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Racism, Misogyny, Intolerance in the San Diego Ultrarunning Community: A Compilation
A compilation of racism, misogyny, intolerance, and hate publicly directed at writer Myriam Gurba by ultrarunners in California
Introduction
Last June, Myriam Gurba and I went down to Cleveland National Forest for an intended weekend of hiking, relaxing, and taking photos. The San Diego 100 ultramarathon was taking place, and as an ultrarunner from Los Angeles, I had a handful of friends running it. We thought we would stop by for a few minutes so that I could show Myriam what an ultra looks like, and maybe catch a glimpse of our friends. What happened instead was that Myriam was subject to racial profiling, hostility, and suspicion, and we were illegally run off of public land. When we first spoke up, everyone dismissed it. Myriam wrote about it here. This is what happened next.
Terra Incognita Media
Myriam GurbaMyriam frames her experiences at San Diego 100 in the broader historical context of anti-Mexican racism in San Diego and in her own life in an article called “RACES, RAÍCES AND RACISM: Anti-Mexican Sentiment and Ultrarunning”, published by Terra Incognita Media.
Via email(s)
Paulette Stevenson Believing Myriam’s story and troubled by it, ultrarunner Paulette Stevenson, PhD, professor of English and former winner of AC100, Javelina 100, Zane Grey 50, emails SD100 race sponsor Hoka One One, and alerts ultrarunnerpodcast and others of Myriam’s Terra Incognita article via tweet. Hoka responds and says they will contact Myriam. Ultrarunner podcast responds by doubting the story.
Ultrarunnerpodcast.com
Andrew: “It is quite apparent that this writer seaks(sic) out racism claims any opportunity she gets. Having lived in San Diego for 20 years I have never seen racism towards an Mexicans in my daily life… Sure, in San Diego there have been protests about the border, illegal immigration, etc., but that is going to happen anywhere near a border city… Racism works both ways and she clearly has a problem with white people, 99.9% of whom have been good to her during her lifetime.”
Ultrarunnerpodcast.com
Eric Schranz: “I’m with you, Andrew. I get the feeling this (essentially self-described) SJW sees everything through the prism of a victim mindset and throws the very serious terms racist and sexist around haphazardly and recklessly.”
Ultrarunnerpodcast.com
Jose Guerrerohmm I wonder if all these SJW’s are campaigning for the NBA to be more “diverse”. Funny that only sports popular with white people have a “diversity problem”.
Gilroy, California
Mass ShootingA 19 year old white supremacist armed with a WASR-10 semi-automatic rifle opens fire at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, killing 3 Latinx and wounding 19, many of the children. The shooter was of Italian Iranian descent, and had posted to Instagram that the Gilroy Garlic Festival infested the area with “”hordes of mestizos” and instructed people to read the 19th-century book Might Is Right, a pseudonymous proto-fascist manifesto that promotes racial violence and anti-Semitism and is popular in white supremacist and neo-Nazi circles.
[ wikipedia ]
Twitter
Larry GassanThe initial attack [on SD100] was vicious and premeditated. Those two can seriously go fuck themselves.
July 29
Twitter
UltrarunnerPodcast
(Eric Schranz)
I’m with you 100% Larry.
July 29
Twitter
@jakescheck
guys: isn’t go fuck yourself exactly what she claims to have felt? regardless of motivations, don’t y’all (especially @ultrarunnerpod) have an opportunity to help show how welcoming the ultra community REALLY is? get these two parties together on an episode.
July 29 2019
Twitter
@ultrarunnerpod Eric Schranz
Nope. No interest in SJWs who try to start sh*t by exploiting sensitive and important issues for their own gain.
July 29 2019
Twitter
Larry Gassan
Nope. The attacks were vicious, the narratives keep changing. It’s a textbook example of a dishonest methodology.
July 29 2019
Twitter
@jakescheck
“in the ultra world that I know, I would like to think that the response to somebody saying they felt uncomfortable at an ultra would be “holy shit, that’s not what we meant and I’m so sorry that’s what you felt”.
July 29 2019
Twitter
@jakescheck
it may not matter much to you, but I just unsubscribed to @UltraRunnerPod. the ultra world that I know is a place where people can have disagreements about all aspects of the world, and still come together for something amazing. this response does not represent the welcoming ultra community that I know
July 29 2019
Twitter
@ultrarunnerpod Eric Schranz
Neither does making wild, unsubstantiated and refuted accusations against one of the more respected ultras in the country while simultaneously trying to shake down one of the sponsors.
July 29 2019
Twitter
@jakescheck
what I see from the outside of the situation is somebody new to the sport saying they felt unwelcome at an event, and somebody who is prominent in the sport saying go fuck yourself.
July 29 2019
Twitter
Larry Gassan
An ad hominem attack on an event based on their flouting the stated rules, plus a crude attempt to shake down sponsors, is totally worthy of a go fuck yourself.
Facebook
Larry Gassan
The defamatory attack on the San Diego 100 was a new low in ultras. The perpetrators can seriously go fuck themselves.
Facebook
Larry GassanHere’s a quote that’s relevant:“… because when you are a professional victim who looks for any reason to feel oppressed, you show absolutely no interest in actually improving the world.”*
*(Note: this to a woman whose rapist sits on death row in San Quentin, convticed of a series of sexual assaults culminating in a brutal murder over the span of a few months – hers was the first assault. Click here for a supreme court transcript).
Via telephoneRace sponsor Hoka discusses the situation with Myriam. They say they will work on an action plan with the race directors involving diversity training and also to ensure that signs are placed at and near aid stations making clear that an event is going on and that the National Forest and trails are open for use by people not involved in the race. The plan is to prevent others in the future from having the same experiences that Myriam had and witnessed at multiple aid stations at San Diego 100.
Mrtrailsafety.com
Larry Gassan:
Last time it was mentioned by an aggrieved SJW who was newly woke on ultras,* I nearly shot coffee out my nose. Wikipedia can be like that. There were stern advisories from Escobar on Thursday and Friday about how the Raramuri were real private, don’t approach them etc. OK, all very mystical and so on. They were stoic during the Friday beer-mile, and all the attendant shenanigans.That Saturday night, more than a few of them were happily getting shit-faced with very curious willowy girls, and they were enjoying themselves mightily. Don’t recall any Raramuri women in that group, and their minder was keeping a sharp eye on the money from sales of handicrafts.
Again, the Little Brown Indian Traveling Circus had come to town.
(*Note: This to describe a female Mexican American author who is a trained historian with a degree from UC Berkeley.)
