Crossing the river at Rucky Chucky at Western States.
© Gary Dudney
Grand Slammed
“What are you doing in here?”
The voice was angry, accusatory, and disgusted. Kathy Welch stood in the doorway of the medical tent where I was stretched out on a cot under a sleeping bag. She was a long-time friend. I’d shared many races with her and chatted away miles of trail in the process. She was unfailingly friendly, kind, upbeat, and positive. Right now, she looked pissed off as hell.
“I’m quitting,” I said.
A grin replaced her scowl, and she laughed. “No, you’re not. You can’t quit. You’re in the Grand Slam.”
And that was true. I was back trying to finish the Leadville 100, at which I had failed so miserably the year before. This year, however, I had set my sights even higher. I was attempting the Grand Slam of Ultrarunning: a series of four designated 100-mile races that must be done in a single summer with minimal recovery time between races. Besides Leadville, the other races of the Grand Slam are Western States, the Vermont 100, and the Wasatch Front 100 in Utah near Salt Lake City. So you not only had to do all the races, but you had to travel all over the country to get to them.
When Kathy found me in the tent, I had already made it through Western States and Vermont, and I had just 25 miles to go to finish Leadville. All that was left was Wasatch, and I’d be lifting a magnificent Grand Slam finisher’s eagle trophy over my head. But instead, I was quitting.
“My ankles are killing me,” I gasped. “I messed them up in Vermont. I thought they were better.”
“Get up, and let’s go,” Kathy said.
“I can’t.”
“I’ll park my car a mile down the road,” she said, “where you get off the blacktop and start up Sugarloaf. Just walk to my car, and we’ll talk.”
I groaned. Images of Chlouber telling the crowd that the one thing we could not do is quit flashed through my head. “Make pain your friend,” he’d said. Well, I’d managed to do that in spades. I’d spent hours trying to stay positive, accept the pain, and move past it. I’d worked the hell out of all my mantras and tried every other trick in the book, but having a swelling, urgent pain well up from each ankle on every step had just been too much. I had slowed to a crawl by the time I’d gotten back to the Fish Hatchery aid station and the medical staff there had said they could not provide any painkillers. They’d offered me a cot instead, and I’d taken it.
But now Kathy had me. The pain screaming out of my ankles made it impossible to face the 10-mile stretch to May Queen, but a mile to a car that could give me a ride home if I wanted, that I could maybe handle. Plus, being off my feet for a while had helped.
I pushed off the cot. Kathy had my waist belt back around me before I knew what she was doing. She ran off to fill my water bottles. She did everything but kick me in the butt as I limped back out onto the course and onto the road toward Sugarloaf.
The Colorado night was still and quiet. The air in the Rocky Mountains was crisp. There were no cars, no other runners. It was just me on the blacktop road following the dim light from my headlamp, pine trees forming a dark wall on either side. Every step hurt; the shooting pain from my ankles stayed urgent and intense. There was no lessening into a bearable ache, just sheer agony. I didn’t know what I’d done to my ankles, but the level of pain seemed to suggest something serious.
I saw Kathy’s car in the distance and her standing next to it. Despite the pain, I seemed to be able to keep moving forward. If I could just get to May Queen and then on to the finish, maybe I could recover in time for Wasatch. There was still hope. I reached Kathy, gave her a hug, and said, “If anything good comes out of this, I have you to thank.”
“Hang tough, Gary,” she said. “It’s the Grand Slam.”
I stepped off the road onto a short stretch of trail that followed the edge of the forest. Where the trail turned into the trees and up the steep climb over Sugarloaf Pass, I stopped. I had finished the little jog over to Kathy’s car on the flat road, the easy part. Now I was facing a big ascent and the rest of the trip to May Queen—the last aid station before the finish. Time was running short, and my ankles were on fire again, murdering me with each step. I looked up at the trail and thought, Goddam you, Robert Josephs, this is all your fault!
