Folks, we'll be on the ground in just about twenty-eight minutes, and we've got some turbulent skies ahead, so please fasten your seat belts. Thanks for bearing with us, and thanks for choosing Continental.

So spoke a flight-crew member to fliers en route to New Hampshire from Pittsburgh, site of the 2002 USATF 50K Road Championship, on a bright, cold and blustery Sunday. Among the passengers was a contingent of half-asleep and wholly exhausted New England distance runners who, having undertaken this perambulatory fool's errand the previous morning in similar conditions, surely empathized with the plight of the mechanical bird as it ground gamely against an inimical, invisible tide. In fact, the 50K race director's starting-line speech might well have gone like this:

Ladies and gentlemen, your predicted travel time is - at least for some of you - right around three hours. But we've got some hellish winds to contend with, so expect significant delays in reaching your final destination, just about fifty thousand lurching steps away. Thanks for being strange, and thanks for choosing an ultramarathon.

That's not exactly how it went down on the northern shore of the Allegheny River, but it was close. At seven in the morning on March 23rd, about fifty pleasantly misguided souls gathered among tables stocked with every sort of comestible and potable that could conceivably be put to use in any sort of survival contest, be it an ultra or a nuclear war. Most of the light-hearted banter routinely exchanged between competitors at such gatherings was sent crashing and bouncing into the distance by the raucous winds before it could reach the ears of its intended recipients. This was just as well: It is hard to imagine any two entrants in an ultramarathon exchanging anything of substance or import at such a penultimate moment, when plans have already been laid and re-laid, prospective splits computed, convoluted and committed to memory, and insanity established beyond a reasonable doubt.

However, it was tacitly clear from the race's opening moments that no one would be setting any records in Pittsburgh, at least none not associated with futility. On the first of ten out-and-back 5K loops run on a path comprising equal amounts of packed dirt concrete, Verrington edged into the lead, gaining a hundred-yard lead on Dunham, Beck, and Dan Salazar of Washington State, a wild card who actually challenged Verrington for the point several times in the opening half-hour. The leader's split of 18:18 at 5K did not portend a sub-3:00:00 time, but his burgeoning lead did indicate if nothing else that Verrington would, as his race-week intonations had implied, be going at it alone, at least for a while. Dunham and Beck trundled through 5K in 18:30, just behind Salazar, while Danny Fink, a 1:07 half-marathoner from Virginia, held a small gap on a group of four or five runners - including Behan - tackling the winds together and exchanging their life stories.

Just after the 10K mark, Salazar fell back and Dunham and Beck ran almost stride for stride in second as Verrington implacably extended his lead to a quarter mile and beyond. Fink remained about a minute behind Dunham and Beck, while Behan and established ultramarathon maven Mark Godale of Ohio eased away from their early companions in running steady 6:20 miles. Verrington reached the halfway point in 1:31 and change, later saying, "At that point, I was just running to finish." His record ambitions had been sapped by the unrelenting winds, but he wasn't alone; Beck and Dunham had already shifted into a survival mode of their own and didn't look to be challenging their teammate anytime soon. Meanwhile, a phenomenon unique to ultramarathons had begun to unfold around the aid-station tables girding the start/finish line: Entrants stopped not only for water, but for items that would have looked more at home in a restaurant dumpster.

Ladies and gentlemen, there will be meal service on this flight. For your culinary pleasure, your choices include water, Cytomax, Mountain Dew, hot soup, mashed potatoes, Pepto-Bismol, and enough Advil to put a smile on the face of a sperm whale with a kidney stone. Vomit bags will not be provided, but feel free to blow chow under the bridge right next to the swastika graffiti if the need arises.

As one vacantly smiling man wearing earphones the size of a toaster oven shuffled past this macabre and increasingly sloppy buffet, it became evident to observers why "conventional" runners regard ultramarathoners with the same mixture of detachment and fascination with which non-runners generally regard runners - and this was "only" a 50K, a veritable sprint by the standards of most of the lads and lasses in the field. Many of the competitors resembled enthusiastic stoners sampling of hot Sam's Club freebies, rambling from table to table, spooning in a bit of this and lapping up some more of that, smearing their innards and outards with precious calories. Genghis Khan himself would have cringed at the tableau.

Speaking of upset stomachs, Verrington suffers frequently from mid-race nausea, and as Dunham fell further and further behind, the two-time Mount Washington Road Race winner knew his best chance for victory lay in the foibles of his training buddy's boisterous belly: "He had four or five minutes on me in the last 15K," Dunham said later, "but I knew if he stopped to puke I'd make the whole gap up right there." By this time, no one was splitting 5K segments any faster than 19:00-19:30. Beck, running alone in third by the 20-mile mark and rapidly unraveling despite spirited efforts to revive himself by chanting the misbegotten stanzas from Afroman's "Because I Got High" for the better part of a mile, retired to the sidelines after 37K, leaving an almost equally distressed Fink clinging unsteadily to third and the resurgent duo of Behan and Godale battling for fourth.

By 45K, however, Verrington's (below) demise seemed unlikely. Although he covered the final 5K in just a shade under 21:00 to claim his first national championship in 3:09:15, Dunham made up only a small amount of ground, grabbing the silver in 3:13:19. Behan passed Godale with a few miles remaining, but never broke free, and Godale roared back on the final loop to take third (3:18:09) to Behan's fourth (3:19:09). The women's race was both more dramatic and more ho-hum, as a pair of Annes (actually, an Anne and an Ann - how often can you use those words in combination?) nominally ran together in chatterbox mode for 40K before Anne Riddle of North Carolina ran away from Ann Heaslett of Wisconsin to take the championship, 3:44:38 to 3:45:29.