<4 Tim Olson relaxes outside of Telluride during his pre-Hardrock taper.

also it’s just what I love to do: running to the top of a mountain and coming back down.” He had been alternating days of long tuns of five to eight hours with days of five-hour hikes, carrying Tristan on his back. For cross-training he uses Tristan as a kettlebell: “He likes being thrown. You’re always doing core work holding a kid.” Nonetheless, he said, because the course elevation averages more than 11,000 feet and demands 33,992 feet of climbing, “You can’t prepare for what’s going to happen to you out there. Fi This race is so much more than a your physical abilities. That will only bring you halfway. It’s just got so many variables of challenges.” The other

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half, he reckoned, would depend on his mental strength. Before races, he meditates, going into his body and becoming more self-aware. “I try to be still within. It helps me for races, when things are hurting and there’s chaos all around going through aid stations. I focus on my breath and connecting with the earth. It helps me be at peace no matter what happens.”

During a race, he keeps tabs on other racers who are within striking distance: “T like to know if people are within 20 or 30 minutes, because you’re definitely inspired by people rocking the course; if they’re close, that’s incentive to catch them and be there next to them, or if someone’s chasing me, that definitely gets the blood going, but if someone’s an hour ahead that doesn’t concern me, because in this race, a couple of hours’ lead doesn’t mean anything.”

He doesn’t check his watch while racing, however, because he doesn’t find it to be important or helpful. “I’ve never cared about time. I don’t know my splits. … I don’t worry about those things because it’s not in my control. I’I pick up some minutes here, and that’s not going to excite me any more than it discourages me if I’m back a few minutes in places.” In his 2012 Western States 100 performance, Olson didn’t know he was breaking the course record until he hit Highway 49, about

P Sharing a Western States victory with Krista.

10 miles from the finish, when others began to make him aware of it. He was accomplishing what, until then, no one knew was possible, but that is one of the inspiring aspects of the sport and about Olson too: not accepting limitations.

Originally from Amherst, a small town in central Wisconsin, Olson grew up racing through cornfields and took up cross-country in high school mainly because he identified with the other runners, but as an adult he lost focus and found himself adrift, a college dropout experimenting with drugs. As he explained in a 2012 interview for Competitor magazine: “‘. . . I used drugs every day, multiple kinds, to mask the feeling of being lost.”” He witnessed the destruction of friends—one “‘ended up in prison, another committed suicide, and a few others I knew died from drug overdose’”—and found the strength and courage to change. ““T suddenly wanted to be sober. And alive.’” He met Krista in 2007 and they got married a year later, choosing to settle in Ashland, Oregon, for its natural beauty and finding a family of elite ultrarunners there who encouraged and informally coached Olson while crushing him on the trails.

Doing the impossible at Western

I asked Olson how he could account for the fact that, after years of attempts by so many others, including some of his fellow Ashland runners, he was able to smash the Western States record by 20 minutes. “That was a special day,” he said. “More than anything, I was really excited to be a dad. That feeling drove me. Krista had a good-sized belly then, and that really inspired me, just realizing that life was changing all around me and having these intentions years prior of hoping to meet someone who loves me and to share a life with and maybe have a kid with someday—that all coming to fruition, all those things were falling into place—that win was just icing on the cake.”

A few months later, during the inaugural Run Rabbit Run 100 in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, after bottle-feeding his baby boy in the middle of the night, he was too tired to give his best effort in the race. “I was really dumb for a few months.” Since then, his perspective has continued to change. “Now I’m trying to be a good dad. I train hard but also try not to worry about it too much and just let things fall into place.

“My number one priority is my family. They come first, and I try to make the running go around it. I love hanging with them. Having a young kid, you only get those years once, so it’s really awesome to watch him grow up.”

Krista is his crew chief, making spreadsheets and charts to organize his races and optimize his efforts. “She’s a huge inspiration for me on race day, or all the time.” In addition, Krista’s parents generally attend all of Olson’s 100-mile races, babysitting Tristan and serving as backup crew. “They geek out at all the maps and go to all the race meetings. It’s really special to have in-laws get into a sport like this and support me,” he says.

Fast-forward to Friday, July 11, 2014, day one of the Hardrock 100: Olson was experiencing one of the worst races in his life. Less than halfway around the course, he was overcome with nausea, vomiting, and shortness of breath. As he later recounted frankly and humorously in a phone interview, it took him an hour and a half to travel a mile and a half outside of the town of Ouray. “Flopping all over the place,” he eventually surrendered, collapsing for about 30 minutes on “a nasty, pee-stained mattress” lying in a junk pile trailside. “Something in my lungs just wasn’t letting go, like I’d been elbowed in the sternum, so I just tried to relax at low altitude, hoping maybe that would give way, because while I was hiking

<4 Tim Olson prone on the infamous mattress, unable to breathe during his epic 2014 Hardrock.

© Chris Rennaker

I couldn’t breathe.” He continued to slog up the trail, vomiting a dozen times more, until the chest pain went away. “Throwing up has never been a benefit before,” he joked. ““Apparently, I couldn’t digest anything that I’d been eating all morning.” So it went, more vomiting and “waddling” through that climb to Engineer aid station, where he arrived hours later. Meanwhile, he and his pacer, Chris Rennaker, realized they had only one light between the two of them. “I sat by a fire; my body was shutting down, freezing, shaking. It was just rough. I wanted to call it a day; I didn’t know what was wrong with my body.” However, Engineer aid station ATim and Krista at mile 58, “Love Endures’—an isn’tnear any kind of civilization and iconic image in Hardrock history. consists of little more than a few tarps at the tree line. And after eating a bowl of Fritos and drinking some Sprite, foods that he had never especially savored before, he was able to get moving again. “Four of us took off.” Topping out at Oh Point, around 13,000 feet, he recalled, “We saw the most beautiful and peaceful sunset, and then in the other direction:

storm clouds, rain, and lightning hitting rocks up there, a complete yin-yang.” By then, Olson just wanted to get down to the next aid station, Grouse Gulch, and crawl into a tent. “Lightning was so close that I hit the ground a few times. . . . I forgot I was racing or how crappy I felt; I was in survival mode and started running down that pass as fast as I could.” He guessed he was clocking six-minute miles. “When I got to Grouse, it was amazing to be there. I saw my family, I hugged and kissed my wife, and I thought, /’m alive.” This was the moment Dominic Grossman’s photo captures.

The bed-and-breakfast version of Hardrock

At just mile 58, after seeing his chances of winning the Hardrock slip away, experiencing physical disorders of epic proportions, and escaping with his life through a battlefield of lightning strikes, Olson wasn’t keen to set out on the next leg of the course, which takes runners over the highest point, Handies Peak, above 14,000 feet elevation, in the cold, stormy night. But Krista was of a different mind: “I thought she might want me to quit because there was so much lightning,