Robert Josephs was my running buddy who had talked me into trying the Grand Slam against my better judgment. He and I were not the first runners who would come to mind when you thought about the Grand Slam. Both of us had been to Leadville once before and failed. While I had managed to get halfway in my attempt, Robert hadn’t even gotten that far.
On my first attempt at Western States, I’d quit at Foresthill, mile 62. On my second attempt, I’d finished but with only 23 minutes to spare before the final cutoff of 30 hours. Robert had racked up three finishes at Western States, but had also come up short four other times. Neither of us had even tried Wasatch, which many runners claim is the hardest of the four races. So the two of us successfully completing all four races back to back in one summer seemed like a very remote proposition.
When Robert first raised the possibility that we should sign up for the Slam, I told him, “Wild horses could not drag me back to Leadville this year.” I was determined to get back there eventually and get my hug from Merilee O’Neil, but the sting was still there from my first try, and I was convinced that to have any chance of finishing, I needed at least two solid years of focused training and maybe several trips to the top of Mt. Everest before I would be ready.
But if Robert was anything, he was persistent and stubborn, traits he had parlayed into becoming a runner despite a childhood bout with polio that had left him with a limping, awkward gait. Medium build, medium height, but strong and solid as an ox, he had been raised in a large Jewish family in Philadelphia. With his olive skin and brown hair and eyes, he wouldn’t have looked out of place walking the streets of Tel Aviv, except he’d be limping.
Robert was not one to suffer fools easily, which is why he met much of the blather I constantly spouted when we were out training together with dead silence. When he did speak, it was usually direct and to the point. He was amused by my habit of over drinking early in a run and then having to pee behind every bush along the trail until I got back into equilibrium. He told me I was the hero of dogs everywhere. Sitting on a plane once, waiting to take off, I showed him an ad for some Lord of the Rings trinkets. “Hey,” I said, “you should get some of this Lord of the Rings stuff.”
“Yeah, Lord of the Rinky-Dink,” he shot back without hesitation.
Way back in 1980, when the very first American River 50 Mile Endurance Run was being held in Sacramento, Robert was at the starting line. It was a time when finishing a marathon was still considered a supreme running achievement. Running 50 miles wasn’t even part of the known universe. Since then, he’d run American River 23 times, putting him fourth on the all-time list of most finishes at that event. Robert had a great running past, but he wanted the Grand Slam.
“We’re getting old,” he argued. (He was 46 at the time; I was 50.) “We’re never going to be in better shape than we are right now. We’re going to get more injured as time goes by, not less. I’m going to do it, so we might as well do it together and split the costs. You’ll never, ever have a better chance.”
I guess I was swayed by the part about splitting the costs.
After we signed up for the four races, we were out on a trail somewhere training, and Robert very casually mentioned, “I signed up for the Last Great Race.”
“What?!” I exclaimed. The Last Great Race was the Grand Slam plus two additional races, still done all in one summer, and the two extra races were tough ones. I figured the odds of us finishing the Slam were about one in a thousand. Finishing the Last Great Race? No way. “Why would you do that?” I asked.
“Because anyone can do the Grand Slam,” Robert replied.
Now that we were committed, the next step was dealing with all the mechanics and logistics. Planning for the summer was like Napoleon’s preparation for the invasion of Russia, except Napoleon didn’t have two teenage kids and a full-time job. Reservations for planes, hotel rooms, and rental cars had to be made. There were volunteer requirements to fulfill. There was recruiting pacers and crew, finding people who could travel to Colorado, Vermont, and Utah. I ordered more shoes, bought more drop bags, and stocked up on energy gel. I leafed through catalogues for the latest in high-tech flashlights and lightweight shells. I spent every weekend running punishing long workouts on gnarly trails. I entered a whole series of springtime races. I set aside Memorial Day weekend for the Western States training camp.
Inevitably, the training we did seemed inadequate. Even the most elaborate training runs, six hours of humping up and down the hillsides around Monterey, would pale in comparison to what we knew we would face at Western States in the high country or the climbs at Wasatch. Plus, the Monterey Bay area where we both lived never got hot enough for heat training and was obviously too low for altitude training. How in the world could we be ready for the machine gunning we would endure over the summer?
