Missed Manners
Play your cards right, and someday you'll look like this. Periodically I'll go to an event's training run. Certainly not to establish World Dominance, but just to see who and what. This time we [yrs truly and my enigmatic unindicted co-conspirator "J"] ran the training loop backwards, to see some of the talent that had signed up for the upcoming race. My speed went off a cliff some time ago, and frankly, I'm past giving a shit. Here come the frontrunners. Oh boy! The gear, enthusiasm, fresh faces, and KOM FKTs blasting past you. You've got that GoPro Game Face you already imagine in a Thundering Ultra Movie About You. They hit the finish in record time, did the obligatory "aw shucks-gee whiz way-to-go-bro" moves, like in those movies, downloaded your Strokas by Cheezing the Garmin, and so on. Then there are the dogged middle-packers, who seemed to be looking their first trail race in the face, going "holy shit, really?" Fina