Piease No Dust — Initiation Memo
A note on the origins, intentions and planned output of Piease No Dust.
Theme: Aid is not a pause. It is where the body changes hands. This study will observe the compressed interactions at Western States aid stations. It will focus on the emotional: the touch, trust and intimacy of those moments rather than the spectacle of endurance that bookends them.
01 Origin
The title comes from a sign seen at one of the aid stations during Western States 2026. It read PLEASE, NO DUST, but the L looked more like an I. A misspelt word felt wrong, yet right for the environment: handmade, urgent, practical and specific to the race.
It asked for cleanliness and calm in a place defined by dusty chaos. The aid station is already a cloud of heat, hands, voices, bottles, ice, questions, instructions and bodies moving through too quickly to fully take it in.
At Western States, the aid station is often described as a temporary pause. A moment of support. But inside the moment itself, it feels more urgent.
A runner arrives carrying heat, dust, distance, doubt, hunger, pain and momentum. The crew is bombarded by all of these emotions. All at once. There is barely any time for collective breath.
Hands move before full sentences are articulated. Ice is poured. Bottles swapped. Caps soaked. Food offered. Instructions given. The runner may speak, or may only be able to manage a look. The crew has to read both. For a brief moment, a disjointed race becomes a temporary collective.
This study is interested in those compressed moments of transfer. Not the spectacle of endurance, but a handful of minutes where the athlete’s future depends on emotional intelligence in the here and now.
02 Project context
Throughout Western States, photographer and filmmaker Dan King documented the aid station environment and the emotional architecture of crewing: the moment a runner arrives, is assessed by the people around them, and then sent back into the race.
The work focuses on the brief interruptions that make continuous movement possible. The ice, water, bottles, vests, towels, caps, hands, checks, corrections, instructions and quiet moments of reassurance that sit between arrival and departure.
This is not a study of the logistics of aid stations.
It is a study of care under pressure.
It is a study of what happens when the individual effort of ultrarunning becomes temporarily shared.
03 Contributing writing
Alongside the photographic work is Kimi Schreiber’s accompanying written response to the study from inside the race environment.
As an elite runner herself, a member of the Terrex team, and someone who has crewed at Western States, Kimi is able to write from a position of lived proximity rather than detached observation. Her piece draws on what it felt like to wait, read, respond and release a runner back into the race.
This takes the form of:
A long-form creative piece, approximately 1,000 words.
A collection of shorter runner and crew reflections, fragments, quotations and observations.
Caption-style moments and field notes to sit throughout the newspaper.
The intention is not to produce a conventional race report or performance analysis, but to observe the compressed psychology of aid from the perspective of someone close enough to feel and intimately and instinctively know its pressure. Kimi will also speak with runners and crew to gather reflections, fragments and observations that sit around her own experience.
04 Notes on approach
This should not feel restrictive.
The strongest observations will likely come from instinct, proximity and attention to the small details: hands reaching before words arrive, bottles being passed, ice against skin, a crew member asking the question they already partly know the answer to.
There is space for Kimi to shape this contribution freely and respond intuitively to the theme. The aim is not to explain ultrarunning, or over-interpret the runners and crew, but to observe the temporary transfer of responsibility that happens at the aid station.
05 Planned output
The output is a printed zine titled Piease No Dust. A publication that functions less like race coverage and more like a field document: photographic material from the aid station environment, course fragments, and accompanying writing organised around the transfer of care under pressure.
The title and opening line establish the thesis. Invited writing sits beside the photographic archive rather than explaining it away.
06 Archive status
This memo records the reasoning at initiation and is retained after completion because the study was realised in broadly the same terms.
Fieldwork was carried out around Western States, documenting aid station environments and the emotional architecture of crewing.
The completed zine, Piease No Dust, preserves the structure described above: the misspelt instruction as an organising device, photographic observation of transfer, and space for proximate written response.
As such, this document should be read not as a separate brief, but as the originating note for the publication that followed.