Changes in Altitude, Changes in Attitude: My First Mountain Race

Bighorn runners Vicky and Jim Halsey, Don Frichtl, and Judy Tolliver before the race.

Here is an article I wrote that appeared in the Second Wind Running Club newsletter about the Bighorn Ultra.  Photos, except for the first one taken by an innocent bystander, were taken by Don Frichtl.

Many things will compel a runner to stop running. Fatigue usually. Pain sometimes. But that Saturday in June, under a bright blue sky, picking my way down a single track through a meadow flanked by walls of weathered rock and jumbled ridgelines, I was stopped by beauty.

The narrow trail cut through an explosion of purple and yellow flowers. The grass was shot with granite boulders covered in lichens the color of celadon, paprika, and soot. I took in the wonder of it all for a moment, then picked up my feet and started off again. In the heart of the Bighorns of northern Wyoming, deep into a 50K, I was not only 1,200 miles west of my home in Urbana, Illinois, I was also 8,000 feet closer to the sun that was beginning to parch my body as I ran my first ever mountain ultra.

Back in January, euphoric after a 25K and well into my second beer, a voice next to me warned: “Believe me, you’ll want to sign up for Bighorn, ‘cause it’s gonna fill up fast.” Kennekuk runner Vicky Halsey was unmercifully nudging me toward my next big challenge just minutes after I’d completed my last. I call such friends enablers. She and her husband Jim were eager to return to the site of the first ultra they had run together. I held out my arm: “Twist, please.”

Trail-running is among the top five fastest growing outdoor sports, up 11 percent in 2011 over the year before. Bighorn has grown even faster, and it did fill up quickly, in just weeks, in fact. And so I became one of the 800 who converged in Sheridan, Wyoming, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Bighorn Mountain Wild and Scenic Trail Run in 30K, 50K, 50M, and 100M distances.

Runner in the distance among blue lupines and yellow arrowleaf balsam root.

In the shadow of the Big Horn mountain range, along the old Bozeman Trail that connected the gold fields of Montana to the Oregon Trail, sits the historic town of Sheridan (pop. 17,641 and a bag of chips). The trail encroached on valuable Indian hunting grounds, and the area witnessed many tragic  conflicts including the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Today the town’s Main Street still retains its Western character, but you can also order berry-stuffed crepes for breakfast and a cold one from a local microbrew pub. At the Blacktooth Brewing Company, I met up with Jim and Vicky and Second  Wind’s Don Frichtl. We had all road-tripped out.

The conversation turned to the race. We speculated about how we’d fare in higher altitudes. I hadn’t prepared any differently than for any other long race. You can’t really prepare a body for altitude in Illinois. The best you can do is to prepare for the terrain, so I did a fair share of Clinton and Forest Glen long runs, maxing out at 20 miles.  Nonetheless, I began to doubt as I heard people talk about sucking air at a mile and a half high. Maybe my 8-hour goal was wildly optimistic. Even 9 hours began to seem too ambitious. The cut-off was 13 hours. I hoped I could make that.

Sheridan native Penny Hanify had generously opened her heart and home without ever having met us. She’d recently moved back from the Midwest, where she was a member of the SLUGs (St. Louis Ultrarunners Group), which is how Don came to know her. She cooked us a feast of barbequed chicken and fettuccine upon our Thursday night arrival and put us up for the weekend. Someday I hope to pay her kindness forward to far-flung runners who come to race in our area.

On Friday, I acclimatized to the area, touring Sheridan, channeling cowboys and Indians, and looking at Western art. The 100-milers started their race at 11:00 that morning, about the time I was wandering through the aisles of King’s Saddlery museum, jampacked with nostalgic cowboy gear. Don drove up to the Medicine Wheel, an ancient Native American spoke-like pattern made of stone atop a windswept peak, while Vicky and Jim went to the trailhead to preview the course. Sheridan had rolled out the red carpet for us, and so did the tiny town of Dayton (pop. 794 and site of Wyoming’s first rodeo), where  the race would finish and post-race festivities begin.

Approach to Tongue River Canyon.

