The more joy you put out, the more you’ll see reflected back at you. Plus it was the best way to fend off Krissy’s mom, who’d promised to make her stop if she didn’t look alert and “with it.”
#2 Make someone else smile.
When you’re thinking about someone else, you forget how bad you feel.
#3 Race like a demon.
There’s no fun in just plodding along, right? “Make no mistake, I count the ponytails in front of me,” Krissy says. “But only after I take care of #1 and #2.”
So before the running world knew Krissy’s name, they knew her face. Spectators pointed as she flew into the aid stations, asking one another, “Who’s the smiling girl?” She climbed the hills above Bellingham, looking down at the sea of mossy green firs sloping to the Pacific, and even though a vicious rain was blowing as she reached Mile 22 and had to climb a nasty hill called the Chinscraper, Krissy was elated. This is my place, she thought. This is where I’m supposed to be.
Krissy’s rules were more like laws of physics: as long as she obeyed them, she was unstoppable. For the next few years, she ran the mountains like a thing unleashed. In the 2007 Hardrock 100, only two guys could beat her. At Hawaii’s notorious HURT 100, only one. And no one—man or woman—could defeat her in a 100K in Oregon. But perhaps the greatest achievement of the Early Krissy Era was her assault on the Grand Slam: in eleven weeks, she ran all four iconic American 100-milers, becoming the youngest woman to complete the series and the second-fastest ever. (If you breezed through those numbers, take another look: in less than three months, Krissy ran sixteen mountain marathons.)
Of course, the happy-happy stuff couldn’t go on forever. Krissy was becoming a bona fide phenomenon, and she began to realize she could actually make a living at the sport. Her big moment was coming up quick: the 2009 Western States 100, the premier American showcase for trail-running talent and the perfect opportunity for Krissy to become the first woman to win it all. She’d never felt stronger or savvier, and two fast guys agreed to pace her. Time to buckle down and get serious. On race day, she wiped the grin off her face, went out hard…
And hated it. She placed second among the women and thirteenth overall, but it wasn’t her finish that disappointed her. It was the way she’d zombied through the whole day, feeling dead-eyed and anxious. She ran a hundred miles and enjoyed none of them, so focused on what she’d get at the end that she missed everything along the way. “I missed the beautiful sunrise,” she realized afterward. “I wasn’t smiling.” She wanted to show her pacers she was just as tough as the guys, so she barely grunted as she charged through the aid stations and grabbed her drink bottles. She pushed harder than she ever had, reached deeper…and ran slower.
Krissy spent the next few days on her sofa, sore to the bone and wondering what she would do next with her life. Racing was over, obviously. If competing at the top of the sport meant putting yourself through that kind of torture, she decided, then no thanks. She replayed the race in her mind, starting from the final moments before the starting gun. She remembered huddling with the pack in the pre-dawn gloom, peering through the dark at the massive hill ahead: a four-mile heartbreaker shooting 3,000 feet straight into the sky. After that, you have ninety-six miles to go.
It really strips you down, Krissy thought. Running might be the only time in your life when you’re not defined by how much you make, where you’re from, what you did with your hair. “We’re all stripped down to shorts and T-shirts,” Krissy reflected. “Stripped to the core of who we are.” Take her pal Scott Jurek, the most mild-mannered Clark Kent in the world. Ultrarunning has always been vexed by the mystery of what kind of weird voodoo spell comes over Scott on race day, when he tears off his glasses and suddenly becomes an absolute Superman savage, continually defeating the most ferocious racers in the world. At the starting line, Krissy recalled, Scott always leaps into the air and screams like Braveheart.
That isn’t a show, Krissy realized. That’s Scott. The core of who he is.
So who was she? Krissy stirred from the sofa, testing her aching legs. There was one way to find out.
