Man Against Horse

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This is Radiolab. I am Lulu, and today we have a tale about some tale. We got a backstory to the back story. That's right, we are here to talk about butts.

Wait, you're listening?

Okay.

You're listening to Radiolab, Radiolab.

From WNYC.

Rewind.

Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad. This is Radiolab and today we've got a story from our producer, Matt Kilty Okay, and reporter Heather Radke.

All right.

I have no idea where we should start. I was wanting, like, it's like with the dawn of human civilization.

Maybe.

Okay, so the story comes to us from Heather, who is a fantastic writer who brought us a story. That, if I were to boil it down, is about a horse, a lone man running through the desert and what it fundamentally means to be a human being. And, weirdly, butts, I didn't see this coming, but it's about butts, just butts, your butt.

You gotta say it a few times. Butts, Okay, so let's back up. I am writing a book about the cultural history of the female butt.

Oh, interesting.

I know I thought I'd save that one for on tape. It started as an essay that I was just working on. Because I have a big butt and I grew up in, you know, mid-Michigan, it was pretty white. And in high school, in the 90s, it was very much like, not good to have a big butt. Like, I got made fun of, et cetera, et cetera. But then, sometime in the mid-aughts, all of a sudden, this body that had sort of been bringing me all this shame became attractive in sort of a mainstream way.

And as Heather started picking that apart and looking into these things about race, appropriation, beauty, this essay about the butt.

About You know, what does the butt mean, like, what does it symbolize, and why does it symbolize that?

But before she could really dive into all those things, she realized she had, like, just a more fundamental question.

Why do we even have a butt at all? Okay, so I started to research, just like search around for people who have tried to answer it before, but because of what a butt is just even like. Anatomically, it's not a simple question.

You have, you know, the butt.

The aesthetic object.

Like the whole entire butt.

And there's two parts to the butt there's the butt that's the muscle, and then there's the butt that's the fat. So I talked to the fat butt people and there's a lot of them. And although there's a lot of different theories about why we have fat butts, there's no real consensus.

No one knows why we have the fat. Do we have the fat because we sit a lot?

But then why do men have so much less than women? question.

So then Heather started looking at the butt muscle.

Butt muscle, yeah.

Which led her to this guy.

Sorry, I just missed you for a second, say that again.

Daniel Lieberman.

This evolutionary biologist at Harvard.

You want to talk about the gluteus maximus, if I recall.

I do, I do, I do so. You called him up.

You're sort of the preeminent.

A while back for your book.

Butt muscle scientist, as far as I can tell.

That's an interesting distinction, but possibly true.

Then we called him up not too long ago, because what was the thing you'd learn from him?

The butt maybe made us human.

Well, gosh, so I've been interested in the evolution of the human body and the evolution of human physical activity for a very long time now.

Is it just because you look at a human body and you're like, why?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm interested in how and why our bodies are the way they are and the way in which we evolved.

Okay, so to get to the butt stuff with Lieberman, we have to go back.

So many years ago.

Around 1992.

I was, I guess I must have been a postdoc or a grad student at Harvard doing research on. Actually, it was about pigs. The story starts with a pig on a treadmill.

Sorry, just out of curiosity. you were doing this just out of curiosity.

I don't think anybody just puts a pig on a treadmill out of curiosity. But it was an experiment to look at how different parts of the skeleton respond to the effects of the loads caused by exercise.

So Daniel said every day he would come into the lab where he had these pigs.

Mini pigs.

Mini pigs on a treadmill.

Yeah.

Cute.

He'd put one of them on a treadmill.

Mini pigs are just the right size, let me tell you.

And to keep the pig on the treadmill.

You put a box and you put a box and turn the treadmill on. And you know, the pig doesn't like having its butt hit the back, and also the animals like it. If you put a mirror in front of them, so weird. So if there's a mirror in front of them, it thinks there's another pig there. And they're kind of much more happy running.

Forever chasing towards their other pig.

Yeah, that's sad. It works.

So this was Daniel's life. Mini pigs, treadmills.

Sounds like an exciting thing, but, believe me, eventually it gets kind of dull.

But then one day it got exciting.

A fellow named Dennis Bramble, who's a professor at the University of Utah, now retired.

That's bramble.

He was on sabbatical at Harvard.

Yeah, I was there for the whole year.

To do his own research, coincidentally, right next door to Lieberman.

And I heard this sound.

Turned to his co-researcher.

