will have dropped ten pounds. Some will hallucinate.

They wonder if the outlay of energy been worth it as they stand wobbling at dawn, too exhausted to wipe their crusty faces. Their legs circle on phantom pedals, and they confront phantom visions of nighttime riding.

Why did I do this, they think.

Ignoring the part of themselves that said 'stop,' they have ridden their bikes—over steep buttes and through soft sand, over uneven rocks and through sagebrush—for 24 hours.

(Credit: utahmountainbiking.com)

Having never done anything, let alone exercise, for 24 hours straight, I came to Utah to witness this bedlam at the Behind the Rocks Trail in Moab, the site of the 2009 National Championship race of 24-hour mountain biking.

I'd been in Wisconsin the previous year—at 24-hours of 9-mile in Wausau—and I'd recognized the compelling breakdown that outlasters endure. I had theories. About our common attraction to pain. About addiction and competition. About how personalities vanish so easily in the face of extended adversity.

I'd seen the way the riders start out intact and then begin their slow dissolve into pain, need, insolence. This descent spoke to me about something beyond sports. Look what we can do, I thought. Look what we encounter, and look what we become.


* * *

The Moab race began at noon as hundreds of perfectly fit people ran toward their bikes like a proverbial horde of lemmings, attracted to their own demise. Cowbells rang. Pump-up music blared from the loudspeakers. Dozens of spectators scurried to snap the quintessential photograph—the one that would capture the chaos and promise of the beginning of a 24-hour race.

(Credit: Rob Strong)

The festivities begin this way to ensure a staggered start. Those who are riding as part of a team sprint out and begin their lap first. The solo riders tend to come next. This time, an immediate crash slowed the works. Eventually, though, everyone was off, a mass of cyclists followed by their support crews, all of them shouting instructions at each other.

In a race like this, the excitement level for the supporters peaks so quickly, and then falls off. Sarah was there, a flash of yellow jersey, and then she was on her bike and gone for the next hour and a half. But it had begun.

Dave and I, with our friend Rob, hunkered down in her pit—an easy-up tent stocked with food, tools, and firewood. It was time for predictions and a recap of the pre-race jitters.

Though none of us are particularly knowledgeable about cycling, and though none of us follow Sarah's brutal training day-to-day or even month-to-month, we felt like immediate insiders.

“She's going to win this race,” I said, and we all agreed.

“Nutrition's key,” Dave added. Oh, of course.

“She just needs to take in 300 calories an hour,” I said. Yep, yep.

“And race her race,” said Dave.

“And race her race,” we choired back.

Rob chewed sunflower seeds and spat. We were like farmers at a country store who'd just glanced the almanac and so were experts on tomorrow's weather; but we were know-nothings, too, just trying to catch ourselves up in the glow of these excellently foolish athletes doing what we all thought was a heroic thing.

The racers take it all very seriously—detailed training regimens, guru-ish coaches, color-coded meal charts—and so we did too, handicapping the race and jotting what we thought might be helpful notes.

Before the starting gun, there'd been a feeling of military drill.

While we were getting ready, Sarah's water needed to be prepared with the proper amount of energy powder (“three scoops, three scoops!”). Both her bikes needed to be tuned and re-tuned. The food she might consume had to be laid out in carefully-aligned paper cups. Someone, dear God, someone had to find out whether she was allowed to wear an iPod (turned out she wasn't).

There was an air of espionage around our tent, too. Sarah would approach us with a surreptitious “There's Jari,” referring to the defending champion of this race, Jari Kirkland. “Watch out for Monalee,” said another racer through a cupped hand. The static of walky-talkies and the slang of cycling heightened the spy-thriller mood. I pulled on my ear lobe.

(credit: lajollaplayhouse.org)

The iPod question emerged again as one of our neighbors indulged in a conspiracy about secret speakers through which pit-crews could illegally communicate with their racers. Another wondered about Inspector-Gadgety water bottles that might afford an unfair advantage of some kind. The cock flew at midnight. And the code on everyone's tongue was “Pua,” “Pua,” “Pua.”

It stood for Pua Sawicki, four-time national champion and all-around superstar. Oh Pua. Say it loud and there's music playing. Say it soft and it's almost like praying. More on Pua later. Watch out for Pua.

