Standard stuff for a 100-mile race
© Gary Dudney
Chasing Leadville
Leadville, Colorado, sits in the Rocky Mountains at an altitude of 10,200 feet in the open plain of the Arkansas River Valley, isolated and alone. It’s the highest incorporated city in the United States of America and the only official town in Lake County. Almost half the county’s residents live there. It started as a silver mining boomtown in 1877; once it was second in size only to Denver with a population of 40,000 (now 2,600) and hosted a parade of Wild West figures and mine swindlers until the silver profits went bust with the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893. Thereafter, miners turned their attention to the lead and zinc that had always been there but had played second fiddle to the silver. The Second World War sparked a demand for molybdenum, which, it turned out, Leadville had in abundance, at one time producing 75 percent of the world’s supply.
In spite of the pizzazz and dazzle that molybdenum mining brought to the town, Leadville wilted back to its Old West roots and presents itself today as a not too prosperous place but with a dusty, dog-eared charm. It has a rambling collection of creaky Victorian buildings that show their age like distressed antiques. The row of 19th-century storefronts on Harrison Street still conjures up the kind of place that the Badman from Bodie might ride into and shoot up.
Standing on the corner in the center of town under an intense summer sun that is microwaving everything in its path, I half expect a grizzled old miner to sidle up to me, spit a stream of terbakky into a cuspidor, and in a high squeaky voice say, “Lookee here, Pardner. This’n here town don’t cotton to no sidewinders, no way, no how.” The air is so thin, just walking around window shopping for tourist junk in the curio shops, I have to stop and catch my breath every few minutes. Off on the horizon, Mt. Elbert and Mt. Massive sit brooding and ominous. They are Colorado’s two highest peaks in a state that is known for high peaks.
The snowmelt from the surrounding mountains feed the headwaters of the Arkansas River which flows south from Leadville and then makes a grand turn out of the mountains to the east. The Arkansas (pronounced AR-kan-saw here and in the state of Arkansas, but ar-KAN-zes when it crosses Kansas) then meanders for a thousand miles through the Great Plains, flowing eventually through Wichita, Kansas, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Little Rock, Arkansas, before finally emptying into the Mississippi River. I peer down the length of Harrison Street, and it strikes me that the snow that melted off the rooftops I’m seeing right now might have ended up in my drinking water in Wichita when I was a kid. Was Leadville calling to me even back then? Did the place already have a claim on me?
Perhaps. Follow running long enough and deeply enough and passionately enough, and you might just end up like me in Leadville in August under this glaring sun facing one of running’s toughest challenges, the Leadville Trail 100, “The Race Across the Sky.” It seems like Leadville can’t be avoided. It’s a long-distance runner’s destiny. Say the word “Leadville” over and over. It sounds like an elephantine iron bell tolling out a death knell, and, if you’re a runner, well, sorry, it tolls for thee.
The average elevation of the course is over 10,000 feet. The high point, the top of Hope Pass, is at 12,600 feet. You go there twice. And just for good measure, the time limit for Leadville is set at a miserly 30 hours. Miss the mark by a second, and you are not a finisher. You might as well have stayed home in Akron and had a barbeque. Other tough, mountainous 100-mile races allow up to 34 or 36 hours for an official finish. At Leadville, after 30 hours, you get the boot. In a typical year, less than half the starters in the race reach the finish.
The race was the brainchild of Ken Chlouber, a rough-edged ex-miner and Colorado state senator who lost his job when the molybdenum mine temporarily closed and threw Leadville’s economy into a tailspin. Chlouber reasoned that the audacious challenge of a 100-mile race would draw visitors from around the country and boost Leadville’s flagging fortunes. It worked. Like the Western States Endurance Run, the idea of toughing out such a gargantuan effort appealed to the type of runners who live to see limits pushed and the impossible, well, possibled.
The hospital director in Leadville didn’t believe human beings could run 100 miles at such an altitude without someone dying. In that dire prediction, Chlouber saw a silver lining. “At least that’ll make us famous,” he is said to have replied, or words to that effect.
It’s August 16, 2002. The 20th running of the Leadville Trail 100 is tomorrow. I’m standing in front of the Sixth Street Gym just a few steps from the corner of Sixth and Harrison where the race will begin. The dilapidated gym is an odd hunk of a building. No entry way, steps, fancy columns, porch, overhang, vestibule, balcony, or awning interrupt the way it squats directly on the sidewalk. Gray stucco clings to its facade. The aqua blue paint on the window and doorframes brighten it up a bit, but it is a lost cause.
