Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness (24 page)

Add the quinoa and water to a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to low, and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes, until the water is absorbed and the quinoa turns translucent. Fluff the quinoa with a fork and cool for 5 minutes.

Place the quinoa and the remaining ingredients in a blender or food processor and mix for 1 to 2 minutes, until smooth.

This porridge can be made the night before and refrigerated so it is ready before a morning workout. For a warm porridge, pour the porridge into a small pot and warm on very low heat for 5 minutes (you may omit the Flora Oil from the mixture and stir it in after the porridge is warmed). Garnish with raisins, apples, and chia seeds or your favorite nuts.

MAKES
4
SERVINGS

17. Hunted by the Wasatch Speedgoat

HARDROCK 100, JULY 2007

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

—
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Don’t think about your ankle!”

Dusty was yelling at me again. Would he be yelling at me when we had white hair and canes?

“C’mon, Jurker, don’t think about your ankle! Climb!”

I didn’t answer. I was too busy sliding backward down a glassy snowfield, trying to stop my descent with three good limbs. We had just hammered through a steady downpour, up a ridiculously steep 4,400-foot incline through an opening in the Colorado Rockies called Oscar’s Pass. The rain had glazed the snow, turned it to ice. We had turned off our headlamps so the record holder who had been stalking me for 70 miles couldn’t gauge the distance he had to make up. It was 2
A.M.
, black except for every few minutes when lightning bolts strobed the scene: Dusty standing on a mountain, looking down, yelling (of course); me, crawling, sliding, then crawling some more, dragging what I hoped wasn’t a broken ankle.

Forty miles earlier, at a cold, windswept little valley, Dusty had taunted a forty-year-old named Karl Meltzer.

“You’re getting beat by a guy with an ankle the size of a grapefruit,” Dusty jeered.

Meltzer had just smiled. He had won the Wasatch 100 six times and was known as “the Wasatch Speedgoat.” He had also won this event—the Hardrock Hundred-Mile Endurance Run, or Hardrock 100, four times. In fact, he held the course record. One of his other nicknames: “King of the Hardrock.”

“The race doesn’t start until Telluride,” Meltzer said. Dusty and I had begun our climb to the snowfield from Telluride. I looked back over my shoulder.

“Climb! C’mon. It’s just snow. You’re a Nordic skier, you can do this. You’ve dug deeper before.”

I wasn’t so sure. I had dropped out of the Hardrock 100 in 2000 after only 42 miles. At the time, I blamed the effort I had expended in my second Western States victory. I had also blamed the altitude. And I blamed the naiveté and youthful optimism of two certain Minnesotans. Dusty picked me up at the Denver airport the day before the 2000 race. We drove eight hours to Silverton, Dusty behind the wheel, me pretzeled on top of plastic bins filled with his construction tools, where the back seats used to be. We arrived at 6
P.M.
, ate and tried to sleep, then stepped to the starting line at 6
A.M.

After winning my seventh Western States I had decided that, with the proper acclimatization and training, I could conquer the Hardrock. In June 2007 I had arrived in Silverton, Colorado, a month before the race.

Then, two nights before the event, I had sprained my ankle.

I had been camping at Molas Lake, at 11,000 feet, sucking in the thin air, almost feeling my marrow pumping out more oxygen-carrying red blood cells. Mornings, I lingered with locals and other runners at the Avalanche Café on unpaved Blair Street. To save money I made my own breakfast and brewed my yerba mate. Late morning, I headed into the mountains to learn the secrets of the course. My guide and companion was Kyle Skaggs, a twenty-two-year-old emerging ultrarunner who was spending the summer as a research assistant at the Mountain Studies Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to examining the ecology and climate of high-altitude locations.

Kyle, along with his older brother, Erik, would go on to become the best known—and in certain quarters the most idolized—siblings on the ultra scene. Lean, ruggedly handsome, and irrepressible, the pair were referred to as “the Young Guns” and “the Jonas Brothers of trail running” on the running forums. They have doubtlessly increased the recent female interest in the sport. (When he worked at Oregon’s Rogue Valley Runners shop, Kyle was famous for drawing huge numbers of women who asked him to analyze their gait but never bought shoes.) The brothers had been born and raised in rural New Mexico, and along with a dedication to mountain living and environmentalism, they would go on to approach races with a blithe aggressiveness that shocked racing veterans.