(Credit: autobuscyclingnews.com)

We were all tense. Sarah was in a trance, trying to drown out all the hype about Jari and Pua (especially Pua) with repeated mental mantras. She was like a pitcher carrying a no-hitter into the eighth inning and none of us wanted to approach her and jinx it.

We circled her like altar boys during consecration.

She needed to focus, but we were relying on her. We'd come all this way and we, too, were about to stay up for 24 hours. We wanted some assurance that she was going to go all the way with this race and make it worthwhile for us. So I asked her how she felt.

“Honestly I'm just kind of dreading this,” she said. “But no. It's going to be great.”

Hmm.

While we small-talked about whether the sun would be too hot, our next door neighbor, a solo racer named Steve, chirped in:

“At about 1 a.m., I'll think I am the sun.” We all liked Steve.

(Credit: twitter.com/SamanthaRochard)

Sarah's laughter, though, didn't hide the strange mix of dread and optimism that exudes from the endurance cycling crowd. Before the race, they seem to consider the pain and the joy of it all, and then they quickly blend the two. Pain is pleasure sort of thing.

Danielle Musto, a solo racer who finished second at last year's nationals, told me that “no one wants to ride a bike for 24 hours. But crossing the finish line is such a good feeling. You just forget the pain very quickly. During the race the highs are so much better than the lows.”

I was skeptical.

But then Jari Kirkland, of “There's Jari” fame, told me that she likes to “encourage people when they're out there. No matter how bad it is, when you finish it's a ten-times-better feeling than how lousy you're feeling right now.”

I will not linger on the obvious comparison to childbirth that these remarks elicit. I do question, though, whether cessation of pain at the end of doing something is a valid reason for doing it. The accomplishment is one thing, but relief seems to be at the front of everyone's mind during a 24-hour bike race. And the consensus is that the easiest path to that relief is to not do a 24-hour bike race. Ever.

Outlasters don't listen to this advice.

The attitude of the women I spoke to also reminded me of a debate I often have about going on adventures for the sake of having the story to tell. Is 24-hour racing an investment for which the future return is a crisp little narrative? Do they do it for the glory and the story?

People will go through a lot for the warm feeling they get when they can finally utter the words, “Did I ever tell you about the time I. . .”

An associate of mine once smoked crack with the justification that he had to go to the edge and live to share the tale with others who would not go there. What edge he was talking about, I'm not sure, but I, too, always find myself saying, “At the very least, it'll be a story.” This mitigates hassle and frustration for me. I get a good yarn no matter what happens.

I wonder, though, about our instinct to be living out stories in order to tell them later.

In some ways, what could be better? It's like reminding ourselves to be interesting all the time, every freaking day. Of course, on the other hand, it also leads to a devaluation of the present, to falsification, to crack-smoking, to 24-hour bike racing.

I think the outlasters want more than a relief from pain, though, want more than to have done the thing and have a story. They all tackle the race, in Sir Edmund Hilary's words, “Because it's there.”

(Credit: campsmoke.wordpress.com)

But it seems to me they compete—against themselves and others—because, after the worst of the fatigue has set in, when the legs and the head are set to automatic, there's nothing to distract them from being fully in the present.

And then Sarah'd finished her first lap and we were all up trying to change the back-pack which carried her water (she'd hucked the old one at my feet), and trying to ask her about the course, and how she was doing—“it's hard out there”—to get her food, get her pills, get out of her way, all while feeling none of the anxiety—and this is the key—that we'd felt in the four minutes before when all we could do was anticipate, because this was now and need was need and there's no room for self-consciousness and--

She'd started pedaling again. We were a few yards into lap two.


***


At that point, after a lap of one hour and eighteen minutes, Sarah was eight minutes behind and tied for second with two other racers—Eszter Horanyi and Jari Kirkland. Eszter was a newcomer, but Jari had been in this position before.

(Credit: patagonianexpeditionrace.com)

“The hardest part is really the first hour as far as mentally keeping it your own race,” she told me.

Jari had a plan for this weekend. She wanted to defend her crown, beat most if not all of the men, and ride farther on this course than she's ever ridden before.

“I put the pressure on myself because I would like to do well. I just have to keep telling myself that I've trained my best and that I've done everything that I could possibly do.”

