by Scott Jurek
I dragged myself into my tent that night, and Dusty saw the compress.
“Jurker, you might want to consider some Vitamin I [ibuprofen] this time,” he said.
By the time I was scrambling up the snowfield, I had covered 79 miles on that ankle. The toughest section was yet to come. The race course dubbed as “Wild ’n Tough” was not a course you wanted to run on a freshly sprained ankle. At times it followed animal paths and other times there was no trail, only trail markers to navigate scree slopes and snowfields. Nineteen and a half hours earlier, in the gymnasium of the Silverton High School, I had applied a new Imtiaz special compress, then clamped a Pro-Tec ankle sleeve and aircast over it. Over that I wrapped so many layers of duct tape that it was 2 inches thick. The last time I had seen the ankle, even after two days of treatment, it shined, purple as the inside of a thundercloud. It was so swollen I couldn’t see my anklebones.
My injury provided a great excuse to lose. But I didn’t want an excuse. The truth is, in this race, even on a good ankle, I would have been running if not scared then at least supremely wary. Anyone who knew the San Juan Mountains would be doing the same. A man named Joel Zucker had died of a brain aneurysm after running the 1998 Hardrock, and scores of people had been injured over the years. Hardrockers knew that, but they kept running. Hardrockers had run until blood leaked from their capillaries into their flesh, which made their hands turn into catcher’s mitts and their feet into clown shoes.
But they kept running. Some veteran Hardrockers even chuckled at the sight. On the other hand, pulmonary edema, where the blood seeps into the lungs, could be fatal. Still, past runners had heard moist wheezing deep in their chests, finished the race, and then been driven over Molas Pass to the Durango Hospital with fluid in their lungs. Dozens of runners’ guts milkshaked during the course. There was always plenty of puking, not to mention an abundance of hallucinations. Racers watched boulders turn into Subarus, trees morph into masses of laughing worms. They mistook stumps for severed elk heads. The slowest runners had the most visions, probably because their sleep deprivation was more extreme. The Hardrock has a 48-hour time limit. Dawdlers could pretty much count on phantom hikers joining them the last few miles of the course. Some of the poltergeists told jokes.
The first year of the race, 1992, only eighteen of the forty-two entrants finished. Racers had to cut down tree limbs that were blocking the course; the winner knocked on the door of a trailer at the finish line to alert the race officials that he was done.
Nowadays, the organizers set up aid stations at intervals on the course. But they set up many fewer than other 100-mile mountain races. Hardrockers speak with a disdain that sometimes approaches contempt of races like the Leadville Trail 100, which is more famous and more popular, has more corporate sponsors, and which, compared to the Hardrock, “is running over some hills.” The Western States is an interesting and famous event, but those Californians who speak of it as the most grueling of ultras? To Hardrockers, they’re amusingly provincial.
Some Hardrock highlights: at least one sleepless night and usually two waist-deep river crossings. Harrowing exposure to heights, fixed ropes, and steps cut into snowfields, tundra, and rock, hopping cross-country where no trail exists. Another feature of the race: scree fields that crumble under your feet as you spin in place.
You might think that an event that taxes the human body so mercilessly would have inspired a history of healthy eating. You would be wrong. Next to a typical old-school Hardrocker, the most ravenous catfish in the world is a finicky gourmet eater. For breakfast, especially in the 1990s, the race pioneers tended to scarf doughnuts and slug back multiple helpings of bacon and sausage links. Lunches and dinners often included pepperoni pizzas and greasy cheeseburgers. Not until the race itself, though, did the early Hardrockers make the bewhiskered bottom feeders look prissy. The legendary ultramarathoner and mountain racer Rick Trujillo, who lives just over the mountain from Silverton, in Ouray, Colorado, won the Hardrock in 1996 on a diet of Mountain Dew and Oreos. (He continued his promiscuous diet until 2007, when at age fifty-nine he was rushed to the hospital with chest pains. He eats more salads nowadays.)