Eight weeks after her crash and burn in California, Krissy flew to France for the biggest and most prestigious ultra in the world: the sadistic, soul-crushing, 106-mile Ultra Trail du Mont-Blanc. No American had ever won UTMB; few had even finished. Dean Karnazes, Scott Jurek, Geoff Roes, Zach Miller—all were at their peak when they attempted UTMB, and they all had their asses handed to them. Hal Koerner, one of the top American ultrarunners of the past decade, finished UTMB only once in three attempts, and even then it took him forty hours and a plastic bag around his balls because his testicles were chafed so raw. All ultra races are brutal in their own way, but UTMB is brutal in every way: you’re frozen by night, scorched by day, tripped by scrabbly rocks, suffocated by nearly 33,000 feet of cloud-top climbs (imagine climbing Mount Katahdin—right after you’d climbed Mount Everest).
Krissy blew all that negative noise out of her mind. Six years earlier, she’d won a much shorter version of the UTMB, but for her attempt this time on the official course, she decided to reverse everything she’d done at Western States. Her mom was right; if you’re not engaged and “with it,” you might as well be somewhere else. So Krissy invited a gang of girlfriends to serve as her crew, and instead of hardcore performance shorts, she dug through her dresser until she found something cute—so cute, in fact, that during the race, Krissy could hear spectators in mountainside villages calling out, “That runner is wearing a skirt!” When she stumbled out of the woods and into the aid stations, she made sure to stop for a bowl of pasta with her gal pals and remind them—remind them—to make sure and get some rest. The sun rose, and set, and when it rose again, Krissy was still having a blast—and still in the lead. She snapped the tape to set a new course record, becoming the first American to win UTMB.
Krissy’s skirt-and-a-smile style was so thrilling, so audacious and inspiring, that a pediatric nurse in Sacramento wondered if it would work for her too. Rory Bosio worked long shifts in a pediatric intensive-care unit, caring for infants who were just a razor’s edge from death. The last thing she needed in her life was any more stress, so whenever she was off the clock, she couldn’t wait to get outside and play in the woods. Rory Nordic-skied all winter and ran trails all summer, spending so much time on the rocky heights that her family called her “Billy Goat.” When she tried her hand at ultrarunning, she was a natural—but just like Krissy, when she got to the big show, her soul hit the wall. Rory trained so hard for the 2010 Western States and raced it so fiercely that for months afterward, she could barely walk up stairs without gasping for air. Her doctor found she was so anemic, he recommended a blood transfusion.
Are you kidding me? Rory thought. She was stuck in Aesop’s smuggest fable. She was allowed to like running but not love it, because if she loved it too much, she’d lose it altogether. The Billy Goat’s short, glorious racing career was over before it had really begun.
Unless…
Maybe it was time for someone else to steer the ship. She’d tried letting “Rory the Disciplined Nurse” and “Billy Goat the Hard-Charging Hill Marauder” run the show, and those two had landed her in the hospital with a needle in her arm. All she had left were long shots, so she might as well throw the dice and hand things over to her alter-alter ego, the side of her that had gone underground since her days and nights of college partying: Welcome back, Bozo.
You think Bozo trains? Get real. Bozo plays. Whenever there was snow, Rory would strap a mini-sled to her back, run up the biggest hill near her home in Truckee, California, and bomb back down on her belly. On warm days, she’d churn across the lake on her stand-up paddleboard, or head to the park to rock out with her Hula-Hoop. Once a week, she had a regular date with Alejandro, her chunky but beloved beach cruiser, and together they’d crank all eighteen miles to the top of Donner Pass, one sin
gle-gear pedal push at a time. Along the way, she’d treat herself to snacks, reaching into her sports bra to pull out the Baggies of boiled sweet potatoes and avocados she’d stashed. Rory began to live the advice she’d gotten from a good friend: every day should be “a grand adventure where you’re in the backcountry doing what you love.”
Three years after Rory had been broken by Western States, Bozo edged into the mob of 2,500 runners from nearly a hundred countries awaiting the start of the 2013 UTMB. By the next morning, 2,493 of them were still suffering in the mountains while Rory was leaping madly across the finish line and then—to the roaring delight of the crowd—twirling to thank everyone with a ballerina curtsy. Her performance was mind-blowing: Rory was the first woman and seventh overall (!), and her time of 22 hours and 37 minutes shattered Krissy Moehl’s record by more than two hours. By comparison, Rory was a full half-day faster than Hal Koerner’s best showing.