Kyle would not be running the Hardrock in 2007, but he knew the mountains and knew racing strategy. Together we explored some of the trickier portions of the course, climbing endless switchbacks, sprinting ridges, descending boulder fields, and crossing a number of snowfields, including a few 50-degree slopes where, if we had slipped, we almost certainly would have died.

Even though the Hardrock contained as many perils as I had ever seen on a course, the dangers fit into a majesty I had never encountered. In many ways, it was not only the toughest course I had ever explored but the most beautiful. We ran past turquoise lakes, brushed purple columbine and crimson Indian paintbrush. There was the shocking green of the tundra and the blinding white of the snowfields, gold rock and red rock, ascents that seemed as if they would never finish, endless vistas, deep, cozy valleys, and sharp, cloudscraping peaks.

Many evenings we spent with Kyle’s Mountain Studies Institute colleague, a thirty-something from India named Imtiaz. We cooked meals together in the organization’s kitchen. Kyle made mushroom quesadillas and Imtiaz made eggplant curry and dal with basmati rice. The kitchen was full of mouthwatering aromas as we sautéed tomatoes and zucchini with ginger, cumin, and mustard seeds. We discussed the subtleties of spices in Indian cuisine and the benefits of Ayurvedic medicine.

Years of eating plants had convinced me that the best way to get well and to stay well was to eat simply and to avoid processed foods whenever possible. After my epiphany in my first internship with an old man and his hospital food, I tried to treat injuries and illness with natural remedies whenever possible. Food was my medicine. I even avoided anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen, which other long-distance runners gobbled by the handful. I thought it masked pain so much that I might risk serious injury by running when I shouldn’t. I had also heard too many stories of runners taking so much ibuprofen that they damaged their kidneys. It was a classic case of treating symptoms, of wanting the quick fix. It was, in many ways, typical Western medicine.

By the week of the race, after nearly a month of workouts, simple living, and a lot of new vegan food, I was devouring 13,000-foot peaks and 30-mile journeys without the sensation of breathing through a cocktail straw. Even Kyle, with his fresh, twenty-two-year-old muscles and two months of altitude training, was surprised I was pushing the pace on our weekly ascents of Kendall Mountain. High altitude? I was ready.

I had to be. The Hardrock includes eleven mountain passes, six of them over an elevation of 13,000 feet, and also climbing a 14er (a 14,000-foot peak)—a total vertical climb and descent of 66,000 feet, more than would be involved in climbing and descending Mount Everest from sea level, as the race organizers like to point out.

Two nights before the race, I joined a youth DARE program soccer game on a grassy field not far from the town’s hundred-year-old cemetery. That’s where I tore my ankle ligaments when trying to steal the ball from a seven-year-old.

I gulped glass after glass of tumeric soy milk and lay for hours with my leg elevated with a bag of ice wrapped around my bulging ankle. I dosed myself with the homeopathic remedy arnica montana and with pineapple enzyme, bromelain. It wasn’t enough. The pain electric-eeled my synapses. There was no way I could run the race. Imtiaz watched me limp into the Mountain Studies kitchen and asked if he could take a look. He ground a scoop of black pepper and added tumeric, flour, and water until it was a thick, heavy paste. He pressed the paste onto paper towels, then wrapped them around my ankle.

I dragged myself into my tent that night, and Dusty saw the compress.

“Jurker, you might want to consider some Vitamin I [ibuprofen] this time,” he said.

By the time I was scrambling up the snowfield, I had covered 79 miles on that ankle. The toughest section was yet to come. The race course dubbed as “Wild ’n Tough” was not a course you wanted to run on a freshly sprained ankle. At times it followed animal paths and other times there was no trail, only trail markers to navigate scree slopes and snowfields. Nineteen and a half hours earlier, in the gymnasium of the Silverton High School, I had applied a new Imtiaz special compress, then clamped a Pro-Tec ankle sleeve and aircast over it. Over that I wrapped so many layers of duct tape that it was 2 inches thick. The last time I had seen the ankle, even after two days of treatment, it shined, purple as the inside of a thundercloud. It was so swollen I couldn’t see my anklebones.