And I said, What the hell's that sound? is somebody doing something there? And they said, Yeah, this guy. Dan Lieberman. I said, Oh, I've got to see this.

Eventually, he goes next door to Lieberman's Lab, Lieberman's in there.

With yet another pig on a treadmill.

Popped his head in, looked at the pig.

And cocked his head to the side and said to me, You know, Dan, that pig can't hold its head. Still when it's running. It's funny. I, you know, spent hours watching pigs run on treadmills. But I never really thought about it. But.

Oh, there it goes. We looked up pigs running on YouTube, Oh wow.

Oh, don't, don't, don't. So is his head still or not?

Their heads do kind of flop.

So it's a floppy head.

If pigs on treadmills, their heads flop in this kind of ungainly manner, then, like every which way.

So, anyways, two of them are staring at this mini pig on a treadmill.

It's head bobbing up and down.

And Bramble said, You know, Dan, I bet that pig's head is flopping all around because it doesn't have this thing.

Called the Nuchal ligament.

Nuchal ligament.

Yeah, the Nuchal ligament n-u-c-h-a-l.

And I explained to him that, you know, it provides support for the head and neck.

Okay, so the Nuchal ligament? It's like a rubber band that attaches to the back of the animal's skull and then runs down its spine and keeps the head straight as it runs.

Right, and then I went on to point out that all mammals that are specialized and have evolved as runners.

Everything from cheetahs to leopards to antelopes.

Big, grazing animals like horses.

Down to the teeniest, tiniest runners.

Jackrabbits, among other things, dogs, too.

They've all got a nuchal ligament.

All these animals that evolved to run got this ligament to keep their head from flopping around, and the animals that suck at running, they don't have one, right? Pigs don't.

Apes don't? They have no Nuchal ligament?

Nothing.

They don't really need one because running's not a big part of who they are. But then the weird thing is that humans, well.

Humans have one.

Humans have one of these, too.

We have this ligament.

So then I explained to him just very briefly that.

At this point, Dennis said to Dan, A while back, I had this grad student.

Yeah, so.

Who wrote this paper about humans and running?

Trying to figure out how breathing fits into locomotion, running and breathing.

And he basically argued that because of how we breathe and a bunch of other things. That running was actually a key part of human evolution, that it was like a really essential part to us becoming human.

Yeah, and that was exciting.

Because it turns out Dan had read that paper, thought it was really interesting.

But I remember having a discussion about it with a professor of mine who basically told me to ignore the paper. It was a silly idea that humans really suck at running. They were terrible.

And the things that really made us, us.

It was all about walking and tools and brains.

Not running. There's no real evidence for it.

Well, anyway, going back to the pig story.

To them in the lab with the pig talking about nuclear ligaments, and Dan was the one who was like, Oh, wait.

One of the very cool things about this ligament is that it leaves a trace on the skull, a sharp ridge in the back of the skull.

And so Dan thought, Okay, well, maybe we could go to the fossil record, see when this ligament shows up and see how other things show up with it. Almost in the same way that when we started walking, our bones started changing dramatically. Like, maybe he could sort of see the same thing with running, or maybe this ligament's actually just like the equivalent of, I don't know, wisdom teeth, like it doesn't really matter.

Fortunately, we're surrounded by a wonderful museum.

Right there at Harvard.

Full of fossil casts of our ancestors.

And also lots of butts.

There are butts, we're not gonna talk about the butts yet, we're coming back to the butts for now. Nuclear ligaments go searching, looking at skulls of our ancient ancestors.

And they first look at a skull from a seven million year old human ancestor no nuclear ligament, nothing, and then they keep looking at fossils that are.

Like, six million, five million, nothing, nothing.

But then?

Sure enough, there it is.

A little sharp ridge.

They find a ridge in a skull.

From around two million years ago.

There's a nuclear ligament.

The skull of our ancestor, Homo erectus.

It doesn't have a snout, it has smaller teeth, it's the first species that's really, very much like you and me from the neck down.

And this is sort of like a.

Eureka moment.

Like Dan says, a eureka moment. Because from the neck up, essentially what we're talking about is the brain, the thing that really sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.

And when Homo erectus first appears, you know, their brains are about half the size of the brains that we have today.

What Dan and Dennis would realize like looking through the fossil record, doing all sorts of laboratory research, is that from the neck down. Two million years ago. We got all these adaptations that we still have, adaptations that seem to be explicitly designed.

So, for example.

Take the foot.