Only about half the Hardrock entrants make it to the finish line. If a racer doesn’t make it out of each station by a prescribed time (based on the 48-hour maximum), he or she is told the race is over. Getting “timed out,” especially after 60 or 70 or 80 miles, is such a bitter experience that many racers have pleaded to go on (some have actually threatened the aid station crews), and empathic but firm organizers have had to address the issue in the race handbook: “You are all experienced ultra runners. . . . Do not debate cutoff times with the aid station personnel!”
“This is a dangerous course!” according to that handbook, a fantastic compendium of arcane statistics, numbingly detailed course descriptions, hair-raising terrors, and chilling understatement.
When it comes to the temptation to scale peaks during storms, for example, the manual advises: “You can hunker down in a valley for 2–4 hours and still finish; but if you get fried by lightning your running career may end on the spot.”
Regarding “Minor Problems,” the manual advises crew members: “You may also see, in the later stages of the run, runners who are extremely depleted in sugar and dehydrated. They usually will be extremely fatigued and may be nauseated and vomiting.”
“In addition to trail running,” the manual says, “you will do some mild rock climbing (hands required), wade ice cold streams, struggle through snow which at night and in the early morning will be rock hard and slick and during the heat of the day will be so soft you can sink to your knees and above, cross cliffs where a fall could send you 300 feet straight down, use fixed ropes as handrails, and be expected to be able to follow the course with a map.” (Volunteers placed plastic flags along the course every year until marmots started gobbling them. Now they use reflective metal markers.)
By the time I had made it through the snow to join Dusty, we stood at Oscar’s Pass. We had just climbed 4,400 feet, and if I had not known better, I might have felt an instant of lightning-lit, semicrippled relief. But I did know better. I followed D-Ball as he ran down the back side of the mountain toward a hellish crevasse called Chapman Gulch. I bounded down a series of boulder-strewn switchbacks. Dusty claimed later that he looked back and saw me using the brace to wedge my foot between rocks. I didn’t realize it at the time, though, probably because my neurosynapses were sizzling from a massive overload of “AIEEE” impulses. It would have been painful on two good feet.
I had survived descents as rocky and steep before, though. What I had not survived was what I encountered when we reached the bottom: the awesomely awful genesis of the most difficult climb of the course, a treacherous, hope-suckingly steep scramble over boulders, gravel, and loose scree to Grant’s Swamp Pass.
In 1998, as the two-time Hardrock champion David Horton was ascending this section of the race, a melon-sized rock dislodged by a runner above fell and struck his right hand. “A little later,” Horton wrote in his account of that race, “I noticed that my glove was soaked through with blood.” After finishing (of course), he realized that it was a compound fracture.
Horton’s story was shocking but not singular. Just as the Hardrock is the toughest ultra around, it tends to draw the toughest ultrarunners.
Laura Vaughan, who set a women’s record at the Hardrock in 1997, the only year she ran it, also was the first person to finish the Wasatch Front 100 for ten consecutive years and the first woman to break 24 hours. That makes her fast. What makes her tough, though—what makes her a bona fide Hardrocker—is that in 1996, nine weeks after giving birth to a son, she ran the Wasatch and breastfed her baby at the aid stations. Her ten-year ring from the event is engraved “Lactating Laura.”
Tough?
Carolyn Erdman entered the Hardrock for the first time in 1997, when she was forty-eight years old. She made it 85 miles before the race organizers told her that she was moving t
oo slowly and that she was done.
In 1998, she entered again. Four weeks before the event she ran a 50-mile warm-up race in Orem, Utah. Three miles into it, she fell and scraped her left knee. There was blood and a little pain, but she thought it was no big deal. By the time she finished, she could see her patella; she was shocked at how white it was. The doctor in the emergency room told her she was lucky he didn’t amputate the limb. She spent a week in the hospital with intravenous antibiotics. Surgeons operated on her twice.
The next year she ran again and was timed out at mile 92. The next year, on her fourth and final attempt, she timed out at mile 77.
Tough?
Kirk Apt started vomiting at mile 67 the first time he ran Hardrock, and 3 hours later he was still vomiting. On his next race attempt, his quadriceps cramped at mile 75, so he hobbled the last quarter of the course. (He won the race in 2000, the year I dropped out.) He’s finished the race sixteen times and counting.
