Peter Bakwin

“How do you know when to quit?’ I saw Buzz [Burrell, a Boulder ultrarunner and friend of the family] crying by the side of the road.” Stephanie herself was throwing up for the last 60 miles of the grueling race.

But rather than worry, Dick and Cynthia encouraged and began crewing for their daughter, whose ultrarunning resume now includes such feats as an overall

and second overall, and first among women—with a course record—at the 2004 Across the Years 24-Hour race.

After all, they reasoned, Stephanie had never turned away from a challenge even as a little girl, and she had always done fine. Scratch that: She had driven herself to become a serious competitor. “Her heritage drives her to do what she does,” Cynthia says of Stephanie. “Dick is driven, especially athletically, to get out and move.” Cynthia never thought of herself as especially athletic, though she walks every day, come rain, snow, hail or tornado. OK, she hasn’t walked in a tornado, but it’s the thought that counts. Usually she saunters between two and six miles. But after crewing for her daughter at Across the Years, she got a little advice. “Stephanie said, ‘If you’re getting cold at night, why don’t you start walking?’” [the course], Cynthia says. “So the next year I signed up.” Cynthia strolled her way to 33.3 miles in that first race, and since then also has done a 50K walk and another 24-hour race in Kansas. “I always stop at midnight,” she says. “I don’t think of myself as being in shape, except my legs. I can’t run at all because I have a bad back. Walking’s fine, but I know there’s a big difference.”

Still, having crewed for her daughter, husband, and son-in-law on various races and adventures, she knows that walking ultradistances has at least one thing in common with running ultradistances: “It’s here,’ Cynthia says, tapping her temple. “That’s what it’s all about, as far as I’m concerned.”

A Stephanie Ehret on a leg of the relay.

PASSING OUT MENTAL TOUGHNESS

If Stephanie Ehret inherited her athletic ability, strength, and endurance from her active father, she surely drew her remarkable tenacity—read: mental toughness—from both of her parents.

“T didn’t really think of myself as being particularly athletic” as a girl, recalls Stephanie, a petite, sculpted, rock-solid runner with long, golden hair and blue eyes that seem to promise laughter at any time. “I think it was more than that. I was just very achievement oriented, whether in sports or academics or something extracurricular.”

Attending elementary school and junior high in Boulder, Stephanie’s first athletic love was gymnastics. She didn’t play team sports (“unless you count cheerleading”) but realized she had athletic aptitude while participating in the Presidential Fitness Program that so many middle-aged “kids” now remember from the Nixon era. The program was a school-run certification of students’ rope climbing, push-up, chin-up, sit-up abilities, and the like. “That really suited me. I realized I was really competitive,” Stephanie says. “I remember they had a chin-up hold for girls, and the guy giving the test basically just told me to stop. Anything that required tenacity over skill, I was good at.”

But running and other aerobic pursuits were always a part of the Ehret household. Dick was an outdoorsman who led his children up many of Colorado’s storied 14,000-foot peaks. And long before it was hip, he loved to run.

“T even ran some with my dad early on,” Stephanie recalls. “I remember him running in stretch slacks, a sweatshirt, and a really huge towel around his neck. We’d just run around the block a few times.” The five Ehret children spent their childhood in a brick-and-wood home in the heart of Boulder’s historic, idyllic Mapleton Hill neighborhood. Dick worked as an electronic technician at the U.S. Bureau of Standards in Boulder (now called the National Institute of Standards and Technology), and Cynthia ran a day care for 15 to 20 children out of their home for more than 20 years.

From the house on Mapleton Hill, Cynthia had only to step out the door to take one of her daily walks beneath soaring maple trees or in the grass-clad, piney foothills just minutes away. Today, Stephanie and Peter Bakwin live just a few blocks from the home where she grew up, but Dick and Cynthia have relocated 10 miles northeast to Longmont. “One thing I really miss about living in Boulder was waking up to the chatter of all the runners going by on Fourth Street,” Cynthia says wistfully.

During her years at Boulder High School, Stephanie acknowledges that her biggest activity was spending time with Peter and their friends, drinking beer and suntanning. But even then, the couple would spend time and energy on activities many people considered extreme, from exploring Colorado’s Fulford Cave to winter camping (and yes, beer drinking) at Great Sand Dunes National Monument.

