After the Goldrush
43 women and 41 men found what they began their journey searching for when they came out west.
Thousands embarked from the starting line in Folsom with the dream of running under 2:18 and 2:37. Some with race plans meticulously calculated, some rolling the dice, but all grouping together in packs traversing the storied asphalt river from the dam to the Capitol Mall.
The late Joan Didion, a Sacramento native wrote a lot about the kinds of people who came to California from stories she had heard her elders share about ‘The Crossing’. Stories of survival and rugged individualism that began wherever they were from out east and continued with the idea that
“when you crossed the Sierra Nevada you had redeemed yourself from whatever you had been before.”
You would have a new home in the sun.
It was all but promised that You would become transformed through your individual struggle to claim some thing that defined you anew.
Many struck gold metaphorically, and many did not.
Didion chewed over the thought of
“Survival as an ethic… How far can you take that?... Survival as your strongest ethic… Is it ultimately empty?…
…What I came up with is that it wasn’t quite enough.”
Those who came as individuals on their own separate journeys, found themselves in packs that fueled them down the course. Some got there in time and others were left to find meaning in their performance as the running clock added seconds to their story, but all helped each other in the process.
The reason people came is because of the stories they’d heard- a myth of what the destination had become. A place to strike gold. In actuality, these stories and experiences, however separately collected, had been formed collectively at their inception. Continued in a movement. The celebration in the yellow haze of the sun is about the community created by a sport where individual struggle is worked through shoulder to shoulder and commemorated through stories of a common but unique experience.
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading has begun
(Photo credit: Tony DiPasquale)
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