Hardrock from the sidelines, part 3

A San Juans marmot, apparently with Hardrock aspirations

The night before the Hardrock 100, I left Beat alone to his pre-race fretting, jogged away from our riverside campsite, and climbed Kendall Mountain. This was perhaps my favorite hike/run of our visit to Colorado, despite its lowly status. The path up the mountain was a nondescript jeep road that's still open to vehicle use. The mountain itself was really just a broad ridge towering over the town to Silverton, a benchmark with an elevation of 13,066 feet. The only wildlife I saw was a frantic marmot who had excellent running form. The only other hiker I saw was another Hardrock bystander who climbed up an avalanche path to reach the peak, got spooked by the exposure on his route, and then balked at me when I told him the road down was six miles long. He wanted to return to Silverton in time for the pre-race spaghetti feed, so he set out in another direction to look for a trail (good luck with that.) I too wanted to descend the mountain in an hour or less, so I made like Marmot and loped into my best steep-rocky-downhill "sprint."

Forty-eight hours later, I drove the dust-smeared Ford Fusion toward the last checkpoint on the Hardrock course. Cunningham was located in a narrow valley lined with wildflowers and steep canyon walls. It was ninety-one miles into the race, and I knew the last nine would likely take Beat four or five hours to complete. This math was accurate, but I managed to botch the equations for his arrival time. I thought he'd roll in around 6 p.m., so I arrived at 5, set up my tent, and laid on the cool grass to stare serenely at the white puffy clouds. I hadn't seen Beat since he started his death march out of Grouse Gulch, thirty miles and thirteen hours earlier, so I was still able to convince myself that he had somehow turned things around. When 6 p.m. neared, a racer who left Grouse Gulch around the same time as Beat arrived at Cunningham. Julian looked strong and said he felt great. "How do you think Beat is faring?" I asked, because Julian and Beat traveled together some before. "Dunno," Julian said. "But I can tell you I passed probably twenty people on that last section. It's rough, especially if you're not feeling well."

 Cunningham was fairly close to Kendall Mountain when I looked at it on a map, although maps have a way of making everything look close ... flat ... accessible. The map is what brought me to Kendall Mountain, because I wanted a three-hour hike that I could start right from Silverton. Google Earth made it look easy. So up I went.

I remember this from my days of consistently showing up late for work in Juneau — once I start to climb with a goal in mind, I'm essentially incapable of stopping until I reach the top. It's not that I'm a crazed peak-bagger, not really. I'm just as happy to reach a broad pass or a mountain meadow. It's the goal that drives me forward. When realities trump my expectations, I'll just adjust my expectations, often to the detriment of being on time to prior commitments. I had been lured onto this path by the common misconception that "roads are easy," but the jeep road to Kendall was a road only in the most rudimentary sense. The narrow path was strewn with ankle-wrenching loose rocks and gained altitude at a rate of a thousand feet per mile. As far as footing goes, it was my most difficult climb in the San Juans. But I had committed, and I was not going to concede my three-hour tour of Kendall. So I put my ragged lungs to work, and climbed hard.

Silverton as seen from Kendall Mountain

Shortly after I settled into my tent at Cunningham, the sky opened up. I couldn't fathom how a storm already moved in amid the blue sky I was basking in minutes earlier, but it was intense. Rain fell in sheets, lightning pulsed in the sky like a strobe light, and wind gusted to upwards of sixty miles per hour, enough to nearly collapse the walls of my Seedhouse 2 tent. I braced my arms on the poles to keep it from buckling and shivered, because even though I knew I was in a relatively safe position, it was a scary storm — and Beat was still up there, somewhere far above timberline, in the fierce heart of it.

Twenty minutes went by and the rain finally diminished to a trickle, but the fear remained. I crawled out of my tent and saw a group of four racers jogging along the wall of the adjacent cliff — the trail cut a switchbacking path down it, and they descended in plain view for more than ten minutes. When I realized that the course line of sight was that large, I abandoned the meager comfort of my tent and set up a standing vigil.

