The Black Lake race is the hardest most random run in the United States. People show up for it completely unaware they’re about to take part, and suddenly find themselves in an immersive survival experience that will test them and break them down emotionally and physically. This years brutal race was inside the Black Lake rail road tunnel.
“I found myself disorientated, void of all perspective, quickly losing hope, desperate and longing for a particularly decorative cake for no reason at all. ” — lost runner inside the tunnel.
This years run of Black Lake began on January first of 2020 with the unwitting participants being shoved into the tunnel under the mountain. We’re nearly a year in, will anyone win this years race? We wait at the exit to find out, but until then we sat down with the race director who had overcome massive budget cuts to put on the best race yet and who promised us a birds eye view into the challenge!
“We thought we would change up the route this year. I think we’ve done a tremendous job where the runners themselves will provide the majority of the obstacles.” The race director said. “The tunnel provides a disorientating soul crushing slog. Runners speed will be hampered due to broken track, lose rocks underfoot, pot holes and debris. So they have to pick their way along very carefully through a dimly lit monotonous course and that starts to weigh heavily on the consciousness. ”
On the walls of the tunnel in environmentally friendly chalk is a repeated slogan that reads:
“I LOVE SEEING RUNNERS CRY.
It’s my daily MEDICINE.
My WEEKLY energy .
my monthly inspiration,
and my yearly motivation.”
“That’s our psychological prompt, it repeats ad nauseam through the entire tunnel course, and it will affect some of our runners more than others.”
“What we were really aiming for was a dystopian hellscape and you can’t get there through any other means then psychological manipulation, because almost every other way is escapable, and also we’re on a budget!”
“Runners this year can be divided into two distinct groups. Our trained special pack will naturally think the phrase makes sense and is a confirmation that they’re doing the correct route in the correct way and will help remove any doubt in their minds, it reinforces the programming — but for all the other runners being confined without explanation and forced to try to figure out what is actually going on, it is going to be jarring and possibly maddening.
“I LOVE SEEING RUNNERS CRY.
It’s my daily MEDICINE.
My WEEKLY energy .
my monthly inspiration,
and my yearly motivation.”
“WHAT IS THIS? LET ME OUT!!! What is with the crazy message? Is it a clue? AM I supposed to solve this? Why is written every two feet? Where am I going? I gotta go home. I have to feed my dog. GET ME OUT OF HERE.” — a passionate mid-pack runner
“The race really gets going when participants can no longer see the light from the tunnel entrance and have no idea how far the tunnel stretches on before they will see daylight again – if ever. We like to give them small prompts that may lead to the assumption it will never end or suggest the end is worse than where they currently are. An old rusty radiation symbol sign. A warning notice ripped in two. Budget friendly, foreboding and draining emotionally. We want the runners to get preoccupied with defeat, to ask themselves if going forward is worth it.”
“Unexpected. Random. Terrifying. Uncertainty.”
“Those were the guidelines that this years race was organized around. ”
“There were runners coming back down the tunnel in my direction and it was disorienting, am I even going in the right direction? Did I get turned around? They were frightened. One looked at me and said, ‘it gets worse, it gets a lot worse further in.’ and I didn’t think I wanted to keep going. ” — lost runner inside the tunnel.
“We split the race participants into two mind sets and then pitted them against one another. To switch things up, the runners who are typically more timid, imaginative and shy who self-identify strongly as ‘outsiders’ in our online survey became our ‘special alpha pack‘, they were indoctrinated as ‘special winners.’ We removed empathy from their thinking and replaced it with an US (the special) vs. THEM (unspecified vague otherness they were supposed to automatically hate).”
“We really wanted to see people who normally under perform, run at the back of the race pack, who lack confidence and self-discipline, put into a dynamic where they at least believe they hold most if not all the power, to believe they are gifted athletes, popular and admired, and morally superior, at least as long as they run together in the assigned pack – that’s the key here, you can’t have them separate out. This groups requires a lot of reinforcement and it must be consistent.”
“They have never felt like they have personal power let alone felt admired and we put them into a group with a strong megalomaniac ambiance. They have all the power in the tunnel. They are special. Gifted. The best and the most righteous. They belong. Belonging for a human is stronger than a drug. We’re giving them what they crave.”