All in all it was a very anxious spring. Time crept by so slowly I swore I was looking at the same Panda bear on my wildlife calendar for three or four months before I finally got to flip it over to the stolid-looking Galapagos turtles. I obsessed over every little ache and pain, certain my sore hamstring was going to turn into a career-ending injury or that the pain in the arch of my foot was a stress fracture. I imagined myself walking around in a cast while Robert was leaping happily over Hope Pass at Leadville.
And then, without warning, it was June. The Grand Slam race dates for 2003 were Western States, June 28; Vermont, July 19; Leadville Trail, August 16; and Wasatch Front, September 6. Western States created some kind of weird time-warp vortex that sucked up all of June. The race was three weeks off one day, I took a sip of coffee, and the race was that weekend.
Western States is the very spot where Gordon Ainsleigh touched off 100-mile trail racing in America when he famously decided he could run the 100 miles of trail that the horses normally traversed for the Tevis Cup Western States Trail Ride. His success at finishing the horse race course on foot in 1974 is what led to the Western States 100 Mile Endurance Run. And amazingly, when we got to Squaw Valley where the race begins, the very same Gordon Ainsleigh was right there, walking around at the orientation, laughing with his friends, still running the race himself and perhaps looking to do it under 24 hours, which earns the runner a special silver belt buckle. It was like visiting Appomattox Courthouse and finding Grant and Lee still sitting at the table, shooting the breeze.
“The hardest 50-mile race I ever ran was the first 50 miles at Western States,” one of my running buddies had told me. Waiting for the start on Saturday morning, it struck me that four out of every ten runners around me were not going to cross the finish line at Placer High in Auburn. I wondered which group I would be in. Then the moment arrived, and the long months of anticipation were suddenly over. Robert and I wished each other well, and the clock ticked down to zero. The race and the Grand Slam were on.
I was nervous striding up the big, initial climb to Emigrant Pass. Was it hard to breathe at this altitude, or was I just tense? Was I exhausting myself, starting out too hard? Who was ahead of me? Who was behind me? I took some deep breaths to relax. I started to notice that people around me were comparing notes on the Grand Slam.
A typical conversation went: “First time at Western?”
“No, I’ve done it before.”
“Doin’ Vermont?”
“Yeah.”
“You slammin’?”
“Yeah. You, too?”
“Yeah.”
There seemed to be a certain calculated lack of enthusiasm in how people owned up to being Grand Slammers, like they were scared they might jinx the whole thing by being too direct about it so early in the game.
Topping the rise at Emigrant Pass, I turned to look at the long sweep of Squaw Valley, far below me now, and Lake Tahoe in the distance. The dawn had come and with it a strange feeling. I felt like I was leaving something behind. There was my life before I attempted the Grand Slam. That was over. Whatever I would experience from here on out would be in the context of having tried this massive thing.
Skipping down the curving sweep of single track on the far side of the pass, I had my first premonition that things would go well for me. The climb had not fazed me. I was running comfortably and easily keeping up with the runners around me. The long transition through the Granite Chief Wilderness along the ridge flowed by despite the many rocks, the tricky footing, the roller-coaster jigs and jags of the trail, and the slippery stream crossings. In my past two attempts at Western, I had arrived at Robinson Flat, the first major aid station at about mile 30, feeling beat up and worn out. This year I felt fine.
So I headed into the next segment of the course, the dreaded deep canyons, miles 30 through 60, feeling pretty spiffy. But then it got hot, and I mean hot—over 100 degrees hot. I started dunking my head in every stream, bucket, sponge, horse trough, and mud hole I could find. At the bottom of Deadwood Canyon, just before the storied Devil’s Thumb climb, I made a bee line for the river that would have astonished bees. It looked like a beach party along the shore. Runners were stretched out on the rocks with their feet in the water. Some were actually sitting in the river and submerging themselves completely. I got on my knees and used my hat to pour water over my head. The icy water felt like shock therapy.
