Hannah shook her head. “It’s fine. I just need to rest a minute and put on my other shoes.”
She hugged her friends, no longer caring how sweaty or salty she was, or how much she stank. She didn’t have the energy to care. Summer went to get Hannah a change of shoes and a light jacket to help her stay warm as nighttime set in, while Teagan replenished her hydration and energy supplements.
“You look pretty good otherwise,” Summer said. “Are you having fun?”
Hannah thought about it. Was she? “I… sure. Yeah. I’m glad to be here.”
“You sure you don’t want a pacer for the second half?” Teagan said. “I heard some people volunteering…”
Hannah shook her head and sat down to change. God, it felt like heaven to sit for a minute.
Why was she doing this? Oh yeah. She had a goal. She reminded herself of that goal and what it meant to her. She would finish this, no matter what.
After quickly changing, Hannah stood up to go. Time sitting was time wasted. She paused, looking at her friends. “It means a lot that you’re both here.”
Yeah, it was sappy. But she was too tired to care.
“We’re happy to be here,” Teagan said.
“Go murder that second half,” Summer said. “You got this.”
Hannah hugged them again, went through the checkpoint where they weighed her to ensure she wasn’t too dehydrated, and took off into the dusk.
“Fuck,” Hannah growled as she limped to a walk once more.
She was at Mile 71. It was pitch-ass dark. It was cold. And she was alone. Other than the occasional tiny light ahead, from the headlamp of a fellow racer trudging through the wilderness, she was alone. She was dragging, wanting more than anything to pull up a tree stump and sit her ass down. Her stomach grumbled, but the thought of food made her want to vomit. And she felt a little freaked out, not knowing how much of that was fatigue and how much was because she was alone in the dark wilderness after running over seventy miles.
She didn’t know anything. She couldn’t even think straight.
And her foot hurt. Since Mile 50, it had gotten worse and worse. She’d taken more meds to dull the pain, at one point almost vomiting them up. But now her foot hurt so much that she could only run-walk, at best. Her twenty-six-hour goal was long gone. Then she realized that, at this pace, she’d be lucky to finish at all.
“Just get to mile eighty,” she told herself. “You’ll feel better when you get better meds. The docs will be there and they’ll wrap your foot.”
Yeah, she was talking to herself. Out loud.
Hannah trudged along the trail, alternating walking with running, trying her damnedest to ignore the pain, to ignore everything but the path ahead, illuminated by her headlamp, keeping her from wandering off into the forest.
“Just get to mile eighty,” she said. She repeated that mantra out loud to herself again and again and again.
By Mile 78, the light of dawn had reached the sky. The pain in her foot was so intense that she could barely walk, and running had become a thing of the past. Every step, every moment she put even a tiny bit of her weight on that foot, meant a sharp searing pain that made her grunt aloud and brought tears to her eyes. But she kept going, putting as little weight as possible on it, until she finally arrived at the Mile 80 aid station.
Hannah and Teagan wouldn’t be there. That aid station didn’t have enough room for support crew, so her friends would be waiting at Mile 87. She barely remembered seeing them at the last one. What had they talked about? Her nausea? Her foot? She remembered Summer and Teagan giggling, probably because she’d been babbling and a little delirious. Exhaustion could do that.
She stumbled into the medical tent. There were already a couple of people there, both hooked up to IVs and one vomiting into a bucket. Both looked like death.
A young man with a shirt that said “volunteer” approached her. “What can we do for you?”
“My foot’s killing me,” she said, looking around for somewhere to sit. “Is there anything you can do to get me to the finish?”
The volunteer sat her down on one of the makeshift beds. She let out a giant sigh. Nothing in the world felt better than this. He asked about her symptoms, and Hannah tried to answer clearly, knowing she was tripping over her words. The volunteer removed her shoe.
“Doc,” he called out to a man in a white coat, tending to one of the ill. “We’ve got an injury here. Says her foot is injured.”
