Adventures in Onionism

I ran the Black Hills 100 last weekend. It was fine. Nothing extraordinary, just fine. I've liked the Black Hills ever since my sister and I drove across the country after I graduated high school. Badlands National Park is quite impressive if you ever get a chance. Mt. Rushmore and Devil's Tower, sure, I guess, go once in your life if you want. It's a Friday-Saturday race, so I flew to Rapid City, SD on Thursday. My buddy DYK picked me up at the airport and dropped me off at the Sturgis Downtown RV Park that served as race check in, and was walking distance from the start at the Sturgis city park. DYK offered to let me stay with him and M at their AirBnB, but I declined, then felt stupid about it lying in my tent in the rain, but then met some other nice camping runners so it all worked out. I had a little time to walk around Sturgis, and I wasn't blown away. The hills in the distance are pretty, but I mistook the highway through town for Main Street, which is one block...

SKIP this paragraph if you understand the Backyard/last-person-standing race format: Start. Run a 4.16 mile loop in under one hour. Stop and wait for the clock to strike the next hour. Repeat the loop. If at any time you fail to complete the loop in under one hour, or fail to start the loop at precisely the top of the hour, you're out. Repeat until only one person completes the loop. This could take days. No, you can't bank time. That's why I said "Stop and wait." Read the BBC article if you're not following.  -- Well, it's definitely not me; I was not the last person standing. By the time the race ended, I had slept for the better part of 20 hours. The only race I've ever won was the 2015 4 MPH Challenge, also a last person standing event, so I went in thinking I could do well. I'd wanted to try another for a while, and a DC race organizer/runner friend told me about the Capital Backyard in 2019 before it even officially became a thing. I signed...