Four hours

 Rock had run well for several months, so when he saw a fellow member of the Little Rock Hash House Harriers standing in line to turn in his entry and race number to a 40-mile trail race, he bought it from him. Later that morning, Rock started the race and recognized from the beginning he was likely in for a good day. His legs felt fresh and energetic. By mid-race, he had begun to catch and pass several runners and walkers each mile. An idea of breaking four hours for the course occurred. Though he was never fatigued, Rock finished in four hours and ten minutes. He was delighted, and Hashers acted as if they were pleasantly stunned.

Leverage

 It was never clear to Rock what led to this circumstance unique to his life, but he suddenly found himself under the substantial weight of a woman unfamiliar to him. She held him hostage in the hallway of an aging, four-floor redbrick office building near downtown North Little Rock. Prone on the floor, he searched for leverage.

Right?

 By coincidence, Rock drove by War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock. There was a road race in progress. He wondered which one it was until he saw a dozen or more Hashers together in the parking lot. His friend Zach stood before a grill, flipping burgers. It was the Great Cross Country Race. Rock had set it for the last twenty years. He hurriedly set this one the afternoon before but woke up with no memory of it. He walked to the finish line to see the overweight winner complete the 5K course in thirteen minutes and ten seconds. "Rock, you don't want to set these anymore, right?" Zach said.

A reporter's nightmare

 Rock sat in the driver's seat of Jeff Krupsaw's pickup truck parked in a lot on the edge of a small college campus near Little Rock. It was 7:15 p.m., and he knew he had agreed to report on a Parkview High football game for the paper. The game was scheduled to start at 7 p.m. and was likely halfway through the first quarter. Rock needed to find out where he was. He needed to find out where Jeff was, too. 

A thousand feet

 Multiple outbreaks of paranormal crime broke out around Arkansas just in the early predawn hours of Christmas morning. Extreme weather accompanied those near Searcy, Gould, and Nashville; by pure coincidence, Rock witnessed them all. Each led to prosecutions before daybreak. After the arrest in Nashville, Rock drove on a backroad out of town, and it was unlike anything he had seen, straight downhill for at least a thousand feet. At the bottom, the road turned to wet dirt and dead-ended near the pond of an abandoned farm.

Condescension

 Desmy Tutu (aka Zach) drove Rock and a handful of other Little Rock Hash House Harriers into a large crowd of Hashers from several nearby states. Just before he turned his pickup into the gathering, Rock watched the Hashers part to make way. Zach turned back toward Rock. “Watch this,” he said. “These fuckers love you.” Rock listened to shouts of tribute but almost immediately recognized a clear tone of factiousness. Without doubt, this was condescension rather than love. Rock felt humiliated.

Too short

 This was new and alarming. Rock needed a light bulb for his front porch, but he was too short to reach the cabinet above his refrigerator. His only available route required a chair to reach the countertop. This was terrible, and Rock was terrified.

When he awoke

 Rock traveled to the World Cup in a stagecoach straight from the old west. He fell asleep on his way, and when he awoke, he found the pocketful of large diamonds he carried had been stolen.

McDonald's in Levy

 Rock needed help understanding the managerial strategy he worked under at McDonald's in Levy. He and his cohorts were asked to work from morning until closing. As they progressed through their shifts, each would become the restaurant's manager whenever an area of their expertise was required. All the employees were longtime members of the Little Rock Hash House Harriers, a group Rock had run with for over forty years. Hashers understood Rock's mastery of quarter-pounders with cheese.

East of Blackwell

 Work underway on U.S. Interstate 40 between Russellville, Arkansas, and Levy was not supposed to impair traffic. Rock, therefore, began his drive home to suburban North Little Rock from a football game at Arkansas Tech without concern. However, a handful of miles from Morrilton, just east of Blackwell on his eastward journey, Rock followed traffic into a seemingly impossible tunnel. It ran under the entire breadth of the interstate with about ten feet of clearance. He and everyone else were required to drive on broad wooden planks. Arkansas Highway Department workers were everywhere in the dim light. Clearly, something was wrong, and Rock and the other drivers began to turn their vehicles around.