In years past, she certainly has done everything within her power to excel. An adventure racer based in Colorado, Jari devotes large parts of her life to extreme sports and to extreme challenges during those sports. In one particular race, she was stung by a bee, which in itself is not particularly high on the list of problems that can take down an outlaster, except that Jari is allergic to bees. And she got stung while riding her third lap, with twenty hours left in the race.

“It got really cold, but my body temperature escalated so much [from racing]. I'm kind of stupid to keep riding, but if I really go into anaphylactic shock, there will be someone out there to help me.”

She laughed.

When I asked her why she continues to go through the difficulty of racing for this length of time, bee stings and all, she said, “It's insane. But once you get a taste of it you just want to do better.”

I understand the kind of obsession that leads to possibly unhealthy attempts at the same challenge (I've written this sentence nine times), but I'm curious, too, about her word 'insane.' It's a word that's been bandied about a lot in my conversations with solo riders.

(credit: fineartamerica.com)

Before the race started, I asked Jari to expand on her insanity plea, to tell me one more time her rationale for riding.

“Why would I want to do this race? To exorcise the demons," she said. "You get a lot of time to think out there and I really think that you come out a better person. Sometimes the best growing parts are painful.”

I've noticed that often when people try to describe intense, even insane experiences, they come very close to revealing intimate details about themselves, but then move back toward safe platitudes. Jari was no exception. Sure, pain is a character-building event, but what of this exorcism? I'd like to hear more about that.

She wasn't forthcoming.

If she'd told me what her demons were, though, I guess I'd have less reason to indulge my curiosity about the inner workings of these racers, about what they're really facing when they look out into their short beam of light at 4 a.m. and see only a band of earth advancing back at them. If she'd told me, I'd know and then there'd be no reason to speculate.

I thank The Man Upstairs for half-answered questions; turns out Jari sometimes gets spiritual too.

“I'm pretty religious and there are times when I have pretty good conversations with God,” she said, describing tactics she uses to push through late-night laps. Others make deals with themselves to keep them going, or they imagine the potential shame of quitting, or they get angry at the world. Jari talks.

During an activity as distressing as 24-hour racing, it is good, I think, to recognize the authority of a higher power.

(urbanlegends.com)

“After you experience [a race] once," she continued, "It's almost like an addiction. The first time, I got third and I thought 'Omigosh, I'm the shit.' Even though I wasn't the fastest, it was the single most important day of my life.”

That startled me, this suggestion that a bike race was Jari's crowning day. And it made me wonder why attempting the hard thing is so important to us.

Do we do these wild, agonizing things to validate who we are? I overcome, therefore I am? Or is there a sense that we need to punish ourselves, that we don't yet deserve our good lot and so need to scrap for it?

Punishment is always at play during a 24-hour race. On the way to the course, I stopped at a small town post-office to send a card and encountered a Wilford Brimley-esque man who asked me what I was doing in Utah. I told him about the race and he replied, “Hang out with masochists a lot, do ya?”

(credit: channingavenue.com)

I laughed, but he was right.

Jari understated the punishment when she told me that “24 hours is a long time to put your body under duress and have nothing go wrong.”

In fact, here's a list of things that notably go wrong during a race, from least to most dire (subjectively judged by me):

Cramps.

Chafing.

Blurry vision.

Buzzing of the ears.

Blisters.

Muscle pain.

Bee sting (as we've seen).

Vomiting.

Diarrhea.

Joint pain.

Number 11: Much worse chafing. (Whatever your gender, please imagine the evil machinations of a bike seat working on your body for an entire day, and how much that might make you want to never ride, or sit, or ponder your genitals, ever again). SEE FOOTNOTE AT BOTTOM OF THIS SECTION.

But please don't forget about:

Muscle sear.

Concussion.

A mix of six or seven of the above. (Go ahead and choose. It's a fun exercise!)

Blood poisoning.

Joint break.

Kidney failure.

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

“There was one race that I dropped out of,” Sarah recalled to me. “I was a wreck. I couldn't stand up, I couldn't walk. I definitely couldn't pedal my bike. Throwing up. Not in a good way at all.”

“You have to fight your normal biology,” said Chris Eatough, the most celebrated male 24-hour solo racer. “You're doing something totally foreign to what your body is normally set up for, and you have to fight your way through it.” (Qtd. in 24 Solo, a 2007 documentary).