When I felt cooled down, I started the trip up the tight switchbacks of Devil’s Thumb. As hot and torturous as it was, this climb actually worked out well for me. I was passing runners who were stopped, bent over, hands on knees, succumbing to the heat. One guy threw up as I went by, yet I was able to keep up a steady march to the top. Slowly but surely, the hot canyons passed by under my slow but relentless assault. The afternoon passed, and I eased into Foresthill, mile 62, where on my first try at Western I had thrown in the towel.
At Foresthill, I picked up my pacer, and we headed out of town and down into the canyon above the Middle Fork of the American River. I seemed to get into a zone that included my mind being occupied by a constant stream of Doors songs. I didn’t seem to have any control over the song selection or the volume. My mind was just on autopilot. “Come on, Baby, light my fire, try to set the night on fire…” “People are strange when you’re a stranger…” “I’m a backdoor man…” “This is the end, my one true friend, the end…” The music in my head was so loud I thought my pacer could hear it. The aid stations kept appearing out of the dark like cheap bars on ruined streets and then disappearing behind us like jilted lovers. The air was cool now. We got down beside the river, and I could hear the water rushing by next to me.
The river crossing at Rucky Chucky looked like a scene out of Apocalypse Now, weird jerky lighting and people stumbling around like zombies. I actually enjoyed the whole diverting process of crossing the river and sitting on the far side, changing clothes and wolfing down food. It broke up the continuous running. Along the Auburn Lakes Trail section of the course that came next, I managed to fight off sleep and exhaustion so that by the time I’d reached Brown’s Bar at 90 miles, I knew I was home free. All my exhaustion fell away as the light came up, and I approached the Highway 49 crossing just seven miles from the finish. I floated over the final trails, stunned that it was possible to feel so good at the end of a 100-mile run.
Reaching the Placer High School stadium in Auburn, I sped around the track and finished in 27 hours, 13 minutes. That was well over an hour faster than the goal I had set for myself and almost two and a half hours better than my previous finish at Western. It was a great moment, but then it suddenly took a wrong turn. My wife was there, and after things quieted down, she said, “Robert didn’t make it.”
I was stunned. We’d hopscotched with each other at the beginning of the race, but then I had gotten slightly ahead. That kept us separated all the way to Michigan Bluff at 55 miles, but I’d seen him there coming in just as I was leaving. He was still just a few minutes behind at Foresthill. At Highway 49, I’d heard that he had taken quite a bit of extra time to get to the river crossing, but that he was across and pushing on. I learned later that things had gone downhill from there. A bad stomach touched off by the heat had kept him from eating enough. The lack of energy caught up with him later in the night. At the Auburn Lake Trails station, he calculated that at the pace he was going he was not going to make the cutoff at the finish, so he dropped there. I’d lost my partner in crime.
Crossing the river at Rucky Chucky at Western States.
© Gary Dudney
We traveled home separately, and I didn’t hear from Robert for three days. Then he sent an email. He was sorry that he wasn’t going to be able to help me through the rest of the Grand Slam, because, he wrote, “I’ll be running the races myself and trying to beat you to the finish.” So he was going to continue with the other three races even though he’d lost his chance at the Grand Slam. I wondered how I would have reacted in his place. Chances are I would have moped around and then sandbagged the other races. Not Robert.
It’s hard to describe just how strange it seemed arriving in Vermont from California. The Central Coast around Monterey, California, is all green hills and wildflowers in the early spring, but in the summer, the place reverts back to its semi-desert, low-rainfall character. The plant life goes to seed and dies. The hills turn brown. Riparian lakes and ponds dry up, and the earth cracks. As we arrived in Vermont, from the plane it looked as if we were arriving in the Amazon. Everything was green. Everything was growing. The fields were lush expanses of thick grass. The trees were covered in broad, healthy leaves.