Underwater

 Everyone knew how long and hard the rain had fallen, but Rock didn't expect this. He was at his big brother Jim's house in suburban St. Louis, and Jim had just called from downtown to say the city was underwater. "I mean, this is bad," Jim said. Rock could feel a rumble. He looked through the living room window to see an endless line of eighteen-wheel trucks rolling north from downtown along Central Parkway. "Jim, you might want to talk to Karen," Rock said. "It looks like every truck driver in the midwest knows the way to your house."

Little air

 Rock thought he had a million dollars, but he awoke to find he was broke. It seemed odd how little air accompanied poverty and how hard it was to breathe in his house.

Hopeful

 There was no way for Rock to feel sure. Still, he had established enough to indicate he lived somewhere in the past, present, or future along the endless corridors of time. Furthermore, Rock was confident the authority in charge would lean his way after he examined the evidence. At any rate,  Rock was hopeful.

A mess

 Rock was dead. This time he knew for sure. A diety of some sort had begun introducing him to post-life options, all of which seemed undesirable. The final was a disconcerted version of the den where he died, far messier than the mere clutter of his everyday experience. Some of the furniture looked as if it had been knocked out of place. Shelved books were scattered across the floor and rug, and Rock knew it was no worthwhile place to spend eternity. Furthermore, he was also prone to the hardwood near his front door and found it hard to breathe.

Medieval Europe

 Rock and Elizabeth Kimble watched through the snack-bar window as a theatre group practiced on UALR's grounds outside the campus student center. They saw perhaps twenty young men and women dressed in the burlap and leather of characters from medieval Europe. "Where would you put the over-under on the number of them who have had sex with each other?" Rock asked. Elizabeth smiled, shook her head in a pretense of disdain, and said, "Do you mean today?"

Ford Fairlane

 The bill would arrive soon for some rudimentary front-end work auto mechanics had performed for Rock, who imagined it would come to no more than two or three hundred dollars. One of the mechanics wiped his hands with a rag and told Rock his effort had been a snap. As the man spoke, Rock became aware for the first time the front of his car—a navy-blue 1968 Ford Fairlane—was crushed and buckled to within perhaps three feet of its windshield. He could not remember an accident, and it occurred instantly that he had been taken advantage of for these men to have done any work. This damage would cost far more than the car was worth.

On top of that

 This panicked Rock most. It was well past the paper's deadline, and his story was unsent. He wasn't even sure he had written it. On top of that, his blood glucose level was so low it caused him to stumble as he looked for his laptop and the notebook with his game notes. He fought against his walk's wobble as he staggered to his car at dawn, self-conscious and aware enough to fear embarrassment if a neighbor or neighbors were to witness his hypoglycemic struggle.

Rancidness

 Rock had successfully induced each Little Rock Hash House Harrier to drink rancid motor oil drilled by the former U.S. president Donald Trump. He was concerned but not quite sure what rancidness meant.

A wooden twig

 As Rock stood in line at an apparently immensely popular buffet, a pleasant but not particularly pretty nurse struck up a conversation. Shortly after it began, she said, "Hold still for a minute. You have something in your left ear." Rock paused as the nurse extracted the thing she had noticed. When she showed it to him, he was stunned. It was a wooden twig, perhaps three inches long with multiple tiny branches. Before he said anything to the nurse, the twig quickly blossomed into an ornate white flower. Moments later, with no further thought, Rock swam back to his car in an uphill swimming pool, twenty feet wide and a quarter-mile long. Gravity did not affect the water, which did not seem odd to Rock.

Longshot

 There was an intense fear among the hundreds of people that there was no escape from the unrelenting roar of television infomercials in Rock's house. Furthermore, it had become difficult for anyone to breathe. Rock also experienced balance issues. None of this seemed survivable to anyone, until Rock found a lubricated funnel he thought might provide a route out. It was an extreme longshot, certainly, but he slid through it until it deposited him into his silent living room/den.