Runners from the Burning Hell

The noise in my vision became stronger and stronger, I can no longer hear the running engines from the roadside. Ambient city sound melt to a pitch of ring, and everything lost its colors…I desperately pray for a red light on top of the hill…it is the only way I am allowed to stop running.

This is the closest time I was to blackout from heat.

I don’t have any old pictures at the moment, I will put them up when I find them. This is Emilio in center red, 2018 Palo Verde Invitational

It was late August 2013, my first year running with the team, even though we weren’t rookies anymore since training started in June, we were still not prepared for the desert heat. During the summer we trained from 6:30 pm, running through the warm horizontal light of sunset. Now, with the official start of classes, we get out at 1:27 pm and go straight into the locker room, and by 3:30 pm when the temperature barely peaked we are done with the main part of the workout.

On the first day of school, our head coach let us off easy. He gave us a day to adjust to the heat and we only did an easy run, but today was back to the usual. It was a short day and fast, with the varsity guys only on a 4.5-mile loop. For us the rookies, we were to run a single 3.5-mile loop, starting with a gradual descend and finishing with a 0.5-mile hill.

Mountain Vista Road, 96 ft elevation gain, peaked at 8% gradient. I had the fastest time on it with the bike until 2021.

A unique thing about this route (Ramrod) is that this is the only route we run with a light-stop, all the other routes have no stops. For the first 1.5 miles, we mostly stayed as a group, lead by a veteran runner Tyler. Somewhere halfway in the loop in a neighborhood, our head coach was waiting with water, but we weren’t sure where it was. So there we were 2 miles into the run, things are getting tough, and the group shattered with my and Tyler (and one other person, Michael?), and the rest scattered behind. While Tyler was looking for the “right way” someone shouted from behind — we had ran past the water stop.

While everyone behind was able to turn the right street for the water, Tyler and I (and the other guy lol) decided to continue on without going back for some water. At first, I was still intact, but as I got closer to the hill, the heat slowly roasted me and things became very tough. I have dropped everyone I was with and I was all alone with myself.

I arrived at the bottom of the hill, close to my limit, and without hesitation, I charged up it. BIG MISTAKE, I should’ve crossed the street first instead of going up the hill then cross. It was 3 pm, the little private school was about to end. There is a line of parents with their cars still on, parked on the side of the road.

I made my way up the hill, right into a cloud of car exhaust. I felt like I have entered an oven. The noise in my vision became stronger and stronger, I can no longer hear the running engines from the roadside. Ambient city sound melt to a pitch of ring, and everything lost its colors…I desperately pray for a red light on top of the hill…it is the only way I am allowed to stop running.

On the final stretch of that hill, I could not disguise most objects in my field of view anymore. (It looked like a picture taken in pitch-black with the sensor sensitivity to iso 104,000 — just shitty black dots everywhere.)

Two colors determine my fate, red means I can stop, green might kill me. Finally, I got to the top of the hill, and the light just turned red! I was overwhelmed by a sense of relief as I crashed into the street post, hugging it to hold myself up. That 1 minute and 25 seconds seemed like it lasted forever, or at least long enough for me to cool off and recover.

Later that day Coach K made me and everyone who missed the water stop run an extra 0.5 mile because we didn’t listen to him and remember the route.

After that day, I became very well conditioned to running in + 100 °F and never suffer from heat exhaustion to this day. In fact my highest placing race (8th place), everyone who finished in the top 20 blacked out at the last 800 meters except me, I was actually tired.