The drive from San Diego to Stillwater, Oklahoma takes three days if you push it. Michelle pushed it, arrived Thursday afternoon with the kind of tiredness that sits behind the eyes, and found herself standing outside a rental house on a beautiful gravel road, exactly the kind of road she spends most of the year wishing existed closer to home.
She thought about going for a ride. She was too exhausted to move.
There is something fitting about that moment. You drive three days to get to a gravel event, you arrive on a road that is everything you came for, and your body simply will not cooperate. Michelle laughed it off and went inside to wait for her teammates. Frank arrived first, then Crystal and Nick, then Lissa. Most of them she had only ever seen on a Zoom screen. That changed quickly.
Knowing someone through a screen and knowing them in a rental house the night before a race are different things. By the time the Dirt Squad sat down for pizza that evening, the distance between those two versions had collapsed entirely. They were up early the next morning and they would need each other before the weekend was over.
Friday belonged to the runners. Crystal lined up for the half marathon. Lissa, a masters crit racing champion and gravel rider from Pasadena who had not run consistently in years, lined up for the 50k. Thirty-one miles on foot through Oklahoma's red clay roads, the kind of terrain that turns adhesive when it rains and stays hard and relentless when it does not. Michelle spent the morning at the expo with Rob and Frank, picked up chain lube and a bandana she had forgotten to pack, and then went out to find Lissa on course. She stood on the side of a dirt road in rural Oklahoma and cheered her teammate through mile twenty-three of an ultramarathon. A year ago that sentence would not have made sense in the context of her life. Now it was just Saturday.
She barely slept that night. Not from anxiety exactly. Her hydration and nutrition were sorted, she knew the elevation profile of the fifty-mile route, and she had already worn her Cuore Silver Race Jersey 2.0 and Silver Bib Short at the photo shoot the day before and knew the kit was right. The jersey's longer arm length had caught her attention immediately, a detail that matters more than it sounds on a March morning in Oklahoma where the temperature has opinions. The bibs gave her nothing to think about, which is the highest compliment you can pay a bib short. The sleeplessness was something simpler. She had been looking forward to this for a long time and could finally see it from where she was standing.
The Dirt Squad rolled to the start line together around 7:15. Michelle set off with Nick and for the first half of the ride she was, by her own cheerful admission, enjoying the scenery and talking too much. Nick is fast. Michelle kept up. At some point she reminded herself that there was a race happening and refocused.
The second rest stop brought the best surprise of the day. The Salsa Chaise, the long low chair that has become one of Mid South's more beloved pieces of iconography and is usually reserved for the hundred-mile riders grinding through the back half of their day, was set up for the fifty-mile field as well. Michelle had done enough gravel events to understand what that meant and apparently it showed on her face.
From the second rest stop the route delivered the Bovine Bypass, a single-track section with a reputation. Michelle made it halfway through before making the entirely reasonable decision to walk the rest. At mile forty-something of a fifty-five mile day, on legs that have already been working for hours, discretion is not a failure of nerve. It is just good arithmetic. The road back to Stillwater after that was smooth and she came in feeling the way you want to feel, emptied out but not broken, the day already sorting itself into the moments you keep.
Somewhere out on that same course, still moving, was Lissa Muhammad.
She had not run a marathon since 2017. Not because she lost interest in the distance, but because cycling had consumed her in the way that cycling tends to consume people who find it late and love it completely. She had found Major Motion Cycling Club in Los Angeles in 2020, a community that became an extended family and held her together through the death of her husband of sixteen years. She went from recreational rider to crit racer to masters state champion, and when Ride for Racial Justice brought her into gravel riding she discovered what she had not known she was looking for. No judgment about pace. No pressure to perform. Just long empty roads and the freedom to go as far as her legs would carry her. Running, with its demand for constant effort and its refusal to let you coast, had quietly receded.
Which made the decision she took in late 2024 either very brave or very stubborn, depending on how you look at it. Her friend Sarah Bowman had come to her after a crit race with a proposition: the Mid South double. The 50k ultramarathon on Friday. The hundred-mile gravel ride on Saturday. Lissa said yes before Sarah had finished explaining what she was saying yes to.
She was not worried about the cycling. The running was seven years of accumulated rust and she knew it. There is no coasting in a run, no descents where you can let the legs go quiet and breathe. You are always working, and she had spent the better part of a decade not asking her body to work that way. Her longest run in preparation for the 50k was eight miles. Rather than spend the weeks before the race cramming miles and risking injury, she made a decision that required more honesty than it might appear: she gave herself permission to run-walk the distance and focused entirely on finishing. Mid South made that easier. It is an event that celebrates every finisher without condition, and knowing there was no clock to race against removed a weight she did not need to be carrying.