Since they know that these strains are inevitable, I'm amazed that so many outlasters still attempt these rides. Self-validation through punishment, I think. And an assertion of rebellious freedom: many of them seem to have the same attitude as the neighborhood kid who'd eat a spider just to let everyone know she was not to be pinned down, not to be defined, not to be told that she couldn't do what she wanted, and even what she didn't want, to do.

We attempt the hard thing because some shadowy other, most likely a less courageous part of our self, says that we shouldn't. Dr. Jekyll urges, “Ride an easy lap, then rest.” Mr. Hyde says, “Up yours, Jekyll. I'm doin' this.”

(Credit: movieoverdose.wordpress.com)

A lot of it's mental and, as Jari said before she started, “If I say I can, then probably I will.”

On her second lap at Moab, after months of intensive training, Jari suffered a knee injury and had to pull out of the race. She would not repeat as champion and those demons of hers would have to wait another day to be exorcised.




FOOTNOTE: Jari: “The general consensus is that girls are a little more complicated down there than men in some aspects, so rubbing and chafing, yeah.” Jari: “I've felt like my butt hurts so bad, if I hit another bump I just might burst into tears.” Danielle: “The most miserable time I ever had in a twenty four hour race—all of the skin on my butt had worn off. And my crew put chamois cream with menthol on me. It felt like a hot iron searing on my skin.” Sarah (directly, as always): “There's the crotch issue.”

* * *

After two laps, Sarah had found her riding rhythm. Though she was sixteen minutes behind, she was doing well physically and held onto a tie for second place.

To hear it from the Public Address announcer at the course, though, you'd have thought it was a one woman contest.

“Pua Sawicki has this race firmly in hand with 21 hours to go,” he said, laughably.

To him, Sarah and Eszter were merely “other racers.” And thus continued what I called "Pua-stroking."

It's hard to write about Women's 24-hour mountain biking without heaping praise on Monique “Pua” Sawicki. She wins races by hours, appears indestructible, and seems to be backed by the entire machinery of corporate sponsorship that cycling has to offer.

She is primarily helped by Ellsworth, maker of handcrafted bikes. But she also enjoys--for everything from gloves to pedals--the patronage of (deep breath): Byekyle, Ergon, DT Swiss, ControlTech, Genuine Innovations, NiteRider, Magura, Hutchinson, Shimano, Lake, Lazer, Nomad, Park City RV Resort, WTB, i.e.bikes, Okole Stuff, Squadra, PureFit, Pedro's, FuelFactor, MaxMuscle, Crankbrothers, Wobblenaught, and HeadSweats.

Essentially, Pua is the Tiger Woods, the Roger Federer of this sport. That clearly holds true for number of endorsements, but she's also just about as dominant as those guys. And as targeted. The general atmosphere around the Moab race was cordial, but when there's a king of the hill, as Pua is, people get shove-y: the palpable sense was that Pua needed to be taken down.

Since the gates opened, we'd heard a whole lot about Pua. She was trying to set a world record, she had a film crew following her, Wasn't it great that she had decided to come defend her title?, Could we all give her another round of applause?, she has the race in hand, she can't be stopped.

Besides all this, there was her entourage, which amused us by shouting very seriously at each other about some food they hoped she would eat.

“We need another banana!”
“HALF A BANANA. HALF A BANANA."
"Go, GO."
“This one's broken. She needs a different banana.”

To make matters worse, there was a big picture of Pua's face on Sarah's giant sack of Infinit energy powder, watching us all the time. Sarah is sponsored by Infinit. Guess who else is?

(Credit: ppolnews.com)

Rob and I started getting into the rivalry. If Team Pua had ATVs to go out and bring their outlaster food, couldn't we hike out there and do the same for ours?

Most of the 15-mile course was unreachable for us, but there was one place, about a three mile walk, that, because of the way the trail doubled back on itself, was both mile seven and mile twelve for the riders.

(Credit: grannygear.com)

If we got ourselves out there, Sarah would have two extra pit stops per lap, two extra chances to grab water or communicate what she needed. As night fell, we embarked. It was 62 degrees and would be 38 within the hour. Rob and I were going to weather the night in the Utah desert.

We were seven hours into the race. Jari was out. Pua led by a third of a lap. This Eszter was hanging tough.

