Heart of The South: Part 1

Well, the equally anticipated and dreaded notification from Ultrasignup has finally arrived. My phone buzzed and I looked down and saw the Gmail icon with a notice from Ultra sign up, which could only mean one thing. Over the past several days I had been monitoring the Last Annual Vol State Facebook page with a mixture of fear and quiet resignation as names steadily trickled down through my feed, each belonging to some poor unfortunate soul being informed of their impending doom.

If I’m totally honest with myself, I have to admit that part of me still hoped that my name wouldn’t be called and I could shrug my shoulders and say “I tried”, and move on without any shame or embarrassment. This race had been my singular obsession for at least 3 or 4 years, but I just could never bring myself to actually register, and so each summer I let another year slip by. But 2019 was different. I had gotten a healthy amount of ultras under my belt by August and I felt the strongest I had felt in a long time. I had just won a 50K where half the field had dropped down or out due to extreme heat. This was going to be the year.

When the opening date for registration was announced I set a reminder on my Outlook calendar. It gave the familiar chime that announced I only had 15 minutes until registration began. I started feeling perspiration all over my body, and I couldn’t focus on my work as all the characters just looked like blurred blotches of black ink. As my co-workers began to move towards the kitchen and the parking lot, I took out my wallet and prepared my credit card and logged into Ultrasignup and started hitting refresh on the LAVS site. And then right as the clock struck twelve, the status changed to “OPEN” and I was in. I flew through the screens, selecting the race and entering my credit card information. I hesitated for an instant as I moved the cursor to submit, but I told myself “don’t think about it, just do it”, and slammed my index finger onto the mouse. Then nothing. tap, tap, tap, I clicked in fast succession, but nothing happened. It was frozen. It had crashed. I could have walked away right then and there and told everyone I knew that I had given it my best shot. I had even put in my credit card information and gone so far as to hit submit. I couldn’t be thought a coward, it was just circumstances beyond my control. Maybe I’d get in next year. But just like how when the Hulu site had crashed on Black Friday, and I wasted the better half of a morning just hitting refresh and hoping my order went through, until finally I was in and got a year of TV for $0.99 per month, I knew that if I didn’t keep trying I could never be honest with myself, so I rushed to my car and drove the short 10 minutes home and began the registration process again from my laptop.

I’m not sure why I needed to go to my house, but you see, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was a desperate man. After spending my entire lunch break hitting refresh and starting over, I finally convinced myself that I had done as much as I could and it was beyond my control and so I made my way back to the office, a completely broken and exhausted man. My emotions had been all over the place, fear, hope, relief all in the span of seconds and repeated for an hour. I slouched into my chair and opened up my translation to get started again, but I couldn’t focus and so I pulled out my phone and opened Facebook and saw that almost everyone else on the LAVS page had suffered the same fate. There was a mood of general frustration across the posts.

When I returned home that evening, I decided that I would give it one last try, and just like that, on my first attempt I got through. Unfortunately, LAVS had filled up and I was put on the wait list. My first thought was that even if I didn’t get in, I really could say that I had done everything possible, but it just hadn’t worked out. And then Laz made an announcement that due to popular demand he was considering hosting a second race, similar to LAVS which would traverse Mississippi and Alabama, ending at the familiar Castle Rock, Georgia. Everyone on the LAVS waitlist would be put into this race, if they chose, and so I decided to go for it.

However, there were still enough people ahead of me that the 120 or so slots filled up and I found myself now on two wait lists. The new race was given the name Heart of the South or HOTS for short. And so I stayed on the wait list for HOTS and LAVS for several months, from August until December, when one day, out of the blue my phone buzzed. The only question I had was whether it would be HOTS or LAVS that I would be running, and when I opened the message it revealed that I was fated for HOTS. Now, with my position in the race fully confirmed, it only remains to train myself as best I can between now and June. I envision many, many miles on Kentucky back roads and a gas station diet…