“Four minutes! Four minutes!”
Amy Rusiecki’s call rings out over the hum of voices gathered under the tent, where several hundred brave and perhaps slightly foolhardy souls are milling around over cups of coffee and banana halves, some stretching or pogoing their legs, others gone quiet and still in silent meditation.
It is, at Rusiecki’s mark, 3:56 in the morning. The glow cast by the lights strung along the tent’s perimeter makes for a warm contrast with the pitch-black outside. After weeks of unremitting heat and humidity, the temperature has dropped into the mid-40s in the early morning hours on this Saturday in July. But as the crowd files out from the tent and under the pre-dawn canopy of stars still blanketing the sky above Silver Hill Meadow, none seem to mind the slight chill in the air.
If anything, given what they are about to contend with, they welcome it. Among the group of runners now filling the starting corral for the beginning of the Vermont 100 — an annual 100-mile endurance race that has been hosted in Windsor County each July since 1989 — is Roy Van Buren, of Woburn, Massachusetts. Van Buren is sixty-three years old and has run every Vermont 100 but one since 2009. In 2019, conditions on race weekend were so brutally hot that he finished the race, hugged his girlfriend, and then immediately passed out.
Van Buren and the other runners are glad for the cooler temperatures this year. As they line up underneath a white banner strung between two wooden posts — “WELCOME VERMONT 100 FAMILY! IT ALL STARTS HERE” — they strap on headlamps, suck down energy gels, accept well wishes from friends and family who have come to see them off.
Rusiecki, race director and den mother to the community of ultramarathoners who flock to the hills around Woodstock every year, hands off starting duties to volunteer coordinator Carolyn Stocker and joins the throng of runners herself. She will be serving as a guide runner for Alison Roy, one of a handful of visually impaired athletes participating in this year’s Vermont 100, for the first fifteen miles of the race.
As Stocker begins a ten-count, the cheers from the small crowd of assembled spectators grow louder. iPhones come out, their camera lights mirroring the LEDs beaming from the foreheads of the runners just on the other side of the starting gate.
Then finally Stocker yells, “Go!”, and they’re off: across the starting line, banking right, and down the gravel road towards the woods, bobbing away like two hundred sixty-eight fireflies disappearing into the dark.
Last week, Vermont Standard sports writer Max Fraser ran alongside athletes, waited among spectators, and mingled with aid volunteers to gain the full experience of the Vermont 100. For the entire story, please see our July 24 edition of the Vermont Standard.
Max Fraser and Ian O’Reilly Photos