I can't say I've experienced the "runner's high" very many times in my life. Biking highs most definitely, hiking highs on great climbs, and snowboarding highs back when I was less risk-adverse to gravity sports. But the runner's high eludes me. I wonder if this is because, among all of these activities, I'm poorest at running. Running is hard for me, both physically and mentally. My form is awkward, my legs get wobbly, my feet stumble and I fall. I'm working on this, but the steps don't come naturally, and I often spend much of my running time stressed and over-focused. Rarely can I just let go and run, free and unhindered, to the point of bliss.

The obstacles that made Kendall Mountain a tough climb created an even tougher descent. Loose rocks rolled like wheels under my feet, the steep pitches somehow seemed even steeper, and 6 p.m. was much too soon. I'd have to do something like ten-minute miles to make it, which seemed laughable when I was side-stepping down boulders. But I wanted to try. I grasped my secret-weapon poles, tightened the laces on my Cascadias, and let go of everything else.

I kept my Cunningham vigil for hours, horrible hours. I should have done better math or put more faith in Beat's experience, but instead I watched racer after racer who weren't Beat and Daniel descending the cliff, and I fretted. I wandered over to the aid station and watched as the other racers huddled shivering in blankets. I listened to their accounts of the terrible storm, of hail and lightning, of crouching next to rocks smaller than them, of picking their way along exposed cliffs slicked with sleet, of hypothermia and fear. Twilight arrived imperceptibly beneath a sheet of dark clouds. "Beat should have been here two hours ago," I fretted. Darkness came. I stood vigil next to the trail as bobbing headlamps descended into the valley. And still Beat and Daniel weren't among them.

Still sleep-deprived and slightly irrational, I was close to panic after a long lull in headlamp lights, when finally a set of six emerged from the rim. The final two in the small group took quite a bit longer than the others to descend, but at 10:14, Beat finally emerged onto the road, followed closely by Daniel. I can't say I've seen Beat so shattered before. He didn't notice me walking alongside him for some minutes, and slumped over immediately once we reached the aid station. I tried to coax him with soup and ginger ale, but he wasn't interested in anything. His pack was still full of uneaten food. Beat was soaked and Daniel was shivering. I gave Daniel a down coat and took Beat to the car to warm up. He fell asleep with a cup of soup still in his hands.

It's easy to say "there's only nine more miles," but in Beat's state it might as well have been another hundred. Even his fumes were long spent, he couldn't eat without puking, and even slow steps caused his heart rate to spike to the point of exhaustion. I decided I was going to try to let him sleep until an average of one and a half miles per hour wouldn't allow him to finish in time — which was midnight. He woke up after ten minutes and began to gather up the remaining dry clothes in his drop bag. He wanted it all for the push into Silverton.

I'm not often comfortable while running, but when I am, I feel like the whole world is moving with me. Descending Kendall, the daunting vastness of the San Juans closed in and my vision narrowed to the delicate puzzle of every footfall. My lungs burned with the effort and my shins ached slightly, but my feet were dancing around the rocks and I felt so free that each step seemed beyond consequence. I didn't have to fall on my face or break my ankle. I didn't have to accept that I wasn't "born to run." I could be invincible if I wanted to be.

After setting my alarm for 2:30 a.m., I crawled into the tent and collapsed in my own exhaustion for two more hours. The drive back to Silverton was silent and dark, and I took strange comfort in an idea that Beat was so deep into his struggle that he had reached the point of apathy, and wasn't suffering any more. The finish line at the Silverton High School gym was like a morgue, with people sleeping beneath sheets on the bleachers and successful Hardrockers shuffling like zombies around the food table.