“You get a press of them through the tunnel and they start acting as a single unit, but we put no one in the pack with leadership capabilities so in-fighting and group dynamics will be incredibly destructive. They also have modest-self-discipline at best leading to a more chaotic and turbulent group over all. We’ve provided the distorted mirror if you will. We’ve set them up.”
“These are typically impressionable people who don’t hunt on principal and who wouldn’t even so much as fish suddenly violently defending their right to murder others because it’s “good”. We’re looking forward to seeing the irony play out. They didn’t all work out of course we had about a 5% variance, we had to move some from our special pack to just being solo runners, but in the end I think we got our 50/50 quota. That is 50 percent packs and 50 percent loan runners.”
“The other half of participants tend to be mid-pack in life, quasi successful, local leaders – not special enough to stand out with some kind of distinction but who in a small way have had some success and hold a little discernment and self-confidence. They tend to be more conscientious and competent in their skill sets. We’re just letting them go through the tunnel with zero input or explanation and we’ve staggered start times to where they are not running in a pack or have any allies. They’re going to be for the most part running alone and it will be interesting to see if they stay that way and find a unique way to run this race or if they attempt to change their own mind sets to assimilate into the special pack. This would require them learning the programming and script from that pack and then accepting it without question.”
“This race is going to be as full of surprises for us as it is for them.”
“We want to see if the solo runners, desperately lonely and isolated if they’ll try to reason with the other side, avoid confrontation, make alliances, or just emotionally crack? The fun trick is of course is that for the special pack that we’ve trained, anything anyone says to them that isn’t directly from the conditioning script is proof they are the sinister ‘other’ (we purposefully do not define most terms in our conditioning finding that the ambiguity of the programming lends itself well to the imagination while inside the tunnel and that our subjects will fill in detail far better than we could have prompted anyway…picking people with keen imagination and high creativity was the key!) anything outside of their script will instantly be reacted to as heresy, if the script is wrong how they now view themselves is also wrong. Their entire sense of self will be on the line. They’ll react if in mortal danger and see the person talking as sinister. It’s going to be a phenomenal show of survival in the tunnel this year!”
“If the mid-pack normal people say anything that is counter to conditioning it’s going to just explode in there.”
“ARE YOU CRAZY? What are you doing? PUT THE WEAPON DOWN! I just wanted directions!”
solo runner in the tunnel
“I LOVE SEEING RUNNERS CRY.
It’s my daily MEDICINE.
My WEEKLY energy .
my monthly inspiration,
and my yearly motivation.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, but this is NECESSARY. THIS IS A NECESSARY. Just remember this is necessary.”
“–That doesn’t make any sense you moron, we’re stuck in the same damn tunnel.”
“It’s so sad you can’t understand, I pity you, but I must do this, this is necessary.”
“–Put the weapon down! Are you insane!”
The Black lake tunnel run 2020
“Eventually we suspect some of the solo runners will find each other and team up, maybe solve tunnel survival and possibly overcome the conditioning of the special pack to reason with them and work together to go all the way to the exit. Or maybe they’ll come up with their own explanation and their own propaganda that is uniquely terrifying.”
“Part of what is particularly hilarious, to us anyway, is that the tunnel is just that: a tunnel. But we’ve seen so far that most if not all participants have interpreted it to be a maze instead of a point to point race. Their belief that the tunnel has no end and cannot end is why the race is still going.”
“We did not anticipate that actually. We didn’t put that into the script for the special pack, and we didn’t set up the tunnel to seem particularly maze like but it happened organically in the minds of the participants and they have reinforced that for each other. They honestly believe they are navigating loops instead of just simply moving in a linear predictable fashion. If they realize the end is right there in front of them they might exit, but they seem very preoccupied with interpersonal struggles thus far.”
So there you have it, the Black Lake Tunnel Run of 2020. Unfortunately I have no results to give you yet because if the run is ever going to end is unknown. How runners are fairing inside the tunnel is said to be largely pandemonium and violence.
Until next time!
