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In response to
"Top allies warn Russia against using ‘dirty bomb’ accusations to escalate the war."
by
crash davis
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For Ukrainian runners, a brutal race made sense when little else did. (this is Dano's thing - cd)
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On Oct. 11, under the sound of air-raid sirens, a scraped-together band of 15 Ukrainian ultrarunners met on Telegram with a decision to make. The question was posed on Day 230 of the war, as Ukraine reeled from a barrage of cruise missiles: to run or not to run?
Four days later, there would be a race like no other: Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra Satellite Team Championships, a grueling last-nation-standing competition with no set finish line or time limit — no definitive end to the pain. To run in such a race would be to mirror the trauma the Ukrainians had been enduring since February.
The meeting was short. All 15 athletes were adamant, defiant; no man, no missile was going to take away their freedom to choose.
They would run.
Backyard ultramarathons are medieval in concept. Entrants have an hour to run a 4.167-mile loop. At the top of the next hour, they begin again. A winner is declared when all have faltered but one, and these sleepless brawls can last days.
The race was created by Gary Cantrell — known to most as “Lazarus Lake” — in his own backyard, hence the name. Each country forms a team of 15 runners and chooses courses in its homeland. A country’s score is the sum of each runner’s completed loops. In two years, this international battle royale erupted from 25 countries to 37 and now features qualifiers, hype videos and a livestream broadcast.
This year, Ukrainian backyard record-holder Viktoriia Nikolaienko was planning to do great things with her nation’s team. Then war came, and the best runners went to the front lines. She vowed that Ukraine would still compete, and she recruited a team that included three runners over 50 and one 66-year-old. They were the least experienced nation on the roster. Winning wasn’t their goal, though; showing up was.
— Jared Beasley
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