But our Sarah was still in the race, still pumping at sunset. All we could do was hunker down and see what night would bring.


***


Edward Abbey, the naturalist and veritable poet laureate of Southeastern Utah, loved the land surrounding Beyond the Rocks Trail. “This is the most beautiful place on earth,” he wrote to begin his book, Desert Solitaire. “The slickrock desert. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky—all that which lies beyond the end of the roads.”

(Credit: jonsart.blogspot.com)

Rob and I saw what Abbey meant as we hiked out to support Sarah, and we saw that the arid dusk was a sort of reflection of the inner landscape of the riders—on fire, as they were, with thirst, solitary as the faded sky.

People were burning juniper for campfires and the riders had switched on their bike lights. We could smell the fires, then, and look out at the small cacti and feel a sense of the primal.

But we could also scope the hundreds of lights hopping over the horizon; we could look out over the dune-ish, hardscrabble hills to imagine ourselves in a sort of lunarscape.

I felt like we'd gone backward and forward in time, to the mesozoic and to Mars.

(Credit: popsci.com)

There is an atavism about the event: outlasters seem to rely on ancient instincts to keep them running, and they revert to our basic characteristic—desire. They can only speak in the language of need: need for water, food, rest. After many hours, they are bare-bones human.

Conversely, there's something futuristic about dozens of muscle machines--on strictly calibrated contraptions, donning head lamps, riding through a fine powder of red dust toward a lit-up tent city--who are fueled primarily by energy gels and Excedrin.

It all took me out of time.

Until, that is, Sarah'd pedal up and we'd all key in to the here and now. When she set out again, we'd wander again.

***

I'd been telling Rob about last year's race, about how a few outposts out on the track were bound to be teeming with supporters. At Wausau, there'd been tiki parties, meat roasts, and whooping.

As I hiked on, I looked forward to that sort of scene, to the frat party of the fit. We'd have an all-night Bike-hanalia!

We reached the spot. We dropped our gear. But Bacchus was nowhere to be found.

For some reason, Rob and I were the only ones who'd decided to tromp out there. Our only company would be Randolph and Lawrence, the seemingly stoned Medical Service guys. They were a couple of characters out of Beckett. Always awaiting the imminent arrival of their boss Todd, a sort of medically-trained Godot, they argued hilariously about proper procedure and whether or not they were allowed to sit in their truck during the race.

(Credit: incakolanews.blogspot.com)

This point became moot after we heard the following from Lawrence:

“Dude, press unlock, dude, fuck.” They'd shut themselves out. But no matter. Todd would be by soon with the key.

The outlasters, it seemed, were in shaky hands. We heard that some riders—facing injuries at evocatively named trailmarks like “Nose Dive” and “The Ledge,”—had been waiting for three hours for treatment. Others, though, pulled into the checkpoint with cramps and sprains and, thanks to Randy and Larry, things went smoothly.

The race was also going smoothly for Sarah, who kept riding steady laps into the night. We saw her at 8:20 and she had no complaints, didn't need the paper cup of sweet potatoes we'd hauled out there, didn't need anything at all. This was a breeze, we thought. She was only going to get stronger and we were, we told ourselves, an essential part of that. Team Sarah was on the move.

Prematurely, Rob and I shared an echo-y high-five. We'd had a purpose for those four seconds of delightful panic.

But then there was blankness.

(Credit: Rob Strong)

It was a no-wind night, and because a bike came by with its light every twenty seconds or so, our eyes never adjusted to the dark. We got cold. We paced. We discussed the habit-forming properties of Chap Stick (I'd never needed the stuff more than when I was in Moab).

Three times a minute, the hard-breathing, bouncing-light presence of an outlaster.

Punch-drunkenness is contagious and so, after watching riders struggle past us for an hour or so, we got silly. Each person, we decided, needed a specific yelp of encouragement.

“Go, go, go,” I began.

“Marry me,” shouted Rob to a shocked competitor (we weren't really sure who was a man and who was a woman, but he went for it anyway).

“Looking good, looking good,” I'd say.

“Do it for the first person you ever kissed,” Rob would add.

Most seemed buoyed by this. For hours, we kept it up, partially to help the riders and partially to warm ourselves. They began to expect it and so we tried to oblige.