A NATURAL PROGRESSION

“When [Stephanie] started doing the ultrarunning, I realized that she’s always done extreme things,” Cynthia says, “starting with cliff jumping at Gross Reservoir”—a

mountain lake southeast of Boulder that supplies water to nearby Denver, where swimming is strictly verboten. And both friends and family recall that Stephanie’s relationship with Bakwin brought out the competitor in both of them. The song “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” well sums up their relationship of more than a quarter century.

At Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, Stephanie ran an eight-mile loop every day, never varying her course, proving early on her ability to play the mental game necessary to be a successful ultrarunner. “Like most college students, I did it for stress reduction and weight management. I was really disciplined about it, and really enjoyed it,’ Stephanie says. “But at the same time, I was smoking and drinking a fair amount and studying all night.”

Then, from her sophomore to senior years, she ran for the Vassar cross-country team.

“T think I was fairly competitive but nothing really special,’ she says. “But I would always race well, and that continues to be true, in terms of how I train. I do tend to race pretty well, to rise to the occasion. At Vassar, I had some good races, but I wasn’t the star.”

Despite her remarkable record of success—a glance at her resume of 20-plus ultraraces shows that she rarely finishes below first, second, or third place among

Caption to come.

women, and often overall—Stephanie is known for her relatively relaxed approach to training. She is an intuitive rather than calculated trainer, but she knows her body extremely well. Early on, she had her share of problems, such as a dangerous case of rhabdomyolysis—when skeletal muscle breaks down and proteins cause kidney malfunction—which happened after the 1998 Across the Years race. [See M&B, May/June 2000.]

Now, she is happy to simply run without pressuring herself, though if anything, she is performing better than ever.

“T’m no longer as interested in the achievement part of it. I’m not getting any younger or faster, and I don’t need that. I don’t need the accolades that come with doing well in an ultra.”

But keep in mind that Stephanie Ehret’s standards are high. The weekend before the 24 Hours of Boulder race, she participated in her first orienteering event, the 24-hour World Rogaining Championship in Arizona. Seven days later, she was kicking out eight-minute miles at Boulder on the second of her five loops for the “All in the Family” team.

After college, Stephanie moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Peter was attending graduate school at Harvard University. The couple ventured out nearly every weekend for white-water canoeing, cycling, rock climbing, and running. “We were strictly weekend warriors,’ Stephanie says. Then, in 1988, they decided to run a small road race, the Boston Peace Marathon. They ran every mile together on a course around segments of the Charles River and “really had a blast,” Stephanie says.

THAT FIRST THREE-HOUR-LONG RUN

She remembers one particular revelation from training for that first marathon: “After our first three-hour run, we were so proud of ourselves. It seems funny now, but it was great.”

Years later, her mother has similar thoughts about the relative difficulty of moving from marathon-distance races to the great beyond: “I say ‘only a marathon’ now,” the 69-year-old says, “because I’ve seen people doing 100 miles, and a marathon doesn’t seem that far now. And people running up mountains, instead of on the flats. You get very blasé about it after a while.”

In 1991, Peter and Stephanie came back to Boulder to live. He leveraged his Ph.D. from Harvard into a job as a physicist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and she was the curator of a small art museum in Longmont. Just as in Cambridge, they headed outdoors virtually every weekend, adding snowboarding and mountain biking into the mix of activities.

Ultimately, climbing Colorado’s legendary fourteeners (the 54 peaks above 14,000 feet in the state) planted the seeds of their ultrarunning careers to come.

“We climbed most of the fourteeners, and those were really our ‘ultrarunning’ routes in those years. We kind of got greedy for fourteeners, for doing more in a weekend, so we’d run down the peaks,” Stephanie says. Meanwhile, during the week, Stephanie had begun to run with some “faster, fitter, more ambitious” male friends in Longmont on her lunch hours. Although she was keeping up with them, she realized that longer runs—at that point, a half-marathon seemed long—might be her forte. So in 1995, she trained for and ran the Imogene Pass run in western Colorado. She prepared a long time, mentally and physically, for the 18-mile, high-elevation, 1 1-mile-uphill, seven-mile-downhill race, going so far as to tape a map of the course above her desk to motivate herself.

