Chapter 5: Jill’s answer

It was not an answer easy coming.

Jill again weighed the pros and cons, this time with the further information she was armed with.

One morning, she opened the chat box.

“I know this might seem weird, but: there is a very good chance I will do this, but I still have reservations. I know this is a lot to ask, but do you have some people who have done this that I could talk to, on here or something? Men, women, whatever ... I just want to get a little bit more information from past participants.’

“This is actually a request we receive quite frequently” came the reply. A list was provided. The other user offered for some of the past participants to contact Jill. Jill said that was all right.

She spent the next several days researching the event in the secretive corners of the internet. She asked questions she never thought she would ask. She requested and received Strava data from all of them. She studied the route intently, finding the routes for each one matched up.

She requested pictures and videos, receiving masses of both: Nature shots, running shots, sex shots.

And, against her better judgement, her libedo urged her to do the race more and more with each shot.

Eleven days after she had sent the request, she opened the chat box. She treated it like taking off a bandaide – she typed in her response and sent it in a fraction of a second.

A second later came the reply: Thank you for your interest! We will see you next June 1^st. Further instructions will be coming to your inbox soon.

It was March.

March turned into April.

April turned into May.

May into June.

June into July.

July into August.

August into September.

And so on.

As April again turned into May, the date was growing nearer.

Jill was in the best running shape she had been in her life. She had trained hard, she had cross trained hard. During her peak, she had run 600 miles in one week. That was more than three times better than her best effort.

Instructions at first came monthly, then starting the last March came in weekly.

Some of the emails contained biographies of the other athletes who had run the race in the past and who were running it that year.

Several months earlier, Jill had been encouraged to submit a biography, along with some pictures. Submitting the biography came easy. Taking a selfie did not. It was a month after she submitted her biography that she submitted her selfie, a simple head shot taken from her mirror.

When she explored the other biographies and pictures, she found her own lacking. Yes, some did only include head shots, but most included body shots as well as nudes. A couple contained pictures of the athlete having sex.

One day in March, she woke up after a restless night’s sleep, grabbed her phone, spread her legs and took a few shots of her lying in bed, pictures ranging from tame nudes to explicite nudes. She quickly bundled them together and sent them in with hardly a thought, again going with the idea that it would be easier if it were done like a band aid.

During her training, she concentrated on her running, she concentrated on her fitness.

Combining her workouts with work in general, she had little time for anything else but eating and sleeping. This suited her quite finely.

She had already abstained from sex a few years ago. Going into that January, she even stopped pleasuring herself, letting the pressure build within.

During one trail run in March, she shed her clothing.

Running naked through the woods was like nothing she had felt before. She felt a freedom she had never felt before.

The nude run had only lasted 10 minutes – she felt there were eyes on every tree in the forest. But it was enough to convince her that she had signed up for the perfect event.

As her tapering began in early May, the instructions now came almost daily. A lot of them were repetitive. She filled out every form imaginable, virtually signed every thing she could imagine. During her training, Jill submitted three separate blood works, inclusive to sexually transmitted disease.

Finally, the day came. One afternoon in mid-May, she hopped onto her bicycle and began her very long ride to Kansas City.