Race morning Crystal ran the first six and a half miles of the 50k alongside her. They talked through the weekend, made their plans, checked in with each other the way people do when they know that what is coming will require more than fitness. Then Crystal peeled off and Lissa was alone with the distance.
The middle miles of an ultramarathon are where the negotiation happens. The early excitement has burned off and the finish is still too far away to pull you forward. Somewhere around mile twenty-three, climbing a hill with her feet already speaking to her in ways she preferred not to hear, Lissa looked up and saw Crystal standing on the course ahead of her.
Crystal had finished her half marathon, gone back to the house, and come back out. She had driven to a point on the course, gotten out of the truck, and run toward her teammate coming up the hill.
They walked together for a stretch. Not far in miles but far enough. Crystal asked how she was doing and Lissa told her the truth. Her body was aching, her feet were on fire. Then she said the thing that would become the operating instruction for the rest of the weekend: I am not going to quit. They made it to an intersection and Crystal got back in the truck. The hill looked different after that.
Two or three miles from the finish, Crystal and Michelle found her again. By then the goal was not complicated. Keep her in it. Don't let her stop. They ran and walked beside her, talking her through the last stretch, until the street ahead straightened out and Lissa could see where this was going to end.
She came through the finish line to flowers and noise. As the final female 50k finisher she received a bouquet, which is the kind of thing Mid South does that makes people drive from across the country to be part of it. Her teammates were screaming. People she had never met were screaming. She got a hug from the race director that she is still thinking about. For a moment she forgot entirely about her feet.
Then she went back to the house and remembered.
The blister on the ball of her left foot was the size of a half dollar coin. The shoes that caused it were sitting in the corner, a familiar pair of trail shoes chosen in part for the kit but not built for what the course demanded. Lying in bed that night, unable to sleep, she turned this fact over without mercy. The question was not whether she had made a bad decision. The question was whether the foot would go into a cycling shoe in the morning.
It did. She does not entirely know how, but it did.
When she rolled to the start line Saturday morning in her gold and black Ride for Racial Justice kit from 2021 by Cuore, Crystal beside her, the soreness had retreated to a level she could work with. The first sixty miles were manageable, even good in stretches. Then the heat arrived and the accumulated cost of Friday caught up with her all at once. Her shoulders locked up. Her hands went numb. She was deeply uncomfortable in a way she had rarely experienced on a bike, and she had been on a bike long enough to know what that means.
At the second aid station she pulled Crystal aside. The conversation was short. Do not let me quit.
There was more behind that request than the immediate suffering. In 2025, Lissa had been pulled from the Mid South 50k course one mile from the finish when the fires in Stillwater forced the event to stop. She never got her finish. The hundred-mile ride that year was canceled entirely. She had come to Stillwater carrying two unfinished pieces of business and she had closed one of them yesterday. The thought of leaving Oklahoma with the second one still open, the thought of having to come back and do all of this again, was enough to keep her turning the pedals when nothing else was.
Crystal held to the agreement. They rode the remaining miles together, watched the sun get low, beat the sunset, and crossed the finish line as a pair.
That evening the whole squad ate together, everyone around the table, the weekend's miles already becoming stories. Just before Frank came in after completing the hundred miles, the final fifty-mile finisher crossed the line to a reception that stopped Michelle where she stood. Mid South does not send its last finisher home quietly. The crowd that had been there all day stayed. The noise did not diminish. If anything it got louder. That is not an accident. It is a deliberate expression of what the event believes about the people who show up and see it through regardless of pace or placing.
Michelle was back in the car Sunday morning, home in San Diego by Tuesday. Lissa was already thinking about Emporia.
She technically finished Unbound 200 in 2025, but crossing the line forty minutes outside the official cutoff will show as a DNF in the official records. She is going back at the end of May to fix that, and she is going back as someone who just completed the Mid South double on a foot that kept her awake the night before wondering if she could walk.
Her advice to anyone considering an event that feels too large: break it down. Ten miles per hour gets you to the finish line at Unbound 200. Fifty miles, a rest, another fifty. The number is big. The increments are not.
She knows this because someone told her once, at a point when two hundred miles seemed like an abstraction too large to hold. It changed how she thought about what was possible. She has been paying that forward ever since.
In Stillwater, on a cold March morning with a blister she probably should have let stop her, she went and did the big thing. Again.