The two races, Western States and Vermont, are also a study in contrast. The Western States trail passes through rugged mountains and isolated canyons. Signs of civilization are few and far between. In Vermont, the foothills of the Green Mountains are low and rolling. Farms are scattered along the country roads. Cabins pop out of the woods at every turn. Stone walls line the roads. Western passes through the crumbling remains of the Gold Rush era—abandoned graveyards deep in the forest, rusting mining equipment. In Vermont, the stone churches, covered bridges, village greens, and Federal-style houses evoke early America and the colonial past. Western is gold miners and lumberjacks. Vermont is dairy farmers and innkeepers.
Robert and I sat in our hotel room in Woodstock, fiddling with the alarm clock and working out when we needed to get up. The race start was at four in the morning. It was going to take us about an hour to get up and get ready. We left another half an hour for the drive over in case we got lost, which, as a matter of fact, we did. We set the alarm for two o’clock Eastern time, which was 11 o’clock Pacific time, our time. Neither of us slept a wink.
The race began to the strains of “Chariots of Fire” played on an electric piano with bursts of fireworks going off overhead. But the excitement quickly dissipated as we entered a dark forest and picked our way over a muddy trail with our flashlights. In the close, foggy air, my breathing echoed in my head. The first trails gave way to country roads lined with crumbling stone walls and maple forests. Fog hung low over duck ponds next to the road where cattails hugged the shore, and frogs croaked dissolutely. I monitored the state of my legs and wondered if exhaustion from the lack of sleep and the second 100-mile effort was going to come crashing down on me early in the race, but all was normal.
Because of the early start, it seemed like we had been running forever by the time early afternoon rolled around. The weather had been very forgiving. Prepared for heat and humidity, I kept looking up at a broken cloud cover that was keeping the sun in check. We were catching a real break here. Compared to Western, this was like running in the Arctic.
At the 60-mile mark of the race, I took stock. Nothing major was going wrong. I was handling the second hundred in good order. It was looking like a definite finish in Vermont, but more importantly, for the very first time since agreeing to the Grand Slam, I was feeling like I might actually have a shot at going all the way. I had been careful to keep that kind of optimism in check for fear of feeding too much red meat to the monster of disappointment that might be waiting around the next corner. But now hope came spewing out of me like fizz from a dropped soda can.
Around 90 miles, we climbed a road up the aptly named Blood Hill. Along the climb, glow sticks beckoned from high above like distant stars. The final miles snaked along a hillside through the woods, the trail constantly shifting up and down. I had developed pains at the top of both feet just where the foot meets the ankle. I attributed it to the pounding my feet had taken throughout the day on some unforgiving hard road surfaces that were prevalent on the course in Vermont. A similar thing had happened to me the year before in Kansas in a race that was also run extensively on hard, dry country roads and rock-hard trails. But a little ankle pain wasn’t going to dampen my soaring spirits. I was just a few miles from the end of the race, and I had only been running for 22 hours. It looked like I would be collecting a silver belt buckle reserved for those who finished in less than 24 hours.
I trotted up to the finish line in front of a big horse barn. No one seemed to notice me as a local favorite had just finished ahead of me and was drawing everyone’s attention. I walked into the barn and sat down in the first folding chair I came to. Someone, a stranger, draped a big horse blanket over my shoulders. It was just after four in the morning, and the air had that damp intense chill that comes just before dawn. I could hardly believe I had just made it through Vermont. Half of the Grand Slam was done.
Robert found me a couple of hours later fast asleep in the back of our rental car. He told me he’d dropped out with just ten miles to go. I was too wiped out to realize that he was kidding. He strung me along for a while and then told me the truth. Actually, he’d finished in 25:40. It was a new 100-mile personal best for him, so we’d both come through Vermont smelling like roses.
A little over four weeks later, I found myself back in the shabby Sixth Street Gym in Leadville, Colorado, waiting for Chlouber’s infamous pep talk. Bill Finkbeiner was up at the front of the room, showing his son the specially made belt buckle that he was expected to take home for finishing Leadville for the twentieth consecutive time. It was as big as a dinner plate. The race was 21 years old at that point. Finkbeiner had been invited to the first running of the race, but he had declined.