From the sidewalk, you step through a narrow door into a small room that looks like a large shower stall. From there you enter the gym proper and encounter an interior space that continues the themes from the exterior. The floor is chipped, marred, faded, and blotched with big brown stains as if the place were used to slaughter sheep in the off season. The walls are adorned with all manner of mismatched panels that must have been taken from various demolition sites. Barren steel girders crisscross overhead. Old parachutes hang from the girders. They may once have been bright and silky white, but now they’re discolored to a dull yellow and covered with forlorn patches.
Shabby as it is, though, today this place is the epicenter of endurance running in the United States. The little gym is crowded to bursting. People hang over the narrow balcony that rings the court, hooting and hollering like a rowdy crowd in a saloon waiting for the dancin’ girls. Chlouber is prowling around the front of the room dressed in the most garish running shorts you can imagine. He brings out two stools and eyes one of them suspiciously. He puts it on the ground sideways and stomps on it. Satisfied, he sets it back upright. Chlouber is tall and rangy. His long, unruly hair, massive forehead, craggy face, and gravelly voice make him seem every bit the former miner that he is. From his very first words, which he shouts into the microphone, everyone is mesmerized by him. “ARE YOU READY? ARE YOU READY?”
“We’ve got runners here from 44 states,” he says. After a long pause, “From four foreign countries.” Another long pause. “And from AR-KAN-SAW,” contempt dripping from his voice. Everyone laughs. A girl sitting on the floor at Chlouber’s feet is stretching, pulling her leg impossibly high up across her chest. Two big dogs next to her wag their tails and lick her face.
From where I’m sitting, I can see Chlouber’s notes, a confused mess of scribbles on a piece of notebook paper. Co-race director, Merilee O’Neil, a stocky woman with long silver hair, stands at his elbow, whispering in his ear and directing him to the next item on his list. Chlouber mumbles and breathes heavily into the mike. It’s getting warm in the gym. He tells someone in the back to open the door. “You might have to kick it,” he adds. In going over the rules, he says only one pacer is allowed per runner, except for the final mile or so. For that, he says, “We don’t care if you bring your whole first-grade class along.” He fields a question about using walking sticks. “Ain’t no rule against ‘em,” he says, “but they’re just plain stupid.”
He gets to the meat of his talk. “Now I know you’re all waiting for the pep talk, but this is no pep talk or motivational speech or sales talk or whatever. This is truth, just plain truth.” The audience is now leaning forward, leaning into his words. He utters his iconic statement, “You’re better than you think you are; you can do more than you think you can.”
“The truth,” he continues, “is that inside every one of us there is an inexhaustible well of strength, power, grit, and determination. You can finish. So I am asking you to do one thing. Do not quit. What is the number one reason people quit? Because they say it hurts.” He smirks at that notion. “Well, I guarantee you that if you keep going, it will hurt no more than 30 hours. If you quit, it will hurt for the next 365 days. People will have one question for you after this race: ‘Did you finish?’ Now you can either say, ‘Yes, I did.’ Or you can spend the next 15 minutes dreaming up some lame excuse.”
“Make pain your friend,” he continues, “and you will never be alone.” I turn that over in my mind, thinking maybe being alone from time to time wouldn’t be so bad. Pain, determination, grit—these are all great concepts sitting here the day before the race. I wonder how well these things will work out on the trail the next day and night. Dr. John Perna, the race’s medical director, offers some more concrete advice: “Pee yellow, bad; pee clear, good.”
We pile out of the Sixth Street Gym with everyone all charged up, me more than anyone. Wow, I’m thinking, I have an inexhaustible well of determination and grit. I can do more than I think I can. I don’t have to fear pain; I just have to make friends with it. I’m not going to quit because I’ll be damned if I’m going to end up as one of those poor souls who has to duck his head and explain why he didn’t finish. I wanted to hug Chlouber, the big galoot! He’d set me straight. I felt like I was on fire; of course, the sun in the open street baking my head might have had something to do with that.
But one idea kept troubling me. Almost every year at Leadville more than half the runners quit. What happened to their inexhaustible wells? Wasn’t pain their friend, too? These were troubling questions and didn’t fit in with the enormous confidence I now felt about my chances to finish the race and take home a silver Leadville belt buckle. This idea about reaching down into the well when things got bad and tapping into all that grit and determination just seemed so foolproof. I decided I had nothing to worry about.
Standard stuff for a 100-mile race
© Gary Dudney
Nevertheless, that night I barely slept. Chlouber’s words churned through my mind, mixed with fear, mixed with the knowledge that I had to get up impossibly early to make the 4 a.m. start. Plus, every few minutes I woke up gasping for air and had to hyperventilate to give my brain sufficient oxygen so that I could continue to live on this planet. I was about to undergo a great learning experience. Running was about to substitute all these notions about what I could accomplish with some hard reality.
