Massanutten Mountain Midnight Madness described some of what went on 16-17 May 2009 at the Massanutten Mountain Trails 100 miler, as seen from the viewpoint of Kate Abbott and me. Three more observations, all involving glimpses of light:

• At 11:20pm, after a hot and humid day plus an evening of violent thunderstorms, the clouds part for a moment and a handful of bright stars appear overhead. I'm waiting at Mile 58.1, a parking lot on US-211, with a few other pacers and support crew members. We stand around chatting in the murk, interrupted every few minutes when a runner arrives, refills a bottle, and crosses the highway to head north toward the finish line. The clouds close again; darkness deepens. Then flashlight beams glimmer off the wet tree trunks, Caroline Williams and Kate Abbott clamber upslope, wet from wading through overflowing streams, still gamely making progress but increasingly close to the cutoff time. We cheer them onward ...
• At midnight I'm driving Kate's SUV up Chrisman Hollow Rd, a winding one-lane dirt-and-gravel route along the mountain ridgeline, heading toward the next aid station at Gap Creek, mile 64.9. The forest to the east thins and suddenly a cluster of lights peeks through. It's the small town of Luray, 1600 feet below, starting to shut down on a Saturday night ...
• At 12:35am, a few hundred yards down the road from the Gap Creek aid station I'm sitting in the passenger front seat of Kate's vehicle, dozing intermittently after turning the car around at a wide spot on the road. Headlamps and flashlights appear ahead of me, bobbing as a small cluster of runners approach. I hear a familiar voice and open my door. "Gary, is that you?" I ask. It is indeed the ever-ebullient Gary Knipling, age 65, heading toward his 12th MMT finish. Gary is notorious for carrying (and displaying at every opportunity) a pair of mango panties that he found in the woods long ago. I stop him for a few seconds and give him another faux trophy, a tiny blue-and-green thong, girl's underwear that I picked up as litter on the street a few weeks earlier during my pre-dawn walk to the local Metro station. Its label says "Pink", and it's from a young ladies' line of scandalous lingerie by Victoria's Secret. Gary accepts it cheerfully and plants it in his friend Quatro Hubbard's drop bag at the next opportunity. He tells Q that the panties were sent by a "hot babe" whom he met in the woods ...

^z - 2009-06-07