My race strategy and had two integral pieces to it. First, go out slow. And second, have a shitload of fun. To remind myself of this, Sam painted my toenails glittery gold before the race. I reiterated to myself to not care about what place I got, but to race as hard as I possibly could and have a blast doing it. If I win, awesome. If I get last place, awesome.

And there I pranced, clad in nothing but short shorts, dancing alone along a fin of rock jutting out atop the ridgeline. The spine of mountains stretched for miles before me like a patchwork island of snow and rock floating above the civilization sprawled out below.

Two naked women came sprinting across the sand towards me. They were clad in nothing but American flag hats, dollar store sunglasses, mardi gras beads, and one, a giant fur coat flowing in the wind. Dana handed me a plastic pineapple filled with hydration mix. I sipped out of the frilly green bendy straw and stripped the pack off my sweaty back. Jordan tossed me a fresh handheld bottle as I looked up at a weathered plywood sign locals had posted where beach meets road: “DANGER LIVES LOST HERE.”

I don’t know whether it was the rain or my alarm that woke me up. A northern-California-coast deluge came slamming down on the thin-roofed garage that I lived in. Well, I lived in my van, parked inside the garage (I convinced myself it was a “cute apartment”). It was 5:30am and I was smothered in blankets hiding from the cold in my unheated van. Tired but excited, I heaved my rusting sliding door open and hopped out into the cavernous, chilly, musty garage. The icy concrete floor was startling on my naked feet. I was soon dressed, donned my running pack, and set off into the pre-dawn solitude and rain. Guided by my headlight’s glow, I began my seven-mile run-commute under the watchful eyes of a few massive redwood trees.

For six days, the only fresh tracks we saw on the trail were those left by a family of wolves. The disconcertingly large imprints in the dusty trail easily obscured any old boot prints lingering in the dirt. The trail undulated sinuously over the rumpled mountain landscape, a bright line through a recently burned forest. The single track crested a rise before dropping steeply into a lake basin. The lake was broad and brilliantly blue, mirroring the cloudless sky. This drop of subalpine water tucked itself snugly into a deep wrinkle of mountain, a teardrop amongst the rugged hills. The scars of old forest fire surrounded the lake, lending to the landscape the image of uneven stubble on a weathered face.