El Paso, Texas
El Paso anti-Mexican Mass MurderPatrick Crusius, a 21-year-old white supremacist from Dallas shot and killed 22 Mexican and Mexican American people in a Walmart in El Paso Texas, near the Mexican border, wounding 24 others. Shortly before the attack, he published a white nationalist, anti-immigrant manifesto, on 8chan, citing inspiration from that year’s Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand and mentioning the white genocide conspiracy theory. “The anti-Hispanic, anti-immigrant manifesto promotes the white nationalist and far-right conspiracy theory of The Great Replacement.[40] The New York Times characterized the manifesto as racially extremist, noting the passage: ‘Hispanics will take control of the local and state government of my beloved Texas, changing policy to better suit their needs.’ It states that Hispanics and their intermarriage with whites would cause the loss of purity of race.” [ wikipedia ]
Instagram
Nell Bell“I look like a freaking mexican but I’m Native American…. Its called rules, SD 100 has a list if rules in what they call “The bible” It Applies to All runners, volunteers, crew members, friends, strangers, tourists…. It goes both ways!!! I had experienced some very rude people from Mexico but i simply gave them space and moved on”
Facebook
Karl Manly
“sounds like an angry mexican woman mad at the world and if she cant have it her way then we are all haters.”
Facebook
Monica Harris
“Angry Mexican who only promotes hate and wants to finds a racist problem everywhere she goes.”
Facebook
David Baca
“it is a sad state if affairs in this country right now with some people thinking that it is ok to call people you disagree with or do not like a racist, fascist or transphobe or some other identity politics driven ideological phrase. divisive and not good for the country at all.”
Facebook
Vito La Bella
“WOW. I left a few choice words on her Instagram page. What of a piece shit!”
Facebook
Vito La Bella
[to Myriam Gurba]: “This story is complete bullshit. Maybe you should start following the rules so others don’t have to enforce them. Based on what I read, you sound like the racist.”
Facebook
Vito LaBella, Victor Runco, etc:Vito La Bella: She mad about something. Trump maybe???? hahaha
Victor Runco: Vito La Bella is Trump in SURF?
Vito La Bella: He’s been a member for years!
Victor Runco: we have to invite him to the new Run from the Border 50K!
Jessica Mangine-Inglis: wait, what? A new run!? Stupid knee! One year and I can’t wait to come play with you all again!
Victor Runco: Jessica Mangine-Inglis yea basically you get chased by border patrol on the PCT…you gotta make it to Boulder Oaks without getting nabbed
Facebook
Nell Bell“I actually had dealt with some specific ladies (maybe 4 of them) from some part of Mexico running SD 100 with me last year. Pamela Parker and I have never experienced such a rude bunch of runners. So it basically goes both ways!! We had to get away from them once we arrived from the aid station because I couldn’t stand thier Attitude they had with us! Plus thier crew went into a section they clearly weren’t supposed to be in and Pamela had warned them. They gave no fucks and gave us attitude, she ended up telling the volunteers about it once we arrived at an aid station but nothing was done. But whatever… i was just happy to be away from these people.”
Facebook
Daniel Smith“You can find reasons to whine about racism if you look hard enough. The problem is no one is allowed to be just assholes anymore.It is like any black, brown, green, blue people can be dicks, but if a white person is a dick they are racist. Sometimes people might hurt your feelings, doesn’t mean they are racist.”“Sometimes people are just plain assholes, I don’t need anyone treating me special or different because I’m brown.”
[2]
“And it has gone viral so many people will believe her without calling BS on it. She is an idiot. This fires me up, pinchi llorona! [3]
Facebook
Victor Runco
“she is a liar and completely delusional. When people have no one around them to tell them they are nutz they start to believe their own BS…then they inflict hurt on others cause no one called them out on their shit. This one is completely full of it and did this to further her political agenda….and in the process hurt the SD community and those that put on and run here
Instagram
Daniel Smith
“Race traitor whore… You are an embarrassing sell-out. Sellout. 100%”
Instagram
VanessaMermaid619
“Are you trying to play victim to sell more books? … Clearly you enjoy being a victim… You really should be ashamed.”
Facebook
Vanessa Homyak (aka @VanessaMermaid619)
“ya well as tempting as it would be to her a lying piece of shit that should never set foot in my city wouldn’t change much”
Facebook
Vanessa Homyak (aka @VanessaMermaid619)
“I hope her car breaks down in a desolate area. She goes to find help passes out and wild animals eat her corpse”
Facebook
Nell Bell“Btw.. her profile name has “666” on it…that’s the number of the beast.. she’s evil…….which makes sense now. The devil tries to cause dissension with people… but not with us!!! SUCKA!!!!!!!!
Facebook
Victor Runco
“These 2 useless a-holes are trying to emotionally, spiritually and financially hurt the SD ultrarunning community. It’s one thing to be butt hurt and post some BS on social media it is escalated to a whole new level when you go after someone financially especially when you are making the shit up. IMHO its slander and they need to be held accountable for their fabrication
Facebook
Karen Hamilton
“this makes me soooo mad. As a foreigner I’ve had my share of moments, but I don’t think it’s because I’m white….lol!!!”
Facebook
Victor Runco
[Myriam Gurba] maybe you are too far gone….maybe not. You can still come back to reality and save yourself just don’t do it in San Diego.
Facebook
Vito LaBella
“Geoff Cordner You need to take all your prescribed meds. They work better when taken together. It’s Unfortunate people like you have a platform to spread lies and foster hate. You’re a coward and pray on the fear of others.You make me sad.”
Facebook
Nell Bell
“Shame on you Geoff!!!! You’re a complete fucking coward and an idiot!!! Some of my imates in prison have more fucking class than you do!!!”
Victor Runco:
“fucking inmates would teach him a thing or two about what racism really is”
Nell Bell:
“ohhhh for sure!! Talk about racial segregation in jail! everyone sticks with thier own race. People get checked or jumped. Shits real fucked up in here. But as long as each race don’t step over on each other’s boundaries and give “respect”….. ….they do fine Keeping to themselves and working with each other.”
Facebook
Vito La Bella
“I mean I’m not a huge fan of all the beaners, but I would never treat the “brown man” poorly. Viva La Mexico!”
Note: Vito LaBella is co-race-director of Oriflamme & PCT50, both run on public land in Cleveland National Forest.
Facebook
Edward Wang“Call me insensitive, but who dies?”
August 7 2019
Facebook
Larry Gassan
[to Andrea Feucht] “Why am I tagged on this? I wasn’t there.
