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Badwater!

That picture was taken almost exactly a year ago at the Mt. Whitney portal about 10 minutes after Blake finished Badwater in an amazing 29:46:49. In case you’re interested (and bored) I wrote up a very detailed report of my experience crewing and pacing Blake – you can find the report along with a bunch of pictures here (part 1), here (part 2) and here (part 3).

I had a blast up there last year and am really looking forward to going back this year to crew Jimmy Dean Freeman. I’m headed up there early Sunday morning (hopefully in time to catch at least most of the World Cup final). We’ll spend Sunday getting the vans ready for the race and the race starts Monday morning. There are three starting waves, 6am, 8am and 10am. Jimmy got a spot in the coveted 10am wave. He’ll be lining up next to some pretty bad-ass ultramarathoners, including the top three (Marco Farinazzo, Oswaldo Lopez and Zach Gingerich) and eight of the top ten finishers from last year! There’s also some new racers who are threatening to challenge. It should be a fast, exciting race!

In addition to Jimmy, I have a few other friends racing this year and a bunch of others crewing/pacing people. Fun!

The plan this year is that Jimmy hopefully finishes sometime Tuesday afternoon, we get a little food and sleep Tuesday night and then hike to the top of Mt. Whitney on Wednesday.

That would be up to 14,505 feet. Where there’s still a fair amount of snow. From 282 feet below sea level to 14,505 above it in 2+ days. Hot damn!!

Last year I was hoping to update Twitter and Facebook during the race, but it turned out that there was limited-to-none cell service for the first 90+ miles of the race. I heard some rumors that some new cell towers were installed, so I’ll try again, but who knows.

Whether or not my twitter and facebook updates are successful, you can follow along on the webcast, which begins with the pre-race stuff on Sunday afternoon and will cover the race from Monday morning until Wednesday evening. Here’s the link for the webcast:
http://www.badwater.com/2010web/index.php. During the race, you should also be able to get specific runner splits at badwater.com.