Maybe I was asleep when the alarm rang at three o’clock, maybe not. I tore myself out of bed and began the process of covering myself with sunblock, skin lubricant, bug spray, and strategically placed Band-Aids. I laced up my running shoes and put on a fancy lightweight jacket with warm cap and gloves ready in the pockets. I filled my running bottles with tap water, put on my waist belt with the side pockets for the bottles, adjusted the strap, and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked ready and terrified.
Outside in the dark the air was thin and cold. Four hundred runners shifted around uneasily, jumping up and down to keep warm, their arms wrapped tightly around them. A bright lamp on a pole near the starting line threw a harsh light over the street. Jerking, elongated shadows danced over the pavement. I cowered, shivering under a bush and then joined the other runners on the street with five minutes to go. I recited the Lord’s Prayer to myself. I felt like I was already reaching down into my well of determination. After all, I was more than happy to make pain my friend and tough it out, but that was assuming I’d had a good night’s sleep and felt warm and comfortable. Maybe there was more to this than I realized. The long sweep of Sixth Street heading out of town was before us. A shotgun went off and scared the living bejesus out of me. I took off like a spooked rabbit.
We ran out of town and got onto a wide jeep road called the Boulevard. Dust kicked up by the runners in front of me hung thick in the air illuminated by a dozen bouncing flashlight beams. I calmed down now that I was moving and actually getting something done and concentrated on not turning an ankle on the larger rocks strewn about the road. By the time we reached the single track that skirted the edge of Turquoise Lake, I’d discovered that my elevated heart rate and faster tempo of breathing from the running was giving me sufficient oxygen to keep me going steadily. I just had to keep my pace under control because whenever I sped up I’d get behind the curve and start gasping for air.
The single track along Turquoise Lake was a minefield of rocks and roots. A string of lights bounced along the lake shore before me and behind me. Occasionally the dark just around me was interrupted by a camper shining a flashlight. We streamed through a shouting, yelling pack of crew people at Tabor Boat Ramp and then were immediately back on the dark trail. It was quiet. The only sounds were the grunts and heavy breathing of the other runners as we worked our way over all the obstacles. Between having to concentrate on not tripping and the early hour and the weight of the task before us, the talking and joking that had gone on back on the Boulevard had all died out.
Light rose slowly over the lake. A thick mist hung over the water. I could see the forest on the opposite shore now and the hulk of Sugarloaf Pass which we would be climbing shortly. Up around a bend in the shoreline were the lights of the May Queen Aid Station, which was placed a full half marathon (13.5 miles) from the start. It was not lost on me that half-marathoners would already be just about finished with their race while here at Leadville we hadn’t even reached the first aid station and had barely scratched the surface of the race proper.
At May Queen, we were processed through a large tent that was open at each end. Inside, heaters were going full blast. I passed by an array of food, filled up my water bottles, and then checked my number out as I emerged from the other end of the tent. Bam, bam, and I was back out on the Colorado Trail in a forest of lodge pole pines and aspens. Boulders were scattered everywhere. Streams cut across the trail. I ran in stutter steps over a constantly shifting jumble of big rocks and downed trees. It was tiring work, and I found I had to take it slowly or I immediately started gasping for air.
Next came the first major climb—a trek over Sugarloaf Pass, but the way up was on a wide, gently sloped jeep road. The sun had crept a little way up into the sky, so runners were shedding jackets and long-sleeved shirts and tying them around their waists. The summit was anti-climactic. The road just flattened out and then bent down. From the road, we turned into a wide swath that had been cleared in the forest to build a power line. The massive power lines cracked and hissed above us as we descended to an asphalt road at the bottom that took us to the Fish Hatchery Aid Station.
There I received some bad news. Back home at sea level, I had put together what I thought was a conservative pace chart that would get me to the finish in a comfortable 29 hours and 30 minutes, leaving me a half-hour safety margin before the 30-hour cutoff. I’d checked my progress against the plan at May Queen and found I was a little behind schedule, but not by much. Since May Queen, I’d been pushing it, trying to find the sweet spot where I was running as hard as I could without getting into oxygen debt. It felt like I was whacking away at the Leadville monster, keeping myself together, strategizing, and reaching down into my well of grit and determination. Wouldn’t Chlouber be nodding with satisfaction at this tenderfoot? But at the Fish Hatchery, I got a cold shower. I had fallen even further behind my race plan than I was before.
