Running with Sherman

by Christopher McDougall

  But not this time.

  To hell with them, Ryan said when Kelly got him on the phone from the doctor’s office. If they’re not listening to you, take her to Oklahoma. Kelly strapped her four-week-old baby back into the car and drove more than a hundred miles across the state line to another hospital. There, physicians complimented her intuition: Yes, Lynzi tested positive for a respiratory virus. But it was very mild, so Kelly was free to take her home.

  “No,” Kelly said. “This doesn’t feel right.”

  “There’s only one little spot on her lungs,” the doctors pointed out.

  “Please check again,” Kelly insisted. They did. And when that test came out the same, she asked again. And again—and that’s when all hell broke loose. In a matter of hours, the single infected spot had erupted, covering Lynzi’s lungs with a ghostly white film that started choking her to death. A doctor slapped the Code Blue button, and medics swarmed into the room. Within minutes, Lynzi and Kelly were on a Flight for Life chopper, en route to a specialty unit in Texas. As soon as they touched down, an ER doctor took one look at Lynzi and leaped onto her gurney, giving her chest compressions as she was wheeled in for emergency transfusions to replace her oxygen-starved blood. She was briefly taken off the respirator to see if she could breathe. Moments later, doctors were threading a tube down her throat: all of Lynzi’s systems were shutting down.

  Kelly stared, numb with shock. One thought penetrated her panicky haze: If she had obeyed the pediatrician in Oklahoma, her baby would have died in the backseat of her car on the drive home.

  Day by day, Lynzi hung by a thread. The doctors warned Kelly and Ryan to prepare for the worst. Nine out of ten babies in this predicament—premature, undersized, heart and lungs under lethal pressure—would never recover. Kelly wasn’t even able to hold her suffering baby; whenever Lynzi sensed her mother was near, she would go into spasms of excitement and begin choking. For weeks, Kelly had to gaze through thick glass as her baby struggled to stay alive. She watched in agony every day as a respiratory specialist whacked Lynzi with such violence that the baby was jolted across the bed. “Believe me, it’s good for her,” a nurse assured Kelly. “He’s breaking up congestion. If she doesn’t fly in the air, he’s not doing his job.” Out in the hall, Ryan was dealing with his own nightmare: every few days, he’d see a gurney roll past covered in sheets, carrying another infant who had died of the same infection that Lynzi had.

  But bit by bit, Lynzi got stronger. After two months, she had defied the odds and was stable enough to go home. The Dokes returned to Colorado, but found that the life they’d left behind was gone. As a farmer, Ryan paid for his own health insurance, and he was stunned to discover that it covered so little of Lynzi’s care that the Dokes now owed the hospitals more than $1.5 million. Lynzi would continue to need expensive treatments and monitoring; just to safeguard her against another infection, for example, each of the Dokes’ two older daughters needed $40,000 worth of vaccinations. The Dokes had to sell their home and everything they owned and then begin the struggle to rebuild. Ryan left farming to work double shifts through the bitter Colorado winters as a telephone lineman, earning better health benefits but getting home so late each night that he barely had time to kiss Kelly in the doorway as she left for her graveyard shift as overnight nurse at the federal prison.

  Kelly could deal with her own exhaustion. It was Lynzi’s that began to worry her. By the time Lynzi was four, Kelly kept finding her asleep in odd corners of the house. “She’d find any small space—under a desk, behind a laundry basket—and tuck in there for a nap,” Kelly said. “She’d sleep in awkward positions, balled up in like a fetal position.” She called her doctor, who told them to bring Lynzi in immediately. Testing confirmed his fears: Lynzi’s heart was failing. The high altitude of the Rockies was too much strain for her damaged respiratory system, causing her frail heart to work overtime. “If you stay here,” he told the Dokes, “your daughter will die.”