I took one trip to the bathroom and managed to miss Beat's own shuffle into the finish line at 4:16 a.m. for a finishing time of 46 hours and 16 minutes. I missed the opportunity to take a picture of him kissing the famous Hardrock rock, and had to settle for a hug and a portrait taken shortly after he sat down. The triumphant rock-kissing picture is the popular image for this race, but in my opinion, this portrait is more telling. The Hardrock 100 pummeled Beat, slowly and forcefully. He fought back in the only way he knows how, by not quitting, by continuing to move forward, even when it was the last thing he wanted to do. He was the fighter with bloodshot eyes and a swollen face, horizontal on the mat after a near-certain knockout blow, only to struggle upward at the ninth second and deliver his last decisive punch. And when it was all over, he did, ever so slightly, manage a smile.

I'm so proud of him, and inspired, too, to try harder in my own running. 

Hardrock from the sidelines, part 2

Crewing for an ultramarathon can be an unrelenting job, especially when it stretches out for nearly two days. Luckily for me, Beat is really low maintenance (probably too much so, because I didn't pick up on the red flags of his food problems until it was too late.) So for me, crewing was just a good excuse to travel to the different communities of the San Juans and spectate the race in the best way possible — by hiking against it.

My first chance to see Beat was at mile 29, in Telluride. I last visited Telluride in 2002 during a bike tour, and still retain many wistful recollections of the little town tucked away in a nook surrounded by huge mountain walls. My return did not disappoint — skies were blue, temperatures were warm, and the race checkpoint was buzzing with excitement as volunteers and other crew members awaited the first runners. When I visited Telluride ten years ago, I remember looking up from the campground at a trail switchbacking up an adjacent cliff. We had too many bike miles to cover to go exploring, but I vowed to return. "Someday," I said, "I'm going to climb that and see what's up there."

That trail was the Bridal Veil Falls road, which, at 10 a.m., was just the place to watch the leaders knock out the first 50K. Because my shin had a few good days, and because I wanted to do some "intensity" training for UTMB, I hiked as hard as I could. Although I was "low" at 9,000 feet, the air still scoured my lungs like steel wool. My legs, however, felt great. I even dabbled with uphill running, but my lungs couldn't process enough oxygen to make it work. There's a consistent degree of difficulty to the Hardrock course that is tough to quantify against other trail events. Even though there's no technical climbing and relatively minimal off-trail travel, I'd still rate Hardrock as closer to a mountaineering traverse than a trail run. The fact that only one runner has finished in less than 24 hours in the history of the event is telling — Hardrock is a "race" happening at four miles per hour, or less. On anything uphill, whenever I was moving faster than three miles per hour, I was working as hard as I could for a pace that felt downright speedy. This is one aspect of Hardrock I can really get behind — a person can finish the event, and even do relatively well, by perfecting their power hiking.

I was looking forward to seeing the first runners pass, and hoping that Joe Grant would be among them. I had the pleasure of spending some time with Joe in Alaska during the week between the Susitna 100 and the Iditarod 350. We had a great time commiserating about the Su100, and you could say Joe was my fan-girl favorite. Unfortunately, no one passed until I had reached a cross-country traverse, and by then I was unintentionally so far off course that all I could see were a spread-out series of bright T-shirts descending a green slope in the distance. Joe would go on to finish second at Hardrock in 25:06 (for what it's worth, more than an hour faster than he finished the Susitna 100 ... not that I'm arguing the Alaska race is more difficult by any means. Ha!) Anyway, I worked my way back to the course in time to see Karl Meltzer cruise by in sixth or seventh position, running downhill — with poles! Another one of my favorite unconventional techniques validated by a fast guy.

In those early, friendly hours, it was easy to see why Hardrock is such a popular event among distance runners. The setting was stunning, the miles were rewarding, and the challenges were variable enough to create a more level playing field between typically fast runners and determined mountain hikers. Hardrock is sometimes criticized for being overly risky, but I appreciate the fact that there are still popular endurance venues that haven't been sanitized with heavy-handed safety measures or relegated to tedious loops of well-traveled trails. The adventurous spirit still flows freely through the Hardrock 100, and although it is certainly a different kind of adventure than true mountaineering or wilderness travel, it is most definitely an adventure.

