Van 1 was done with our second round of relay legs, one more round and one more leg for me. We drove to La Pine High School to get some rest, maybe even a little sleep, which is what I got. I had to shower before trying to sleep. I know I have to feel like my pores are clean if there’s any chance of my sleeping. After my shower, I didn’t know where any of my teammates had ended up. I knew they were somewhere sleeping or trying to sleep. I donated five dollars for a cot to sleep on in the gym. I set up my cot alongside a hundred other cots with people I didn’t know and noticed anytime someone moved on one of these things, it made some huge scraping, popping sound that reverberated all over the gym. I tried to lie down on mine without making noise. I wasn’t perfect, but I kept it pretty quiet. It was still dark outside, but morning was coming. I had maybe somewhere between an hour or two hours to rest. I looked at my watch, and surprised myself by falling asleep to the echoing hum of the gym’s air conditioning. I actually fell asleep.
Suddenly I awoke with a start. What time is it? The sun was out and bright. I could see it through the door. I imagined the birds were singing or were already done with that. How long had I slept, and why am I still here? Why didn’t my teammates wake me up? They must have left without me. This was no dream this time. This was real. I looked at my watch, and my fear gave way to disgust and amusement. I had slept for less than fifteen minutes. But I was awake now. My panic had taken care of totally waking me up.
So I got up and bought breakfast from some little girl, maybe eight years old, who was really overly-enthusiastic about her role as a waitress. She was like, “Well good morning, sir, and what can I get for you this morning?” I looked at the posted menu again. There was really only one thing on the menu.
“I guess I’ll have the five dollar breakfast.”
I expected her to tell me, “That one’s been real popular this morning.” But she asked me, “Do you want orange juice? It comes with it.”
Well, I was sort of hoping I got everything that came with it if that’s what I’m paying five dollars for, so I said, “Yes. Thank you.” And besides, asking me if I want orange juice in the morning is like asking me if I would run from a badger if it bared its gleaming teeth and chased me in the middle of the night. Anybody who knows me well knows I drink orange juice every morning, and I have for as long as I can remember, so nearly sixty years, if not sixty. On the rare occasions that I don’t get orange juice in the morning, I am condemned to think about it for the rest of the day like an obsession. The first thing I will then do when I can is go buy orange juice, and I sigh and close my eyes contentedly when I take my first swallow. Sometimes I’ll even say, almost to myself, slowly, “Hah . . . cha, cha, cha.” And take another swig.
After locating my teammates, kind of one by one, we loaded up and departed. This was going to be the hard one, but then we’d be done, and there was some pleasure in knowing when we were done, Van 2 would just be starting their last legs. And we’d be done, finished, completed. We’d be somewhere celebrating with a beer, maybe a wedge of lime, and probably under a palm tree—paradise. And I took pleasure in that thought. You have to understand, there had been some discussion, maybe you’d call it bitching, about how we always got the worst times to run compared to Van 2, and our legs were hotter or darker or more remote, ours were like more dirty and made of gravel, and we had worse hills, and our rest breaks were shorter, and somebody had done some math and figured out that each of us ran an average of four miles more than the average of the runners in Van 2, saying which means each of us will be running for almost an hour more than them, even though all of us run faster than 15 minute miles. Rounding in math can be a wonderful thing. And I thought, “Yeah, and in the other van, Jesse has all the girls to himself, and I have to share my girls with Connor. . . . Well, at least Jesse’s girlfriend is in our van, and I’m sitting right next to her. Ha!” In other words, I was really getting into this complaining. And don’t forget, we were the ones who survived a plague of locusts, even though it was really only Shelley.
Now I will tell you. It was pretty hard to be mad at all of Van 2 for the punishment being inflicted on us. Jesse had a “Very Hard” leg coming up. He might even need rock climbing gear; he would have such a climb. Because of this, I even called him, “an honorary member of Van 1.” So he’s OK. And who could be mad at Jean, or Tiffany, or Danuta? Who could even be mad at Caitlin, even though she is Kirsten’s daughter? They’re all so nice. But Kirsten Bartlett! That’s a whole other matter! We were all innocent newbies to this relay. We didn’t know. But Kirsten Bartlett, our team leader, had run in this thing the year before. She knew. And isn’t it interesting to note that last year she ran in Van 1? Now look at what van she assigned herself to this year: Van 2. Because she knew. She knew and she did this to us. She did this thing to us. Later she would claim she wanted to do Van 2 so she could experience the whole course. She had done Van 1 last year, and so now she’s covered the whole course. I just smiled when she said that. It sounds true, but I’m still going to have to think about this for a while.
In the midst of all this complaining, I was feeling sorry for myself. My bruised chest was hurting. My legs were really tired and nowhere near recovery. And my sleep-deprived body was shot. I looked at the map. My last one, Leg 27, was on pavement, which would be better traction, but it was going to be hot and uphill. There was nothing steep on my leg, it was gradual, but uphill all the way, which I knew would grind me down at this point. Leg 27 was going to be my longest leg at 7.5 miles, and it is classified “Hard.” Some legs are classified as “Very Hard.” But I knew by the way I felt that I was going to have to classify this leg for me with a whole new name: “Extremely Hard—should not be attempted without seeing a doctor first and then second a psychiatrist.”
Before my leg, I’d sit in the van and watch Connor run his “Easy” 6.0 mile leg, as if any six mile at this point could be easy. And in fact it made him bleed. The heat, the sweating, the mileage, and the rubbing of his shirt had added up. Kristi got back in the van after rendering her support to him with water and maybe GU or something and announced, “His nipples are bleeding.” I suggested that I could give him some Nip Guards, which I had some in my running grab bag, if he wouldn’t be too embarrassed to wear them. I mean I don’t know, do some guys think of them as some abbreviated form of a bra? I guess I do. But I knew they would help right away. No more pain. No one in the van had ever heard of Nip Guards, and Kristi was pretty sure Connor didn’t know about them either. So I described them as decently as I could as a sort of round, raised band aid. Then I added that he might like them better if we attached little tassels to them. This got a round of laughter, and then all the women started talking about how they were going to start a fashionable line of these things in different colors and different designs, and even novelty versions. And I thought with some discomfort, now I know what girls feel like sometimes. For God’s sake, I feel like they’re talking about guys’ nipples, my nipples. Connor refused the Nip Guards. I'm guessing he looked at them and thought I'm not wearing those girlie things; I'd rather bleed to death from my nipples.
And before my run I knew I’d be feeling really sorry and kind of worried about Shelley because her run of 7.2 miles was classified as “Hard,” with four miles having no van support, and the map showed that ominous picture about an inch in height of a mosquito, which some of the legs show on the map as a warning; in this case, because she’d be running alongside the waters of Crane Prairie Reservoir. Poor girl! If she’s not fighting off locusts, she’s a target for mosquito swarms. I don’t know how Shelley feels about bugs, but her experiences with them are accumulating.
After we met up with Shelley again, my leg was only a mile ahead. We gave her water, and she looked so red, so hot in complexion. I thought how red I was going to look. It seemed like we were now driving uphill, approaching some mountain. I thought it might be Bachelor. It occurred to me—is that mountain my leg? But I relaxed, knowing it was too far ahead to be mine. That must be Jesse’s—Jesse, earning his honorary membership through the hardship of running a very Van-1-type leg, somewhere up a mountain slope.
(To be continued.)
(To be continued.)
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