Almost all animals that run have short toes.

If you have long toes and you're running, your toes break.

And sometime around two million years ago, our toes got shorter.

Or also, like four million years ago, our feet were flat.

You can have a flat foot and walk very well, but once you have a flat foot, it's very hard to run.

So our feet start to arch.

That arch is a spring, and, in fact, there are plenty of other springs.

Like the Achilles tendon.

Which is like a centimeter long in a chimpanzee or a gorilla.

With homo erectus, it becomes really long.

A huge spring in your leg.

Also, our hips become.

Twisty, tall, narrow. That help us stay stable.

Arms.

That are really useful for climbing shorter.

Legs.

Longer.

The inner ear.

The semicircular canals larger, more sensitive to pitching forces.

So you can balance better.

Our joints in our knees and our hips get bigger, which are supposed to be able to bear the load of running.

The most important adaptation, the butt.

Butts, so butts are not only beautiful, and they're helping me sit on this chair right now, but the butt is, of course, the largest, the gluteus maximus.

When I'm running, I'm in a perpetual state of like, near falling.

That's correct, running is a controlled fall.

Tiny Buns.

Teeny Buns.

Wimpy Buns.

Took them out of the oven too soon, keep them in the oven.

There you go.

But as soon as Homo erectus comes along, you can see that it really got big, so they must've had big butts like us.

Yeah, big buns.

But then it's like, Well, why?

Why did this happen?

Yeah, like now butts, nuchal, ligament, everything, inner ear, yeah, all this stuff.

It's just like the whole human body changes all of a sudden. Why, like, why did we start running?

Well, there was climate change, so the ice age began starting, you know, or starting around 2.8 million years ago. There is climate started changing substantially, and Africa started to dry out.

And Dan says what happened is forests and jungles turned into-.

Grassland habitats and more open habitats.

Which quickly filled up with large, grass-eating mammals.

Herbivores.

Like Kudu and Antelope.

And other large mammals.

Sabertooth, tiger or something like that.

That ate those mammals.

But unlike other carnivores.

Your Lions, Tigers, Cheetahs.

We don't have any natural weapons, we don't have claws and fangs. And the kinds of technologies that we think about for hunting were not invented until very recently. So the bow and arrow was actually invented less than a hundred thousand years ago. And, in fact, just putting a sharpened stone point on a stick, right?

Really, we had nothing.

We had, well, we had pointed wooden sticks, which probably weren't that sharp. We had maybe clubs, you know. We can throw rocks great, and we don't have lots of fur to protect ourselves.

We sound like the worst equipped animal to deal with this climate change.

Natural selection often comes up with really interesting solutions.

Dan says Imagine you're back 2 million years ago. Where are we?

Well, we might be in a woodland, or we might be a savanna, you know, there's a variety of habitats.

We'll stick with the savanna.

You're out there with your family, friends, clan.

We don't really know the group sizes, but probably, you know, 15 to 20. Maybe it's not an unreasonable guess, but who knows?

You and your group are walking through the tall grasses of the savanna.

You're hungry.

And off in the distance.

You see some wildebeest and you run after them, but the wildebeest run away faster than you can possibly run, and the wildebeest will run far away. Right and go hide.

But that's okay, you're just gonna keep chasing them, tracking, looking for any signs of their trail.

And you're not chasing them at a sprint, you're kind of running along at a nice, relaxed endurance pace, like 10 minute miles.

And you do this for mile after mile after mile.

But the trick is you find that animal before it's cooled down, because, of course, the animal would have run away. And when it runs away, it gets hot, like when you're running, generates a lot of heat, and these animals aren't very good at dumping heat.

And why can't it dump heat?

Because they can't sweat.

Unlike us.

Most animals are unable to sweat, so the way they lose heat is by panting.

The thing about four-legged animals, though, is every stride they take when they're running.

The guts slam into the diaphragm like a piston. And so when an animal starts galloping, it has to train each breath with each stride. And that prevents it from doing the shallow breaths that animals do when they pant.

And so Dan says, what you do is you try to keep this wildebeest sprinting. So you stay slow and steady, keep moving. Just slowly chasing this thing, and slowly over time, you're making it get hotter and hotter and hotter. Until at a certain point, after tons of miles, could be 20, could be 30, you push this animal to the point of exhaustion.

At that point, the animal is basically collapsing, its defenses are gone, and they just find a rock and dispatch the animal with a rock.

And when you say dispatch, you mean, like, we beat its brains in.

