The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Don’t think about your ankle!”
Dusty was yelling at me again. Would he be yelling at me when we had white hair and canes?
“C’mon, Jurker, don’t think about your ankle! Climb!”
I didn’t answer. I was too busy sliding backward down a glassy snowfield, trying to stop my descent with three good limbs. We had just hammered through a steady downpour, up a ridiculously steep 4,400-foot incline through an opening in the Colorado Rockies called Oscar’s Pass. The rain had glazed the snow, turned it to ice. We had turned off our headlamps so the record holder who had been stalking me for 70 miles couldn’t gauge the distance he had to make up. It was 2 A.M., black except for every few minutes when lightning bolts strobed the scene: Dusty standing on a mountain, looking down, yelling (of course); me, crawling, sliding, then crawling some more, dragging what I hoped wasn’t a broken ankle.
Forty miles earlier, at a cold, windswept little valley, Dusty had taunted a forty-year-old named Karl Meltzer.
“You’re getting beat by a guy with an ankle the size of a grapefruit,” Dusty jeered.
Meltzer had just smiled. He had won the Wasatch 100 six times and was known as “the Wasatch Speedgoat.” He had also won this event—the Hardrock Hundred-Mile Endurance Run, or Hardrock 100, four times. In fact, he held the course record. One of his other nicknames: “King of the Hardrock.”
“The race doesn’t start until Telluride,” Meltzer said. Dusty and I had begun our climb to the snowfield from Telluride. I looked back over my shoulder.
“Climb! C’mon. It’s just snow. You’re a Nordic skier, you can do this. You’ve dug deeper before.”
I wasn’t so sure. I had dropped out of the Hardrock 100 in 2000 after only 42 miles. At the time, I blamed the effort I had expended in my second Western States victory. I had also blamed the altitude. And I blamed the naiveté and youthful optimism of two certain Minnesotans. Dusty picked me up at the Denver airport the day before the 2000 race. We drove eight hours to Silverton, Dusty behind the wheel, me pretzeled on top of plastic bins filled with his construction tools, where the back seats used to be. We arrived at 6 P.M., ate and tried to sleep, then stepped to the starting line at 6 A.M.
After winning my seventh Western States I had decided that, with the proper acclimatization and training, I could conquer the Hardrock. In June 2007 I had arrived in Silverton, Colorado, a month before the race.
Then, two nights before the event, I had sprained my ankle.
I had been camping at Molas Lake, at 11,000 feet, sucking in the thin air, almost feeling my marrow pumping out more oxygen-carrying red blood cells. Mornings, I lingered with locals and other runners at the Avalanche Café on unpaved Blair Street. To save money I made my own breakfast and brewed my yerba mate. Late morning, I headed into the mountains to learn the secrets of the course. My guide and companion was Kyle Skaggs, a twenty-two-year-old emerging ultrarunner who was spending the summer as a research assistant at the Mountain Studies Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to examining the ecology and climate of high-altitude locations.
Kyle, along with his older brother, Erik, would go on to become the best known—and in certain quarters the most idolized—siblings on the ultra scene. Lean, ruggedly handsome, and irrepressible, the pair were referred to as “the Young Guns” and “the Jonas Brothers of trail running” on the running forums. They have doubtlessly increased the recent female interest in the sport. (When he worked at Oregon’s Rogue Valley Runners shop, Kyle was famous for drawing huge numbers of women who asked him to analyze their gait but never bought shoes.) The brothers had been born and raised in rural New Mexico, and along with a dedication to mountain living and environmentalism, they would go on to approach races with a blithe aggressiveness that shocked racing veterans.
Kyle would not be running the Hardrock in 2007, but he knew the mountains and knew racing strategy. Together we explored some of the trickier portions of the course, climbing endless switchbacks, sprinting ridges, descending boulder fields, and crossing a number of snowfields, including a few 50-degree slopes where, if we had slipped, we almost certainly would have died.
Even though the Hardrock contained as many perils as I had ever seen on a course, the dangers fit into a majesty I had never encountered. In many ways, it was not only the toughest course I had ever explored but the most beautiful. We ran past turquoise lakes, brushed purple columbine and crimson Indian paintbrush. There was the shocking green of the tundra and the blinding white of the snowfields, gold rock and red rock, ascents that seemed as if they would never finish, endless vistas, deep, cozy valleys, and sharp, cloudscraping peaks.
Many evenings we spent with Kyle’s Mountain Studies Institute colleague, a thirty-something from India named Imtiaz. We cooked meals together in the organization’s kitchen. Kyle made mushroom quesadillas and Imtiaz made eggplant curry and dal with basmati rice. The kitchen was full of mouthwatering aromas as we sautéed tomatoes and zucchini with ginger, cumin, and mustard seeds. We discussed the subtleties of spices in Indian cuisine and the benefits of Ayurvedic medicine.
Years of eating plants had convinced me that the best way to get well and to stay well was to eat simply and to avoid processed foods whenever possible. After my epiphany in my first internship with an old man and his hospital food, I tried to treat injuries and illness with natural remedies whenever possible. Food was my medicine. I even avoided anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen, which other long-distance runners gobbled by the handful. I thought it masked pain so much that I might risk serious injury by running when I shouldn’t. I had also heard too many stories of runners taking so much ibuprofen that they damaged their kidneys. It was a classic case of treating symptoms, of wanting the quick fix. It was, in many ways, typical Western medicine.
By the week of the race, after nearly a month of workouts, simple living, and a lot of new vegan food, I was devouring 13,000-foot peaks and 30-mile journeys without the sensation of breathing through a cocktail straw. Even Kyle, with his fresh, twenty-two-year-old muscles and two months of altitude training, was surprised I was pushing the pace on our weekly ascents of Kendall Mountain. High altitude? I was ready.
I had to be. The Hardrock includes eleven mountain passes, six of them over an elevation of 13,000 feet, and also climbing a 14er (a 14,000-foot peak)—a total vertical climb and descent of 66,000 feet, more than would be involved in climbing and descending Mount Everest from sea level, as the race organizers like to point out.
Two nights before the race, I joined a youth DARE program soccer game on a grassy field not far from the town’s hundred-year-old cemetery. That’s where I tore my ankle ligaments when trying to steal the ball from a seven-year-old.
I gulped glass after glass of tumeric soy milk and lay for hours with my leg elevated with a bag of ice wrapped around my bulging ankle. I dosed myself with the homeopathic remedy arnica montana and with pineapple enzyme, bromelain. It wasn’t enough. The pain electric-eeled my synapses. There was no way I could run the race. Imtiaz watched me limp into the Mountain Studies kitchen and asked if he could take a look. He ground a scoop of black pepper and added tumeric, flour, and water until it was a thick, heavy paste. He pressed the paste onto paper towels, then wrapped them around my ankle.
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 too 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.
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.
Place all the ingredients in a blender and blend on high for 1 to 2 minutes, until smooth.
MAKES 3 8-OUNCE SERVINGS