Furthermore, it was lucky you weren’t DQd, because you were a solo runner.
Rules are rules.”
Via email
SD100 sponsor Hoka becomes aware of the overtly racist social media threads attacking Myriam Gurba and defending San Diego 100. They postpone a followup call with Myriam.
Via telephone
SD100 sponsor Hoka call to inform Myriam that they are ending their sponsorship of San Diego 100.
Facebook
unknown[to Martine Sesma] “And by the way, you probably shouldn’t brag about having friends of color like that somehow qualifies you to give advice” (In this deleted comment thread the guy also said something about having been a white man in the 1950s, so he knows what racism really is).
Ultraholic.com Comment
The Prez
107.77.165.3“Make America Great Again
Homosexuality is a Sin
Tattoos are only for sailors
Deport all illegals”
Lets Run
O.D.W.“White people are the only ethnic group that even admits to having issues with racism. Just admitting to having racists among them makes white people an easy target for willy nilly accusations of racism.No other group has the self-awareness and ability for self-criticism to admit that they have issues with racism.”
Lets Run
O.D.W.“Jews, blacks, etc view whites as nothing but an enemy tribe to be conquered, and 40-60% of whites just want to be conquered as quickly as possible, thinking that the criticism will stop when whites are a minority.”
Lets Run
O.D.W.“And do you want to know why non-whites are always so eager to call white people “white supremacists”?
The answer is related to the fact that the entire world desperately wants to live in a white majority country.”
Lets Run
Viking 21“If you go through life expecting to find racism behind every tree and aid station, you will probably do so. I have a Latino wife. We have never experienced a similar situation, but then we haven’t gone out of our way to find one. OP, Hoka’s cowardly reaction was their own decision, as is your decision to boycott. Personally, I can’t run in Hokas because I feel like I’m wearing high heels, so I have no dog in this fight.”
Ultrarunner Podcast
Eric Schranz
“The charges of racism towards the volunteers of San Diego 100 infuriate me…Those making the charges are activists who make a practice of this sort of thing. Head on over to either of their social media accounts and you will see them filled with these sorts of claims. They’re grown adults who act like Social Justice Warrior students and they are attempting to shut the race down…Hoka has pulled their support for San Diego 100 next year because of these two people’s complaints. This is a bad, bad, bad move for Hoka to kow-tow to this sort of weak, weak pressure. Racism is a very real thing, but in this case I’m gonna side with the race over two professional snowflakes.”
Ultrarunner Podcast
Paul“Regarding your commentary on SD100 – I think you do yourself a disservice by using terms like social justice warrior and snowflake. Those are terms used by the alt-right to belittle and demean critics.”
Eric Schranz“Snowflake and SJW are/were terms that perfectly describe this type of person and it makes no difference to me who else uses them.”
ultrarunnerpodcast
Eric Schranz“I wasn’t there (nor have I ever been to SD100), but when one side is hysterical with myriad claims of different -isms, I’m not inclined to trust anything they say.”
ultrarunnerpodcast
Eric Schranz
“HOKA pulled its sponsorship of San Diego 100 after some race-baiters made some spurious accusations against an aid station”…”I’ve decided to believe the volunteers’ version over that of the couple who finds a racial element to every aspect to life…My complaint is that HOKA decided to pull its sponsorship out from below a well-established race with a solid pedigree because of a threat from some ridiculous activists.
October 31, 2019
Mallory R
Referring to Myriam Gurba and Geoff Cordner as “crazy people” seems like it should be a violation of your own Comments Policy (https://ultrarunnerpodcast.com/comments-policy/). Yes, I realize that you disliked Gurba’s article: as ultrarunners, we love our volunteers and we know that races often depend on sponsorship. But let’s keep it classy. I don’t want us to shy away from talking about race and inclusion in ultrarunning. I’d say more, but I don’t want to find out what colourful labels my opinions will earn me.
Eric Schranz
There are exceptions to all rules, and “crazy people” is hardly an offensive term.
Racism, Ultrarunning, and San Diego 100
Back in early June 2019, Myriam and I took a weekend to head down to Cleveland National Forest. We’d been there before, just a few months earlier. The town of Julian doesn’t look or feel at all like Southern California, and Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is stunningly beautiful.
I am an ultrarunner, or was; injury has taken me out for the past few months, and after the shit I’m about to describe here, I doubt I’ll ever be back. San Diego 100 was happening that weekend. I’ve never run the race, but I’d been down there the previous two years, crewing and pacing one year, spectating, visiting with friends, and hanging out the next.
I thought we would pop in and I could introduce her to some of my “ultrarunning family”. We didn’t plan on staying for more than a few minutes; being at an ultra if you are not running or crewing is like watching paint dry. (Yes, I know, some people really enjoy watching dirty middle aged people in tight spandex outfits moving slowly and eating gels, but that’s a pretty niche taste. For most of us, it’s not what we want to see when we come to the forest).
After a brief visit to the race, the rest of the weekend would be spent hiking and taking photos on the Pacific Crest Trail and in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park – a beautiful park open to the entire public, even people of Mexican heritage, even while a race is taking place.
It was a disaster. Sort of like the families in the movies Get Out, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, my ultrarunning family consists almost entirely of creepy racist cousin Eddies (except that they are not funny) and those who enable them “because they’re family”. Everything is excusable if you are family. Consequently, sometimes you really don’t want your partner to meet your family. Sometimes, instead, you need to disown them.
Myriam Gurba is a writer, and a trained historian with a degree in history from UC Berkeley. Her book Mean was called one of the 50 All Time Best LGBTQ Books by Oprah’s O Magazine, and has been recommended by Barnard College as one of four books to read if you want to learn about racism. Her essays have been published in Time Magazine, The Paris Review, The Guardian, Vox, and the New York Times.
Myriam wrote about her experience at San Diego 100 in the broader historical context of anti-Mexican racism in San Diego and in her own life in an article called “RACES, RAÍCES AND RACISM: Anti-Mexican Sentiment and Ultrarunning”, published by Terra Incognita Media.
What follows is my story of what we experienced, the immediate aftermath, and then the howling outrage of the ultrarunning community when we called them on it.
It was not meant to be a San Diego 100 weekend.
I originally told the story of what happened on Facebook in a series of posts that were thoroughly litigated by increasingly agitated ultrarunners banding together in solidarity against us.
I emphasize this point because much has been made out of the assumption/insistence that we were there to crew a specific person, despite our having made clear that we were not.
