All Friday, runners start trekking across the St. Louis metro.
Fingerhut's wife, Sara, is acting as race coordinator, tracking the competitors on a centralized map and updating a Facebook event page. As the hours tick by, the cluster of points begins to separate into distinct strands heading out in all directions. Ultimately, their distances will be measured as the crow flies for purposes of the challenge. Choose an inefficient route and those miles deviating from a straight line are wasted.
After leaving Dogtown, Fingerhut runs south and makes a big left to cross the Mississippi River on the Jefferson Barracks Bridge. He'll have to eat some miles on the dogleg in the final tally, but the payoff lies just beyond the river's edge on the Illinois side: the levee. A single-lane road atop the flat top of the berm offers a virtually traffic-free, relatively straight shot south for as far as a human could ever wish to run in a day's time. As a bonus, it is by design resistant to the kind of flooding Duenke saw on the Katy Trail early that morning.
Fingerhut leaves the bridge-rattling tractor trailers behind, climbs through a wire fence and scrambles to the top of the levee. The river laps off to his right, and the rumble of the highway soon drifts away.
About 7 p.m., he records a video of himself walking along as the sun sets. The field of competitors swelled to ten during the day, but it quickly thins as evening comes. McEwen and her crew reach their Wildwood destination after about ten hours and end their adventure. Three more daytrippers are wrapped up by 8:30 p.m. By then, it's dark and cooling off fast. Only LaRocca, Fingerhut and another afternoon starter, a strong runner named Adam Arce, are left.
In his sunset video, Fingerhut had already pulled on a windbreaker.
"Feeling alright," he says. "Enjoying the sunset. Starting to get a little chilly and looking forward to a fun night."
Shortly after 9:30 p.m., there is a surprising development: LaRocca has dropped out.
In eleven and a half hours of running, she has covered a total of 50 miles, roughly 42 as the crow flies. But the shoulder of Illinois Route 267 in the dark is not the safest place to be, and it's time to move on to the second phase of Type 2 fun.
That leaves only Fingerhut on the levee and Arce on the Katy Trail to run through the night.
The temperature has dropped into the 30s, but Fingerhut seems to be in good spirits.
"As long as I'm not feeling injured, I'm going to keep going," he says.
His buddy Kelly tracks him down after 10 p.m. for a supply drop. The stars are out, and a crescent moon illuminates the gravel of the levee road with stunning clarity. To the left are low farm fields and the occasional house. To the right, high water pools midway up the trunks of trees like a swamp. There are more raccoons than cars out here at night.
Fingerhut has changed into long pants and has swapped his mesh-back baseball cap for a blue stocking cap. He wears an orange buff around his neck, black gloves and an electric headlamp. He has to pump his legs as he stands to keep the muscles from stiffening.
It's now as much of a mental challenge as a physical one.
"Some of the folks started early this morning, and when you're walking all day and then you have to face walking all night, I think that's really tough," he says.
He intentionally started in the afternoon so the night would come relatively early in his journey. It seems to have been a good strategy. Still, it's not going to be easy to continue on through the cold and dark. By the time Kelly departs shortly before 11 p.m., Fingerhut has been on the road for more than nine hours, meaning he's barely more than a third of the way through the 24-hour challenge. Sunrise is a long way away. If he runs into trouble, his plan is to call his wife and hunker down with a foil emergency blanket stashed in his backpack until help arrives.
Not that it is all grueling. Walking along under the stars, often without a house, much less a human, in sight is an experience of its own.
"It's very peaceful," Fingerhut says. "You don't get a chance to be out here like this, especially living in the city."
The glow of St. Louis is far behind him on the northern horizon. A cousin will meet him in the morning, and he hopes to end his adventure tomorrow afternoon with a beer at a riverfront brewery in Chester, Illinois, some 70-plus miles from where he started. But for now, he's taking it all in.
"I guess I would equate this to paddling on the big rivers, like you're on the Missouri River at night," Fingerhut says. "There's nothing like it, because there's no lights, no civilization, just you. The big race we always do is always during a full moon. So it's super bright and you're just out there in the middle of this massive river, and you can see so much just because of the moon. It's so peaceful you can hear everything."
