Hello! I’m glad to be back with you for Issue 2 of Writing the Rush. The audience is growing (thank you for that), and there’s a lot to talk about.
But I’m not going to talk about all of it, because this week the main thing on my mind has been running, and that’s the direction we’ll go today…
Tragedy at Yellow River Stone Forest 100k
Two weekends ago, there was a tragedy in the mountains of central China. Sudden bad weather hit a trail race there (the Yellow River Stone Forest 100k), and 21 runners ended up dying on the course, mainly the result of exposure. If you aren’t a runner, you might not even have noticed the story.
As a trailrunner, I felt it like a body blow, still feel it that way.
The thing is, it wasn’t just a race, it was my kind of race, our kind of race, a mountain ultra, 100 kilometers of beauty and challenge in a remote landscape. It was exactly the thing that my friends and I do on a regular basis. And while I didn’t personally know any of the runners there, in a deeper sense I know each of them better than I know my neighbors. They are part of my tribe, brothers and sisters of the trail whose basic nature transcends nationality and makes the question of whether we’ve actually met a technicality.
So yes, a body blow. My post about the incident isn’t finished yet — it deserves more thoughtful analysis than I’ve been able to give it yet, but I hope to have it published soon.
The reason it deserves that analysis, the reason it’s important for all of us in the trail-ultra community to look at (and actually for any of us who venture into the wilds for any activity) is that it was not an outlier.
Of course it is an outlier in the casualties that came from that day, but as far as I can tell, it was otherwise a fairly ordinary, non-extreme race.
Frantic headlines called it “high altitude” but looking at the course map, I can’t see that it ever goes much above 7,000 feet. For context, Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB — a race I ran in 2017) goes above 8,000 feet multiple times, and the Hardrock Hundred Mile Endurance Run (our benchmark high-altitude race in the U.S.) averages 11,000 feet and peaks-out above 14,000 feet. And finish times from past runnings (a reasonable proxy for a difficulty rating) indicate this is less challenging than some local races many of us have run (compare the Stone Forest course record of 8 hours 38 minutes against the Worlds End course record of 10 hours 50 minutes, for example).
On the participant side, the prerequisites for entry and the mandatory gear list were equal to or beyond our general standard in the U.S. And at least some of the runners who died were experienced mountain athletes (Jing Liang, who won the three previous runnings of this race, had a sub-30 hour finish at UTMB in 2019, and a long list of other accomplishments). In photos from the race before the weather hit, runners look like they’re wearing exactly what we’d be wearing, and probably carrying exactly what most of us would have carried.
The point is that this was not the extreme outlier of an event you might imagine from the headlines. Instead, it was the 4th iteration of a moderately difficult race, with a qualified field of experienced runners, carrying gear that most of us would probably have thought adequate. It looks like it was very typical of what we do and how we do it. Which means that some local version of what happened there that day could happen at any of our races.
That should not cause outrage or hysterics. But it should trigger a solemn assessment of our own situations. If we’re involved in organizing events, we should have a look at our plans and preparations and requirements and make a fresh decision about whether they are adequate (or not). As individuals, we should consider what we individually carry when we venture out, not only for races, but any time we are out.
Ultimately this is about risk management and risk mitigation during inherently dangerous events and activities, and it’s about the intersection of personal responsibility with organizational responsibility. I don’t have answers to present, but I want to at least help clarify the questions.
Tragedy in Boston
For whatever reason, one of my first thoughts when I saw the story about the Stone Forest tragedy was of the Boston Marathon bombing.
It’s a very different kind of running-related tragedy, but the feeling I got in the pit of my stomach was exactly the same. I went back and pulled up my journal entry from that day (April 15, 2013), and it still felt raw.
I stand by the observation I made back then, that the violence of man is just another force of nature. Terrorist bombs and unexpected gale-force winds on the mountain are just parts of the world we play in, and the real battle is with ourselves.
Speaking of Worlds End…
This weekend is the seventh running of the Worlds End Ultras (a 50k and 100k race I helped establish many years ago and have been involved with in one way or another ever since) in Sullivan County, PA. I’m proofing a portion of the course this year (and then hanging out, to enjoy the novelty of being able to hang out together).
But mainly I’ll be admiring the spirit of the runners, trying consciously to notice the smiles and that distinctive look in their eyes. And I’ll try to have in mind that same spirit, the same smiles and look-in-the-eyes that those brothers and sisters we lost in that race in China surely had, to just try to savor it all and better appreciate the gift of it all.