“You're my favorite guys to see,” one said. “I love to see you guys, cause it means it's all downhill from here,” said another. Lest you think I'm praising myself by including their responses, I should say that their incommensurate gratitude for any distraction we offered speaks to the torture of the event. They would have appreciated a tree with glasses at that point.

“You're an animal,” shouted Rob at a rider and I thought it was an apt description.

“You're a machine,” he told the next, and I agreed with that too. I was learning quite a bit by seeing what became of each rider out in the night, alone.

(Credit: exceler8ion.com)

At a slow spot, we both laid down and, motionless, tried to Zen ourselves out of being freezing. I thought I might fall asleep, but I'd pledged that I would stay up as long as Sarah did, and that meant all race, till noon the next day, forever. It was 10 p.m.

She doesn't need you, said sleep-coaxing me to responsible me. Responsible me ate a ham sandwich to keep alert. She can do it on her own, said sleep-coaxing me.

But then she was there and, suffering, cried for her vitamin box and dried fruit, having disintegrated noticeably in the last hour, in obvious stomach pain, drawing on years of hard rides to keep on going—filthy, breathless, soul-struck.

“Tell the pit I need my Useless Shit box,” she told us, referring to her most unuseless shit, her supplements and medications (because outlasters do need to medicate during the race).

“We'll see you in five miles,” we said urgently.

“Do you need sweet potatoes?
“SWEET POTATOES.”
“Half a banana?”

We'd clearly become like Pua's people with our tone of emergency. Maybe they weren't so bad, after all. At 10:30 p.m., it seemed, we all cared a whole helluva lot.

We got on our phone (somehow there was service in the desert) and reported in to camp. She was in trouble, and not even halfway through. But there was nothing else we could do.

Rob proposed marriage to a few more riders and I fashioned a turban out of a blanket we'd brought. Sarah, we realized, had to go it alone. I counted her laps on my fingers. She'd lost eight minutes to Pua in each of the first three so, now that she'd gone through seven, we could expect that she was 56 minutes behind, if not more. Things seemed bleak. We made plans to head back in for the rest of the night.

And then I got a phone call from a number in Southeastern Ohio, where I'm from.

(Credit: fineartamerica.com [by John Osgood])

“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“Who's this?” I asked.
“Who is this?”
“You called me, bro.”
“Yeah, well where's Bronc at?”

I didn't know a Bronc.

“I don't know a Bronc.”

A pause.

“C'mon, man, go get Bronc.”
“Alright, that's it. Goodnight dude.”

It seems certain to me that a guy from SE Ohio who's unwilling to identify himself and is desperately in search of a shadowy character named Bronc probably has a vested interest in crystal methamphetamine.

This story has little bearing on cycling, but, though it's a sad reflection of a place I love, it cheered me. And the strangeness of it seemed in keeping with the adventure of the bike-racing night. Where's Bronc at? indeed. It became my rallying cry.

Heartened by Bronc and his friends (and by another necessary ham sandwich), I started to think we could stay out there all night. At least a few more laps. Rob agreed.

By midnight, we were able to shout to the riders that they were halfway through. Some seemed encouraged, others incredulous. Sarah loved it, started riding faster when we told her, demanded caffeine for the decisive push. She'd had a fourth wind and, as far as we could tell, was steadily in third place.

She took a blueberry juice from me, drank, and hucked it into the scrub. We are in the presence of greatness, I thought. I only hoped that greatness wouldn't be lapped by the irrepressible Pua, whom we hadn't been able to track.

Between 12 and 2, a thick crescent moon appeared in the northeastern sky, a dismal rider had to reassemble his bike right in front of us, and the cold attacked from all sides.

Dave had promised us bratwurst and soup upon our return, and the thought of the food heating over a campfire lured us home. This would be our final lap. We'd hiked miles to bring our rider a cup of dried fruit, and now we were headed back.

On the hour-long journey in, I surveyed the area again, this moonlit Mars. The land, crusted and soft, snatched my heels. I imagined what traveling that ground must have been like for the tiring riders.

(Credit: Rob Strong)

And I thought about walking by a window at night, the fear that can bring. Essentially, the riders were all encountering that fear for twelve consecutive hours, from sundown to sun-up. I picked up my pace.

