I was out for a run this week and was thinking about runners I admire.  Kristina Trygstad-Saari tops my list.  Maybe because she is local.  Or maybe because she slays so hard and so humbly.  I don’t get the sense that she has any interest in leveraging her talents for instagram fame.  (“The lowest form of celebrity” according to sensei Jack Donaghy).  She is a GOAT, I admire her greatly, and will always root for her in a competition.  I can think of a few other runners that I cheer for with as much enthusiasm, but this is not a story about them. (But if it was! Emily Allison.  If she is in a race I generally hope she’ll win it).  I digress.

I was once on a bike trip with my friend Dewey.  We were on a “Goran Kropp”—our expression for an adventure following the Bike-Climb-Bike format.  We had ridden to the Tetons and were on our way home.  We were having a late afternoon beer and some sweet potato fries at the Old Faithful Inn after a long day of riding 60+ miles.  (Remember the sweet potato fry craze of the early 2000s?  What a time!).  At the OFI we saw a flyer advertising a West Yellowstone Rendezvous Trail Race.  For the next morning.  Dewey and I leveled up our collective fatigue and ambition and decided we needed to partake of the race.  So we hopped back on our bikes after having already finished a full day of riding, and set out for West Yellowstone another 30 miles away.  We camped that evening and showed up for the race the next morning with our bikes loaded to the gills— two weeks of camping supplies in tow.  There was a 5K and a 10K race option, and a $50 purse for the winner of each.  Dewey decided to do the 10K and I elected to run the 5K.  We made a plan to win our races and use the cash to buy ourselves a room (and much needed shower) at a super cheesy log cabin that night.  This was a bold plan because we were exhausted from almost 2 weeks of constant movement and had each lost about 10 lbs on this adventure.  Fortune favors the bold.

The 10K course was essentially two loops of the 5K course.  Kristina was running the 10K.  The gun went off, she took off, and I never saw her again.  I was the 2nd female out of the gates and I essentially walked until I could see someone coming up behind me and then I would run as hard as I could until they were out of site, and then I would walk again.  My admittedly annoying plan was basically to expend as little effort as possible to win my race.  Cheeky, yes, but to be fair I was really fucking tired.  I won the women’s 5K.  Dewey won the men’s 10K.  Kristina won the women’s 10K.  The funniest bit, for me, was that Kristina technically also won the women’s 5K because she crossed lap one ahead of me in her bid to win the 10K.  Did that stop me from accepting my cash prize?  Hell no!  I laid on the lawn that afternoon, drank two very large root beer floats, watched bears attack trash cans filled with marshmallow fluff at the Discovery Center, and basked in the glory of my “win.”  I then retired to my cozy log cabin with a carved bear out front.   A day for the books.

Long live the GOAT.