That might be what they might do, yeah.

Huh, this is so horrifying.

I know it's a terrible way to die, right?

Yeah.

But once we are able to do this, we were able to become hunters.

Yeah, but I gotta say the idea of humans running down animals over these huge distances, it just seems-.

Well, and it kind of boggles the mind, right? Yeah, it seems impossible. I think I had heard this theory before. I think you had probably heard this theory before, at least in some part of my life.

People do it all the time, even I've done it.

I've actually done it, you've outrun a horse.

Absolutely, there's a race called man against horse every year in Prescott, Arizona, and two years ago I ran the race and I outran almost all the horses. And I'm just a middle-aged professor, I'm not particularly fast.

It's kind of like he was saying, you can see this whole theory play out in the desert of Arizona, right? And you and I talked about this and we were like, Okay.

We're going.

When we come back, it is off to the races.

So in 1983, a city councilman in Prescott comes into this bar in Whiskey Row, like super old West America.

And he gets there, he sits down and he has a beer and down at the end of the bar.

There's a couple of cowboys the city councilman's just run a marathon.

And at some point-.

The city council guy says, I just ran this crazy race.

And one of the cowboys says-.

My horse could run that far easily.

You're not that fast.

My horse could do that in an afternoon, wouldn't even break a sweat. And then the city councilman's like, you know, I'm not sure he can.

Actually, in fact, I bet I can outrun your horse.

And for 30 plus years, they have been sort of seeing who's right.

I put in new batteries last night.

Yeah, what the-.

I am so confused.

We drove to Phoenix, we rented a car and drove up to-.

Prescott, Prescott, we went to Prescott.

Don't say Prescott.

No, it's kind of just like high desert country.

Cactuses and scrub and red rocks.

Big Blue Sky.

It's like super cinematic, it's like, this is the West.

Ah, man, horse sign arrow to the right and we were there to see this race.

Nicely homemade, too.

It's just a piece of wood, it says. Man horse in red paint, born out of this bed and the race, it's a 50 mile race through the desert.

Up this mountain man against horse winner take all.

All right, okay, so I mean, we're essentially what? just standing in like an open desert plain.

Everything's super flat.

A little bit of a valley.

Kind of right out ahead of you is this big mountain, that is the mountain that they're gonna climb during the race.

Shin high dry scrub, scrub grass. We got there for day one.

And we go to the check-in table.

By the way, I'm Matt, I don't think. Hi, Matt, Ron Barrett, Ron Barrett. nice to meet you. He basically orchestrates this whole thing.

Tall guy bald got a white goatee, you meet him and you're like, Now that's a good guy.

Here we got some nostalgia. Oh, look at that.

Oh, a bunch of clippings. He was propping up this big poster board.

It's just a board that we, you know, over the years, we've taken pictures of back in 83, 85, the early years.

There's a lot of old newspaper photos of horses.

So that's the mojo man, Scott Moduleski.

Runners.

A shirtless runner?

He was a mojo mo and he was the first guy to be with no shirt on Runners World magazine.

Allegedly.

But when we were talking to Ron-.

He won it back in 94.

It turns out Daniel's theory is kind of not quite holding up out here.

He won the human portion.

He won the Yeah.

Because the headline reads, Horses again prove to be faster than man.

He won the run at that time.

Can beat some horses? Did he ever? did he ever end up beating a horse?

No, he never did.

But no human ever in this race has outrun the fastest horse.

This guy here, he's been the one to come the closest.

So in the 36 years that this race has been going, a horse has won every time.

And, to be honest, it sort of makes sense.

And easy, easy. It's not just like Pony down at the fair or something. They're big, they're muscular.

I can never stand that close behind a horse.

Like, evolution has made this animal to be like the best running beast on the planet.

So we talked to some of the riders.

The horses don't run by themselves. I'm Bruce, I'm Heather.

Heather, how are you? there you go? you're just revving this, aren't you?

Good boy, and these people know what they're doing. They've been running endurance races with these horses for a really long time.

I'm Matt, by the way, I'm Matt Troy.

Troy, nice to meet you. nice to meet you. So one of the guys we ended up talking to for a while was this guy, Troy.

Barrel chested, cowboy hat on, and Troy looked determined. I think of this ride, I don't even worry about who else shows up here to race on the horse race, I just want to beat the runner.

Troy's actually been competing in this race, the man against horse race, for the last 13 years, and he's beat a lot of humans.

