Persistence Pays Off
Here's my friend Viki with her Pikes Peak Ascent Finisher's medal.
Viki didn't finish the Pikes Peak Ascent, but she has a medal. Now, hold on! Don't get
indignant on me. I'll tell you what happened, and THEN you can fuss if you want to.
Pikes Peak has certain "cutoff" fimes at various spots on the course - the assumption
being that, if you don't make it to that point by that time, then you won't be able to make
it to the finish in time.
Viki was over a half an hour AHEAD of those cutoff times - and she had made it all the way
to
A-Frame, when race management heard that there was a *storm* coming, and decided to
close the course.
And they closed the course from A-Frame *down*, which meant that anyone ahead of A-Frame
got to go ahead and finish.
Viki was two switchbacks shy of A-Frame.
That meant that, instead of only having to go three more miles UP, she had to go ten miles back DOWN.
So, even though she beat the race-mandated cutoffs, Viki had to do TWENTY miles instead of 13.34 - and,
in addition, having trained for nothing but UPHILL, she had to go DOWNHILL for ten miles. Plus race management
asked VIki to break the news to OTHER runners on the way down - giving her the job of telling everybody else
that they had lost their chance to finish, as well.
And the storm didn't actually arrive until after she got back down - long after she would have finished anyway.
So, if you still feel indignant about her getting a finisher's medal when she didn't "finish", then send email
to
WeDontWannaHearAboutIt@Fuggehdaboudit.com
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