I get it—ultrarunning is the domain of the self-important, where people who haven’t really achieved much in life feel the burning need to wrap themselves in overpriced, skin-tight spandex and march into the wilderness to “conquer” nature. They return, naturally, to write long, self-congratulatory blog posts about their heroism—how the mountain (completely oblivious to their existence, of course) nearly ‘killed’ them, and how they emerged from their “dark night of the soul” as Nietzschean supermen. After all, nothing says “Übermensch” quite like staggering through 100 miles, some of it in the dark, becoming “new men” forged by suffering, as if they’ve reenacted Heart of Darkness without realizing the jungle couldn’t care less.
There are other people, though, who go into nature because nature is beautiful. Anza-Borrego state park with its vast variety of desert landscapes, badlands, mountains, and expansive valleys, amazing night skies, and some of the most spectacular wildflower super blooms in the U.S is the sort of place that attracts people who, gasp, love nature rather than seek to conquer it.
It was not meant to be a San Diego 100 weekend.
This is the unfortunate story of how it became one.
Five Minutes at Penny Pines
I don’t really know the San Diego 100 course. Like most of the 2 to 3 million people who visit Anza Borrego State Park or Cleveland National Forest each year, I have never read the San Diego 100 race manual. Why would I?
I picked Penny Pines aid station because I knew where it was. I’d spent four hours there the year before, taking photos of runners, chatting with friends, and occasionally lending a hand at the aid station tables. I’d been thanked for being there, my photos were widely circulated, and there was never any indication that I was unwelcome. The PCT can be accessed across the street from the aid station, and there are turnouts nearby so that we wouldn’t take volunteers or crew parking spots.
As we entered the aid station, we were approached by a woman we would later learn was the aid station captain, who told us that this was a no crew aid station. Not having read the runner’s handbook I did not realize that, but it shouldn’t have mattered as we were not anybody’s crew.
The aid station captain’s distrust was plainly evident. “Your runner could be disqualified,” she said. “We don’t have a runner,” I repeated. She warned us a second time that our runner could be disqualified. I repeated for a third time that we did not have a runner.
“We’re here as tourists,” I added, hoping that this might simplify things and make clear our right to use public land in a National Forest.
I shrugged this off as an overzealous volunteer, even though we were getting a lot of pointed stares and hostile body language from everyone operating the aid station. Everyone there trained suspicious attention on us, monitoring our movements as if we posed a threat that needed to be contained.
I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen it with Myriam and other friends of color, when they walk into a store and the staff follows them around to make sure they don’t steal anything.
Maybe we were going to steal a pretzel. Maybe we were going to illegally assist a runner, even though there were no runners in the station. Turns out only the male leads had come through.
It was being made excessively clear that we were not welcome, and it’s never fun to stay where you aren’t wanted. Still, I wanted to give Myriam a look at ultrarunning. I pointed out the dropbacks arranged on the ground across from the aid table, and explained what drop bags were. We walked through the station and continued down the PCT. We spotted the female first and second place runners coming through and cheered them. We then hiked back down the trail, through the aid station, and to our car, which was parked a few hundred yards away from the aid station, to keep limited aid station parking clear for people participating in the race.
We drove down to the general store, about 30 miles away. We saw Gary Hilliard and chatted for a minute. We bought snacks and sat outside the general store and ate them. We headed to the ranger station and took some tourist photos. The ranger was chatty despite having almost lost her voice. She welcomed us to the park. Several relaxing hours passed.
Tourists
tourist (noun): “a person who is traveling or visiting a place for pleasure.”
I’d told the aid station volunteer we were tourists. This would later get mocked by ultrarunners, who are an astoundingly self important bunch. They take weekend warrioring very seriously. That anyone might want to visit Anza Borrego Desert State Park for the pleasure of visiting the park, to get away from the noise of the city, breath clean air, see, and spend time in this beautiful place, is not believable to ultrarunners.
This really speaks to ultrarunners’ contempt for the land they run on. They seem to believe it exists only for them, and that nobody else would want to be there were it not for the ultramarathon. To them, nature exists to be conquered.
For this reason alone, I’ve come to believe that ultramarathons should generally be banned in public lands.
Three Minutes at Penny Pines
subtitle: BBQBecky vs the Mexican Bandit
Because I don’t really know this race, I didn’t really have any idea where on the course runners might be at any given time. I realized that they were now coming through Penny Pines.
With astoundingly poor judgment, I decided we should head back there so that Myriam could actually see the race. Yes, it was a no crew station, but we weren’t crew, and this was public land; anybody but crew should have been welcome.
We parked in a turnout down the road. I took a photo of Myriam as we entered the aid station. The time stamp is 5:26pm. We saw a runner friend, and I photographed her as she left the station. We left then, too. The time stamp on that photo is 5:29pm. We were there for 3 minutes.
During those three minutes we had our entrance blocked, were threatened with being thrown out, saw a friend for a moment, Myriam was racially profiled, humiliated, and yelled at. There was a lot of naked hostility in those three minutes. It was a rare moment of the ultrarunning community excelling at something.
Here is the sequence of events as I remember them.
I’m not gonna ask you to leave but they probably will.
Once again, we were immediately blocked from entering the aid station, this time by a tattooed white man who stood directly in front of Myriam, much too close, puffing up as he loomed over her. Myriam is 5’1” tall, and weighs 105lbs. It’s not hard to loom over her. He said “I’m not gonna tell you to leave, but they probably will”, gesturing in the direction of the food table.
Andrea Feucht is a three-times HR100 finisher, a 3 times San Diego 100 finisher, a 2 times Wasatch 100 finisher, ran her first ultramarathon in 1997, and is on the HR100 board of directors. She is also an old friend, and one of several runners (Amy Berkin-Chavez and Sarah Emoto) I thought Myriam might like to meet. Andrea stepped out of the drop bag area and came towards us. She was having a good race and was all smiles. While Andrea gave me a hug, Myriam stepped around the tattooed guy.
Race photographer Howie Stern had been talking to Andrea with his back to us. It took a moment to get his attention. He turned, we said hello, and I introduced him to Myriam. Howie looked Myriam up and down as he said hello. He seemed in a foul mood. As we arrived, we’d seen Paksit Photos staff leaving the aid station. Paksit Photos poach other photographers’ races and then undercut their prices for race photos. Howie hates them, and I reckoned this was why he seemed so agitated. Still, the last time I’d seen him, the end of the previous summer, while I was sweeping Kodiak 100 and he was taking photos, he’d been similarly rude. We’re both photographers, and I wondered whether or not it was a competitive thing.
Don’t steal the food!
