Transition

For as long as I’ve been running long distance, I’ve known people who went longer still, into the wonderfully wacky world of ultras. The realization has recently sneaked up on me that a goodly number of runners I know are suddenly making the transition from marathoner to ultrarunner. It’s almost like a delightful epidemic.

The basic ultrarunner universe has not grown greatly over the past decade or so. There may be 8,000 or so ultrarunners in the United States while there are roughly 400,000 marathoners.

The new converts are finding in ultrarunning a kind of revivifying effect on their running.

Their marathoning has been all well and good, but the transition to ultrarunning has opened new doors, not the least of which is that, at least in America, most ultraracing is done on trails—very much unlike the 1970s and very much unlike the rest of the world. For most international ultrarunners, their races are run either on the road or on the track.

Memory sprints back to 1977 when Ibegan to work for Runner’ s World. As you can imagine, more than the usual percentage of employees ran. Although we were on the edge of Silicon Valley, running was not confined to the offices of Runner’s World; quite a few of the young engineers in the computer industry also ran.

Although it wasn’t a requirement that to work at Runner’s World you had to be a runner, the north end of the hall where I had my first office was a runners’ watren.

As noontime approached, one by one the office doors would close as the inhabitants changed from their office clothes to their running clothes. When noon arrived, it was like a buffalo stampede as runners poured from the building and headed either over Highway 101 to run in the bike lanes along side streets in Mountain View or out to the east, where sat Methane Mountain, a massive landfill with big wide pipes piercing the rolling hills to allow the methane produced by the rotting garbage to escape into the air. (Years later, the Shoreline Amphitheater was built on some of the landfill. Rock fans who sat on the lawn to watch a concert and made the mistake of smoking maryjane there were alarmed to find that the turf began to burn—hottest rock concert in town!)

It takes no great imagination to deduce which runners refused to cross Highway 101 and concentrated their efforts on Methane Mountain.

Our three most famous ultrarunners were Doug Latimer, who had come to Runner’s World after working in the business side of the book publisher Harper’s. Doug would later win Western States. Phil “Bagpipes”

Lenahan was in our marketing and PR department. He had previously done publicity for radio stations. He ran Western States, qualified each year for Boston, and each St. Patrick’s Day culled together an eclectic 40-member band that performed in a rough concert hall he rented. The third was a Canadian, Dave “The Amazing One” Prokop, who went off to run an ultra every weekend he could find one. On one of the few occasions when he ran west from the office onto the paved bike paths, he found a $20 gold piece that he had made into a necklace.

Novice runners were frequently invited by the ultra boys to run with them at noon because their pace was not so rapid that the average runner couldn’t keep up. They also used that opportunity to recruit new ultrarunners by espousing the benefits of the sport: more civilized pace, fewer injuries, scenic locales, poignant camaraderie. Although I resisted Doug Latimer’s insistence that I run Western States, I did succumb to temptations by Bagpipes to run the occasional ultra. He was a sweet talker.

One weekend he talked me into running a50-mile road ultra in Sacramento by promising to take me to a really groovy restaurant the night before that served the world’s best buffalo burgers. The burgers were big, they were mighty tasty, and we weren’t all that convinced that carbohydrate loading was the way to go the day before a long race.

The ultra world naturally had its colorful characters besides those who worked for Runner’s World. There was

Park Barner, a Pennsylvania lad who ran incredible miles in 24-hour track races and who wore black shoes the brand of which nobody could make out; Tom Osler, a New Jersey math teacher who, by using his massive brain to augment his little-more-than-average talent, took several national ultra titles and who pioneered most of what we know about long-distance running; Nick Marshall, a bewhiskered fellow who by the looks of him should not have been a champion runner, but who was. A few years after meeting him, I became a pen pal of his for something like 18 months when he lived at a salmon cannery in Alaska, far from his beloved ultra courses in the Lower 48; Frank Bozanich, a Marine who knew only one way to race: go out fast and hang on as long as you can manage, with the result that you would either crash or win; and Don Choy, the San Francisco mailman who reintroduced six-day track races to the United States ata little high school track in Woodside, California.

