Welder's Break

The alarm went off at 5:40 and I was already awake. I'm always awake before alarms on race day. Been that way since I was twenty-one and did my first mud run outside Yakima. Forty-four years old and my body still thinks it's fun to lie there doing math about hills.

I got up, pulled on the layers, and looked out the window of my room at the Silver Fir Chalet. Dark. Stars still out. Frost on the glass in the corner even with the heater running. Out front I could see the little flag line they'd strung along the start of the trail, snapping a little in the wind.

Coffee was already going in the lobby, which I appreciated. A woman my age needs her coffee.

"Up early," said the guy at the desk. Austin, his name tag said. He was wiping down the counter like it was 6 a.m. and not 5:50.

"Big race," I said.

"The Solstice Scramble." He said it like he was reading it off a card. "You're signed up? Dinah, right?"

"That's me." I poured a cup. "You going to be up there cheering people on or what?"

"I'll be around," he said, and smiled, and I took my coffee and went to lace up.

Now, here's why I was doing this, and it's dumb, but I'll tell it anyway. My ex-husband Simon Upton signed up for this race. I saw it on his feed. Simon, who I married when I was twenty-eight and who left me at forty-three for a woman who I'm told does yoga and says things like "energy." Simon, who was going to be standing at the finish line of a mountain race telling everyone about his personal best.

I've been a welder for twenty years. I'm not fast. But I'm stubborn in a way that scares people, and I figured if I trained all fall on the hills behind my shop, maybe, just maybe, I could come in ahead of a forty-six-year-old man who does cardio on a machine while watching television.

So that was the plan. Beat Simon. Get one clean win. Go home.

* * *

They counted us down at dawn. There were maybe sixty of us at the flag line, breath pluming up into the cold, headlamps bobbing. The race went up the mountain road for a mile and then cut onto the trail, four miles and about three thousand feet of climbing, then back down a service road to the lodge. Or that's what the map said. My knees had some opinions about the descent part but I told them to keep it to themselves.

I spotted Simon about a hundred yards ahead of me on the first switchback. Red jacket. Same red jacket he's worn to everything since 2019. He was moving okay, I'll give him that, steady little machine pace.

I didn't speed up. That's the trick with hills. You don't chase, you just hold your pace and let the chase happen on its own. So I held it, and by the second switchback he was thirty yards up, and by the third I was on his shoulder.

"Dinah?" He actually sounded surprised. "Wow, hey. You run now?"

"Nope," I said, and went past him.

"You look great, by the way!" he called after me, which is such a Simon thing to say that I almost laughed. Complimenting the wife he traded in for a newer model while she passes him on a mountain. I didn't look back. I want that documented. I didn't look back once.

The middle section was steep, switchback after switchback through the pines, and there was a stretch where all I could hear was my own breathing and somebody's footsteps below me that never got closer and never fell away. I ate half a gel at the false summit because my legs were starting to whisper about unionizing.

Then the trail crested, the trees opened up, and there was the whole valley below, white and blue and completely indifferent to my divorce. I took about four seconds to look at it, because my therapist says I should notice things when they're good, and then I ran down.

The service road was frozen mud and I passed three people on it, including a guy in his twenties who looked personally offended. My knees filed their complaints and I ignored those too.

* * *

I came across the finish line in front of the lodge at one hour fifty-one minutes, first overall, chest heaving like a bellows, and the first thing I did was put my hands on my knees and the second thing I did was look for the red jacket.

Simon came in maybe four minutes later. I know because I stood there drinking the recovery water they handed out and watched him come down the last stretch of road. He saw me, saw the timing clock, saw the little marker at the finish, and did the math. I watched him do the math. It took him a second.

"First overall?" he said, walking up. "You're kidding. First overall?"

"First overall," I said.

"In your age group too, obviously, but..."

"Simon. Overall. Everybody. I beat the twenty-six-year-old with the compression socks too."

He laughed, and it was a nice laugh, it was always a nice laugh, that was one of his weapons. "Well. Hell. Congratulations, Dinah, seriously." And he meant it, that's the infuriating part, he's not a monster, he's just a man who got bored and handled it like a coward. "Trish is going to hear about this all week."

"Give her my best," I said, and meant it about half.

A little crowd had formed because apparently nobody expected a forty-four-year-old welder from the wrong side of the pass to win their mountain race. The lodge manager, a round cheerful man named Gerry, came out with a clipboard and a big smile.