Andrea left the aid station, and the Howie followed her, taking photos. The tattooed white guy who had threatened to throw us out remained hovering next to us. Myriam asked him where she could throw out her gum. He pointed at a trash bag that was hanging from an aid station table, and watched as Myriam stepped towards the trash bag. Suddenly, BOOM. “Don’t steal the food!” a BBQBecky yelled at Myriam as she leaned towards the table to throw her chewing gum in the trash. “The food is for runners only!”
Myriam recoiled. She was hurt and humiliated. (I know this because she told me so, in tears, later). I was stunned. We turned and left the aid station.
The implication that Myriam was there to steal the food, that for some reason this gangster-looking-to-them Mexican woman had travelled all the way to Cleveland National Forest to steal stale pretzels from an aid station table, plays up one of the oldest racist tropes, that Mexicans are bandits who steal everything. Myriam makes fun of this trope in a piece in the Paris Review, but it’s not any fun when it is yelled at you in public.
Three minutes.
I had never seen anything like this at an ultra. I’ve run 45 ultras, crewed, paced, and volunteered at a number of others. I’ve heard aid station people tell crew and others that food is for runners only, but I’ve never heard anyone yell aggressively at a person the way Myriam was yelled at.
As we left, Myriam said to me “That guy Howie really did not want to talk to you.” The way he took his time acknowledging us, the way he looked Myriam up and down, his belligerence when I’d seem him 8 months earlier at Kodiak 100, made it clear that we were no longer friends.
Meadows Aid Station: Third time is not a charm
I could not believe what I had just witnessed. I really did not want to think my “ultrarunning family” could behave like that. My brain froze. I desperately wanted to think that maybe the issue was just that this just limited to a single aid station.
“They’re gonna do it again,” Myriam said.
“No,” I said. “I’ve been here before. It was just that one aid station.” I kinda wanted to prove to her that my ultrarunning family was a bunch of mostly good people and that the racial profiling, discrimination, hostility, and humiliation she’d experienced at Penny Pines was due to a few “bad apples”, the same kind of excuse that friends of the race would make in the days to come.
We headed down to Meadows, where I’d also spent time spectating, crewing, photographing, and visiting in past years. We parked a distance up the road as a courtesy to runners’ crews, leaving closer spaces open so that they would not have as far to carry their gear.
“It’s going to happen again,” Myriam once again predicted. And it did. She was right. I was wrong, and in my desire to prove that my ultrarunning family was not a bunch of racists I had left her all alone and vulnerable, exposed to yet more racism on what was meant to be a relaxing weekend trip for the two of us, and an introduction for her to the ultrarunning community.
As we approached, our path was once again blocked by volunteers, much the same way it had happened at Penny Pines. This is a big aid station, and there might have been as many as a hundred various crew members, friends, and family walking around; certainly more people than the volunteers were able to police. It seemed odd that they singled out us to stop.
“Where are you going?” we were asked. “We’re just here as tourists,” I replied, so that we could avoid the song and dance about crew. “Well, this is a closed event. You can’t come past here. You need to stay off the trail.”
We looked around. Other people – people who looked like they belonged – mostly white people in Hokas and Altras and trucker caps advertising their favorite ultramarathons or outdoor gear brands – seemed to be going about their afternoon unobstructed by groups of white men in San Diego 100 t-shirts. And then we spotted another couple, both people of color, both tourists, being similarly stopped and barred entrance to public land.
The volunteers were not suspicious when we said we were tourists, but contemptuous. Clearly, tourists were looked down on by volunteers at this Important Ultrarunning Event. I asked the volunteer blocking our path where else we might go. “I don’t know” he said. “You just can’t enter here.”
Myriam clutched my hand tightly. She’s not a big woman, and this hostile and aggressive treatment seemed to shrink her. Her introduction to my ultrarunning family had turned to shit because at every turn we were stopped, barred entry, and she was yelled at not to steal the food.
It had been made abundantly clear to us that we were not welcome at San Diego 100. It had been made abundantly clear to us that San Diego 100 volunteers believed they had the right to police the entire course, which is on public land, and deny access to anyone they deemed did not belong. Looking around, it appeared that the criteria for belonging if you were not crew or runner was racial. When we left, I was in shock. Myriam was upset, frustrated, ashamed, and humiliated by her continuous mistreatment by SD100 volunteers. We did not interact with a single volunteer who treated her with respect and civility. It was disgraceful.
Our combined time in aid stations and interacting with volunteers had been less than 15 minutes. They were both efficient and effective in their racist policing.
We left quietly. We found a part of the PCT that was not blocked by Minutemen-like San Diego 100 volunteers and took a short, sad evening hike.
Call it anything you want, but don’t call it racism
Subtitle: white people explain racism to a Person of Color
While we had dinner I quickly posted about Myriam’s mistreatment. People were helpful, apologetic, and sympathetic. It took me a while to digest what had happened, and in my original post I avoided the word “racism”. I later edited the post to add that word. Suddenly the tone shifted. People were outraged. How dare we make such an accusation? Clearly, whatever happened we must have been in the wrong.
Overzealousness
It was not racism but overzealousness on the part of volunteers, it was suggested, although the overzealousness only seemed to be directed to people of color.
It’s not about racism. It’s about parking
Another excuse still being given by race supporters was that the aid station volunteer yelled at Myriam not to steal the aid station food because there is a limit on how many crew cars are allowed per runner. I shouldn’t need to explain how silly this justification is. In a nutshell: nobody knew how we arrived. Nobody asked. Nobody asked anyone else at the aid station where they were parked. Nobody yelled at anyone else at the aid station not to steal their food, regardless of their parking status. The only person who treated that way was a petite Mexican woman in street clothes who looked unlike everyone else present. Nor were we crew. We were the very tourists whose access to the park those rules are intended to ensure.
I didn’t see it, therefore it didn’t happen
Some have said they didn’t see this happening to anyone else, and therefore it could not have happened. When some have made statements to the effect of “I didn’t see this happening to anyone else,” they are not disproving Myriam’s account but supporting it. No, it did not happen to any of the many white people in Altras or Hokas wearing T-shirts advertising trail races. It only happened to a petite Mexican woman in street clothes who looked unlike others present.
Ultrarunning is for people of economic privilege. This wasn’t racism; it was class bias.
Eventually, the race director himself argued that ultrarunning is a sport for the privileged few, and that the response to Myriam was not racist but classist. To make this about class rather than race is to say that poor white people would have been treated as badly as Myriam was. I don’t really think that is a defense anyone wants to stand behind, and it will probably not be well received by the permitting agencies. Moreover, it’s still racist, because nobody asked to see her resume or bank statement. They just looked at the color of her skin. Myriam would have been deemed to be undesirable, unwelcome, and insufficiently monied because of race.