The rock was worse than the snow. The climb was crueler. I had been racing for 22 hours. I had been racing for what seemed like my whole life. The race doesn’t start till Telluride? I wolverined the rocky ground and willed my good leg to keep pushing. For each step I took forward I would gain only half a step, as the loose scree crumbled from underfoot. I was climbing hard but hardly moving. Where was Meltzer? Had he turned his headlamp off? He couldn’t have won four Hardrocks without being ruthless.
Tough? Sometimes you just do things!
Somehow we made it over. We crested the pass and bounced down the other side. My ankle didn’t hurt anymore. I couldn’t feel it at all. At 4 A.M., after another climb and another descent, the land took shape around us, the blackness turned into mere dark, then into gray, and finally a pale, wonderful dawn. Watching the glow of a new day in those mountains was almost a religious experience. Some people wonder if a Hardrocker-ultrarunner in the throes of exhaustion and near-agony can enjoy the scenery. As I navigated my way down the final gnarly descent, I didn’t just enjoy it, I reveled in it. I wallowed. We heard the sound of a running stream, and we both knew what that meant. We were 2 miles from Silverton and the finish line.
“Let’s get this bad boy done,” Dusty said. “I need a nap.”
We crossed the finish line at 8:08 A.M., in 26 hours and 8 minutes. It was 31 minutes faster than Meltzer’s record. I sat down and removed my elaborate ankle protection—still purple and swollen to twice its normal size. I made occasional trips to the high school, to use the bathroom, shower, get something to eat, and take a short nap. But for the next 21 hours, 52 minutes, and 29 seconds, I spent most of my time in the dirt at the finish line. I wanted to greet the other ninety-six finishers, especially my sea-level compatriot, ultra-studette Krissy Moehl, who finished third place overall setting a new women’s course record a mere 25 minutes behind Meltzer. In ultrarunning, the mountains and willpower equalize the genders.
Strawburst Anti-Inflammatory Smoothie
I have always shied away from using pharmaceutical agents like ibuprofen to treat pain and swelling, so it’s natural that I have experimented with natural anti-inflammatories. When I sprained my ankle days before the 2007 Hardrock, my experiments took on a new urgency.
This smoothie combines the anti-inflammatory ingredients of pineapple (bromelaine), ginger, turmeric, and Flora Oil (omega-3 fatty acids). It’s a great daily postworkout drink, soothing aching muscles, and a terrific addition to your regular meals before your run on a long training day. It has a fruity, sweet taste like Starburst candy and is loaded with healthy fats as well as carbohydrates and protein.
The miso replaces the salt and electrolytes lost in sweat. In Japan, miso is viewed as an endurance-booster. Edamame provides an extra whole-food protein boost. Fresh turmeric root can be found in the produce section of natural foods stores. You will need a high-powered blender to process the roots. If you don’t have one, opt for the dried turmeric and ginger.
2 cups water
1 banana
1 cup frozen or fresh strawberries
½ cup frozen mango
½ cup frozen pineapple
½ cup frozen shelled edamame
¼ cup dried coconut flakes
3 tablespoons Flora Oil 3-6-9 Blend
1 tablespoon plant protein powder (brown rice, pea, etc.)
1½ teaspoons miso
1 1-inch piece turmeric root, chopped, or teaspoon ground turmeric
1 1-inch piece ginger root, peeled and minced, or ¼ teaspoon ground ginger
Place all the ingredients in a blender and blend on high for 1 to 2 minutes, until smooth.
MAKES 3 8-OUNCE SERVINGS
18. In the Footsteps of Pheidippides
SPARTATHLON, SEPTEMBER 2007
Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.
—HIPPOCRATES
Two months later, my sprain was healed, and I was filled with the optimism and joy that only winning a 100-mile mountain race on a bum ankle can bring. All that good stuff was very fortunate, because I was about to begin a 152-mile race with a broken toe.
It was called the Spartathlon, and even though I had won it the year before, a few months after my second Badwater victory, I knew that this year would be more difficult. It’s always easier to sneak up on someone than to defend a title.
