Arizona Trail Magic—Epilogue A well-known writing professor friend of mine once told me that an author never owes his/her audience an apology, but I feel compelled to offer at least an explanation of the months’ long delay in completing my AZT race report. The simplest way to put this is that I have been paralyzed by conflict. Not person to person conflict, mind you, but the conflict within my own mind, body, and spirit. When I finally closed the book on Day Five of my AZT adventure, I was 100% certain that I had made the correct decision, but the tincture of time has a way of changing the goal posts and the farther I got from the end of my race, the more I didn’t want to revisit what I feared was a decision made in haste and in error. With the distance of a number of months now between me and the AZT, I am now ready to pick up the keyboard and finish my story. As I lay in my bivy at the Picketpost trailhead, gazing up at the impossibly dark sky punctuated