(And what | learned from it.)

empty expressway, with no exits until Salt Lake City, Utah. The downloaded

directions to the 2009 Wasatch Front 100-mile footrace that I was reading with my headlamp assumed we were driving north, not south as we were. The race began at 5:00 a.m. I recognized a cross street and blurted, “I think we’ve passed the turnoff for the start.”

“What do you want me to do?” my husband, Sean, answered, his hands tightening around the steering wheel in exasperation.

“Make a U-turn.”

Our truck bounced down a weed-choked culvert and up the opposite side onto the highway going north. Soon we encountered a long line of parked and doubleparked cars blocking the winding road up to the race start.

“T’m gonna just go,” I said, jumping out with my hydration pack. I sprinted up the hill into a mass of bodies and headlamps. The countdown was at “Eight!” Near the front, I found the check in and watched my name being highlighted. Relieved, I laughed. Whatever happens in the race, at least I’ve made it to the start, I thought.

[ens UTAH, September 24, 2010—At 4:55 a.M. we were barreling along an

ES Eo *

Getting to the start is just one of the challenges of ultraracing about which I have nightmares. Running 100-mile trail races—at that point I had finished 13—means accepting increasing variables. I salute multisport endurance racers, who manage the logistics of, say, horse riding, kayaking, climbing, and mountain biking in one race: all the moving parts! But running ultras or marathons, as simple as it is, does have its unforeseen factors. Some of them, you have a reasonable chance of controlling, for example, by allowing extra time to find the start—as Sean pointed out after the Wasatch. Others are beyond your control. I thought there was going to be a riot when dozens of other runners and I were flying out of Denver for the 2013 Boston Marathon and our flight was delayed for hours and almost canceled

because the floor of the plane was “spongy.” To our credit, no one cracked. We remained civil. Then the bombings occurred, and we were changed passengers on the return flight.

Ultrarunners are always comparing race results, scrolling through columns of names, splits, and finish times for a story of what happened in a race. The numbers coldly convey who accelerated and who faded. We look at past results for runners who have beaten us and for those we have beaten to try to gauge how we might do on the same course. But it’s an imprecise method. The full story isn’t there about who got lost, who took a bad fall, who was on a training run, who ate spoiled turkey, who was menstruating or had a flu or suffered temporary blindness, whose crew fell asleep and never surfaced with requisite fuel and clothing—to list a few setbacks that I have personally experienced—or who got chased up a tree by a moose or had to navigate around a female bear and her cub—factors that sometimes no one ever knows but that have qualified those finish times. A lot can go wrong. For sure, in every race, there’s a certain element of luck.

Eo * *

ado. The Bear is a 100-mile point-to-point mountain race with about 22,000 feet of elevation gain, starting in Logan, Utah, and ending at Bear Lake in southeastern Idaho. (Someone claimed that it is traditional for racers to drink a beer when crossing the state line.) The race director, Leland Barker, not only organizes the race but also runs it himself, often finishing in the top 10.

Up the first climb into the Wasatch-Cache National Forest, my legs felt rested, electric even, and, when I started tailgating the young star Dakota Jones on his first 100-mile effort, I consciously slowed down.

“What, are you trying to break the record?” one guy asked.

“We’ll see,” I replied. Kim Gimenez had the course record: 26 hours, 16 minutes. I had picked a previous finisher’s (A.’s) time, which was 10 minutes under that record, and would use his splits as my goals for arriving at each aid station.

Ina series of short hills, I passed two men on the climbs, and they passed me on the descents. The third time I went by, one suggested that I was expending too much energy too soon. “We’ll see you later… ,” he called as I pulled ahead, and I could fill in the ellipsis, “when you’ve broken down on the side of the trail.”

From my experience, most male runners are encouraging, inspiring, even magnanimous. I remember Zachariah Miller, when he was winning the 2011 Bighorn 100, checking my times during out-and-backs and telling me that I was getting faster. He pulled a fighting fist and said, “Keep it up.” Maybe it’s just a result of statistics, because there are more men typically in each race than women, but I have found men to be the best sports. I mean, who has the presence of mind, for instance, when I’m returning over Hope Pass in the Leadville Trail 100, to tell me how many minutes ahead each female competitor is? Women don’t do

© Sean McNamara

A Riders sharing the trail of the Bear 100 in northern Utah.

this. I don’t. I can barely think. It’s this camaraderie that I love about American ultraraces and that I missed when racing in Europe.

The “see you later” guy, however, was condescending, and I resolved that, no matter what, he would not see me later, so I sped up on the next downhill and, as soon as I could, ran out of sight. There was a long, smooth single track through conifers descending to Leatham Hollow aid station at mile 20, my first point of reference for gauging how I was doing. I was already behind A.’s time, so I kept accelerating, coming into the aid station as though it were the finish line but still 15 minutes late.

