You don't hear the sorting happen. It is just the sound of three hundred pairs of boots on hardpack, then the rhythm fractures. Twenty minutes in. Five hundred and fifty vertical feet. The mountain charges you for all of it up front.
The steps are cut high, each one a full lift of the body, the back leg driving, the quad taking the weight. You do one. Then you do it again. By minute fifteen the quads are burning, and there are fourteen hours of this above you, though you don't know it yet, or you know it and won't let it land.
A few keep their line, moving like the grade is a sidewalk. Most have dropped into mouth-breathing now, making sounds they don't hear themselves make. A few have already stepped off.
You cannot slow down in place. Three hundred people are climbing a single line of trail, and if you drop your pace you become a wall the rest of them have to climb around. So you don't get to slow quietly. Your only move is a few steps to the right, off the line, where you stand and let the herd go by.
The first man to step off, twenty yards above me, turned down the slope as he did it. Raised his bottle. Drank. Maybe he was thirsty. The man beside him had stopped to look at the sunrise, which had come up orange and huge over the valley and was, in fact, worth looking at. You don't ask.
I had him diagnosed — rate too high, needs to come down — before I looked at my own watch.
One sixty-three.
Not a number you hold. Not for fourteen hours.
I took a couple of high steps to the right, off the line. Let two runners and a trekker pass. Got my bottle. Turned and faced the valley and the orange coming up over it. I drank water I didn't need, and kept my eyes on the view, not on the people coming up the trail behind me.
It was lap one. The mountain went up into the light and kept going, past where I could see.
From the notebook. I diagnosed another man's pace before I looked at my own number. That order is the whole problem, and not only on mountains. The accurate reading of yourself is the most useful data you own, and it is the one you resist taking. Stepping off the line on purpose was the first honest decision of the day. There were fourteen hours left.