What Is The Sound Of One Solo Clapping?
"Oh hey, I didn't really understand that part of the rules where it said a solo runner was Lonesome Me, with no crew or pacers, gosh..."
Somehow these people pass their DMV tests.
In theory it supposedly confers a registration advantage at the AC100, and reduces the number of cars out on the course and in aid stations. On the face of it, OK; because this is America, and every runner has 3 friends and 4 extra cars. But is a solo runner theoretically a nobody, with no casual admirers?
At the AC100 this is Panic Level DefCon 2. Runners got a multi-signature contract form, pretty much like buying a house. You swore that you know all the rules, you read the rules, understand the rules. Got that Adventure Pass, Crew Parking Pass? Don't give aid out on the road [because there's 12 miles of asphalt butt-hurt on Highway 2]. Fine, but you can give emotional support, as long as you don't shout from your car etc.
Perhaps golf-clap is OK. Time will tell.
Highway 2 is a weekend mountain motorcycle shooting gallery. Every GoPro'd flatlander takes their motorcycle up there, so look out. You're the lucky duck out running on the highway.
I know aid-station captains that said "fuck being a cop, I gotta station to run, not gonna check parking passes etc." The multiple signature mania is completely Ken. His deepest desire is to eliminate all spectators forever. One good way to solve that problem is to have 300 treadmills in an unused Fontana industrial park, fence them off, and then make it a YouTube follow-along from home. Maybe have a Vegas line, oddsmakers and so on.
Finally, I saw one ostensibly solo runner pass by Dead Man's Bench [79mi] with a full-on posse. Maybe by the time she passed thru Idle Hour, Merrill and Millard aid stations everybody was too tired to give a shit. She wasn't DQ'd either.
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*"Lotteries" are mostly RD Sharpie, and even the open-draw executions have their WTF moments.
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