Western States 100 Pacing

Mark and EJ drove up for the weekend to see the Western States 100 finish and go to church with us the next day. Western States is a really famous race that goes 100 miles from Squaw Valley near Tahoe to Auburn, CA in the foothills north of Folsom. We are kind of making a tradition of going to the finish line with Mark and EJ, since we did the same thing last year with them. Here is the finish line, at the Placer High School track in Auburn.

Here are the first and second place finishers. They finished in about 15 hours and 15 minutes, which is really fast.

It takes a beard to win WS100, but long beards don't guarantee anything (he was 2nd place).

After we watched the top three finishers come in, we had to take Dave back up the canyon because he got to pace the last 20 miles for someone else running. Dave signed up to help someone named James at the race website, and he turned out to also be LDS.
The plan was to run starting at about 7PM at the American River crossing. But this year it was really hot, and Dave's runner was nauseous and thowing up a lot during the first 80 miles. He slowed down off pace quite a bit and we were able to keep track of him through text messages and the race day website. Sick as he was, he wasn't stopping and wanted to finish the race.
We dropped Dave off at 9:30PM at a shuttle bus that took him down to the river crossing. Here is the last we saw of him that night:

Dave had fun crossing the river. There was a cable stretched across that the runners grab onto like a railing. There are Halloween style glow sticks in the water to point out the rocks. Dave had a handheld flashlight that also really helped. There are volunteers who are there holding the cable and saying where to step. The water got up to Dave's ribs in the deepest part. Once he got to the other side, he had to wait until his runner came through at just after 11PM. His runner was pretty exhausted and weak from not being able to keep much down, but he was still determined to finish. In the end, Dave says they walked most of the last 20 miles. They finished just after sunrise at about 6AM, a very long night! Dave was glad to help though, and says he learned a lot about what can go wrong and off plan in a 100 mile race. Here are some pictures:

 No Hands Bridge, mile 96 at dawn.

 Dave at mile 99 with his runner, James.

James finished happy, but really exhausted, with his wife and daughters.