"Dinah America! Our champion!" He shook my hand with both of his. "Okay, so, the prize this year is different."

"Prize," I said. "There's a prize?"

"There's always a prize. Usually it's a gift card to the outfitter in town. But the outfitter closed in October, so." He handed me an envelope. A plain white envelope, my name written on it in decent penmanship. "This year our winner gets this. No refunds, no exchanges, I'm contractually obligated to tell you that."

I opened it. Inside was a card, heavy stock, gold lettering. "Full-Body Restoration Service. One session. Redeemable at the Silver Fir hot spring pavilion. Valid through the winter season."

"Restoration service," I said. "What is that, a massage?"

"Better than a massage, or so I'm told," Gerry said. "Our attendant does it. Austin. You met him, he's at the desk. He's... let's call him a specialist. People come back from that pavilion looking like they slept for a week. Woman from Portland cried, said it was like being twenty-five again. She was sixty-two."

I looked at the card. My legs were shaking in the good way, the post-race way, and my shoulders were up around my ears the way they get after a week under the hood at work.

"That's the entire prize?" I asked. "No cash option?"

"No cash option," Gerry said, delighted about it. "The board voted. Can I get a photo of you with the envelope? For the newsletter."

So I stood there holding a white envelope and smiling for a photo I'd never see, and behind the camera I could see Austin at the desk window, watching, and when I caught him he didn't look away. He just nodded at me a little, like he already knew I'd won. Which he couldn't have. Unless he'd been watching the whole race, which, standing at a desk, he could have.

"That's a weird prize," I told Gerry, pocketing the envelope.

"It's the best prize we've ever had," he said. "Book your session at the desk. Austin will take care of everything."

* * *

I took a shower, ate half a plate of the chili the lodge put out for racers, and at seven o'clock I went to the front desk to ask if I could trade the prize for a lift down the mountain in the morning.

"We really can't do exchanges," Austin said.

"You can't or you won't?"

"Can't." He said it like it wasn't his fault, which to be fair it wasn't. He was tall, somewhere under thirty, with dark hair pushed back and one of those faces that makes you recheck your math on how old the front desk guy is. "The board funds the Restoration Service separately from the lodge. It's not really ours to trade."

"So I win a race and the prize is a thing I can't give away and can't sell."

"That's about the size of it." He turned the ledger around on the desk. "I have a nine o'clock open tonight. Or tomorrow at four, but tomorrow at four I'd have to ask you to come back, and you're checking out."

I looked at the ledger. It was a real paper ledger, which in this decade was its own kind of weird. "You book these by hand?"

"Paper doesn't lose signal up here." He clicked a pen. "Nine o'clock?"

My whole body was one long complaint. My shoulders had been knotted since Tuesday, which was a work problem, not a race problem, and the race had made it worse. The hot tub at the gym at home was broken more often than it worked. And the alternative was driving home in the morning with a prize envelope I couldn't use.

"Fine," I said. "Nine o'clock. But I'm telling you now, if this is some up-sell situation, I'm a welder, I can spot a scam from forty feet."

"It's not a scam." He wrote my name in the book. "Dinah. That's your full first name?"

"It's on my birth certificate. My father thought he was being funny."

"Dinah America," he said, and almost smiled. "That's a good name for a champion."

"Sure," I said, and went to bed at eight-thirty like the forty-four-year-old I am.

* * *

At nine I came down in sweats and the hoodie I'd worn on the drive up, hair still damp from the shower, and Austin was waiting at the desk in different clothes, a plain gray sweater, sleeves pushed up. He handed me a folded robe, thick and soft.

"I'll walk you down," he said. "It's behind the lodge, past the woodshed. There's a path."

"Lead on."

He took a lantern off the hook by the door, an actual lantern with a glass chimney, and held it low so it lit the path and not our eyes. The cold hit first, then the pine, then the sound of water somewhere under the snow. We walked single file, him in front, and he moved quiet for a big man. Quiet like a guy who'd learned to walk soft.

"Is there snow on the pavilion?" I asked.

"There's a roof. The spring keeps the floor warm. You'll see."

The pavilion showed up out of the dark like it had been waiting. Cedar posts, a low roof, a stone apron around a pool maybe twelve feet across, and steam coming off it in slow rolls. There were lanterns out there already, three of them, burning low. Past the pool a flat rock sat in the water like a table.