Chlouber interrupted his usual remarks to introduce someone in the crowd. “Now here’s a feller who has raised the bar on toughness,” Chlouber said. “Yessir, this gentleman is just plain old Leadville rock hard, horse leather tough.” Then he asked Aron Ralston to stand up. It was the very individual who a couple of months before had been pinned to a rock wall by a boulder and had had to cut his own arm off to save his life. This was long before the book and the James Franco movie had come out, but everyone in the gym had heard the story. Aron was young and handsome. He stood up, smiled, and waved genially. A new prosthetic arm was strapped to his shoulder. The plan was for him to pace this year and then run the race himself the following year. When the standing ovation finally quieted down, Chlouber said, “So when you get out there in the middle of the night, and you start whinin’…”
At just before five the next morning, Robert and I were standing with 500 other runners on the corner of Sixth and Harrison. I pulled out my gloves and put them on. I strapped the safety loop of my flashlight around my wrist. With five minutes to go, I worked my way up closer to the start banner. I was not calm, but then I wasn’t scared either. This was our third start this summer. I was very aware that patience was required. Nothing big would happen for the next 10 or 12 hours. Then we’d engage the beast.
A shotgun blast sent us down Sixth Street, and I immediately lost track of Robert in the mad rush to get out of town. I spent some time adjusting my stride and settling down on the Boulevard heading toward Turquoise Lake. Once we made the single track next to the lake, I was running comfortably and even moving up on runners who had gone out too fast and were having to cut their speed back. The only surprise was that I was getting a mild little pain in the front of both my ankles. I recognized the pain as an echo of the problem I’d had during the last 10 miles of Vermont. Both ankles had gotten quite painful then, but the problem cleared up in no time after the race and hadn’t bothered me in any of the running I’d done in the past four weeks before Leadville. I’d forgotten all about it. Okay, I thought, I’m going to have this minor irritant going on. Big deal. Pain’s my friend. Grit and determination. Think of Aron Ralston for God’s sake! I started my ibuprofen regimen a bit sooner than I’d planned and put it out of my mind.
We reached May Queen after two and a half hours, and I was relieved to see I was right on my planned schedule. I scarfed down some food, filled my water bottles, and set out over the Colorado Trail for Sugarloaf Pass. I remembered struggling up this road toward the pass last year. This year, I pushed through the same section with short walks and long runs and figured I was putting some time in the bank for later. At the Fish Hatchery, I was actually ahead of schedule! Can this really be happening? I asked myself.
Stream crossings abound in the Rocky Mountains.
© Gary Dudney
The next section of the course from the Fish Hatchery around to Halfmoon was deceptive. Still early in the race, it seemed like a flat, paved road curving along the floor of a valley at the lowest altitude of the race would be a breeze. But we were still well over 9,000 feet, and the altitude was getting to me, as it did to most people who had the temerity to live at sea level and not spend three weeks in Leadville ahead of the race. I decided it was time to work some positive thinking magic, so I picked a runner who was going at a slow but steady pace, tucked in behind him, and imagined I was drawing energy from him. It worked. Instead of perhaps slipping off my plan, I made Halfmoon still ahead of schedule and marched right on to the roller-coaster trail to Twin Lakes.
After Twin Lakes was the momentous climb to Hope Pass. I fell in with a group making a steady ascent at a pace that suited me. A sudden rainstorm brought everyone to a halt as we struggled into our rain gear. As we got higher, some disconcerting bolts of lightning crashed around us closer than I would have preferred, but the thought of being struck by lightning did have the useful effect of emptying my mind of all concerns about my sore and tired legs. The year before, this same climb had broken me. This year, it served to confirm that I had the race well in hand.
At Winfield—the halfway point—my elapsed time was only a little over 12 hours. This was massively better than what I had managed the year before. It meant that I had more than 17 hours to get back to the finish. It was a miracle. I could crawl back in that amount of time. I couldn’t believe it. I could kiss Robert Josephs right now, I thought. What a great and fabulous idea it was to tackle the Grand Slam this year! Next stop, Wasatch, and then I’ll be lifting that big eagle trophy over my head to deafening applause.