It’s your fault.
When all else fails, this is the argument people fall back on. The people who used it used it in the same breath as “I didn’t see it happen”. They said “I didn’t see it happen, therefore it didn’t happen. And anyhow, it’s your fault.”
You don’t need to be a logician to see the fallacy in that argument.
Nobody called her wetback. How is this racism?
Racism does not need to be overt. Nowadays, it seldom is. Trump used no explicit racial slur when he told Ilhan Omar, AOC, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib to “go back to your country”. Are we accepting Trump’s insistence that this was not racist?
When Myriam told her story to a friend who is also a woman of color, her friend shook her head sadly after the first encounter at the aid station, and laughed sadly when Myriam recounted my suggestion that maybe that first hostile encounter was just a weird situational fluke. She knew better. She knew exactly where the story was going.
These are called microaggressions, and if you click on this link you’ll see a nice graphic list of every-day racial ones.
The thing about microaggressions is individually they might not seem like much, but they don’t act individually. They act collectively. They are relentless, and it becomes death by a thousand cuts. Many microaggressions are unintentional, but racism does not even need to been intentional to be hurtful and racist.
Myriam predicted exactly what the response from the ultrarunning community would be. It was so precise you’d think she’d handed them a script. To a person of color, racists are very predictable.
(Note: things would become overtly racist in the aftermath. Scroll to bottom and/or click here for a sample.)
Were we lying about being tourists?
tourist (noun): “a person who is traveling or visiting a place for pleasure.”
That I am an ultrarunner and that I was aware that San Diego 100 was taking place is used to disqualify our claims that we were there as tourists. It seems that to a someone who is an ultrarunner, the existence of a race means the only possible reason a person could be in the vicinity is to participate, and any claims to the contrary must be lies intended to cover up for cheating.
I am one of those ultrarunners who actually really loves the mountains, and the desert, and spends time in those places even when there isn’t an ultramarathon. This is why not having run a race in a year and a half, I still head up to Angeles National Forest at least once a week. Myriam and I visit those places for pleasure. We are, by definition, tourists. Deal with it, assholes.
Anza Borrego Desert State Park doesn’t need an ultramarathon to be an extraordinarily beautiful place worth visiting for pleasure, and if ultras actually interfere with the public’s enjoyment of public lands, they are in violation of their permits, and the permits should be revoked.
Period.
In her book “Citizen: An American Lyric” Claudia Rankine writes that white people “can get explosively angry when asked to recognize that their racial imagining might not be perfect… in particular, when confronted by a person of color… And the target of that anger is usually the person of color who shared with them this fact. The white [person] feels injured in this moment – misunderstood and wounded – and believes it is the person of color who has dealt the injury. This is how the white mind tends to racial “wounds” – it makes a mistake about who has dealt the injury. For it is not the person of color who deals the injury. It is whiteness itself.”
White Fragility
Some of the folks who vigorously defended the race are people who really, truly don’t see themselves as racist.
Dr. Robin DiAngelo coined the phrase “white fragility”, and has written a book about it. White fragility is the knee-jerk defensiveness of white people when it comes to race. She defines it as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.”
When a white guy like an ex’s brother in Burbank refers to Altadena as “full of crackheads” and the heavily gentrified but still majority Latino Highland Park as “gang ridden” and “sketchy”, he is deliberately not saying he thinks Altadena is dangerous because it has a visible Black population (about 20%). He is saying it is dangerous because it is full of crackheads. And who are the crackheads? Black people. When he says Highland Park is gang ridden, he means that it is majority Latino, and “everyone knows” that Latinos are all “gang bangers”. George is relying on coded language to hide his racism, and if you call him racist, he will blow a gasket in white fragility. How can he be racist? His wife is Asian!
From Salon Magazine: “According to DiAngelo, most white people ‘live in a social environment that insulates them from race-based stress,’ due to their privilege as part of the cultural majority. In turn, says DiAngelo, whites are infrequently challenged and have less of a tolerance to race-based stress, causing them to be hostile, guilty, defensive, or fearful when confronted. This phenomenon is white fragility. In the end, white fragility ensures that conversations about race are derailed, and the status quo of white supremacy is upheld.”
According to DiAngelo, those who identify as progressive are some of the worst: “I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color,” she writes, pointing out that she herself is a white progressive. “White progressive can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doi g for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice. White progressives do indeed uphold and perpetrate racism, but our defensiveness and certitude make it virtually impossible to explain to us how we do so.”
That’s it in a nutshell. When Claudia Rankine describes the reaction of white writers when their work is critiqued as racially insensitive by people of color, she is talking about white fragility.
It’s hard to say how much of the outrage from white ultrarunners after being called racist was due to white fragility and how much was the old fashioned racist response of denying racism, turning things on their head and demanding an apology from those who have been harmed, as many of the ultrarunners offended by Myriam have done, and as Donald Trump has demanded from Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Elijah Cummings, and other people of color he accuses of being racist towards him, or that Joe Biden demanded from Corey Booker when Booker called Biden out for working with segregationists to stop busing.
Racist Bones.
“There’s not a racist bone in my body!” cry Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and countless other white men and white ladies. “There’s not a racist bone in their bodies!” cried one ultrarunner in defense of the San Diego 100 race directors.
Here is an amusing article in The Root titled “‘Racist Bone’ Disease: The Diagnosis, Treatment and Causes of Skeletal Racism”.
The symptoms of Skeletal Racism are:
1. The invisible black or Mexican friend.
2. They voted for Obama.
3. The bootstrap delusion.
4. They did something for people of color people that has a lot of prepositional adverbs.
5. They are allergic to talking about race.
6. They know all the euphemisms for racism.
As for the treatment: “researchers are developing a prolonged treatment that includes acknowledging facts, learning history, and coming to grips with the reality of whiteness in America.”
Stereotypes
I was talking about Myriam to a white woman I’ve known. “Let me guess,” she said. “You probably know her from AA. Based on the tattoos I’d say she’s an ex gangster, who has not had an easy time getting clean and off the streets, but she’s worked hard at it. She’s street tough, and that’s what you like about her.”
