Mazz led me about a hundred yards away from the kiln batteries, over to where a curious metal machine was set up next to an array of barrels, a small cabinet on wheels, and a washtub. At one end of the machine was an open-top feed tank that looked to hold about twenty gallons, connected to a large funnel beneath it. That funnel led into a metal contraption built around a cylinder twice the length of a pony and approximately the width of a pony’s barrel. Mounted just off the side of the machine was a treadmill, with sturdy belts attached to drive whatever mechanical parts were inside the machine.

He flipped open a hatch on the top of the cylinder. “This is a briquette extruder. See, inside here’s a screw press that can compact whatever loose material we feed in. The treadmill drives this rotating screw that compacts the feed, squeezes out the water, and really packs the mix together before extruding it. Lastly, it cuts off the extruded piece at a certain length. These two drive belts work together to provide the mechanical advantage and can be adjusted to apply far more force than a pony can by hoof.

“It’s like when you use a jack to lift up your cart to fix a wheel. You turn the crank a dozen times, moving the handle several feet in rotation for the jack to boost your cart an inch. The mechanical work done’s the same, and in exchange for the force multiplier, you need to move the crank a much greater distance. Ahh, here come Pearly and Daley now. I’ll leave you to these experts while I go talk to Bartlett about the other charcoal burner teams and our overall progress so far this week.” Mazz waved to the approaching mares, then walked off.

“Pearly Waltz?!” I exclaimed in surprise. “What are you doing here?!” The slim beige mare and her bouncing honey-nut tail was well-known to sports fans and Manehattanites. Having won four of the past five Manehattan Marathons, she’d earned the nickname the “Princess of Manehattan” after her third straight win.

Her results at the two other “marathon major” races included two wins at Fillydelphia and three victories at Trottingham. Nine majors in the past five years – when her closest rival only had three, and nopony else more than one – was two more than anyone else had managed in any five-year stretch in the three-century-long history of organized distance racing. When added to her Equestrian Games gold medal in marathon and two wins in the Summer Sunup-to-Sundown Distance Challenge, she was considered by most fans to be not only the best long-distance runner alive, but probably the best of all time. Only the greater totals of Quick Stepper’s fourteen majors and three golds, and Flying Fin’s four Summers, over far longer careers, left any doubt. Pearly could expect having another seven to ten years in or near her prime to chase them down, and I expected her to succeed.

I’d first interviewed her a little over five years ago, when she was virtually unknown outside her home village of Owl’s Hollow. At the time, it was a pony-interest story about a small-town elementary school teacher running the Manehattan Marathon for the first time. The week after my profile of her was printed, she won in record-setting time. I interviewed Pearly after her first three victories and her lone Manehattan defeat, but I was hospitalized during last year’s race and hadn’t seen her in twenty moons.

Pearly and a tall gray pegasus mare approached me, the gray mare carrying a half-dozen metal canteens slung over her back. “Hi Spuds! Nice to see you again! I’ve been making briquettes for about a year and a half now with Rose Dale. Daley’s the mixer who’s really the skill behind this machine. I have the easy job. All I do is trot and canter and sometimes gallop.”

Rose Dale laughed. “I have the easy job. All I do is make sure things get mixed in the right proportion and stir a bit, and Pearly does all the running that makes the screw press go.”

I laughed too. “Well, if you both think you have the easy job, that’s perfect! What are you mixing?”

“Come over to the barrels and see. But first, do you want a cup of coffee? Or maybe water?” The mare unslung the canteens, and I noticed that five were striped with blue and one with brown.

“No thanks,” I replied.

“It’s here if you change your mind,” she said as she opened the wheeled cabinet. Inside was a small tool set, a shelf of clean coffee mugs, and three boxes of sugar cubes.

Pouring herself a cup and adding eight(!) sugar cubes, Rose Dale led me over to the barrel arrangement, laid out atop the grass in five rows. As she removed the head from each barrel at the front of a row, she said, “This first one is bigger charcoal fines. All the fines that are bigger than a pea. This second one is the finer charcoal fines. Fine finey fines. Careful you don’t get your muzzle too close and accidentally inhale a bit of charcoal dust! Third one’s sawdust and wood shavings. Fourth is wet-pulped newsprint, and the last is water.”

She took a sip of coffee and waved the mug at the barrels. “You’ll notice there are way more barrels of fines, especially the fine fines...“ she giggled “...than there are of sawdust, pulp, or water. That’s because the fines are really what we’re trying to make product out of, and the sawdust and wet paper pulp are mostly just there as binding materials.”