  Once again, Ryan and Kelly abandoned everything they had and started over. They packed up their three kids, said good-bye to both their families and the mountains they loved, and moved into a basement apartment in the flatlands of Missouri. Ryan and Kelly found work, and over time, the family began to recover. So did Lynzi. When she reached middle school, she began jogging with the cross-country team, hoping it might strengthen her weak lungs. The experiment was so successful that within three years, Lynzi skyrocketed from a recovering sick girl into one of the top track prospects in the district. The Dokes were overjoyed, because Lynzi’s success also meant something else: she was now strong enough for the family to return to Colorado.

  On their first week back home after nearly twelve years, Kelly brought Lynzi to the dentist for a checkup, and was happy to discover the hygienist was none other than her old pal Barb Dolan. Kelly and Barb had both worked in the same prison medical unit, and they hadn’t seen each other since the Dokes had made their forced migration to Missouri.

  “Wow, how long have you been back?” Barb asked.

  Kelly answered that question with one of her own, and it showed better than anything else just how out of touch she’d been: “Any chance you still have your burros?” she asked Barb.

  * * *

  —

  Any chance? Is there any chance the sun is still rising and the earth is still round? Because you’d have better luck betting on those two coming to an end than on Barb’s being done with donkeys. True, Barb did retire from the sport. She hung up her halters and called it quits—before roaring back with a vengeance two years later and beating every man and woman in the field in the Leadville twenty-one-mile race.

  Wait—that’s not technically correct. No one would ever associate Barb Dolan with the words “roar” or “vengeance.” Mention her name to anyone who knows her, and you’ll trigger an instant involuntary response (“She’s such a sweetheart!”) followed by a barrage of stories to prove the point. When Caballo Blanco, the grouchy wanderer from Born to Run, turned up in Leadville with the flea-bitten Mexican stray he’d adopted, guess who opened her door and her fridge, even though she barely knew him? And continued to offer him clean sheets and hot meals from the day they met until the day he died?

  “Barb Dolan is the sweetest, quietest, most warmhearted person on the planet,” says Roger Pedretti, a fellow burro racer from Wisconsin. “Until the gun goes off. Then you’d best be out of her way. We have a saying when someone is slowing down: Go Barb Dolan on that burro!”

  Barb and her identical twin sister grew up in Boulder, where they both became U.S. National Team cyclists. But Barb also enjoyed running, and more and more she found herself leaving the bike behind so she could scramble the dirt trails. She was so torn between her two passions that in 1994, she created a whole new performance standard: she became the first person ever to complete both the Leadville 100 Trail Run and the Leadville 100-Mile Mountain Bike Race in the same month. Today, that achievement is called the Leadman Challenge, but it should really be the Double Dolan, or at the very least the Leadwoman, because no one attempted it until Barb showed it was possible.

  “You’d kick butt with my Dinky,” one of her trail-running buddies commented, which made no sense to Barb until he filled her in on the basics of burro racing. Even though Boulder is a hotbed of endurance athletes and only a few hours from Fairplay, the two are separated by the iron curtain dividing Carhartt from kombucha. Boulder is Prana and JUULs; Fairplay is Wranglers and Copenhagen. His Dinky, Jim Feistner explained to Barb, was a fast and extremely well-trained racing burro. But unfortunately, Dinky couldn’t compete in the upcoming World Championship because Jim’s knee was dodgy. Unless Barb wanted to step in?

  “It sounds crazy, but yeah, I’ll give it a try,” Barb said. “What do I do?”

  “Simple,” Jim said. “Just hold on to the rope.”

  Easier said. “What blew me away was the speed those donkeys tak
e off!” Barb recalls. “I was hanging on to Dinky for dear life. Luckily, Mary Walter took pity. She yelled, ‘Wrap the rope around your butt! Slow him down!’ Oh my god, I have never run so hard in my life. When I finished, I think I was crying. I swore I would never do that again.”

  But as the soreness faded, Barb kept ticking over the race in her mind. What made Mary Walter so much better than she was? Barb was stronger, faster, and more experienced as a competitor—she was an Olympic-caliber cyclist, for Pete’s sake—and her burro was every bit as speedy as Mary’s. So why did Mary soar through the mountains while Barb suffered? As an athletic challenge, burro racing was a lot trickier than it looked.

