Greetings from Lapland

A couple of weeks ago, Dana and I worked an aid station at Heartland 100. We did this last year when they had a 50 miler and a 100 miler going on at the same time, but this year they just had the 100. We have been so busy at work that we did not get away from Tulsa til 10:30 and rolled into our aid station location about 4:00 am. We awoke to the race officials setting up our tent and dropping off our supplies. 10-12 crew cars were already there. Glad we did not sleep through the wave of runners!!

We were at mile 16 at Lapland. Runners started hitting us at 8:30, and by 11:00 they were all through. Since the course is an out and back, we had several hours of down time, and went to "town" that is Cassoday. We had lunch and then went to El Dorado to give WalMart some of our money, and coffeed up at Quick Trip!!


The "T" intersection at Lapland--a couple of gravel roads that meet in the middle of nowhere. Write "nowhere" on a piece of paper, and the "h" is Lapland. It's still beautiful in it's own way. Runners came from the south (left) and turned east down this road.


This is the direction they came. We brought our camper. We had electric via our generator, and good water for coffee via gallon jugs of Ozarka.


Here's the same road heading east zoomed in to pick up the runner.


The race set up super duper heavy duty tents for us. I took 10" spikes and nailed it down to the ground, which was basically solid rock. Good thing though. Last year this tent was almost blown to Oklahoma before I managed to tie it to a telephone pole and later bought these spikes. It was chilly in the morning, and threatened to be in the upper 30s during the night, but never dipped below 45°.


The early runners buzzed through, but the later runners stopped and grazed. In true TATUR fashion, we served pancakes and bacon. It was all consumed. And I helped.


My duties were mostly recording numbers. The RDs are pretty adamant about that and it's a good idea. We need to be more diligent on that in our races.


Arnold Begay and Russell Bennett were the only two from TATUR running. Kelvin and Kathy, along with Roman were crewing and pacing Russell.


There's only one restaurant in Cassoday, and you always run into friends there. The bbq was especially good, as were the homemade desserts.


The Kansas prairie has amazing sunsets.  At our little rural intersection, there were two other people besides me taking pics of the sunset.


A couple of LED strands powered by our generator gave us ample light. From 2-3 miles away, weary runners on their return trip could see our oasis.


The little aid station on the prairie.


The clouds tried to break, but the full moon remained partially obscured for the duration of the night.


The light on the right was a runner about 100 yards away. I zoomed in and took a burst of pictures, and one of them was less fuzzy than the rest.

Our last runner made their was through right around 67:00 am. A crew came around and disassembled the tent and loaded the tables and leftover supplies. We crashed in the camper for a few hours of sleep and woke up barely in time to make the post race awards ceremony. Most of the runners had left for home, but our friends were still there.