At the top of Oscar's Pass, elevation 13,100, I left a message for Beat near a rock cairn. I was bursting with adrenaline from my eight-mile climb and so excited that Beat was lucky enough to have a good excuse to travel these trails for a full hundred miles. Of course these thoughts changed dramatically as I watched his physical state deteriorate, but at the time I could still let myself believe that Hardrock was simple fun.

I launched down the pass at a full run, determined to at least jog the entire descent if my shin was up for it. Less than a half mile from the pass, a previously unnoticed black cloud overhead unleashed a deluge of hail unlike anything I've experienced in a while. It beat my exposed skin like air gun pellets and accumulated on the ground like snow. I think later in the race, such a storm would be disheartening, but for these front-runners at mile twenty-five, it was still a source of glee. Two runners passed me sprinting and giggling, one holding a shirt over her head like a child dodging the rain.

The descent went remarkably well for me. I ran most of the way — at eight miles my longest run post-shin injury, and mostly downhill to boot. It also rained the entire time, leaving me soaked to the skin and buzzing with endorphins. I was so excited that I couldn't wait to tell Beat, and had to remind myself to restrain my desire to brag about a tiny downhill run when he was in the midst of battling the Hardrock 100.

I never had a chance to see any of that same excitement in Beat. By the time he descended into Telluride at 3:30 p.m., he was already sick. I'm still second-guessing what I could have done to help deflect this downward sprial. I could have made a run to buy him a sandwich in Telluride, or purchased a pizza in Ouray. His strategy had been to rely on aid station food, but clearly this wasn't working. He wasn't eating, and neither of us had prepared anything to fall back on. Once a stomach goes completely empty it can be almost impossible to get it back — hard enough to cope with if you're out for a day run, and close to unfathomable when you have what would turn out to be thirty-six hours left in a high-intensity, often high-risk mountain effort. I have one prior experience with trying to function for long periods of time on bonked-out fumes: My 2008 Iditarod ride. It was a complicated situation — there were times I felt so depleted that I truly believed I might just pass out and die of exposure, but when I tried to stuff down any of the food I had with me, I felt so nauseated that the death option seemed more desirable. I was quite new to endurance efforts at the time, and I certainly made my share of mistakes, but I still remember that feeling vividly. It is the worst kind of pain — because it hurts immensely, and yet you know you can keep moving through it, so your decisions aren't as easy as being forced to quit.

I've alluded several times to the irrationality of all of this, the search for motivation in something like the Hardrock 100. Since I've never run the Hardrock 100, it's not my place to say. I know there were times in the night, while waiting desperately to see Beat's headlamp bobbing along the high cliffs, that I vowed to withdraw from UTMB. "It's all ridiculous," I lamented to myself. "Impossible and ridiculous." But in the next minute, I would turn to see a break in the inky storm clouds, framing an incredible depth of stars, and I imagined Beat high on the ridge looking at those same stars and feeling an even greater gratitude, hoping the storms had broken. Really, life is ridiculous and irrational. Why do we get up every morning, make coffee, beat the streets with efforts that time will erase effortlessly, in a generation? It's because these lives are all we have, they're what we are, and the things we do are as meaningful or pointless as they are to us. I believe a life spent in search of awe is not a bad life. To quote Annie Dillard (yes, again): "You don't have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary."


To be continued, again ... I know, I know. There's still more I want to write. And this is my blog. :-)

Hardrock from the sidelines

After two hours of sleep I was back on the circuitous crew course, bouncing a Ford Fusion up a boulder-choked jeep road. The narrow road hugged a rock wall on one side and a yawning black abyss on the other. When there wasn't a good line down the middle, I just gunned the gas and drove the tires directly over the larger boulders rather than risk severing the car's exhaust system. I was glad Beat wasn't around to see me driving the rental car this way — although I wondered if he'd even care at this point. Say what you will about the complete irrationality of a hundred-mile mountain traverse, but there's real merit to the simple yet profound realizations that emerge when you reduce yourself to survival mode. For example, one might realize just how silly it can be to fret about car rental insurance fees, and just how powerful of a gift it can be convert a lukewarm cup of soup into the energy to run up mountains. When you've lost the ability to do the latter, the former seems like a monumentally small price in contrast.

