We climbed out of the river bed into some of the lushest, most green forests I’ve seen in a long time. Head’s down, we marched up switchbacks for what seemed like forever. I started to fall behind, and Sam stopped on the trail ahead, letting me pass him. Throughout the night, we came up with a plan that if someone was dragging they went into the #2 position, also known as the penalty box.

I scarfed down some salt and caffeine and only had to spend a short time in the penalty box before I was firing on all cylinders again.

For the next several miles, it seemed we were repeating a process of big climbs and big descents, all of which we managed to complete at a good pace.

It was mid day, and we knew we only had 2 climbs and one big descent left. I was excited and the steep climbs and steep descents felt good. It was the rolling terrain that was becoming increasingly challenging to run.

We reached the last big descent that starts from Klapatche Park and goes 6 miles down to Longmire. Excited for another hammering descent, I took my trekking poles and affixed them to my vest. A short downhill later, I was faced with another uphill. After a few more encounters with the rolling ups and downs, I re-deployed my trekking poles.

The personality of this section would continue with rolling down terrain; thus far the hardest part of this final section. Pressing these rollers on legs full of 130 miles and 45,000 feet of climbing was challenging. We were 2 miles out from Longmire, and the terrain finally shifted to a straight down hill descent.

There’s a saying in ultra running: “When it hurts to run, walk. When it hurts to walk, run.” We’d reached that point and were hammering the downs in silence hoping to numb our legs and feet with the increased pounding. The trail spit us out at the Nisqually River and the Longmire Trailhead. The final grueling descent was over.

All that was left was 3 miles of rolling up, to a final steep 2,000 foot climb to Paradise. I asked Sam to calculate our time, as his “trail math” is far better than mine. We all knew that the Rainier Infinity could be done in under 60 hours, but could Erik and I pull it off? We were out of water, and needed to average 2 miles per hour to come in under our goal time.

We ran the rollers to the base of the final climb. Passing a creek, we refilled our bottles quickly and tried to rehydrate.

After completing the Wonderland Trail, we turned uphill and marched on up Narada Falls trail. The magnitude of the adventure was starting to set in, and my legs were starting to feel it.

We were ½ mile out and the passing tourist gave us some interesting looks.

We hit the pavement of the Paradise Trailhead and Erik and I broke into a poor looking run, known better as "the ultra shuffle." We shuffled across the parking lot, passing the hundreds of tourist taking pictures of Mt. Rainier.