From a mile off, we could see the tent city and its thousands of people settled in for the night. It was inspiring that so many people had collectively decided to buy into this nomadic peculiarity. We cut off the trail and straight for it.

“I feel like I'm approaching a moon base,” Rob said. It reminded me of Dagobah from Star Wars, and I only wished we had a land cruiser.

When we finally made it, we went straight for the Results Tent. The standings were available on computers there and we wanted to see how far behind Sarah was. An hour? Two?

At 3:30 a.m., two full work-days after the riders began, Pua's lead had shrunk to a mere 25 minutes!

Where's Bronc At?!

The “Other Racers” were advancing unstoppably, like dawn, on grey-eyed Pua.


***


Meanwhile, back at base camp, Dave was so hopped up on coffee that he was threatening to bite off our fingers. Usually cool to the point of near-pulselessness, Dave radiated excitement about his sister's possible victory. He'd been her support crew for quite a few races and this was the closest she'd ever come to a National Championship.

There was ample reason to worry, though, about Sarah's status in the race and about her health.

Unbeknownst to Rob and me, her stomach problems had gotten worse. During her most recent pit stop, she'd had to go out behind the tent to relieve herself, and she was medicating with anti-diarrheals as well. (Though there were porta-potties 200 yards away, Sarah's legs were not land-worthy at that point and so she'd had to do the best she could).

Dave was beating himself up about her nutrition problems.

“We started the fruit too early.”
“Maybe,” I said, solemnly.
“Or maybe people shouldn't ride their bikes for 24 hours,” he said.

I remembered Sarah's travails the year before when she'd finished third. And what she said about her biggest challenge as a top-tier outlaster.

“Nutrition is the biggest thing. It's the hardest thing to manage once you get tired. You're eating drink mixes and gels. Your stomach usually turns into a mess.”

That, unfortunately, had come to pass. After about 5000 calories of intake and 15 hours of riding, her basic physiology was beginning to break down. To make matters worse, her light faltered on lap 11 and she began to, in her words, “crash around the course.”

(Credit: Rob Strong)

I tried to get unnumb around the campfire. When I'm cold I pace, and when I'm tired I pace, so I was double-timing it around the tent, achy and ornery. I couldn't give my pain much respect, though, especially when all around our pit, riders were giving in, packing up, and going home.

They'd been felled by the roughness of the course, the difficult technical sections of the first half, the beach-like sand of the middle, the curves and shock-rattling rocks of the end. One of our neighbors, Sterling Ford—bearded and on some kind of spirit quest—had fallen asleep half-way into his first 24-hour attempt.

And our other neighbor, Steve, who had predicted that he would claim to be the sun at 1 a.m., was turning to stone as well.

At 4, I was standing with Bryce, Sarah's boyfriend and an all-around sweet guy. He claimed he'd never been up for 24 hours, and it was showing. Despite all the excitement of only a short time before, we now felt like we were playing out the string. Bryce had internalized Sarah's ultra-competitive streak, though, and we were both trying to will her to a win.

In a flash, Steve pedaled up and said, “Is Sarah in first place?” We perked, desperate for word of our racer. Even hearsay-victory tasted so sweet.

We all liked Steve.

“Pua's on the side of the trail, crying," he said. "Her crew's trying to tell her she can catch up but she's saying she can't.”

I felt so good, then so ambiguous, then so bad. I moved from an “Oh how the mighty have fallen” kind of schadenfreude to a pretty deep pity for Pua in about five seconds. I was a Sarah-partisan all the way, but it's hard to route for someone else's demise. In order for Sarah to win, Pua had to crumble.

(Credit: Artchive.com [by Egon Schiele])

When Steve gave us the news, we shared some applause. Three seemed an appropriate amount of claps. Anything more would be a celebration of someone else's suffering. Some supporters and friends, though, had long since brushed past my watery morals. Someone had to win, and they were thrilled for Sarah. I think I counted sixteen hearty claps. Maybe I was in on some of them, but for each one I was conflicted, I promise.

There was a new focus in the pit. When Sarah came in, she was a triage case, but she'd been heartened by passing Pua—a feat that outlasters dream about all race, all season.

“This race was billed as a fight between Jari and Pua,” Sarah said right then. “And Eszter and I have basically dispatched of them both.” This was uttered in the heat of the race and, after all was settled, Sarah did evince a deep respect for her competitors. At the time, though, her remark seemed super-bad-ass, coming as it did from a five-foot-tall woman, who, to use some boxing lingo, could barely answer the bell for the twelfth round at this point.