Hannah heard big, heavy steps heading her way. The doctor kneeled down and faced her. He hesitated for a moment, staring at her, probably trying to assess what sort of condition she was in. Finally, he spoke.
“Can you run on it?”
She shook her head. “I can barely walk on it.”
He picked up her foot, pressing on the bottom of her foot in a few places. “That hurt?”
She shook her head. He then probed the top of it, pressing here and there until she felt a stab of pain. “Right there,” she said with a grimace.
“You’ve probably got a stress fracture,” he said, looking at her with big brown eyes that somehow seemed familiar to Hannah’s exhausted mind.
“What can I do to get rid of the pain, just enough to finish?”
“Have you tried ibuprofen and the usual stuff?”
She nodded. “More than I care to admit.”
“There’s nothing I can give you that’s any better.” He glanced at his watch. “And if you can’t walk at a good pace, you won’t make the cutoff. Which means your race is over.”
Hannah shook her head, finding her sweaty, bloody sock and putting it on again. “No. I’ll make it. I won’t DNF.”
DNF stood for Did Not Finish. And Hannah didn’t DNF.
She grimaced again as she stuffed her swollen, blistered foot back into its shoe prison.
“Your foot is in bad shape,” the doctor insisted, brown eyes boring into hers. “You won’t make the finish. And even if you could, you’ll do far worse damage to your foot by walking on it.”
Hannah stood up, squelching the instinct to grimace again.
“If that foot fails on you,” he went on, more forcefully this time, “you’ll be stuck out there alone.”
Hannah ignored him and left, following the signs to the trail.
But it was only a matter of minutes before the pain was so bad that Hannah couldn’t put any weight on it. She stopped, staring at her watch, her exhausted mind attempting to calculate how long it would take to cover those last twenty miles if she walked, stumbled, or even crawled. She could crawl, right? What mattered is that she finished, not how. Crawling to the finish line only meant that she’d run hard enough earlier in the race to buy her crawling time later. But even in her addled, pained, and desperate state, she knew.
The blunt doctor was right, the mean bastard. She wouldn’t make it.
She would have to drop out of the race.
A giant heave of grief threatened to flatten her like a tsunami. But she shoved it away with all the strength she had left.
“Fuck!” she shouted as loud as her parched throat and tired body could manage.
She turned and headed back to the aid station, limping the whole way.
And there, the doctor with the big brown eyes greeted her, his expression unsurprised at seeing her again, and so soon. She waited for his “I told you so,” but it never came. Instead, she got a look that was part self-satisfied and part sympathetic.
“Glad you came to your senses, Grace Kelly.”
Hannah froze. Grace Kelly?
She took a closer look at him. And even in her foggy, just-about-to-come-unglued state, she saw it.
The doctor who stood before her, the Dream Killer who’d told her she probably had a stress fracture and would have to DNF, was none other than Grizzly the Mountain Man.
Chapter Four
Hannah stared at the man standing a few feet away, his brown eyes glimmering with amusement, his hair trimmed and his Grizzly Adams b
eard nowhere to be found, revealing a finely-chiseled jaw. It was Grizzly, the scary guy in the log cabin who’d finally given her the directions she’d asked for. And who’d called her Grace Kelly.
Grizzly was Dr. Grizzly. That’s why he’d been so dogmatic about driving her home that night, and about her physical condition. He’d recognized the signs of distress.
“Finally recognize me?” he said, his eyes still dancing with humor.
Hannah wanted to give it right back to him. She wanted to call him Grizzly Adams, to make a wisecrack about his beardlessness or his bossy ways or his taking joy in shattering her High Peaks 100 dream. But instead, she did something she never expected.
She burst into tears.