Both Pearly and Rose put on muzzle masks, so I did the same. Rose’s resembled what the kiln unloaders and I were wearing, a feed-bag that covered her nostrils and mouth, but Pearly’s looked like a full-on plague doctor’s helmet-mask and beak. At my raised eyebrow, Pearly said “Neither of us want to inhale any charcoal dust, but I’m much pickier about it than Daley is. I’ve even gotten a unicorn to cast a dust-blocking spell on all my masks. On Daley’s too.”

“Ahhh, you can tell the difference, I can’t,” chuckled Rose. “Besides, mine is easy on and easy off. If I wear one of yours, it’d take me half a minute if I wanted a sip of coffee. Spuds, stay clear of the tub and the intake and you’ll be okay.”

The tall pegasus picked up a bucket, perhaps two gallons in size, and hovered over the barrel with the larger fines. She scooped the bucket into the barrel of large fines twice, dumping the contents out into the big washtub. Next went a bucket of sawdust and wood shavings, sprinkled atop the pebbly charcoal. She used a chipped half-gallon mug – a super-sized coffee cup being repurposed, I realized – to pull two scoops of wet gray goop from the paper pulp barrel, splattering the oatmeal-like substance into the tub. Next went a mug of water. Finally, she put three more bucketfuls of small, dusty fines into the tub before leaving the bucket atop the barrel. Stirring the mixture with a wooden paddle, the tub’s contents reached a chunky consistency within a minute.

Going back to the barrels, Rose twice repeated the entire process of adding their contents to the tub and stirring. After the third batch had been stirred, she muttered, “Colder today. Dryer, too,” before adding another mug of pulp and two mugs from the water barrel. A couple more minutes of stirring later, and she took the paddle out, went to fill another pair of half-gallon mugs with smaller fines and water, and placed them on a ledge next to the extruder’s feed tank.

Meanwhile, Pearly had been stretching and limbering up. Noticing Rose putting the mugs next to the feeder, Pearly turned to me and said, “Those mugs are for last-minute adjustments. Feel free to ask me questions at any time.” As Rose filled a different bucket with the tub mixture and flew up to dump it into the feeder tank, Pearly got onto the treadmill and began to walk. After Rose made three more trips, the sound coming from the extruder changed and the treadmill suddenly seemed to lightly resist moving.

Pearly picked up her pace to a steady trot, clearly having to put in a little more effort than if she were trotting on the ground. Rose put a final three buckets of the mix into the feeder, then headed back to the barrel of large fines to begin adding more material to the half-full tub.

As Pearly continued to trot, I could see a few drops of dirty water begin to drip out from a hole in the bottom of the screw press. A little later, a small black cylinder began emerging from the extruder. Perhaps an inch and a half wide, about three inches of length came out before a rotating blade inside the extruder cut the briquette off. Once it did so, a new briquette began to exit the extruder. I picked up the briquette and gave it a close look. While slightly damp, it was clearly in one piece and showed no signs of breaking apart with casual handling. A few light taps with my hoof didn’t break it either.

“It takes some effort to snap it,” called Rose Dale as she took up the wooden paddle to start stirring again. “That press packs tight. It’ll be even tougher after a couple days of air-drying to get rid of most of the moisture. We only need wet pulp in order to get the initial mixing and binding going. After the starch in the pulp fully sets with the sawdust and fines, it doesn’t need the moisture anymore.”

Pearly added, “Besides, a lot of residual moisture means that more of the burning briquette’s heat will go into evaporating moisture rather than heating whatever it is we want to heat. Everything here’s going to go into producing steam. But if we end up with excess, Bounder and Bartlett will probably sell some briquettes to Equestrian Railways and use all the lump charcoal here. Lump burns hotter than briquettes or wood and is more energy-dense by weight if not necessarily by volume.”

“What do you mean by energy dense?” I asked.

Rose Dale was bringing another bucket up to pour into the feeder. “Some things provide more heat per pound when burned. One of the reasons why locomotives often use coal, and charcoal briquettes, is because both of those give out more heat than an equivalent weight of wood while also taking up less space – lump charcoal takes up more space per pound. Charcoal burns faster than wood too. Wood’s cheaper, but since a locomotive only has so much storage room or weight capacity in its tender, the engineers will want to keep some charcoal briquettes or coal around just in case. So when a train really needs that extra oomph fast, it’s going to be a few firkins of the black stuff going into the engine’s firebox.”