Earlier that year I had attempted Ramsay’s Round in Scotland, a loop enchainment of 24 peaks over 56 miles that you have to finish in under 24 hours in order to have officially succeeded. Seventy-four people have completed the Ramsay since 1978 when Charlie Ramsay first accomplished it. Though I finished the round, with local help, and though it was an exceptionally beautiful experience, my time was 25:24, well over the limit. Sleet and wind up high had made conditions slippery and stymied my progress; the counterclockwise direction I had chosen, which was also Ramsay’s, may be harder than its opposite, which the three successful female finishers chose; and it didn’t help that I had attempted it sight unseen. Nonetheless, I was unsuccessful, and that was a fact. I came into the Bear determined to succeed, even if I did break down on the side of the trail in my attempt.

Here’s one reason the Bear is unforgettable: not long after Leatham, I climbed up Richards Hollow, a tunnel of maple trees in fall colors. A red carpet, delicate red leafy walls, light-infused red above—it was the kind of place that inspires haikus.

Itopped out, accelerated down a dirt road, and saw no need to stop at the Cowley Canyon aid station, still 13 minutes behind A.’s time but feeling energetic at mile 30. I was the first female, but it was quite early to get happy about that. The sky was cloudless and azure, as it is in the West, especially in autumn, like a backlit curtain behind the sharp-edged mountain ridges and cutout orange aspen groves. It was a stunning day: not hailing and lightning pegged, as in my first Leadville Trail 100—the coldest conditions in the history of that summertime race—not hitting the 90s midafternoon, as occurred in the Wasatch Front, not deluging as it did biblically for 12 hours of the Grand Mesa 100 last summer. I heard that one year it had snowed over a foot during the Bear; the race was run anyway.

I kept pressing on. At Right Hand Fork aid station, Sean warned me that the second-place woman was 15 or 20 minutes back and closing. At 3:03 P.M., I arrived at Temple Fork aid station, mile 45, finally ahead by a few minutes of my phantom competitor, A. Encouraged, I picked up the veteran ultrarunner and former Hardrock 100 winner Ricky Denesik as pacer. The next leg offered a lovely, shaded, runable, ascending single track, and the two of us started up at a comfortable pace. I hadn’t gone far, however, before my quadriceps started quivering and tensing involuntarily.

“I might have blown it,” I worried.

“Relax. Just walk for a bit. Drink some,” Ricky coached.

ES Eo * Lalso have nightmares about getting lost: it’s the end of a very long race, and I’m doing well, and then the course leads into the basement of a colossal building, a towering compound. Inside, I run down a low-ceilinged corridor, looking through side doors into empty conference rooms, and then down another corridor, and another, with no people or course markers to be found. Lost in the labyrinth, I wake up.

Getting lost, especially when night temperatures drop to freezing, is a real concern. In October 2011, I was running in the first and only Slickrock 100, outside of Moab, Utah. A fellow ultrarunner, Mark Lisak, who had finished more than 300 ultras at that point, once warned me about entering races in their first year, before directors have worked out the snags. The Slickrock 100 organizers had marked the course in the week before the race, using tinfoil as reflectors for the night sections. By the time the race began, other users of the trails had removed most markers, perhaps with good intentions. I went out with the lead pack of guys and fell into conversation with a runner from British Columbia. We were both blithely following behind when the front-runners stopped at an intersection and concluded we were off course. Back we went two or three miles, having lost our

hard-earned lead. Lesson learned: don’t assume that other runners know where they are going.

Later that night, around mile 80, I got lost alone for a few miles on a dirt road. Icouldn’t tell whether there were no markers because it was a road—often roads aren’t marked until there is a need to turn off—or whether the markers had been removed, or whether I was running the wrong way. I stopped several times to examine any sandy patches but found no shoe prints. Finally, when I hit a paved road, I knew I was off course. It was around 10:00 p.m. I flagged down a lone car; the driver and his wife couldn’t help with directions, but they offered me a ride. I thought about heading back into the dark, empty desert, alone, not knowing if I ever would find the course, and then I did what had to be done: I turned around and ran back to the last place I had seen a marker.

The two leading male runners also got lost, running nine miles the wrong way before realizing it. Depleted and hypothermic, they dropped when they returned to the nearest aid station. I finished the race, but, with course changes during the day, it was later determined that we had run just 90 miles, not 100. I figured that the extra miles I had run while lost made up the difference.

During the early part of the Wasatch race, after I barely made it to the start, I came into an aid station along with two male runners. One left with me and we talked while charging down a road. I stopped at a bend to urinate, and he continued downhill. While I was crouching, the second guy ran by and turned off sharply into the woods. Wait a minute …,” thought. Sure enough, markers led away up a single track. “Hey!” I yelled, hoping the first guy would hear me. “That’s the wrong way!” After a while I went on, wondering how far he would go before sensing he was lost. Again, I thought to myself, Whatever else happens, at least I’m still in the race.