Rory stuffed her trophy into her luggage and headed home, returning to her twenty-four-hour shifts at the hospital and picking up where she’d left off with Alejandro. One year later, she was back at UTMB, but this time she was the Bozo to beat. No more slipping anonymously through the pack; all eyes were pinned to the bull’s-eye on her back. But not for long: Rory smoked the international field for the second time in a row, becoming the first woman to win back-to-back UTMB titles. Skirt-and-a-smile had triumphed again.
* * *
—
So why were American women like Krissy, and Rory, and 2007 champ Nikki Kimball able to crush UTMB, while American men were limping behind with sandwich bags on their nuts?
Probably for much the same reason that Zeke and I cratered on our first run through the maze to Tanya’s house. We were stronger than Mika, and faster—and when things got rough, we fell harder. We were more afraid of looking soft than we were of falling short, so instead of following her lead and playing it shrewd, we insisted on brute-forcing our way into trouble. Krissy Moehl runs into the same thing all the time. During races, she’ll catch up to slower guys on a narrow trail and try to pass. Race etiquette dictates they should move aside, but instead, they’ll speed up, so worried about “getting chicked” that they’ll match her, surge for surge, until—inevitably—the wheels come off and Krissy is free to blast past. If these guys were smart, they’d step aside immediately and draft from behind—but testosterone ain’t smart.
Mika is. She got a copy of Krissy’s training book, Running Your First Ultra, and it became her bible. Mika still considered herself a dancer, not a runner, and here was Krissy Moehl basically saying Perfect! Just the right attitude. Mika looked to Krissy for guidance on her solo workouts, and soon her mileage and foot speed were ticking higher. The stronger Mika got, the more confident she became, and that self-assurance traveled down the rope to Matilda. The bossy little donkey could tell her partner was now in charge; during our runs I’d see her eye roll back toward Mika, ready for orders.
By mid-June, it was still anyone’s guess whether our weird chowder of cold creeks, Thief Vaults, be-your-own-bliss, and thirty-second sprints was actually going to work, but the time for guessing was running out. Race day was in little more than a month, and we still hadn’t found a driver. Before I threw myself full-time into that search, I wanted to know if it was really worth it. So early one Saturday morning, we put ourselves to the test. We gathered the donkeys and headed off toward our old nemesis: the Big One.
Zeke and Sherm take a breather in the maze. Note Zeke’s homemade sandals.
Four weeks earlier, we’d tried to run the Big One and it beat us. This time we were looking for payback—with interest. The goal was to run up and down the Big One six times and cap that with a round-trip of the maze. If we pulled it off, we were looking at a solid sixteen-plus miles, with about half of them straight uphill. Luckily, the morning broke foggy, so we were already on our third trip up the Big One before the heat began to bear down. We notched another climb, and another, and almost before we knew it, we were looking at one another at the top of the hill.
“I can’t believe it,” Mika said. She was flushed and breathless, but more like a lottery winner than a shipwreck survivor. “Are we still doing the maze?”
“You up for it?” I asked.
“I…” Mika paused, mentally scanning her body for signs of the system failures she was sure had to be there, but she couldn’t find any. “Sure!”
Zeke was down on a knee. “You good?” I asked, before realizing he was adjusting the leather thong on the homemade gladiator sandals he’d begun using for his runs. Zeke had gotten so into the spirit of natural movement and Early American–style woodsmanship that he’d learned to make his own trail-running footwear.
“Absolutely,” Zeke said. “Let’s get Shermie out of the sun.”
We paid a price for our bravado, struggling to push our sore legs up the maze’s roller-coaster climbs, but it was worth it. We finally popped out and headed for home, cruising down the Big One on our way to a long, cool dip under the waterfall. We tied the donkeys in the shade and plunged in, so roasting hot it felt like steam was sizzling off our bodies. Mika and I lounged in the swimming hole, while Zeke—being Zeke—detected a structural flaw in the rough pile of rocks serving as a dam and began restacking them in accordance with proper Euclidean principles.