It was a heady period.

I was reminded recently of the casual atmosphere that prevailed at the start of ultraraces. I heard an interview with Roger Staubach, the Dallas Cowboys quarterback who is in the Hall of Fame. He and fellow quarterback Troy Aikman formed a NASCAR stock car racing team. Roger was quoted as being astonished at how casually the NASCAR drivers seemed to take their sport and themselves, signing autographs, giving interviews, and casually swapping stories minutes

before they crawled into their cars to race. Staubach recalled that before a football game, he would be hiding somewhere away from people trying to get his head together to play that game, that he would never have been able to hold a conversation with someone, much less sign autographs.

The starting line of a 10K race or a marathon can be a pretty tense scene. Not so ultras. People were telling jokes, slapping each other on the back, asking about the family. All of that in the pitch darkness of 5:00 a.m. before a 50-mile race that would twice climb a nearby mountain.

It is a whole ’nother sport from regular running and racing.

In fact, it’s a whole ’nother sport from any other kind of sport—except, perhaps, for ultra snowshoe racing, which is of a similar bent.

Certainly the predominance of trail ultras in the United States has a lot to do with the sport’s popularity, although there are no trail ultras—or any ultras—in the United States comparable to the major road ultras like Comrades Marathon, which draws literally thousands of participants.

But once again, that’s some of the charm of the American trail ultras: once the race begins, it’s pretty much you, a few other like-minded souls around you, and the environment. The whole enterprise offers a sort of communion between athlete and nature, a reversion to a human existence that goes back millennia, when to travel great distances, you were required to do it on your own two feet.

Ultrarunning may be the oldest sport/lifestyle on Earth, and it’s still one of the least understood by the walkingaround public—which is just fine by those who go super-long distances.

Eo * *

MARC WITKES

Within sight of the finish line of the Tucson Marathon on December 10, Marc Witkes died of a heart attack. Marc suffered from “a both a bicuspid aortic valve and blood vessels that did not circulate properly. He was 40 years old.

An accomplished marathoner, ultrarunner, and triathlete, Marc was a regular contributor to this magazine. His last story for us (Sept./Oct. 2006) covered wounded Marines competing in the Marine Corps Marathon.

Marc was an athletic fixture in the Durango, Colorado, area, where he wrote a regular column for the Durango Herald, served as president of the Durango Motorless Transit Club from 1999 to 2005 (and was credited with reviving the 250-member club’s fortunes), and was considered one of the spark plugs of endurance sports in that area. John McAward, a friend of Marc’s for 16 years and a frequent running partner, referred to Marc as “the most social runner you’d ever want to be with. He’d stay with you, walk or crawl with you. And he’d talk the whole time if you let him.”

Marc’s athletic achievements were awesome. He completed the Sri Chinmoy 700-mile ultra, 30 marathons, 25 ultras (including the extremely difficult Hardrock 100, where he also served on the board of directors), and competed in double and triple Ironman triathons. He grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts and was a lifelong Red Sox fanatic. He earned a B.A. degree in business administration from Fort Lewis College in 1992. He worked for more than 13 years at Gardenswartz Sports. Richard Ellis, owner of Gardenswartz Sports and a friend of Marc’s for 15 years, said, “He loved to do things that were unusual and very difficult. He set the goal really high for himself.” Marc had traveled to Tucson with a group of Durango runners who hoped to use the race as a qualifier for the Boston Marathon. Scott Brinton, husband of Marjorie Brinton, who took over as president of the Durango Motorless Transit Club from Marc, witnessed

Marc’s collapse. “He was going at his pace, and I turned my camera on to take a picture as he came by 26 [miles],” Brinton said. It was at that point that Marc fell. Scott Brinton reported that as Marc fell, two emergency personnel hurried up and began administering CPR, but he did not seem to be breathing at that point.