I was feeling a little dazed as I picked over the food inside the big maintenance shed building that housed the aid station. Volunteers suggested sandwiches, energy bars, potato chips, or chunks of baked potatoes dipped in a bowl of salt. My worried expression seemed to be sparking their concern. “Looking good,” one of them lied to me. I smiled wanly.
I stepped out of the shed, hitched up my running shorts, and vowed to kill the next section of the course, which by Leadville standards looked like something manageable—a long, flat, paved road that curved around through a valley followed by a gentle climb up a fire road to the Halfmoon Aid Station. I figured I was finally going to put the big kibosh on my pace problem and get back on track. Leadville apparently thought otherwise. Even though I was down under 10,000 feet at that point on the course, each stride seemed sluggish and labored. I couldn’t keep up with runners who were just barely jogging along in front of me. I would lose my breath and need to walk a stretch. Then when I started up again, it was with the same dead leg shuffle that was the best effort I could manage.
By the time I reached Halfmoon, I’d lost even more margin against my race plan. It began to dawn on me that I was in trouble. Between Halfmoon and the next aid station at Twin Lakes was another punishing section of the Colorado Trail featuring a series of three major climbs. The first two climbs culminated in false summits where you swore you’d reached the top and were heading back down only to find another uphill in your path. I tried to hang on to a pair of women negotiating the trail with walking sticks that clicked endlessly against the rocks along the trail, but they soon dropped me, and the clicking faded out ahead of me.
At Twin Lakes, 40 miles, I sat down on an ice chest with my head bowed. I was afraid to look up at Hope Pass, the next and greatest obstacle on the course. My race plan was shot to hell, and only the thought of slinking back home without having even set foot on Hope Pass kept me from quitting right there. I guessed that now was really the time to be grubbing around in my well of determination, but the well seemed to have gone missing. I wasn’t afraid to take on a little pain, either, but this wasn’t so much pain as just the pure inability to keep putting one foot in front of the other. It was too late to get better trained. It was too late to be a stronger runner. I had to work with what I had, but it didn’t seem to be enough no matter how much I wanted it to be. Chlouber hadn’t covered that.
I joylessly gathered my supplies, adjusted my running belt, and trudged on with the vague idea that maybe things would change for the better. I crossed the knee-deep river that flows through the broad meadow just beyond Twin Lakes. A guy next to me was walking across with his feet stuck in trash bags. “Does that keep your feet dry?” I asked. “I’ll let you know in about five steps,” he said.
I reached the trees on the other side of the meadow and looked up the trail that had to be climbed to reach Hope Pass. My heart sunk. It was a steep, rocky single track that cut straight up the mountain. The trail designers must have missed all the classes at trail-making school about switchbacks and gentle grades. The Rocky Mountains were working overtime here to supply the rocks. The smoothest parts of the trail were gardens of half-buried rocks; the worst parts of the trail looked like Brobdingnagian staircases.
I leaned into the climb and hadn’t gotten far when I heard someone shouting from above, “Runner up! Runner up!” I looked up to see Chad Ricklefs, who was enjoying a turn as one of the top ultrarunners in the country, barreling down the trail, coming at me like a freight train, rushing over the tricky footing as if it were nothing. His pacer was frantically bringing up the rear, barely able to hang on to him. Another runner, Hal Koerner, who’d finished second here the year before, rushed past just a few seconds later hot on Ricklefs’ heels. It was difficult for me to believe that these guys and I were somehow participating in the same event. They were impossibly far ahead of me. I’d just left 40 miles. They were about to hit 60.
Halfway up the trail, before the forest began petering out at timberline, I started encountering runners sitting on logs or rocks next to the trail, elbows propped on their knees, heads down. “You okay,” I’d ask.
“Restin’,” they’d reply or just nod their heads to save the energy it took to power their vocal chords. It wasn’t long before I was seeking out my own log. Resting suddenly seemed like a powerfully good idea.
I sat down with my back to the slope, feeling an enormous inertia settle over me. I was sitting for maybe five minutes when a woman leading a llama appeared and offered me a soft drink. She was using the llama to pack supplies up to the aid station. I’d read that llamas were used here for that purpose but to have the tall beast standing next to me placidly gazing about the forest and bearing soft drinks seemed to strain the boundaries of reality. The strangeness of it all got me back on my feet and all the way to the Hope Pass Aid Station. There I found a lot of other llamas scattered over the meadow, chewing up grass and ignoring the desperate human beings like me who were staggering around like zombies.
Just a few of the rocks you’ll find along the Colorado Trail in the aptly named Rocky Mountains.