Hunger and a desperate need for BELTTS*3 eventually drove us out of the creek. We walked the last half mile toward home alongside the donkeys, still not fully believing what we’d done that morning. We didn’t feel good anymore. We felt unfreakingbelievable. Zoned in. Completely on our game.
Until something snapped.
*1 From Donkey Tao, chapter 9: Because nobody really has any idea how you’re supposed to teach a goat to race, Nancy invented her own method. “I’d sneak up behind and goose him. He’d take off running and I’d chase him. Then he’d chase me. Then he’d jump on the car and dance around on it till my husband came out and we had to stop.”
Lest you look down on butt-thumbing and carhood rave parties as crude and unscientific fitness strategies, consider that Nancy went on to reign as a three-time Grand Champion who never missed a race for fifteen consecutive years.
*2 You can see the parkour athletes of Lancaster in action in the piece I wrote for Outside magazine. https://www.outsideonline.com/1928031/concrete-jungle-worlds-best-gym.
*3 Bacon, egg, lettuce, tomato, and Tabasco sandwiches.
23
The Tao of Steve Rides Again
“Does this feel right to you?” I asked a guy named Nate, holding out my left hand.
About a month earlier, I’d added my own side hustle to Coach Eric’s need-for-speed plan. I’d heard that every Wednesday night, a group of guys played two hours of full-court hoops in my daughters’ school gym. I hadn’t picked up a ball in thirty years, not since I quit cold turkey when I almost turned down that reporting job in Portugal because I was so attached to my home courts in Philly. It was kind of a rock-bottom moment, a sickening awareness that you’re making decisions for all the wrong reasons. Now I was fifty-four, and most of the guys in this Wednesday-night game hadn’t even been born the last time I played. Before I jumped in, I checked with Coach Eric.
“Great idea,” he said. “Lateral movement, explosive power, short bursts of speed, upper-body work—all of it exactly what you need. Just don’t get hurt.”
“Not a chance,” I assured him. “I’m only there to run the court. My feet aren’t leaving the ground.”
* * *
—
“What do you think?” I asked Nate.
I’d been playing defense under the basket when another player fell back against me. I held him off with my hand, jamming one of my fingers. I gave it a hard pull, trying to pop the knuckle back out, then forgot about it—until I went for a rebound and a million shards of molten shrapnel shot up my arm. I came off the court, grimacing
and gripping my wrist, and went over to Nate, who was taking a break on the sidelines, for his opinion.
“You know I’m not, uh, exactly a doctor,” said Nate. He’s actually a customer rep for a local dental office, but he proceeded to examine my hand anyway. He probed it gingerly with a finger. “I’m not positive, but I don’t think anything in your body is ever supposed to click. You’re clicking.”
“Probably just a little, like, dislocation,” I said, more to myself than to Nate. It was June 22, exactly forty-one days until the World Championship. We’d overcome so much, trained so hard, and developed such a bond with the donkeys, I couldn’t believe I might have suddenly ruined it all. No way. It couldn’t be broken.
That was what I also told the emergency room doctor several hours later, when she came into the examining room with my diagnosis. “It’s feeling much better,” I said, holding up my swollen, black-and-blue hand. “See? It’s just bruised.”
She stared at me. “You know I have your X-rays, right? You’re not going to talk me out of it.” She slipped the films onto the big lightscreen.
“It’s broken,” she announced.
“Badly? Or like, hairline?”
“Take a look.”
She pointed to something on the screen that looked like an exploded firecracker. One of the bones in my left hand had shattered in the middle, leaving the two ends too splintered to knit on their own. I was going to need surgery, she explained. They should be able to reconstruct the bone with six screws and a metal plate, but there was a bright side: If I healed quickly and really applied myself to physical therapy, I should regain full strength and mobility right away.
“Probably no later than the end of the summer,” she concluded.
Running with Sherman Page 27