I was showing somebody the video of him winning last year. After he finished, it looks like he has no idea who or where he is for quite a while. Like somebody waking up from being knocked out from a concussion. It's not a good place to be.

The problem is training for something like that without beginning to hate it. If you're burned out, then every second is another reason to quit after about 10 hours or so of that insanity.

I bet if he hadn't finished it before, he'd have kept going. But once you did achieve something like that, just repeating isn't enough to warrant going that deep. Which tells us all a thing about how hard this race must be, mostly that it is made that extreme just for the sake of it. If it were organized with the option to use navigation or even arrows to point out the course, it probably would not be all that insane anymore (for the seasoned runners anyway, the course still sounds damn hard for even 1 loop).

Of course. Because everything else about the race is sane. :-/

No, still insane, but the big mental issue is usually that they lose hours finding the book, running in circles. So getting some navigation help for that would take a lot of uncertainty away. Remember they can be out there at night coming from opposite directions than before so doing the loop 4 times already might not help that much as you'd hope and you'd still lose most time looking for those small clues.

You're absolutely right in both posts.

Though it's the spirit of the race to make everything difficult, impractical and unpredictable. The challenge isn't just the difficulty of the course, but as per your example, the ability to cope with uncertainty and the unforeseen, from before the conch to however long the runner may be out there.

There's so many ways to make the race "easier" or "saner", but the biggest surprise Laz could ever do, would be to make a change that actually did so.

Newly dropped





* There's a disclaimer on there that Laz let Nicky run with an audio recorder, and some of the shots "on course" were recreated elsewhere and afterwards #fixitinpost

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