© Gary Dudney
After trying some soup at the aid station, I pushed myself up to the top of the pass where I noted the Tibetan prayer flags strung out over the rocks. I was sure they had been put there with good intentions, but for me, they conjured up the Death Zone on Mt. Everest, not exactly what I wanted to be thinking right then. I stumbled down the other side of Hope Pass and took the measure of the runners coming back up from the turnaround some five miles away. They seemed tired but determined, apparently accessing their wells of grit. They made way for the runners coming down so they could take the opportunity to lean over and rest for a few seconds, hands on knees. I got to the bottom of the trail and turned up the road for the 3-mile run to Winfield, the 50-mile mark of the race and the turnaround for home. I knew I needed to make up some time, but the slight uphill grade of the road was too much for me. I picked out a tree, did a little shuffle jog until I reached it, and then walked until I felt human again. Over and over.
I finally turned into what was billed as the “ghost town” of Winfield, but it was nothing more than an odd collection of modern outbuildings with corrugated roofs. Swinging saloon doors, hitching posts, and tumbleweed rolling down Main Street were nowhere to be found. One larger shed served as the aid station, and I had no sooner reached it than I found myself collapsed into a camp chair, my waist belt in the dirt at my feet.
I prayed that I was way over the cutoff time, which at Winfield was an elapsed time of 14 hours, so that there was no question of continuing. At 14 hours, you only had 16 hours to get all the way back to Leadville. That meant that on legs that had already passed through the meat grinder of the first 50 miles of the course, you were going to run through the dark of night over 10 million rocks, exhausted from having had no sleep, and do that somehow only two hours slower than it took you to get out to Winfield on fresh legs in the daylight.
The aid station captain approached me. He was the one who had the power to cut off the little plastic armband that had been on my wrist since I checked into the race the day before. “You’re a little past the cutoff time,” he said, “about six minutes. But you know what? You can rest here for a moment and get yourself something to eat. Just take your time, and I’ll let you go on. You can still make it, Buddy.”
I looked up at him, hoping maybe he was kidding. He didn’t look like he was kidding. I didn’t want this to be my decision. I wanted the full, heavy weight of the race rules to crash over me like a big wave and wash me out to sea where I could be left to drown in peace. I’d missed the cutoff, so wasn’t that it? No ifs, ands, or buts.
Chlouber’s words rang in my ears, “…an inexhaustible well…don’t quit…you can do more than you think you can.” It all rang hollow. I felt so incredibly bad. It hurt so much. I was convinced I felt worse than everybody else in the race. In years to come I would find out that that was not true, that everyone else felt just as bad as I did, that I had no lock on the suffering, but right there at that moment in Winfield in that camp chair, it seemed to me like the truest thing on Earth.
I lifted my arm up in the air and said, “Cut it off.”
“That’s your wristwatch,” the aid station captain said. “Give me your other arm.” I lifted the correct arm, and he snipped off my plastic armband. I had DNFed (Did Not Finish).
The next morning, as ten o’clock approached, the last of the finishers were coming up Sixth Street. I stood watching from the curb, all showered and rested. I was telling myself that almost everyone has suffered through a DNF at Leadville. It almost seemed like a requisite part of learning what it takes to make it through this race. Way off in the distance, the remaining runners and their pacers appeared as tiny figures coming up over a rise about a half mile away. From there they had to run down into a valley and up to the finish over a carpet placed on the street. It took about 10 minutes to negotiate that final stretch. Because it was unusually hot that year, the finish percentage was below average, just 41 percent. Six out of every ten runners who thought they were ready, like me, failed.
Of course, I had the extra burden of knowing that I could have kept going. I hadn’t suffered a “mechanical.” I hadn’t timed way out. I had quit, in spite of all that Chlouber had had to say on the subject. I had quit, period.
I watched each finisher as they came across the line. Merilee O’Neil was there to slip a ribbon with a finisher’s medallion over their heads. Then she gave each runner a hug. Afterward, the runner would spend just a moment being congratulated by friends and family before lying down on the concrete or collapsing on the curb. At the end of other races, you’d see finishers walking around, standing in groups and laughing, grazing picnic tables for food. Not at Leadville. Almost everyone immediately after finishing ended up on their backs.
I couldn’t imagine what these runners had gone through to get back here over those last 50 miles. I had found out there was a world of difference between understanding all those concepts that Chlouber had talked about and actually executing on them. Knowing you had a deep well of determination was not the same thing as knowing how to use that deep well of determination to keep going when things went to hell on you.
But there was one thing I did know for sure that morning surrounded by all those prostrate runners. I had to come back. I had to cross the Leadville finish line myself someday. I had to hug Merilee O’Neil.