And so when I see these guys running, I'm like, going, you guys are good, but I'm going to beat you, don't worry.

Those will be all ultra runners.

They're little skinny people, all right?

Bred and trained to run, and then on the other side-.

Subarus.

Small group of maybe eight people wearing microfiber, whatever they just like, have these like high-tech clothes on, and they're nibbling on like little vegan treats.

Quietly reading books. Are you guys the runners? We're with the public radio station WNYC, we do not like public radio. Yeah, I know all these Subarus out here, a bunch of public radio haters.

So for some of them, this is their first time racing a horse. How are you feeling about that? Excited for a couple of others, they've actually tried before. Of course, I think I'm about 10 years older, so I'll do it, probably take a lot longer usually.

Their answers-.

I feel like we're kind of comrades out there, just us against the course.

We're not exactly encouraging for the human side.

All you're worried about is doing it.

And then it's time to find another race.

It's us against the course, it's us against ourselves. We're all friends here.

I mean, at this point, it's pretty much seems like the horses have got it.

Yeah, like a blowout.

Yeah, they don't have a shot, but then we heard about this one guy, Nick.

Nick.

Now this kid says he's coming, Nick Corey.

We'd actually also heard about him from Ron.

He's to come tomorrow and beat the course record.

So that's why I'm kind of interested to know how fast this runner thinks he's gonna run, right? Turns out Troy had caught wind of him, but I don't really know, maybe even sounded a little nervous.

At this point, it's almost it's like sunset.

We need to eat lasagna, it's getting cold.

And so we head out to our hotel.

Yeah, yeah, let's eat a bread, thinking like, we're doomed.

It just doesn't seem like there's any chance.

Only other than maybe this guy, Nick.

The race starts at 6.

Step your six race day, race day, race day, the horse people are all getting their horses ready.

They're saddling up their horses.

And back across the divide.

The Runners Sun's finally off.

Are sort of like.

You're ready to go. So did they.

Anxiously moving about stretching.

But we are immediately looking for Nick, like, Where is he? one of the runners was like.

Nick Curry.

Nick, we've been hearing about you, so I hear.

He's a young guy, early 30s.

Little bit bleary eyed.

You just get up.

Kinda, I slept out here last night, so this is my place to get ready.

He slept in the back of his Honda fit in a sleeping bag.

It's easy to just wake up and be here.

And not have to worry about driving. And right away we were like, So are you going for a course record?

I'd say it's a possibility, like, I don't like to get ahead of myself, I know.

So he sort of hedged a little bit, but we didn't actually have that much time to talk to him because the race was about to start. We gotta let you go, but.

Yeah, thanks for talking to us. Yeah, thanks, Nick. And so about 10 minutes later.

50 milers runners check in over here.

Ron starts calling people together. 50 mile horses, horses start arriving.

Hey everybody, respect everybody.

Everybody take their time going through this wash. I don't want no accidents on the other side of that hill.

I had asked Ron if I could run with everybody at the beginning and he was like, sure.

You guys all have a good day, huh?

It's probably about 20 runners standing there, about a dozen horses behind us.

All right, ready to get to horse race?

Start right now, here we go go.

I can't with that.

So all the runners get down into this wash, first, come up into this barren desert, and pretty quick on your right come the horses.

Yeah, it's kind of crazy.

Nick was up ahead of me.

The horses take off in a cloud of dust and you kind of cop it up a bit and then settle in.

Meanwhile, Troy, as soon as Ron says, Go, I'm thinking, Haul ass, Troy is like galloping out there. He's like a hundred yards ahead of anybody.

As quickly as we could.

You can see dust coming up behind his horse. How was your horse feeling out of the gate? Oh, he was good. I. On the other hand, you gonna run the whole race with that thing.

Into the distance, the first thing I think is I will see you later.

It's just like, don't worry about the horses hauling ass.

Focus on the race.

Slow and steady.

Am I running the right pace? am I eating at the right time?

Slow down If you need to let your body adjust, find your rhythm.

Whatever I need to do to keep going steady.

Meanwhile, Troy is hauling ass through the desert, somewhere between 14 miles per hour and 18 miles per hour.

So it's a requirement of any kind of official endurance ride that when the horse gets to a certain point, the horses stop and a vet checks them.

They just want to make sure the horse is okay before they let it keep going with the race.

Which is good, because what that means is that the horses don't sprint themselves to death like they would on the Savanna.