Grouse Gulch had the feel of a refugee camp, with mud-and-blood-stained runners slumped over chairs and huddled in blankets while well-meaning volunteers rushed about in mostly futile efforts to be helpful. It was the kind of atmosphere I would expect at 4 a.m., hour 23 and mile 61 of the Hardrock 100. A large majority of the U.S. population has never heard of this hundred-mile endurance run in Colorado's San Juan Mountains, and yet it's a legend among a few. The run — emphatically not a "race" according to organizers — was conceived as a tribute to the hard men (and a few women) who beat their way through these rugged mountains in search of silver and gold.  The paths these miners blazed a hundred years ago linger today as abandoned, half-eroded roads and steep trails, sometimes literally blasted into the side of granite cliffs. The Hardrock 100 course climbs 13,000-foot passes and plummets into valleys thousands of feet below, thirteen times. The 33,000 feet of accumulated climbing might seem like a cakewalk if it was all on nice trail, but much of this course traverses cross-country, on steep talus, or along treacherously exposed cliffs. Few people travel most of these routes anymore, save for a few hikers, and, once a year, the 140 "lucky" winners of a lottery for what seems to have become North America's most notorious ultramarathon. 

Beat and his pacer, Daniel, stumbled into Grouse Gulch at 4:42 a.m. Daniel, a four-time Hardrock finisher who had been traveling with Beat since Ouray, fifteen miles ago, promptly collapsed in a chair and fell asleep with his head between his knees. Beat seemed too shattered to sleep. "My stomach is fucked," he lamented. I dug through his Camelpak and found what I was pretty sure was all of the food I had stuffed in the pockets back in Ouray, uneaten. I watched him vomit up the meager food he'd eaten in Ouray, so as far as I knew he hadn't successfully digested a single calorie since Telluride, twelve hours earlier. I asked him what he wanted to eat. "Give me a minute," he said, his own head lolling dangerously close to his knees. "You need to eat something," I said sternly, but I felt helpless.

It was late, and the aid station was running low on everything. Beat already told me he wasn't going to touch any of the snack stuff. I found a stack of half-petrified, cold quesadillas and soup with coagulated fat floating on top, a light yellow broth, and an unidentifiable starch that had solidified at the bottom. I wasn't even nauseated — in fact I was almost desperately hungry myself — but I didn't want to eat that food. Predictably, Beat wouldn't touch it, either. He did sip a few cups of ginger ale and ate a bite of Power Bar. Beat admitted he had been reduced to dry heaving for several hours, something with a strange taste that he assumed was phlegm that he coughed up and swallowed again, and consequently was the only substance in his stomach. Beyond the obvious misery he was subjecting himself too, his condition was beginning to seem dangerous. When a person is that depleted, they're more likely to make bad decisions, and their motor functions begin to falter — which, on terrain with so much exposure, can lead to deadly mistakes. Beat is experienced and he hates to quit anything, no matter how miserable he is. As for me, I was a little scared. I wished he would quit. I didn't say this to him.

I stuffed a couple more packets of Gu Chomps into Beat's pack, knowing full well they were basically dead weight. After rousing Daniel from his comatose state, I asked Beat if he wanted me to meet him at Sherman, an aid station that was fourteen miles away by trail and more than three hours away by two-wheel-drive rental car. "No," he said. "I have a drop bag at Sherman. You should hike up Handies. Go enjoy yourself. I'll be fine."

