After chickening out of even attempting the Arkansaw High Country Race in 2019 and only completing 667 miles of the 1,030-mile course as an individual time trial (ITT) in 2020, I trained and equipped myself to go for an ITT this May (2021). Our COVID-adjusted semester ended in early May, and I reasoned that my best bet would be to attempt it before the debilitating June heat started to kick in [1] . I drove to Fayetteville on May 12 th and stayed at the funky, kitschy Graduate hotel which constitutes the start-finish line. I decided to run the course counterclockwise so that I could still be relatively fresh and fat during the long early stretch from Russellville to Hatfield (about 200 miles) with very sparse food, water, and shelter options. Luckily, those first four lean days coincided with some of the best weather I could possibly hope for, comparatively dry and cool. The weather reports I started to track in the days before the race predicted that I would start to encounter ...