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 I began 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’ warren. 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 a 50-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 at a 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. *

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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 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 Chin-

moy 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