But it also eats up an hour and 15 minutes, where the horse is stopped and the human is still running. Which would be like, Okay, great. The humans, like Nick, have this sort of unfair advantage to catch up.

But it actually puts the human at a disadvantage in this race. Because in the end, when Ron calculates the final scores for the humans and the horses, he subtracts. The horse hold times from the human racer scores, so the human has to beat the time the horse would have run if it hadn't stopped.

But I felt sluggish, probably the first 10 miles or so. And so, you know, I'm kind of second guessing myself, like, you know, is this going to go away, or is this going to blow up? And then I'm going to have to drop from the race, you know, halfway through or something.

But keeps chugging along, dragging myself, and then Troy still hauling ass at mile 16. Trots into vet check one and we actually got into the vet check exactly when I had planned to get in.

I could see horses that are being examined by the vets. I didn't see a whole lot more than that because I was in and out of it really quick.

He looked good, too.

I'm finally warming up, trying to more or less push it.

I hadn't seen a guy in that race anything close to as fast as he was. So Nick takes off and then, after 20 minute hold, Troy comes flying out of the vet check, marking the miles as they go by 17 18, wondering when you're gonna see the front runner?

I'm feeling more loose.

But he says, he tells himself, Okay, you don't need to push yourself any faster.

Just keep going steady, the horses are gonna come catch me at some point. I've just gotta keep steady and hold myself together so that I'm gonna have more left later on.

Meanwhile, Troy is hauling out of the vet check, stepping on the gas until he gets to the backside of Mingus Mountain.

The big climb.

And Nick, My legs are burning.

Nick's only a few miles ahead, hitting the steep part of the climb.

My hands are on my knees, almost like hiking poles, to push off every footstep.

You know, climbing like it's a boulder.

I was really like I expected a horse to pass me at any moment.

And while all of this was going on, I can't see anything. We were lost on the mountain.

I don't love that. What is, oh my god?

That's us almost driving off a cliff.

Even now, my hands are sweating and remembering it.

But yeah, so we had gone to look for the first vet check. We had gotten totally turned around and we were on this mountain. That was just treacherous, like, awful. And I just remember thinking like, how do you run up this thing?

Or with a horse, I mean, both of them.

Yeah, but then. So we finally find our way off the mountain circle, all the way back around the mountain, go back up the top. And we go to a different checkpoint. Ron told us. He's like, you can get to this checkpoint, nobody should be up there. Oh, yeah, this is it.

And this is the checkpoint that's at the top of the climb. We found it.

Oh.

I didn't think it would ever happen.

All right, it's at the peak of the mountain.

Mile 32.

Have no fear, NPR is here. It's just a small gravel parking lot, it's like a lookout point.

There's about six volunteers there. Yeah, we're with the Jeep Posse search and rescue.

They all had walkie talkies, they were getting updates from other checkpoints on the course.

And they told us that the first beast was a horse.

Yeah, they're just about to come roaring through here.

Because that's what had always happened before.

Horses always come up the mountain first, and then you is, it grabbed me and you're like, you should come look at this view.

I mean, you're gonna see, go look.

Whoa?

Oh my god.

Isn't it, like, the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?

That's incredible, it's this huge green valley that runs all the way to these beautiful red cliffs.

This is crazy, like they come up there.

These horses and humans climb up this essentially like a sheer face of a mountain. I can't believe they come up this way.

I guess they're gonna be a little further, you'll see them trucking their way up here and you'll hear them coming.

It's like, very steep.

I just have no idea where the trail is, so we kind of just were sitting around, waiting for, like a sign.

Woo.

Nick just appears.

Good job, Nick.

And he looked like he looked good.

He just kind of seemed chill.

I'll keep running, I'll run with Nick for a sec.

Yeah, that's a good sign, I suppose.

Yeah, I figure I'm feeling pretty good about that. How do you feel so far in general?

Not too bad. I mean, that was the toughest part, I had to hike quite a bit of that climb.

Oh, really, just straight up hiking.

Yeah, it's like 1,500 feet of climbing, and I don't know, like a mile, mile and a half.

So it's a steep, steep climb, yeah.

But yeah, now it's all pretty much downhill from here, so that should be good.

How are you doing for pace? I'm not, I'm happy with where I'm at.

I'm just running hard, but comfortable.

Okay.

I don't know where that compares to the record or anything.

Yeah.

Awesome, good luck.

Later, thanks.

Oh my god.

He's been doing that for 32 miles.