I was caught up in it and made anxious by it at the same time. I can't summon that kind of fierceness, though I sometimes wish I could.

Earlier Sarah'd told me that she likes all of her rivals, up to a point: “I would consider the women I race against friends. I don't like to get super close to them, though. It's a weird feeling when you're out there trying to crush somebody. You don't want to be that close to them.”

She didn't seem in a state to crush anyone, but we sent her out for another lap with the promise that the sun would rise by the time she came around again. With her experience—this was her tenth race—it seemed like she was going to pull this one out.

When she finally came around again at 6 a.m., her digestive situation had not improved, she was dehydrated, exhausted, and, worst of all to her, 25 minutes behind. Eszter, who'd come out of nowhere to be the steadiest rider on the course, now led by a wide margin with only six hours left.

Dave held a sleeping bag around his big sister. He was giving her advice with the voice dads use with small daughters. Just be yourself at school and you'll make friends. Just keep pedaling and it'll all be over soon.

Her swollen legs looked like comically-oversized whiffle ball bats.

Bryce rubbed her feet. Rob and I were somber.

“Every time you go to take a sip of water, take two sips,” said Dave.

“No,” countered Sarah before giggling. We all started giggling. It seemed like she had reverted to childhood. She was the bravest toddler we'd ever met, but I wondered if the bike was starting to play tricks with her mind.

“Once I was hallucinating flying squirrels at the end,” she'd told me about a previous race. “They just seem to be around. And I've taken naps on the side of the trail and I can't remember making that decision to do it.”

She set off unsteadily. Stay awake, I thought. And look out for airborne rodentia.

(Credit: aparadigmshift.files.wordpress.com)

I thought about punishment again, and the idea that these racers were trying to stretch the limits of what they could do. Is the race really about achievement, though? Or is the whole ordeal about building up tolerance, about people brashly declaring “nothing can hurt me more than this.”

A feeling of self-reliance is the prize for finishing the brutal therapy, I think. And in the meantime, riders move past distraction to an essential kind of selfhood. They outlast themselves.

“It's like a drug,” Sarah told me. “You just can't help it.”

Compulsion drove Sarah through the last hours of darkness, but new light offered nothing but a phony hope. As the sun poked over the La Sal Mountains, she pitted for the last time and seemed ready to shut it down. Eszter had extended her lead, and Sarah's coordination had completely abandoned her. Because she'd done one more lap than the other racers, Sarah seemed to be comfortably in second; there was an outside chance that she might be caught, though, so she weighed her options.

Stay in and risk falling to third or go out again for another two hours to grab that silver medal. Second in a marathon like this must be one of the most bittersweet sports accomplishments.

She cracked for a moment and Dave with her. I couldn't tell if they were mirthlessly laughing or exhaustedly crying, but the difference at that point was meaningless. I gave Dave a one-arm man-squeeze.

After twenty minutes, she decided on her own to go out for one final lap. We got her seated, got her equipped, and ran along for the first fifty yards. Her opening lap had taken an hour and eighteen minutes. This one lasted two hours and thirty-five. There would be no photo finish.

***

Sometime during the early morning, some vandals stole Pua Sawicki's tent. For the great champion, it had been a discouraging weekend. She finished fifth, but didn't come to the podium. She'd vanished from the premises like a mirage, turned from invincible to invisible in the course of an hour.

Eszter took first overall and made back her $400 entry fee. In her first 24-hour race, she claimed the National Championship. “This is so stupid,” she yelled defiantly as she started her final lap, but, by the end, she was elated.

Sarah won $300, or $12.50 for every hour of riding. But it's definitely not about the money; for the outlasters, for Sarah, the race is a kind of purification.

“The fact that you can experience panic, elation, fear, pain—which I guess is an emotion. The fact that you will experience every emotion in the spectrum in 24 hours. It's cleansing.”

And so Sarah Kaufmann, cleaned out, finished the race intact. Finishing is what's important, they say, and we all agreed. Then, mere hours after shouting “never again,” strengthened by a beer and a bratwurst, Sarah started planning for one more race, that next fix.

(Credit: Rob Strong)