Marc was rushed to Northwest Medical Center Oro Valley, where he was pronounced dead.

Marjorie Brinton said Marc was “a fabulous guy, upbeat and encouraging. He got me into running, and he was very encouraging to the newcomers.”

Marc wrote for numerous publications, including Rocky Mountain Sports, VeloNews, Colorado Runner, Adventure Sports Magazine, Paddler, and Inside Outside. He was divorced and had no children.

—Rich Benyo

ON the ROAD WITH DON KARDONG

Rerunning the Past

When in doubt, attend your college reunion. That’s my advice. In fact, that’s what I did, “last fall.

Ce I graduated from Stanford University in 1971, during the turbulent *60s. Chronologically, 1971 may have been in the ’70s, but the actual end of the ’60s as a cultural phenomenon wasn’t until 1974, when Richard Nixon left office and young men started wearing bow ties and platform shoes. When people embrace disco, you can be damn sure the revolution is over.

Being a college distance runner in the 60s meant you were doubly alienated. As an athlete, you spent a considerable amount of time doing something with no apparent social or political relevance. That meant ridicule by campus radicals, who thought dallying along dirt trails did nothing to stop war or alleviate human suffering. And within the cozy confines of the collegiate athletic community, distance runners were perceived as the wretched, emaciated dogs that skulked around the edges of camp. Running miles and miles every week with little recognition and no professional prospects—what’s up with that? Couldn’t catch a ball, eh?

When the Stanford football team went to the Rose Bowl in 1971, the resident radicals applauded—or at least

some of them did. Our team versus Ohio State. If that matchup didn’t have genuine relevance, one could easily be invented and embraced on New Year’s Day. Left Coast hippies versus a bunch of Midwest fascists. Go, Thunderchickens! Our cross-country team, on the other hand, finished second in the nation in 1968 but created barely a ripple of excitement on campus.

So there we were, alienated from the counterculture and college athletic culture as well. And in response, we did what outcasts often do. We wallowed in it. We ran our guts out and relished the fact that no one seemed to understand why. We knew running was great, counterculture in its own way, and the best sport on campus. Or anywhere. If no one appreciated that, well, so much the better. Damn the culture.

BUT THERE WERE MOMENTS

But hold my horses here. In truth, our alienation wasn’t quite that complete. As lone wolves, we did enjoy a certain respect. We were, after all, tweaking the Establishment’s nose ina way, taking a path that had nothing to do with fame or fortune. That counted for something. And occasionally a professor would surprise us by paying attention to what we were up to. “One of the students in this class ran a 4:08 mile last weekend,” an English prof of mine announced

one Monday morning, for no apparent reason. I sat stunned, amazed to have been found out.

We even had a few fans of the opposite sex. At a party one weekend, my teammate and future fellow Olympian Duncan Macdonald lamented, loud enough to be overheard, “What’s the deal with women and football players? Where are the women who like distance runners?”

“Here,” came the coy response from a nice-looking female nearby. I made a mental note to follow up.

But perhaps the best blessing in those days came from the Stanford band, those musical anarchists who were forever getting themselves lambasted or banned by those in authority. Acadre of band members would show

up at one of our cross-country meets at the golf course each fall, ready to raise the level of noise on the links, not to mention our aspirations. At mile one, they’d blast the Stanford fight song, and I’d silently thank them for the resulting shot of adrenaline. Then near the end, as the first runners rounded the green and headed down the homestretch, you’d hear “The William Tell Overture” wafting down the fairway. Hi-ho, Silver! Validated by the band, it was hard to boast the role of outcast with total conviction.

So, yes, there were signs of interest. Even so, we never quite felt the full embrace of our fellow students. We loved running, but it was still just our thing, a bit of a quirky sideshow on a college campus more attuned to

protest and professional athletes in training. And that, so it seemed, was how it would always be.