Pearly picked up the explanation. “It takes about four pounds of lump to equal five pounds of briquettes or eight pounds of dry wood for heat. Lump’s the pure stuff. You saw Daley dumping in sawdust and shavings for structure and paper pulp for binder. Those ingredients don’t give off near the energy that charcoal does. But since all those charcoal fines and a lot of the sawdust would mostly go to waste otherwise, it’s almost like getting something from nothing.”

“You’re becoming an expert on more than running,” I chuckled.

Her voice came out evenly, as if she were sitting instead of moving at a brisk trot on the treadmill. “Feh, can’t help but pick up on stuff, what with the brains behind this operation talking shop all the time! Good thing I met Daley a couple years ago at the Equestrian Games, because now I’ve got a job that’s basically paying me to train rather than having to fit in workouts around job hours! Pays nearly twice the weekly wage that teaching elementary school did, with most expenses provided for! You know as well as I do that outside the Wonderbolts, hoofball, and buckball, even successful athletes need ‘real’ jobs. The year I won all three majors, the total prize money barely equaled what I made that year teaching.

“And powering this treadmill takes more effort than moving on dirt or on hard roads. So it’s a sort of resistance training. Every couple of weeks I’ll even use fetlock weights too. Running on any natural surface seems so much easier after this! Compared with two years ago, my trotting pace is about four seconds a mile faster, I can keep up a canter for an extra three minutes, and I can gallop for an extra fifteen or twenty seconds!

“Some ponies were saying I only won last spring because Cat’s Eye pulled out a few days before due to a bad cold. It’s true that none of the other runners were as fast as Cat plus I was having a very good day; I was five minutes clear of the field by the time I got to Central Park rather than running neck-and-neck. Didn’t even need to start my last canter before the Duck Pond; ended up not needing to gallop at all and still won by a minute and a half! But they’ll see, this time I’ll be able to start my final canter before we even get out of the Bridleway district. Making that very early attack a mile before the Bridleway-Central Park border will push Cat out of her comfort zone and leave her softened up for those final three miles winding through the park, and then I’m going to gallop the last seven furlongs instead of the last six to finish her off.

“That’s the plan, at least. I’m sure Cat will have something to say about it,” Pearly concluded.

As we talked, the wire basket that the extruded briquettes had been falling into had been filling up. Rose Dale trotted over to move it onto an empty stone-boat and emplace a new basket. As she did so, she said “I think you’ve seen just about a full production cycle, Spuds. It’s just rinse and repeat, with some water or coffee breaks.”

“How much do you two produce in a day of briquetting?” I asked.

“Depends on the day,” Pearly said. “Some days I train more for pure endurance, some days for trotting speed, some days for canters and gallops, and some for terrain. But it’s pretty normal for me to go 20 to 40 miles on this treadmill, which comes to between one-and-a-half to three tons of briquettes. I’ll use the treadmill five days most weeks, and most weeks I’ll run some hills on one other day. The last...“

She was interrupted by Rose Dale yelling, “Gallop thirty!” and immediately accelerated, as Rose kept yelling “Counting off! One Celestia! Two Celestia! Three Celestia...”

While galloping at close to full speed, Pearly wasn’t doing anything else but concentrating on her pace and her breathing. When Rose finished with “Thirty Celestia!” Pearly immediately dropped back to a canter for about twenty seconds, then back to her brisk trot. She was still breathing deep and hard, but the frequency of breaths dropped steadily.

Pearly finished, “The last day of the week is a rest day. Even earth ponies need to avoid overtraining. And in the two weeks leading up to a race, I’ll taper my training down so I’m at 100% energy that day.”

I noted that her trot was definitely taking more effort than it did before her gallop, and while her breathing had fallen back to her usual frequency, Pearly was clearly making an effort to take in more oxygen. “What was that ‘gallop thirty’ about?”

“This is one of the ways I’ve been switching things up. Daley thought that the reason why Cat beat me two years ago in Manehattan, and last year in Trottingham, might be because I wasn’t able to respond to changing race conditions. So by having these forced gallops partway through my workout, I get used to trotting under adverse conditions and I don’t need to just depend on keeping my trot steady almost the whole way.