Hannah sat down on a medical cot and buried her face in her hands. And she sobbed, too tired and too miserable and too beaten down to care how she looked or sounded to anyone, even Grizzly. She heard a deep voice say something before someone put an emergency blanket around her shoulders. Soon, she felt someone sit down next to her and put an arm around her, and she knew it was Grizzly. She could tell by how strong his arm felt around her thin, dehydrated body, and by how thick his shoulder felt. Normally, she’d never cry in public, much less on some dude’s shoulder, but she couldn’t help herself. She didn’t have the strength to stop it, and there was something about Grizzly’s shoulder and warmth that felt really comforting.
Finally, the storm passed and Hannah sat up again. Before she could wipe her snotty nose on the arm of her jacket, Grizzly handed her some tissue. She took it and cleaned herself up before turning to face him. He looked like he was about to say something. Something bossy.
“Don’t you dare get all authoritarian on me, Grizzly,” she told him. “If you do, I swear I will kick you in the nuts with my one good foot.”
He chuckled. “I wouldn’t dream of it, Grace. Getting this far and not getting to finish, after months of hard training, sucks.” He went to grab an ice pack from a portable freezer, and began tying it to her foot. “No pacer, huh?”
“No. I wanted to do it on my own.”
“What a shock.”
Hannah couldn’t help but smile.
He elevated her foot to rest on the cot next to her. “How many centuries have you run before?”
“This was my first.”
He raised his eyebrows. “And you got to mile eighty without succumbing to exhaustion, altitude sickness, or missing a cutoff—”
She shook her head. “That wasn’t my goal. My goal was to finish, even make a good time.”
He sat down across from her. “So is everybody’s. But only about half make it because this is a bitch of a race. What you did is impressive.”
“You’re just saying that so I’ll feel better and get out of your med tent,” Hannah said, the cold icepack soothing her inflamed foot.
His eyes grew serious. “I don’t say things to make people feel better. I tell ‘em the truth. You should know that about me by now.” When Hannah chuckled in acknowledgement, he went on. “I get why you’re upset. But when that passes, you’ll see what a bang-up job you did, especially for your first hundred.”
She sighed. “Maybe. But then I’m left with a bad foot, an unmet goal, and the fear that I’ll spend another six months training and suffering next year, just to DNF again.”
“The foot will heal. And as far as the rest goes… if you have that attitude, yeah, you’ll probably fail.”
“I had a good attitude this time,” she insisted, annoyed. “I believed I could do it. I followed that training plan to the letter.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem.”
“What do you mean?”
He eyed her with those beautiful brown eyes, the ones that told many stories. “You said you didn’t want my opinion.”
Hannah smiled. “Fine. I promise I won’t kick you in the nuts.”
“You sure you want to hear it? You won’t like it.”
She snorted. “What does that not surprise me?”
He smiled, waiting for her.
“Hit me, Grizzly.”
Grizzly looked at her for a moment, as if gathering his words. “Your attitude’s all wrong. You’re all about the goal, rather than the process and the experience of it.”
“So?”
“So, that takes the joy out of it. And when you’re focused on the goal, you don’t listen to your body and you wind up either injured or burned out. Guess which one you are?”
Hannah rolled her eyes. “Go on.”
“Let me guess… you followed a strict training regime.”
She nodded.
“And you kept a neat little log with all your mileage, run times, pace, and all that crap.”
“Of course.”
“And you pushed yourself beyond it on those days when you were feeling unbreakable, tossing in a few more miles, maybe pushing your pace harder, knowing it would make your race all the stronger and faster.”
Hannah was silent.
“And toward the end,” he went on, “you ran through the nagging pain in your foot and you started getting tired and irritable with people, and the only thing that kept you going was the thought of reaching that goal.”
When Hannah just stared at him, lost for words, he gave a wry half-smile.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
Hannah sighed again. “Now I get to guess. You see the same thing over and over in all the fools who wind up in this tent at mile eighty.”
Grizzly shook his head. “Nope. I only see it in people like you. You run for the wrong reasons. You’re all about mileage and pace and goals. It’s like you’re running to prove yourself, instead of doing it for the love of it, for the experience of it. And when you do that, proving yourself takes precedent over what your body needs, and you get injured.”