While waiting in a Dayton school parking lot for the bus that would take us 45 minutes into Bighorn  National Forest, I made several frantic changes of clothes. The start would be nippy; the finish would be hot. What’s a girl to wear? As has happened so many times, I got lucky and wore just the right thing: shorts, short-sleeved tech shirt under a long-sleeved shirt that I could shed and wrap around my waist, gloves I could stash in my pockets, sunscreen, and lip balm.

We stood in a windy alpine meadow at the Dry Fork aid station, waiting for the start, shivering but warmed by the excitement. A few runners could be seen deep in the valley below making their way toward us. They looked like animated toy soldiers. They’d been running all night in the snow-covered upper reaches of the rugged 100-mile course. We were fresh. They were not. So many people I spoke with were Bighorn veterans. Some came back every year to revisit the most beautiful trail they’d ever run. Within minutes, I understood why. After a live performance of “The Star Spangled Banner,” the race director said, “Go,” and we were off, climbing 500 feet to a ridge that looked out on snow-capped peaks in every direction.

The chill soon gave way to sweat, known to some as “liquid awesome.” The mountains knocked me out. I swore I saw Julie Andrews twirling in the distance. But the obstacles and ruts made it hard to lift my eyes off the ground. Once I got my trail legs, my mind wandered to the scent of pine and sage, the silver bark of aspen, the gurgle of creeks and crash of the raging river, weathered snags and bleached bones of fallen trees, boulders ridden to their resting spots by ancient glaciers. Nothing back home could compare.

My fear of searing lungs melted away, and I began to bliss out. The thin air would not suck the life out of me after all. But I didn’t anticipate the steep, rocky descent into the Tongue River Canyon and the toll it would take on my knees and quads. You can’t help but smile as a 100-mile runner blows past you and tells you how good you’re looking while you’re gingerly hopping rocks at mile 11 and he’s loping like a mountain goat at mile 80. Another walked with me a spell as I fought off a cramp that grabbed at my calf. He advised me to take another Scap to stop the siege, and it worked. Nothing beats the wisdom that’s passed from runner to runner. Whether you dispense it or receive it, it feels good. It stops you from whining.

I witnessed many happy reunions throughout the race. I had a little one, too. At the Lower Sheep Creek aid station, I recognized Mark Tanaka from San Francisco. I’d met him while working the overnight aid station at McNaughton, an ultra near Pekin, Illinois. He had asked me to wake him in 20 minutes while he lay on the plywood sheet we’d put down so we wouldn’t be sucked up to our ankles in mud. When I did, he instantly popped up, downed a bit of food, and went on his way into the dark and into my memory of the first ultra I’d ever witnessed.

At the Cow Camp aid station, I was greeted by a familiar face—Penny. She had worked through the night, nourishing the 100-milers as they ran in temperatures that dipped into the thirties. And there she was, offering me bacon! (They had cooked up 60 pounds of it, in grizzly country.) The workers were as helpful as they were delightful: kids filling water bottles, retirees offering humorous encouragement and concern for your welfare, and smiling dogs. Later aid stations had pineapple, apricots, plums, and even shrimp.

Along the Tongue River.

Throughout the race I never questioned my ability to finish. I had worried that my hamstring injury would flare up. The steep descents without solid footing forced me to walk often. Ten miles to go, and I was suffering from flat-out fatigue—the good kind. The kind that’s impossible to get any other way but this. The dry, hot road into town presented the final challenge: five flat brutal miles, punctuated by a spray-down from a local with a hose and a popsicle straight from heaven. The cheers of the crowd and the pulsing live music at the finish line made me pick up my pace. With a time of 8:12, I was the 57th 50K female runner. I rinsed my feet in the icy Tongue River, put on my I Love Bighorn socks (which came with the race swag), and washed down a couple burgers with a post-race beer, when there she was: Vicky, already talking to me about the next one. I hid my arm behind my back. But not long after, hearing Don say Bighorn was the most beautiful of the more than 100 ultras he’s ever done, I thought: well…maybe.

Home again, the first trail I ran was the Schroth at Allerton, which runs along the sluggish waters of the Sangamon. The six-mile loop wasn’t much, but it was long enough. I didn’t need anything longer until the next race. After Bighorn—dry, high, and spectacular—I saw my familiar trail in a different way: oxygen-rich, lush, opulent, bursting, close.

Proust once wrote: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” The Bighorns made me see my home trail again as if for the first time.