My injury provided a great excuse to lose. But I didn’t want an excuse. The truth is, in this race, even on a good ankle, I would have been running if not scared then at least supremely wary. Anyone who knew the San Juan Mountains would be doing the same. A man named Joel Zucker had died of a brain aneurysm after running the 1998 Hardrock, and scores of people had been injured over the years. Hardrockers knew that, but they kept running. Hardrockers had run until blood leaked from their capillaries into their flesh, which made their hands turn into catcher’s mitts and their feet into clown shoes.

But they kept running. Some veteran Hardrockers even chuckled at the sight. On the other hand, pulmonary edema, where the blood seeps into the lungs, could be fatal. Still, past runners had heard moist wheezing deep in their chests, finished the race, and
then
been driven over Molas Pass to the Durango Hospital with fluid in their lungs. Dozens of runners’ guts milkshaked during the course. There was always plenty of puking, not to mention an abundance of hallucinations. Racers watched boulders turn into Subarus, trees morph into masses of laughing worms. They mistook stumps for severed elk heads. The slowest runners had the most visions, probably because their sleep deprivation was more extreme. The Hardrock has a 48-hour time limit. Dawdlers could pretty much count on phantom hikers joining them the last few miles of the course. Some of the poltergeists told jokes.

The first year of the race, 1992, only eighteen of the forty-two entrants finished. Racers had to cut down tree limbs that were blocking the course; the winner knocked on the door of a trailer at the finish line to alert the race officials that he was done.

Nowadays, the organizers set up aid stations at intervals on the course. But they set up many fewer than other 100-mile mountain races. Hardrockers speak with a disdain that sometimes approaches contempt of races like the Leadville Trail 100, which is more famous and more popular, has more corporate sponsors, and which, compared to the Hardrock, “is running over some hills.” The Western States is an interesting and famous event, but those Californians who speak of it as the most grueling of ultras? To Hardrockers, they’re amusingly provincial.

Some Hardrock highlights: at least one sleepless night and usually two waist-deep river crossings. Harrowing exposure to heights, fixed ropes, and steps cut into snowfields, tundra, and rock, hopping cross-country where no trail exists. Another feature of the race: scree fields that crumble under your feet as you spin in place.

You might think that an event that taxes the human body so mercilessly would have inspired a history of healthy eating. You would be wrong. Next to a typical old-school Hardrocker, the most ravenous catfish in the world is a finicky gourmet eater. For breakfast, especially in the 1990s, the race pioneers tended to scarf doughnuts and slug back multiple helpings of bacon and sausage links. Lunches and dinners often included pepperoni pizzas and greasy cheeseburgers. Not until the race itself, though, did the early Hardrockers make the bewhiskered bottom feeders look prissy. The legendary ultramarathoner and mountain racer Rick Trujillo, who lives just over the mountain from Silverton, in Ouray, Colorado, won the Hardrock in 1996 on a diet of Mountain Dew and Oreos. (He continued his promiscuous diet until 2007, when at age fifty-nine he was rushed to the hospital with chest pains. He eats more salads nowadays.)

Only about half the Hardrock entrants make it to the finish line. If a racer doesn’t make it out of each station by a prescribed time (based on the 48-hour maximum), he or she is told the race is over. Getting “timed out,” especially after 60 or 70 or 80 miles, is such a bitter experience that many racers have pleaded to go on (some have actually threatened the aid station crews), and empathic but firm organizers have had to address the issue in the race handbook: “You are all experienced ultra runners. . . . Do not debate cutoff times with the aid station personnel!”

“This is a
dangerous
course!” according to that handbook, a fantastic compendium of arcane statistics, numbingly detailed course descriptions, hair-raising terrors, and chilling understatement.

When it comes to the temptation to scale peaks during storms, for example, the manual advises: “You can hunker down in a valley for 2–4 hours and still finish; but if you get fried by lightning your running career may end on the spot.”

Regarding “Minor Problems,” the manual advises crew members: “You may also see, in the later stages of the run, runners who are extremely depleted in sugar and dehydrated. They usually will be extremely fatigued and may be nauseated and vomiting.”