Uh, no. She’s upper middle class, has a degree in history from UC Berkeley, has published several books, the most recent reviewed in the NY Times and called one of the 50 All Time Best LGBTQ Books by Oprah’s O Magazine, (alongside work by James Baldwin, John Rechy, Walt Whitman, and Carson McCullers) is an artist, a feminist, and an activist, and her day job is teaching high school civics and AP psychology. And those tattoos? Had my friend actually looked at Myriam’s whimsical tattoos, she might have questioned her assumptions, wondering what gang has a hot-dog for a symbol? Or jelly-beans? Is the Lollipop Guild a gang?
But Mexicans aren’t writers or teachers or professors. They are laborers, maids, gardeners, or else work in fast food restaurants. Or maybe they are thieves.
Myriam was born and raised in Santa Maria California, a small town up the coast new San Luis Obispo. Her little brother (now a software engineer) was a diligent student. Once day in third grade he forgot his homework. The teacher said “If you don’t do your homework, you’ll end up working in the fields like your parents.” Her father was a school administrator in Santa Maria. Had he worked in the same school district as this third grade teacher, he would have been her boss. It seems this would have never occurred to this teacher. Because he was Mexican-American, the teacher assumed his parents were migrant farm workers.
SJW! Professional Victim!
A month went by. Myriam’s article RACES, RAÍCES AND RACISM: Anti-Mexican Sentiment and Ultrarunning was published in Terra Incognita Media and many in the ultrarunning community turned troll and erupted with the primal howls of white rage.
They stopped attempting to rationalize and justify and went straight for personal attacks and insults: “SJW!” “Professional victim”! “Newly Woke!” “Seaks (sic) out racism claims any opportunity” “A new low!” “They can seriously go fuck themselves!”
SJW
SJW (Social Justice Warrior) became a widely used pejorative when it became part of the language of #gamergate, described by the Washington Post as a “freewheeling catastrophe/social movement/misdirected lynchmob”.
SJW is an “individual who promotes socially progressive views, including feminism, civil rights, and multiculturalism, as well as identity politics”. Social Justice Warriors are derided as politically correct speech police. To these angry white men, Social Justice Warriors are exclusively women; they are accused of grandstanding and being without conviction. To the libertarian leaning mostly white men who use the phrase, SJWs are trying to police speech and thus limit the freedoms of men who want to be able to refer to the Raramuri as a “Little brown Indian circus” without being accused of racism (even if that is a blatantly racist and offensive description of the Raramuri).
The comparisons to #Gamergate are valid. Aggrieved white male ultrarunners are behaving as if this is indeed a culture war, with feminists, anti-racists, and others arguing for more inclusion on one side. “On the other side of the equation are a motley alliance of vitriolic naysayers: misogynists, anti-feminists, trolls, people convinced they’re being manipulated by a left-leaning and/or corrupt press, and traditionalists who just don’t want their [sport] to change” (Washington Post).
Misogyny
There is a heavy misogynist element to #gamergate, and it’s no suprise that the ultrarunning community has recently come under fire for a lack of women. Ultrarunner and human rights lawyer Stephanie Case wrote a good op-ed in Outside Magazine. In it she discusses the vitriol directed at her in comment threads. Ultrarunner Podcast was one area that linked to her article while fully dismissing her concerns. Stephanie’s op-ed references an earlier article by trainer Jason Koop, in which he advocates changes to race lotteries to address gender imbalance – affirmative action, more or less – and is greeted with howls of derision in the comments.
It’s noteworthy that when one commenter suggests that white male readers might want to consider listening for a change, he is called a “racist retard”. This is the typical response whenever someone points out white privilege. Myriam was called a racist simply for pointing out that the people who confronted her at San Diego 100 were white. One of the people who called her a racist, SJW, and professional victim also referred to the Rarámuri as a “Little brown Indian circus”. If you were to ask, he would also probably describe himself as progressive.
The terms SJW and Professional Victim are almost exclusively used against women.
Professional Victim
Professional Victim is the preferred description misogynists use towards women, or racists towards people of color, or any oppressive asshole towards the people they want to abuse. It’s the accusation leveled at Myriam by almost every man who attacked her after she called out San Diego 100 volunteers for racism.
Shrink4Men is a website for incels that helps “men break free from abusive relationships”. According to Shrink4Men, professional victims are narcissists and personality disordered women with “a barren emptiness behind an independent-seeming façade” who try to assert dominance or seek out attention by proclaiming themselves victims.
Besides being racists, I think more than a few of the ultrarunning men attacking Myriam have incel levels of hatred for women.
Kate Manne is a Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University, and author of “Down Girl – the Logic of Misogyny” writes “That we have a fraught relationship with victims and victimhood is not news”. Manne notes that the conservative “hostility shown toward victims seems to have been increasing during the past few years.”
When marginalized people speak up – women, people of color, queers, the disabled – they assert their agency, even if they are condemned as a “professional victim”. They are claiming the spotlight, and with the spotlight comes attention and sympathy. This is a problem for us white people, settlers, and men because we believe in the economics of scarcity, and believe there is a scarcity of sympathy. To these people, sympathy is a moral good reserved for them.
When Myriam is condemned as a “professional victim” by a bunch of racists and incels, those men are trying to steal back the spotlight. They want the scarce moral good of sympathy for themselves. They claim, in the words of Larry Gassan, that they are the true victims of “a vicious premeditated attack”… by “a professional victim and newly woke SJW” who has sunk “to a new low”.
These white men do not want a woman of color to have agency. In their minds, people of color are “addressable” and whites and men are not. To men like Larry Gassan or ultrarunner podcast’s Eric Schranz, it’s important that marginalized people know their place and don’t get uppity.
Professional Victim, pt2
The current statistics say that 1 in 5 American women has been sexually assaulted. It is estimated that over 80% of American women have been sexually harassed.
Tommy Jesse Martinez is on death row in San Quentin for the rape and murder of Sophia Torres. He was also convicted of a series of sexual assaults and attempted kidnappings. This is a quote from court documents: “The left side of her head was swollen and bruised, as if hit repeatedly by a blunt object. Her nose was broken, with bone fragments protruding through her skin, and the bridge of her nose was indented and had sunk inward due to a large crush-type laceration. Her right ear was bruised, with a small, crush-type laceration. Although her skull was otherwise intact, her brain had swollen to the point of flattening out in some areas, as opposed to having a normal wrinkled appearance.”
In the four months prior to the murder of Sophia Torres, Tommy Jesse Martinez committed a number of sexual assaults on female pedestrians in Santa Maria California. The first of his victims was a young Mexican American woman home on break while studying history at UC Berkeley. Her name is Myriam Gurba, the person angry white ultrarunners are now calling a professional victim.