  “I’ve got to figure this out,” Barb decided. Once Barb commits, she has no second gear. She went full throttle from the get-go, even hitching a trailer to her truck and driving all the way to South Dakota after she saw an interesting-looking donkey for sale in a magazine. The donkey she wanted was gone by the time she got there, but Barb noticed an even bigger one in the pasture. “How about that fella?” she asked. “Mind if I take him for a run?” The owner had no idea what she was talking about, but handed Barb a halter and wished her luck.

  “I roped him up and he took off like a scalded-ass ape,” Barb would later say. “Maybe he liked stretching his legs, maybe he was wondering what this lady was doing behind him. But holy goodness, that guy was fast!”

  Not to mention, wild. Barb brought Chugs home and dedicated herself to mastering the art of burro training. For the first three months, Barb put in a full day of work and then spent every evening walking Chugs around her big rectangular paddock. She was trying to let Chugs know that his job was to go point and set pace, but Chugs had his own approach, which often involved spinning back and bowling Barb over the second her mind strayed. “He’d always keep an eye on me to see when I wasn’t looking,” Barb says. “Once, he got me so hard he knocked me out.” Still, Chugs was magnificent on the trails—as long as he was on the trails. They’d be rolling through the woods in perfect sync, Barb says, “and then BOOM!, he’d go tearing into the trees. I’d get him out and we’d start again, and BOOM!, he’s dragging me off the other way.”

  Animal-human partnerships don’t get much rockier than a teammate who’s constantly threatening you with concussion or escape, but Barb was willing to blame part of it on her own inexperience. She would pepper Mary Walter and Sue Conroe with questions, and the two veterans would invite Barb to join them for all-day training sessions high in the Rockies. Barb and Chugs began to figure each other out, and the better they communicated, the faster they ran. By the end of three years, Barb had been through an apprenticeship that would have put a Shaolin monk to shame. But when she came out the other side, there was nothing a donkey could throw at her that she couldn’t handle.

  The gun had gone off. Time to get out of her way.

  “That’s when I became a force to be reckoned with,” says Barb. That’s not a brag; that’s an undersell. For the next two decades, this gentle dental hygienist was one of the most ferocious burro racers on the planet. Barb won the women’s Triple Crown an astonishing thirteen times, including ten years in a row, by scoring the best finishing times in the three longest races. For years, Barb held the record for the most dominant performance in burro-race history, winning the Leadville twenty-one-miler in 2010 by such a huge margin that the guy in second place finished a full half-hour behind her. That was also Barb’s first race in two years after coming out of retirement—at age fifty-four.

  Barb sprints to another World Championship.

  But being best will beat you up. By 2014, Barb was thinking it was time to re-retire. The downside of running with fireballs like Chugs and her newest burro, Dakota, is you often don’t have a say in how hard you hammer the descents. Barb always had a blast cannonballing down those long, rocky drops, especially when it meant blowing past Hal Walter and Tom Sobal, but sooner or later, twenty years of recklessness leads to a reckoning. Barb’s hips and knees were feeling trashed, and all those big winter miles in below-zero windchill were getting to be a grind. Barb and her husband had a sweet little farm on the outskirts of Leadville, just a short mountain bike ride from Twin Lakes, where Barb could finally ease back and spend her time pedaling the foothills and hiking Hope Pass.

  One thing bugged her: what about Chugs and Dakota? Chugs still had plenty of steam left in him, and Dakota was just hitting his stride. Now that she’d created such fine-tuned racing machines, Barb hated to leave them just standing around in her backyard. She wasn’t sure what to do—until the dentist’s office door swung open, and in walked Kelly Doke.

  * * *

  —

  This could be a reeeeallly bad idea, Barb thought as she led Lynzi into the corral.

  This kid was so quiet, and crazy young, and skinny; Barb was pretty sure Chugs had packed away more for breakfast that morning than this gal had on her bones. Barb didn’t want to scare Lynzi away, but seriously, it takes some muscle to handle a 700-pound runaway. Most burro racers start after they’ve reached peak strength, in their twenties and thirties, not before they’ve gone to their first freshman mixer. And what was the deal with Lynzi’s health—was Barb going to be calling for help when this kid collapsed at 12,000 feet?

