So one of our team members, Angela Hirsch, showed up with two tutus, one for each of our team vans (which carried six runners apiece). We had rented a house in Lake Placid for the weekend, and during our carbo-loading dinner there the night before the race it had seemed as if everyone was onboard with the tutu-wearing. But when it came time for me to run my first leg — the fourth leg overall of the 36 that constitute the race — no one had yet tutued.

As the oldest runner on our team by about 15 years, I realized that it was up to me to set an example. The tutu, which was orange, did not especially go with my navy blue running shorts or screaming fluorescent yellow T-shirt, but I sucked it up and put it on. And a surprising number of strangers gave me thumbs up or other props for the outfit. It occurred to me halfway through the leg that any one of them might take a photograph and upload it to someplace where my mother or my boss might see it, but hey, I had already signed an injury-and-death waiver; dignity seemed a minor concern.

In truth, death was also a minor concern, because during the long months of training I had accidentally solved the greatest of human mysteries. I usually run with a first-generation iPod Shuffle set to play its 153 songs randomly. Three of those songs are by the folk singer Richie Havens. On my first training run after Mr. Havens died in April, the very first song the iPod pumped into my ears was his lovely version of Jerry Merrick’s “Follow.”

Though I’ve been listening to it for 45 years, I don’t claim to know the meaning of “Follow,” a New Agey sort of song that tugs at the heart. But parts of it sound as if they could be about running, and parts sound as if they could be about a Great Transition. Hearing Havens’s soulful baritone talking to me that morning was startling, yet I would have eventually shrugged it off as coincidence. But when, a month later, “Follow” also turned up as the last song I heard before I hit the finishing chute of that five-hour marathon in Vermont, it seemed too improbable to be anything but a message.

I needed that melodic reassurance of an afterlife, because during the Ragnar my niece tried to kill me. On a 12-member Ragnar team (some showoffy teams, “ultras,” have only six runners), each person runs three legs of the race, with the distances of each ranging from 1.9 to 9.4 miles and the degree of difficulty varying widely. In deference to my comparatively plodding pace, Carrie originally assigned me to the easiest slot. But a few weeks before the race, another team member’s querulous knee led to this innocuous-sounding e-mail: