Day 8: Hallucinations from an Ultra Runner

Wyoming must have some zinger winters.  Nearly every highway hilltop is lined on the south side by snow fences. They look like oversized wooden pallets tipped on end and I imagine they allow the wind to blow through but stop the snow from drifting onto the road.  Some of them are quite long, so long that today one of the dirt roads leading between a set of them was called "Snow Fence Road".  

Yesterday evening, while on my 43rd mile of the day, it was actually getting hotter as the sun started to set.  Hewett is such a safe driver, he won't pull off on the shoulder of the road. He'll drive ahead until there's a pulloff.  But I was done for the day and he was nowhere in sight.  I was fantasizing for some way to get up the road and saw a train on the hillside. It was moving but not too quickly.  I figured I could run up to it, hop on, and then jump off when I saw the truck.  

Then I noticed it wasn't a train. It was the snow fence.  Later, after I told Hewett about my hallucination, he said he would have just left me sitting on the wooden fence train, telling my wife that I was sitting on a wooden rail not going anywhere in Wyoming.  

Then there was the time two days ago when I forgot I had a mustache.  It was another hot day. I have been applying sunscreen every couple of hours. The dry air also makes my lips chapped, so I apply lip balm often as well.  As I was putting it on, I thought the lip balm might also be good on my face to protect my skin from the strong headwind. I started to apply it between my upper lip and nose and I hit "an obstruction".  Oh yeah, I have a mustache. The balm had gotten soft in the afternoon heat. It was medicated.  And now my mustache had a thick coat of medicated lip balm, guaranteed not to chap, applied thickly to my full mustache.  It took the rest of the day wiping my face, plus a shower with a washcloth to get it out.   

Then there's encounters with wildlife. While running up on dozens of herds of antelope out here, they often bolt away. I love watching them run in groups. It's so iconic.  I imagine I can hear a bass voiced narrator from Animal Kingdom talking about how it's either eat or be eaten. These antelopes aren't much different than us, as they usually stop after 100 yards and turn back to see if that was far enough to flee from the danger.  As they turned back to me, I often have the feeling they see me clearly for the first time and say to each other, "What? We were running from that guy? We could take him! Hey runner guy, wanna race?"

"Sure," I say, let's race for pink slips.  "Nah," they'd respond, "let's race for that nice GPS watch on your arm."  They won the race and the watch, but I had the last laugh.  "Good luck re-charging the battery in 20 hours," I'd say with a maniacal laugh.  

Beautiful but tough day today. Ran 36 miles, 25 of it into a strong headwind with many long uphills. Climbing towards the western border of the state.  In the evening today, we got a flat tire on the truck and had to drive back to Lander to replace the tire in the morning. Fitting that the section where the flat happened was near "Rocky Ridge", a famous hill on the trail that has such unforgiving rocks along the trail that it often shook the wagons apart on the climb. The rocks are still there and even though Hewett was driving on a nearby county road, it too was filled with razor sharp angular rocks, one of which easily scalped the sidewall of the tire, causing an immediate explosion. Near South Pass on the trail tomorrow and still headed west.