  “Lynzi is tougher than she looks,” Kelly assured her. “That’s the only reason she’s still alive.”

  Barb got it. All Lynzi wanted was a chance. So Barb handed her a halter and began sharing the wisdom that greats like Mary Walter and Diane Markis had passed down to her. Barb showed Lynzi where to position herself (Get behind him and tuck in close, like you’re joined at the hip), and schooled her in the Growl. “Lynzi, you can’t just whisper ‘C’mon, Dakota,’ like you’re feeding a kitten,” Barb scolded. “It’s got to come from your gut. HhhheeeeyYAAAAA! YA! Git goin’!”

  Barb even unveiled her secret weapon: the Trash Wrapper Trick. The Growl will get a burro going, Barb explained, but it’s wicked hard to slow them down. So early on in the Chugs years, back when Barb was coming home bruised and bloody after being dragged through juniper thickets, she began experimenting with an old technique from nineteenth-century Russia. During her long training runs, Barb told Lynzi, she would always carry a few Clif Bars in her pockets. Every time she stopped for a snack, she made a big deal out of opening the wrapper, crinkling and tearing it loudly, before sharing a bite of the bar with Chugs. Over time, the Pavlovian conditioning locked in: whenever Chugs heard the crinkle of a wrapper, he hit the brakes. If they were bombing downhill and Barb couldn’t match Chugs’s speed, all she had to do was reach into her pocket.

  That spring and summer, Barb and Lynzi got together nearly every weekend. Sometimes Kelly joined them on her mountain bike; other times, Barb would have a little All-Star team reunion and invite along her best bud/archrival/multiple Triple Crown champion Karen Thorpe. No big deal, everybody, just a ninth-grade novice out smacking balls with Venus and Serena. Barb was always on Lynzi to speak up and take command of Dakota, but privately, she loved the girl’s quiet strength. Talkers aren’t listeners, and Barb had seen too many first-timers who acted like ugly Americans abroad, thinking all they had to do was shout louder instead of learning the language.

  “You’ll see people screaming, all this high-energy stuff, but the more you do that, the more you confuse a burro,” Barb told Lynzi. “All you need is a few quiet commands. Burros give you a lot of signals, so you have to be in tune with that. Hal has that. Curtis has that. Burros have such big hearts, and that’s what makes this sport so special. It’s all about bonding.”

  Once, two of the world’s best ultrarunners came to Fairplay to try their hand at burro racing. After triumphing in the toughest contests on the planet, it was time to tick this box on their bucket list. Max King had won the World Mountain Running title and the 100K World Championship, while his buddy Ryan Sandes had conquered basically everything else: the Leadville 100, Weste
rn States, all the major desert races, even the Grand Himalayan Trail. Max and Ryan were paired with fast donkeys and tutored by none other than Meredith Hodges, the Trainer of Trainers, a mule and donkey specialist with such command of the equine mind that even Hal Walter seeks out her advice.

  “If you get too cocky, they will most definitely humiliate you, and they’ll pick the biggest crowd to do it,” Meredith warned Max and Ryan. She taught them the rudiments of burro communication, then turned them loose to try their luck in the World Championship Pack Burro Race. “If these guys have really done their homework with their donkeys, if they’ve really fostered that relationship in a positive manner, they will be running together,” Meredith predicted. “If you engage in a partnership with them—if you are polite, considerate, respectful in the things you ask—and you keep it fun and exciting, they’ll like doing things with you. They like the extra excitement. They think it’s pretty cool.”

  On paper, it was the perfect marriage of animal and human. On race day, it was a disaster. Ryan and Max spent a good part of the morning pulling their donkeys up the mountain, trudging like galley slaves with ropes over their shoulders. Ryan finished in sixth place, well behind weekend warriors like Caitlin Jones, and Laura Hronik, and fifty-seven-year-old, AARP-eligible Hal Walter. Max was even farther back in sixteenth—out of sixteen. The pros could run like the wind, but they couldn’t partner for crap.