Grand Slam of a Year
We had made a pact, my youngest daughter and I, not long after Katie finished the Wasatch Front 100-Mile Endurance Run in September 2019.
Watching the finishers of that year’s Grand Slam of Ultrarunning honored during Wasatch’s awards ceremony, most looked every bit the part of people who had just successfully completed the final leg of running the country’s four oldest 100-milers in the space of a single summer.
The 2019 Grand Slammers moved slowly and with a patient inexorability as they received their Wasatch finisher’s plaques and bronzed eagles, signifying their completion of the Grand Slam. They were a group of women and men whose 400 miles of the summer had seemed to age them all prematurely – in a good way. Because of what they’d done, they seemed brimming with a rare sort of steadfast wisdom. They were, as Socrates once put it, “Wayfarers who have preceded us along a road which we too, perhaps, must someday travel.”
Katie herself wasn’t moving all that well after finishing Wasatch that day in a little less than 34 hours.
Yet, like me, Katie was transfixed by the Grand Slammers.
“I can’t believe what they’ve done,” she said.
“And I can’t believe what I’m thinking,”
