By HPRS Runner Ben Liddle

On my way to Fairplay for Last Call 50 weekend, I picked up a hitchhiking thru-hiker crossing the Colorado Trail at US285 (Kenosha Pass). He needed a ride to town, and I needed the karma.

We spoke a little, I told him I was in town for this weekend of ultra racing, of individual suffering and community support. He asked “Why, why do you do this, it just really does not make sense to want to move fast through this beautiful space.”

“It’s not about moving fast,” I explained, “it’s about going deeper. You don’t move fast; to go fast, you gotta slow down. It’s about feeling, about asking and hoping to know what your body is telling you. It’s about hitting a beautiful, un-runnable uphill and slowing to a hike and accepting the things you cannot change. It’s the flowing downhill in the silent dark, poles in hand and headlamp moving the earth from in front, to underneath, to behind you.

But most importantly, it’s about every person out there, going through the same uphill, who put in the months of work before to know how to ask their own bodies, how to know what it is to truly slow down and accept.

It’s about people broken and tired and wanting to walk it in, until your paths cross just after the last aid station (High Park, above the trees at 12k’ elevation) and someone asks, “hey, you want help on this?”. And that’s kind of like life, in a weird way that you can’t explain to your coworkers on Monday. So you run it in together- keeping pace, openly admitting to being human and that you need a break (but just to the next telephone pole). You talk about the nature of being human but wanting to feel, wanting to ask those difficult questions of your body. Admitting that you’re just trying to prove you’re still as strong as you remember; that these aren’t quite the golden years, but almost. You run it in regardless, together, barely-there humans in a beautiful space, blistered and aching. Maybe then you cry a little at the audacity of the universe, the memory of the sunrise all those hours ago, the magically-restorative douple-IPA sips at High Park so many feet above where you lay now.

Or, in a bigger way, that these are actually those golden years, and moving fast means to accept.”