That was pure luck.

Midday, the author cools down in a creek.

© Heidi Attenberger

Runners had expressed concerns to Leland Barker about getting lost in the Bear 100, so he assured us at the prerace meeting that this year the course would be well marked, with reflective strips attached to trees for the night segment. And he was right; the course was well marked and I never got lost, not even when a runner in front switched off his headlamp at an intersection, presumably to confuse me.

T heard that, the next year, a fellow drove into the Franklin aid station on an ATV with fistfuls of pink ribbons, threw them down at the volunteers, and yelled, “Here’re your [expletive] markers!”” Most competitors were still making their way to Franklin and would arrive in the dark, and now, some would not get there at all.

ES Eo *

I had never experienced muscle cramping before. Was I dehydrated? Did I need more salt? Had I started too fast and wasted myself? And this is where you would expect the story to change, where things start going badly: the aching and nausea, the mishaps and mistakes, the mental fog and hallucinations, the disappointment and self-loathing. I expected this myself. It makes a good story even though, for ultrarunners, it’s not very original.

I swallowed three electrolyte capsules, drank a lot of fluids, stretched, and hiked for a spell. In the back of my mind was Sean’s warning about the woman closing on me. The weird thing was that when we arrived at Tony Grove, mile 52, I was half an hour ahead of A.’s time, even though I had slowed down. Clearly, he had slowed down too. Soon Ricky and I were running around a plowed field and into the Franklin aid station at mile 62, where Sean excitedly reported that a drunken cowboy had demanded that the aid-station volunteers move their bonfire; it was scaring his horses.

“Why doesn’t he just move his horses?” Ricky said.

“He’s drunk. I almost got in a fight with the guy!” Sean said, worked up. It seemed to me that he had had a few beers himself.

“Where’s my headlamp? I gotta go,” I said.

ES Eo * You hear stories about hallucinations: the guy running the Wasatch who encountered some miners in the middle of the night, 19th-century miners with headlamps who led him far away off course; the guy in the second night of the Hardrock 100 who saw faces in the flowers and avoided stepping on any. Eventually, he lay down and fell asleep and was fortunate to have been found by volunteers before succumbing to hypothermia. I myself have hallucinated, though not nearly as imaginatively. Usually, it’s sticks turning into snakes and lichen lifting off rocks. For an hour in the night during Leadville, I saw neon-blue geometric shapes floating gracefully above the trail, gently colliding with themselves and actual boulders. Nothing like this occurred in the Bear. My stomach feeling bombproof, I gulped down a can of Starbuck’s Double Espresso and remained wide awake and clear headed all night.

At the top of Peterson Hollow, Ricky and I came face to face with an enormous harvest moon. We stopped at the Beaver Mountain Yurt, mile 76—over an hour ahead of A.’s split—where I said good-bye to Ricky and picked up my other pacer, Heidi Attenberger, a ski patroller and former German national-champion singlescull rower. She and I were in good spirits as we passed a few men on our way up the chilly Sink Hollow. Around then, we came upon the state line and celebrated, though we had no beer. We motored on. The final descent to the finish was steep and loose. As we came out of the forest onto a dirt road, I began to panic. What were the directions? I couldn’t remember. At the end of the Wasatch, Ricky and I had run aimlessly around in a suburban neighborhood; the finish line was so quiet that we actually ran past it. Then someone had shouted and we backtracked and climbed over a fence to get there.

“Have you seen any markers?” I asked Heidi.

“No,” she said. “Do you see any runners?” “No.”

Then we did pass a runner, who was walking. And then, abruptly, we turned down a lane and heard Sean and Ricky cheering in the darkness. I had broken the women’s record by more than two and a half hours.

© Sean McNamara

The author (center) at the finish line with pacers Heidi Attenberger (left) and Ricky Denesik.

For once, nothing had gone wrong. We awoke the next day to discover that the finish line, where we had camped, was beside massive Bear Lake. A bull moose sauntered by. It was clear and calm again. We showered, lazed around, cheered for finishers, ate trout from Leland Barker’s farm, and enjoyed the last sun of an Indian summer.

And what | learned from it

After the Bear, I felt that I had graduated, had earned some kind of endurance degree. I had finally gotten past the nausea and fatigue and other calamities. Running the Bear had been painless, hitch-free.

In fact, I had not graduated. I’ve done 10 100-mile races since then, and the truth is that none has gone quite as well. I’ve made old mistakes. I’ve had bad luck. All kinds of stars have to align in an ultrarace. I suppose that’s why we love the sport: it’s tough and unpredictable and humbling.

My record lasted only a year. People have asked why I don’t run the Bear again, and I reply, “It could never be as good.” Mp

© Sean McNamara

A Racers of the 2010 Bear 100 kick back on a warm autumn day at the finish line beside Bear Lake in southeastern Idaho.