Or maybe not. Thirty-five years later, let’s take a look.

I took a run around the Stanford campus on the morning of my first day in town, renewing my acquaintance with a few of the paths of my misspent youth. I circled Campus Drive, ran on the levee at Lake Lagunita, jogged past my old fraternity house, and dawdled for a while at the practice track where our freshman team used to run intervals.

DEAD COWS, DEAD HORSES; NO DEAD POETS?

I had been hoping to rerun a few of the longer routes we used to travel, like the Dead Cow Loop or the Dead Horse Run (as a psychology major, I surmised that the frequency of death in the titles of our runs was no accident but rather a reflection of inner turmoil suffered trying to match each other’s pace). But these days, long runs aren’t always in the cards, and a faulty knee limited the distance I would be able to run on reunion weekend.

But even with just a short loop around “The Farm,” running’s new place on campus was dramatic. I think it’s fair to say that runners are no longer outcasts here, or on any other campus for that matter. In the °60s, my teammates and I were the only running show in town. Then, we jogged in isolation through campus, around the lake, on the golf course, in

the foothills. Now, runners and joggers were everywhere, padding along wood chip trails and around the practice track. A 10K charity run was advertised for Sunday morning.

Since the lonesome ’60s, a fitness revolution has occurred, with a good share of its scientific foundation laid by researchers like cardiologist Peter Wood at the Stanford Medical School. Running is now an integral part of American life, on and off campus, and if you want more proof of that, consider the new $100 million business school facility planned on the Stanford quad, to be financed by Nike cofounder Phil Knight. Knight earned his M.B.A. here with a thesis that suggested someone could make money importing athletic shoes from Asia. In my college days, those imports were generally sold from the trunk of a car. Now… well, you know the now.

Running, then, is kicking patootie 35 years later. And the sport of track and field, which may have slipped afew notches on the cool-o-meter since the ’60s, is still looking spiffy at Stanford. What used to be a second-rate track with a rutted, crushed brick surface, known as Angell Field when I was in school, has been totally renovated and upgraded. Now it’s a top-notch facility with artificial surface and viewing stands, with periodic world-class competition.

OK, then, the evidence that running has scuttled from its 1960s hiding place on the fringes and emerged into glorious limelight is everywhere on this campus. But I didn’t come to my reunion

to prove a point. I came to reconnect with friends and acquaintances. And how are they doing?

On the first day of my class of ’71 reunion weekend, as classmates met up with friends of yore, we all seemed to share a similar, unspoken musing: who are all these old people?

There were a fair number of my campus comrades who—how shall I put this—seem to have been stuck in the banana cream pie line when the rallying cry went forth for the fitness revolution to begin. Miss that revolution and add a shock of white hair or the shine of a hairless dome, and you have the unmistakable critter known as “old guy.” My classmates had become their parents.

SOME HAD GONE OVER TO THE DARK SIDE

But not all. Getting old may be inevitable, but staying in shape makes a visible difference in beating back the ounds of hell. More than a few of the crowd admitted to being regular exercisers. Some had run marathons. Those

who had taken up running at one time or another in their lives wanted to let me know and to inform me that they remembered the days when seeing me disappear over the horizon for my daily tromp made them shake their heads. That was an eccentric vision in the ’60s. Years later, that was them.

I also ran into two of my track teammates, both in admirable shape after all these years. One, Randy White, was a 46.5 quarter-miler in college who has since morphed into a dedicated distance man.

“In college, I was stuck on the track every afternoon running intervals,” he recalled, “and you guys were always heading out to do your own thing. Once I jogged around campus with Pete Fairchild [Stanford’s best half-miler], and I thought, hey, this is all right.”