“Daley will toss in anywhere from one to three other gallops today, and she can put in up to two extended canters. But we do set a maximum. That overtraining thing again. I completely expect her to give me the full treatment today, since it’s still a bit over two months before Manehattan kicks off the running season and the goal until a month before Manehattan is pure endurance work. And because I’ve got a massage booked with Lavender Hooves tonight.”

Rose Dale laughed and said “Yup, we’ve got a masseuse on staff. Two of them, really. Lavvy doubles as the aide for our medic-on-call, but she’s mainly around to give massages. A lot of mining and forestry work will really tire out a body, even an earth pony. When Bounder was putting together his first soup mining team, Auger talked him into hiring on a masseuse because – “ and here she briefly dropped her tone of voice in an imitation of a gruff old stallion, “Lad, getting a weekly massage makes me feel a decade younger! Bet a lot of your crew will like feeling younger too!

“Turns out that regular massages reduce soreness, soft tissue injury, and all the little niggles that anycreature over the age of twenty gets after a day or five of physical work. Cookie can probably tell you about injury rates and work-days saved and all that.”

By now, the stone-boat held four wire baskets of briquettes and Rose Dale was moving a fifth onto it. “Once this thing gets close to full, somepony will be by to haul it back over to the drying sheds, while dropping off an empty one here. We’ve got stone-boats everywhere!”

“The sheds are what, about a furlong away?” I asked.

“About that, yes. Figuring out where to put a battery of charcoal kilns is a surprisingly involved task. You’ve got to take into account where the wood’s coming from, where the pumpjacks or the shipping stations are, and where you can get good airflow to prevent the burny smell from polluting any nearby village or other housing. Not even Mazz likes sleeping with his nostrils full of smoke! Anyway, drink break!” As Rose Dale finished moving the basket, she went back to where she kept the canteens. She poured out two full and one half-full mug of water.

Pearly hopped off the treadmill and came over to grab a full mug. She sipped from it steadily as Rose Dale poured another half-mug of coffee, again adding an absurd amount of sugar. By the time Rose Dale had finished stirring and took her first sip of coffee, Pearly had finished both full mugs and was back on the treadmill.

“Not sure if you’ve kept up with the rule changes, but Manehattan, and just about every other marathon, now has mandated 45-second water breaks somewhere between miles 6 and 8 and miles 13 and 14, and a 30-second water break between miles 19 and 20,” explained Pearly. “This is mostly to formalize what good runners have been doing all along.

“The reason why it’s now formalized is that last year at the Trottingham Marathon, one stupid colt decided that he could shave some time by not taking any water breaks at all! It netted him maybe eighty or ninety seconds, sure, so he had caught up to those of us in the lead pack as we finished our final water break at mile 21 in front of the Princesses’ Medical Center of Trottingham University. It’s a good thing the next two miles wound around and through the TU campus, because he was looking unsteady before we had gone another mile and by the time we reached the turnoff from campus toward the Hockley Markets, he was swerving all over the road! Race officials had already taken note and were probably getting ready to step in!”

As she finished her coffee mug and started in on her water mug, Rose Dale picked up with “Lavvy and I were there as they passed by. It’s a good section to cheer on the leaders because they usually pick up to a canter as they exit the University Gate. Because the race route goes through Hockley Markets before winding back to the finish at Old Town Square, we could trot just a half-mile shortcut and reach a spot a furlong from the finish line, so we’d be able to wave Pearly on both places. But once Pearly and company broke into a canter, this poor dumb colt just passed out cold!

“Sure enough, race officials and EMTs swooped right in and got an IV going within a minute. And the TU hospital was right there. Turns out he’d be fine with a few days of rest and plenty of fluids, but it did sort of put a damper on the rest of the race,” Rose Dale snickered. “Especially because Cat’s Eye outsprinted Pearly to win by two seconds.”

Pearly laughed. “Ahhh, I’ll get her this year. You going to be covering Manehattan again, Spuds?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I sincerely replied. “Not unless I accidentally eat some baked bads again!”

As the mares continued to work, I excused myself to go sit on a stump maybe twenty yards away from them and pulled out my notebook to try to organize the notes that I had taken this morning and afternoon. And to organize my thoughts as well. There was a lot I had seen today, and it would take a while for me to digest it all.

Author's Note

Click here for the notes to Chapter 6! This chapter is the last "work" profile that Spuds has today. There will be a few interlude sections coming up before the next workday's chapters, where we get a better look at characters and what they do in their off hours.