Two hours later, I finished my leg, muddy and cold, and handed the timing chip off to Murray. After showering and eating, I spent the next four legs with my teammates in the mini-van, shuttling between drop-offs and pick-ups, cheering a racer coming over the end line only to cheer another one leaving.
As Andy handed off the chip to John for the last leg, we were in good shape. It was 8 p.m. and our goal of finishing before dark looked like it was going to happen. Not everyone’s team held up as well as ours, however. While we were celebrating our completion around 10:30 p.m., fourteen hours after we had started, other people were still waiting to start their leg, some of whom did not set off on the dark trails until after midnight (the race officially ended at 8 a.m. the following morning).
We watched the first soloist cross the finish line, fifteen hours after he had started, looking happy, relieved, and unmarked by bears. Half of the soloists that entered did not make it to this point, bailing out at various points along the way. Even though I have run three marathons, I wondered what prompted someone to want to run seventy-eight miles straight. How does one train for such an event?
“Oh, you know, I just did some long hikes and runs through the bush with a buddy,” responded John, our leg #5 who had run it solo years back. Though his use of the word “bush” was distinctly South African, his attitude was hallmark Canadian.
I had come to realize that many Canadians, or at least Albertans, had this nonchalant approach to the wilderness and extremes. People seemed tougher. Elsie, who stood about 5'2'', told us how she regularly ran with bear mace and used crampons to scale her roof in the winter so she could pick the ice off. Every time we heard stories like these, saw more wildlife (luckily, the grizzly spotting wasn’t until the trip home), or stopped to walk over a glacier, we Americans would look at each other, jaws dropped, and think, “Where in the hell are we?”