Avolcanologist by vocation, White has become a full-fledged distance runner by avocation. After reading a story I wrote afew years ago about running rim to rim and back in the Grand Canyon, he became intrigued with doing the same. A few years later, the converted quarter-miler did it, accompanied by his

son. Talk about range. And talk about a guy who didn’t look his age.

By the way, I don’t want you to think I was sizing up all my classmates by how fit they were. Running is an admirable tool, but I understand it’s not everyone’s cuppa java. Plus, I’d like to think my classmates weren’t subjecting me to that kind of scrutiny (“Hey, didn’t you used to be really thin?’’).

In fact, my running in recent years has had its ups and downs, and my 57-year-old body is showing signs of wear and tear. Knees buckle. Weight accumulates. No surprise there, but it’s still aggravating. Being on my college campus again, though, transported me back to days when six-minute-per-mile pace was comfortable, and I could explore Stanford’s vast campus with my teammates with ease.

I stayed in these familiar surroundings for a year after graduating, in an aborted attempt to make the 1972 Olympic team. It was an amazing time in life, when focus was entirely on chipping a second or two, or three, off personal records. One Saturday night in Oakland, I ran a personal best of 8:34.6 for two miles indoors. The next morning, as a lark, I ran my first marathon, and won in 2:18:06. Hey, I thought, this might be an event worth revisiting. That was a heady year, when I trained harder than ever, raced faster than I imagined I could, made my first U.S. national team, and ended up flopped in bed with mononucleosis. I couldn’t do any real training for six weeks, and my aspirations to make the 1972 Olympic team evaporated.

HUMAN PARTICLES—AT SPEED

Mostly what [remember about that final year, though, isn’t the hard workouts or the exhaustion of illness but just the joy of it all. There’s a nuclear particle accelerator (SLAC) near the Stanford campus that parallels one of the roads we used to run. Sweating and puffing next to it, it was easy to imagine ourselves as human particles, self-accelerating to ever-greater speeds. That was, after all, what we were after. And at night, we were known to break into our best Jim Morrison imitation, singing as loud as the pace would allow, “Not to touch the earth, not to see the sun, nothing left to do but run, run, run, let’s run!”

I left the Bay Area at the end of that year and continued to pursue faster times until energy waned and this human particle slowed. But I continued to run for pleasure. Or, to be precise, for joy.

On Saturday of my reunion weekend, I attended a panel discussion titled “Anxious Times” with a group of my college friends. The experts included, among others, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, former Secretary of State George Schultz, and former Defense Secretary William Perry. Terrorism and nuclear proliferation were high on the list of anxiety-inducing problems discussed, but for some reason I was more struck by the scenarios attached to an Avian flu pandemic.

As one of the panelists pointed out, Americans are already edgy about limitations of their basic freedoms resulting

from the fight against terrorism. Imagine, then, how they would react to being told they needed to stay homebound for weeks on end during a pandemic.

Here’s what I imagined: no daily runs, no mass running events. The freedom to travel on two feet is suspended. This wasn’t a happy thought. Nor is the thought of how terrorism or nuclear proliferation, in their extreme consequences, might upturn the apple cart of our daily lives. Our daily runs could disappear, and that would be the least of our problems.

We live in a dangerous world, to be sure. But is it more dangerous than the world of the ’60s? Then, we were squared off against the USSR in a mad game of nuclear chicken, with myriad missiles aimed at each other. We were mired in a war in Southeast Asia. Streets

of every major city in the country were balanced on the sharp edge between order and anarchy. Our mothers told us to stay inside.

Somehow, though, we lived through it. Some of us even ran through it. And that, friends, is why I urge you to attend your college reunion. To rejoice for having survived all that.

We’re all older, grayer, and with an increasing interest in Alzheimer’s research and the Social Security system. But we brothers and sisters have survived.

And some of us—imagine this—are still trying to whip our bodies into shape. Even more amazing, one or two of us—rapidly approaching the other 60s, the ones that count our personal years—are even thinking of running another marathon.