The Spartathlon begins at the base of the Acropolis in Athens and ends in front of the statue of King Leonidas in Sparta, a distance of 245.3 km (152.4 miles). The course is predominantly road racing (95 percent) with some improved dirt roads (4 percent) and a small section of mountainous trail (1 percent). The elevation ranges from sea level to 3,937 feet, climbing a few mountain ranges for a total elevation gain of over 8,000 feet. In addition to the sheer length of the course, runners are challenged by the potent Greek sun and coastal humidity. In the heat of the day, temperatures can reach 90 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
The total overall time limit for the course is set at 36 hours, but there are seventy-five race control points, each with its own time cutoff. Approximately half of the 300 or so starters finish each year. Volunteers at the aid stations offer water, nectar juices, sodas, bread, yogurt, as well as other items, and runners are allowed to leave drop bags at any of the stations, so it is theoretically possible to run this race without a crew. No pacers are allowed.
I ran the Spartathlon in 2006 because of its reputation. I returned in 2007 because of my experience that first year and because of what I had learned of the history of the race.
The most famous long-distance race with a Greek origin is the marathon, which celebrates the arduous journey of the messenger who ran from Marathon to Athens, a distance of 26.2 miles, to announce Greece’s victory over the Persians in 490 B.C.; he then dropped dead from exhaustion. Though Pheidippides is the messenger most often credited with the noble and fatal trip, the runner was probably named Eucles, according to the ancient writer Plutarch.
The real story of Pheidippides, according to those same historians, is much better and has a happier ending. It also inspired the modern Spartathlon.
The Persian fleet was on a roll. They had plundered their way through the Greek islands, sacked the city-state of Eretria, and then had their sights set on Athens. The Athenians sent a small force, commanded by General Miltiades, to seal off the exits from the Bay of Marathon, named after the ancient Greek word for the fennel that probably grew wild there. The ancient historian Herodotus writes that the Athenian generals dispatched Pheidippides to the great city of Sparta to ask for reinforcements in holding off the much larger invading force.
Pheidippides reached Sparta the day after he left Athens, but his plea fell on deaf ears. Although sympathetic to their fellow Greeks’ plight, the religious Spartans were in the middle of a festival to Apollo and could not wage war until the full moon. It must have been a long 152.4 miles back home with the bad news, but luckily Pheidippides had something else to report.
While running through the mountains above the ancient city of Tegea (checkpoint 6
0 of the modern Spartathlon), he had a vision of the nature god, Pan. The son of Hermes, the divine messenger, Pan ruled over shepherds, nymphs, and rustic places. He was a great guy to have on your side in a big battle, because he could induce a wild fear in mortals called “panic.” This god called Pheidippides by name “and bade him ask the Athenians why they paid him no attention, though he was of goodwill to the Athenians, had often been of service to them, and would be in the future.”
If we read it closely, everything we need to know about running is in Pheidippides’ story. He ran over 300 miles—the first half in a little over one day—and he didn’t even get what he wanted! If you run long enough, that tends to happen. Whatever quantitative measure of success you set out to achieve becomes either unattainable or meaningless. The reward of running—of anything—lies within us. As I sought bigger rewards and more victories in my sport, it was a lesson I learned over and over again. We focus on something external to motivate us, but we need to remember that it’s the process of reaching for that prize—not the prize itself—that can bring us peace and joy. Life, as countless posters and bumper stickers rightly attest, is a journey, not a destination. Pheidippides kept going, and he ended up getting something even better, something outside the normal realm of human experience. Nature itself called out his name—Pan is nature incarnate—and it gave the great runner a sacred message to bring home to his people. The message was pretty much what nature’s message always is: Pay more attention to me, and I will help you the way I’ve always helped you in the past.
Pheidippides recounted his vision to the Athenian generals, who took it seriously and erected a new temple to Pan after the war. Unable to wait until the Spartans arrived, the Athenians charged the Persians. The Athenians fought with legendary courage, dividing and conquering the Persian force. Their underdog victory at Marathon is considered the tipping point in the Persian Wars, heralding the golden age of Greece.