“T did it and it was great. I consider that to be the beginning of my ultra days,” she says.

But as accomplished as Stephanie is, the real marvel of the family may be her father. Dick Ehret is, unsurprisingly, slim and tautly muscled, his lanky frame tanned an even gold during the warmer months. He smiles almost incessantly from behind his eyeglasses, even when running distances that would make the average American 25-year-old quail and collapse. His 78-mile finish in Across the Years 2002-03 was enough to earn him 16th place overall in the 24-hour race, and he finished first in his age group in the inaugural Boulder Backroads Marathon in 1999.

THE SECRET TO ULTRA SUCCESS

Dick says he has learned the secret to successful ultrarunning: Take it slow.

“When I started [doing ultras], I didn’t really gain much expertise. The first time I did Across the Years I was just running 20 miles and I thought, ‘Wow. I’m in good shape.’” he says. “But when I ran 20 miles, my legs got sore to the point where I couldn’t run. I realized that in order to go longer, I needed to go a little slower.”

After running 83 miles in this year’s 24-hour Across the Years race, Dick has now done that race five times, as well as the 50-mile course in the Olmstead 100 in Kansas two times. /QQ: is this the Ad Astra 100K in Wichita? He ran 50 miles in that race in 2003 when Cynthia Ehret (and I) did the 50K. The only 100-mile in Kansas is the Heartland Run, and his name is not in its results. See Kansas Ultrarunners site at XQQ/

Like his daughter, for years Dick didn’t feel the need to have a very specific training regimen, doing it mostly by feel, running out from his home to nearby lakes.

But a couple of years ago, he took Bobby McGee’s “Happy Running” course and found a new way of training that has bumped up his performance considerably.

“You don’t put in miles. That won’t help you,” Dick says. “If you train, you run 100 yards. On a track, you walk the curves and run the straights.”

He now runs sets in the McGee regimen and doesn’t ever run more than 20 miles: “I don’t run more than 50 miles a week. That way, I don’t hurt myself.”

Cynthia is visibly bemused that her husband is now such a true believer in any kind of training regimen.

“If you’d told him before he had to train for something, he’d have laughed you off,’ she says, shooting Dick a wry glance. “He didn’t do it until he decided he had a reason.”

“And I’m going to go back to Bobby McGee,” Dick says enthusiastically. “I want to run Boston. I’m going to have him train me for the next [Boulder] Backroads [Marathon]. I have to run four and a half hours to qualify for Boston.”

But in truth, for a “slow” runner, Dick Ehret can move pretty fast. On the downhills of the 24 Hours of Boulder course, he was loping along like a wiry old coyote.

“My body just tells me how fast to go,” he says.

But like his daughter’s—and, come to think of it, his wife’s—his mind has a little something to do with his ultrarunning success, too. A capacity for deep concentration, fending off boredom, and the ability to run through adversity seems to run in the family genes.

In her first Leadville 100, which was her second 100-mile race, Stephanie had a terrible time, vomiting for more than half of the race. “But I felt committed to finishing no matter what. At that time, I didn’t think there was a chance to push myself to serious problems, and I thought it was just mind over matter. It was pure misery, but you know, when I finished, precisely because it was so difficult, it was life changing for me,” she says. “It empowered me to do a lot of things, including change careers.”

THE VARIOUS RUNNING PHILOSOPHIES

Dick makes himself run, even when he doesn’t feel like it. “Running is fun, and it keeps you healthy,” he says. “People think it’s so much work, but only occasionally is it a lot of work. If you don’t want to run, go run. You’ll be glad you did.”

And the harder the run, the better, he says: “I love to run uphill, into the wind. Running uphill is no harder than running downhill. It’s just a mental thing.”

And Cynthia scoffs at the notion that circling a track or other short course for 12 or 24 hours is boring.

“You’ll only get bored if you allow yourself to get bored,” she proclaims.

Since the family has been going to races together for six years, it’s a little surprising that it took so long for them to team up for a relay. The inaugural 24 Hours of Boulder seemed an opportunity they couldn’t pass up.

“Steph actually had the idea that the family should do something together,” Cynthia says.