Beat was far from fine, but I felt better knowing Daniel was with him. Still, I actually did not want to climb Handies Peak. I didn't tell Beat this, but I was deep in the cranky cave. For starters, it was 5 a.m., and I hate 5 a.m. pretty much no matter what. I didn't prepare well for the amount of driving and waiting and the sheer time it took to simply crew the Hardrock 100, and I wasn't adequately supplied myself. The only thing I had eaten since the pre-race breakfast at 5 a.m. the day before was two granola bars during a fifteen-mile hike/run, a small packet of tuna and two ounces of Pringles at 4 p.m., an espresso-laced chai tea at 7 p.m., and a brownie that I rescued from Beat's pile of rejected food in Ouray at 10 p.m. I had already inventoried my hiking food and knew I was down to two granola bars and a one-ounce bag of Goldfish crackers, which was all I had for both breakfast and the hike to Handies — about fourteen miles round trip and probably a lot of climbing, because this was, after all, the Hardrock course. What I really wanted to do was return to Silverton for a big breakfast, but the bloodshot look in Beat's eyes punctured my internal whining. Say what you will about the irrationality of feeling inspired by others' suffering, but I knew as long as Beat was out there stomping out these near-impossible miles, I could at least make a small effort. 

I ate one of my granola bars and left about a half hour after Beat and Daniel, just as the first rays of sunlight graced the tops of the canyon walls. The climb up Grouse Basin was scenic and pleasantly cool. My mood steadily improved until I crested the Continental Divide at 13,000 feet, only to see another deep basin between me and the massive mountain that was most certainly Handies. "Beat didn't tell me there was a thousand-foot drop in the way," I whined to myself, until I realized how silly this sounded. I resisted the urge to devour my second granola bar right away and — because it's good UTMB training anyway — started running down the steep descent. 

The climb to Handies is actually quite easy if you're not entrenched in a hundred-mile endurance run. As a fourteener — elevation 14,088 — it has a well-traveled trail and solid footing all the way to the top. And when I saw the view from the top — not a sign of civilization in all directions and rippling mountains as far as I could see — I felt even sillier about being so reluctant to go there. While savoring my last granola bar, I remained on the peak for fifteen more minutes to cheer on passing Hardrock racers. Handies is the highest point on the Hardrock course, so I greeted them by saying "Congratulations, you made it!" Every one of them regarded me with a resigned smile and a variation of, "There's still a long way to go." 

On the descent from Handies, I encountered the last remaining runners — the back of the pack, the survivors. Their demeanours were telling — ashen faced, limping, hunched over hiking poles, a few almost entirely unresponsive. Others would laugh and make jokes as I stepped off the trail to cheer them on, but their march was unmistakable. The journalist in me wanted to photograph this harsh progression, but I kept my camera stowed out of respect. I felt a rush of emotion for these men and women, a combination of awe and empathy that was amplified by my own sleep- and calorie-deprivation. This is actually one of the reasons I enjoy endurance efforts myself — because physical depletion opens the gates for powerful emotions.

On this morning, I was tired, hungry, and trying to speed-hike my way through fourteen miles and 5,500 feet of elevation gain to an altitude of 14,000 feet — and that was nothing, nothing compared to the efforts of the Hardrockers. The emotions I felt were similar to listening to a meaningful song or viewing a moving piece of artwork. On the surface the Hardrockers were simply marching, for no rational reason. But to this observer, their movements were a kind of dance, a tribute to the human condition — one of determination and perseverance, beautiful and inspiring.

I greeted the second to last women I passed with my usual, "Way to go. You're doing awesome." She looked up at me with a pained look on her face and said, "You have no idea how hard this is."

Her eyes were terrible, almost frightening, and in them I saw a reflection of Beat's suffering that I had been trying to put out of my mind. I couldn't help it. The tear ducts opened and I looked down to hide the moisture in my own eyes. "You're right," I said with a slight stammer. "I can only imagine."

Say what you will about the irrationality of it all, but that is the experience of being alive.


... to be continued