The drones were watching us.
You probably shouldn’t trust any observations from a group of runners 170 miles into a sleepless sufferfest, but as we looked out over the Fort Irwin military training base in the Mojave Desert, amidst a sea of stars, there they were.
“It looks like they’re just hovering there,” my teammate Sam Prusse observed. “They might be getting closer.”
We kept our eyes on the two yellow-orange lights shining in the night sky while waiting for the other group of three to finish their 20-mile leg under the power lines. The tail lights of our Jeep cast a red glow over the surrounding sand and shrubs, a safe haven for our crew of runners, a driver, and a navigator in the endless desert. More than halfway through our run from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, the quiet surroundings betrayed the excitement that gripped our team.
Jake Martinez (left) and Daniel Sealand (right) bracing themselves for a long night. (Photo: Brendan Davis)
After 15 hours of racing, our relay team, Eat Dust, found ourselves a mere half hour behind race leaders the Portland Bureau of Runners (PBR), a formidable bunch with a lucrative sponsorship from the beer company sharing its initials. We’d been racing them since 4 a.m. on Friday, April 3, 2026, when our teams joined dozens of others heading east from the Santa Monica Pier. Over 170 miles of LA city streets, narrow highway shoulders, and desolate dirt roads, we had stayed neck-and-neck. Thirty minutes isn’t much of a gap in a race lasting nearly thirty hours.
Jake Martinez, Malia Pivec, and Daniel Sealand were ripping quarter-mile segments of the sandy Powerline Road at over 10 miles an hour. Sam, Kayla Moore, and I donned our reflective vests and headlamps, ready to take the mantle as soon as they appeared over the horizon. The flat-out running was taking a toll, and this next 29-mile segment would end up being a low point for us all. But as the headlights of the incoming crew’s Jeep lit up the desert, all we could think about was keeping our legs moving until the next exchange.