“But I don’t run to prove myself to others,” Hannah argued. “I don’t care about winning or how many people I pass, or trying to place in my age group. I run for myself and I race my own race. I do it for me.”
“It doesn’t matter who you do it for. It’s how you do it. I mean, you wouldn’t even accept a ride home after you got lost for God knows how many hours, when you were obviously dehydrated and exhausted and ready to fall over. I get why you wouldn’t trust some dude you don’t know, but that wasn’t why you refused. You had to do it your way. You had to prove you could make it home, for your own sake. And earlier, when I told you you had a fractured foot, you still wanted to go and limp your way through another twenty miles—longer than most people will ever run on two good feet—and risk your foot and your very life just to reach that finish line. You’re all business, and you put that before any kind of respect for your body. Your body doesn’t like that. And, in my opinion, it’s not the way to do ultras.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” Hannah said. “Meditate? Do yoga? Pray to the forest gods? That’s going to help me finish High Peaks?”
Grizzly shrugged. “Maybe. Everyone’s different. Ultrarunning is more than just getting a medal or scratching another item off your do-it-before-I-drop-dead list. It’s a spiritual experience for some people.”
She narrowed her eyes. “How do you know all this? You don’t look like a runner…”
“Cain,” someone called out.
Grizzly looked over, standing up immediately when a new runner stumbled in, looking like he was about to pass out. Another fallen victim of the High Peaks 100 suffer-fest. Grizzly went to treat the man, and Hannah sat there with her reflective emergency blanket around her exhausted, depleted, sticky, and salt-covered body. Suddenly, she remembered Teagan and Summer. They were waiting for her, wondering where the hell she was. By now, they must be sick with worry. She needed to call them. They should have cell service in this area. She began looking around, wondering how she would call.
“Excuse me,” she said to the volunteer. “Do you have a phone? I need to call my crew to pick me up.”
“Of course.” He handed her a cell phone.
&nb
sp; She dialed Teagan’s number, one of the only numbers she knew by heart.
“Hannah!” came Teagan’s concerned voice. “Where are you?”
“Mile eighty, in the med tent. I’m out. Doc says I probably have a fractured foot.”
“Shit. I thought that might have been what kept you.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Stay put. We’re on our way.”
Hannah returned the phone and sat there. The adrenaline had begun to wear off. Her body felt weary, her blisters throbbed, her foot ached, and she felt sick to her stomach. She realized the foot traffic through the area had stopped. No more runners. They were past the cutoff, and anyone else who straggled in would have to do what she did—get any needed medical attention, have their friends come get them, and go home without a finisher’s medal in their hands. Suddenly, all Hannah wanted to do was get away from all of it. Away from the trail and the other runners and the med tent, all reminding her of her giant failure.
Suddenly, someone shook her. Hannah sat up suddenly, realizing she’d fallen asleep. She looked up to find Teagan and Summer staring at her.
“Hey,” she said, glad to see their tired faces. “You guys must be exhausted.”
“Yeah,” Teagan scoffed. “We’re exhausted. You know, from the not running eighty miles.”
Hannah managed a tiny laugh. “Let’s go home and sleep.”
When Hannah tried to stand up, she grimaced. Sitting had made her so stiff that it took both her friends and considerable effort to get her to a standing position.
“Can you walk?” Teagan said. “The car’s close by.”
“I can make it,” Hannah said, wincing in pain as she put weight on the offending left foot, the traitorous villain that had ruined her chance at a High Peaks finish. Just as she started to hobble out, she heard someone call out.
“Yo! Grace.”
Hannah turned to find Dr. Grizzly heading her way. And for reasons she couldn’t entirely explain, that fact filled her pitiful broken body with warmth.
“Teagan, Summer, I want you to meet Doctor Grizzly. But whatever you do, do not let the big brown eyes fool you. He’s a mean bastard who spent the last half hour schooling me on everything I did wrong.”
Going The Distance (Four Corners Book 3) Page 3
