Sunday, July 13, 2008

I have a confirmed entry

My entry has been confirmed and I'm just waiting for the site to update. But just on there web packet was a couple of paragraphs that just make you think.

We at Kansas Ultrarunners’ Society (KUS) want to make this race a memorable and rewarding experience for each of you. Our goal is to help each of you to the finish line. The Heartland 50 is uniquely different from other 50 miles races. The openness of the course will present challenges you may not have faced in other races. William Least Heat-Moon in his book Prairy Erth may best describe the run you are about to undertake:

“There are several ways not to walk in the prairie, and one of them is with your eye on a far goal, because you then begin to believe you’re not closing the distance any more than you would with a mirage. My woodland sense of scale and time didn’t fit this country, and I started wondering whether I could reach the summit before dark. On the prairie, distance and the miles of air turn movement to stasis and openness to a wall, a thing as difficult to penetrate as dense forest. I was hiking in a chamber of absences where the near was the same as the far, and it seemed every
time I raised a step the earth rotated under me so that my foot fell just where it had lifted from. Limits and markers make travel possible for people: circumscribe our lines of sight and we can really get somewhere. Before me lay the Kansas of popular conception from Coronado on – that place you have to get through, that purgatory of mileage. Hiking in the woods allows a traveler to imagine comforting enclosures, one leading to the next, and the walker can possess those little encompassed spaces, but the prairie and plains permit no such possession. Whatever else prairie is – grass, sky, wind – it is most of all a paradigm of infinity, a clearing full of many things except boundaries, and its power comes from its apparent limitlessness; there is no such thing as a small prairie any more
than there is a little ocean, and the consequence of both is this challenge: try to take yourself seriously out here, you bipedal plodder, you complacent cartoon.”

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