Myriam’s book Mean details this crime and the affect it had on her life, and the lives of Martinez’ other victims and their friends and families. It is also a memoir of growing up queer and Latinx in California. Barnard College picked it as one of four essential books to read about racism in America. In the past week, there have been three separate mass murders by white supremacists shooting Mexican American and black people. Racism is a very important topic right now.
I’m going to refrain from naming the somewhat prominent angry white male ultrarunning people who have called Myriam a professional victim.Larry Gassan and Eric Schranz should be ashamed of themselves. I am sure they are not. They seem too entitled and angry to be capable of self reflection.Flexing
Who is this Myriam Gurba chick anyhow?
Myriam Gurba is a latinx writer, spoken word performer and artist from Santa Maria California. She has a degree in history from UC Berkeley. She has written for the Paris Review, Colorlines, Les Figues Press, Zocalo Public Square, The Wanderer, figment, XQsi Magazine, and Terra Incognita with the article that offended so many in the ultrarunning community RACES, RAÍCES AND RACISM: Anti-Mexican Sentiment and Ultrarunning.
Her third book Mean was voted one of the 50 All Time Best LGBTQ Books by Oprah’s O Magazine, (alongside work by James Baldwin, John Rechy, Walt Whitman, and Carson McCullers). It was also just picked by the librarians at Barnard College as a must-read book on racism, despite the insistence of angry white male ultrarunners who call her a professional victim and an SJW and think she “seaks (sic) out racism everywhere”. (Angry white dude: people of color don’t need to seek out racism. It finds them, every day). Here is a NYTimes review of Mean.
You guys with race report blogs who call yourselves writers and think that makes you her equal – I’m gonna give it to you in ultrarunning terms: you are back-of-the-packers. She is an elite. And when you bloggers and podcasters start shrieking racist and misogynist cuss words like SJW and professional victim and coming up with Mexican conspiracy theories against ultrarunning instead of offering intelligent arguments, just know you are proving her point. Loosen up your tinfoil hats and listen, boys. Maybe you will learn something.
Why I run, encore
I am not a social runner. I don’t run to belong to a running family. I go to the mountains and run in solitude to get away from this shit, because more often than not when I am alone on mountain trails, feeling my legs, watching the ground, breathing in the air, hearing the sounds of nature (which aren’t always soothing) I can get away from anger, bigotry, hatred, misogyny, aggression, Donald Trump, and all the other pitfalls of big city life.
The sport of Ultrarunning has been fun, but now all the worst of white intolerance, aggression, noise, misogyny, male aggression, social bullying, and preening self aggrandisement seem to have infested it.
Time to say goodbye. I hope I don’t run into any of you in the mountains.
Quick Followup
In the aftermath of this event, Myriam’s article, and this blog post, a few things happened. Race sponsor Hoka One One contacted Myriam, listened to her story, and proposed working with the race to ensure that people in the future do not have similar experiences. Meanwhile, various ultrarunners and podcasters upped the attacks.
Besides the usual alt-right standards “Social Justice Warrior” and “Professional Victim”, Myriam was called a whore, a Mexican Uncle Tom, and thinly veiled rape threats and death threats were made. Mexicans were derided and called nasty and beaners, and a Run From The Border 50K was (jokingly?) proposed in which runners are chased up the PCT from the Mexican border by people dressed as Border Patrol. These attacks were spearheaded by RDs for other races in the San Diego area. There is absolutely no doubt that there is a serious problem with racism within the San Diego ultrarunning community, and an unfortunate tolerance of racism within the ultrarunning community as a whole.
While this was going on, folks suggested we brought it on ourselves; that calling people racists was what provoked the racism. Beyond this victim blaming (“what were you wearing when he raped you?”) there was a refusal to connect the dots. Nobody was willing to admit that what happened at San Diego 100 and the overt racist attacks by members of the San Diego ultrarunning community were connected. These attacks were not indicative of the San Diego ultrarunning community we were told, but no one from the San Diego ultrarunning community was willing to publicly condemn the attacks.
I believe Hoka was monitoring social media. As the attacks escalated, they decided to end their sponsorship of SD100. There remains a refusal of anyone in the ultrarunning community to consider that maybe the overt racist, homophobic, and misogynist attacks and threats of violence against Myriam might have contributed to Hoka’s decision, just as there remains a refusal to consider that if someone responds with a racist attack after having been called a racist, they might indeed be validating the accusation of racism.
These attacks have been compiled HERE.
While all of this was going on, a white supremacist opened fire on Latinx people at Gilroy Garlic Festival, killing 3, and a week later another white supremacist opened fired in a Walmart in El Paso, killing 22, and citing anti Mexican hatred.
Euphoria, Brown Mountain, Bloody Knee
Looking down from Brown Mountain
He is the fourth person to offer me first aid on this run. This means two things, I guess: people are generally nice, and also people are well prepared, at least the people I am meeting today in the front range of the San Gabriel Mountains.
I’m not even sure how my leg came to be so bloody, although I have a pretty good idea. I’d headed up Fern Truck Trail to Brown Mountain Truck Trail, neither of which are truck trails but more like single track. You can see they were once paved, though – there are little chunks of ancient asphalt here and there – and I like seeing that it was once a paved road, because I like seeing nature taking it back. I like seeing how quickly and completely nature can eradicate all that we do to try to tame her. There used to be entire resorts down in the canyons below Mt Wilson. There’s not a trace of them now. We humans have not been on this planet all that long, and we’re probably nearing our own extinction. The planet will survive us and probably thrive once we’re gone, and in the end nature might look back on us like we were a nasty skin condition she had for a short while, if she looks back on us at all.
Humanity’s extinction is not really the point of this post though.
Pavement Remnants on Brown Mountain Truck Trail
So I headed up Brown Mountain Rd until it ends at the Ken Burton Trailhead. Ken Burton Trail heads more or less west, switchbacking down into the canyon where it connects with the Gabrielino Trail. To the east behind a concrete pillbox is a scrappy, overgrown use trail that heads steeply up to the summit of Brown Mountain. On a whim, I’d headed up there.
I knew there was a trail, and I knew it was a use trail, but I had no idea whether it still existed except on old maps. I was able to find it and started headed up. The trail was loose, very steep in spots, and a little hard to find. After about half a mile it leveled out for a hundred yards or so, and by leveled out I mean it went from a 40% grade to maybe a 15% grade, which isn’t really level at all. It looked like it was going to get steep again, and I really did not know how far I would be heading along the ridge before I would start going back down the other side to Tom Sloane Saddle, from where there would be another ten miles or so back to the car. It was chilly and rain was in the forecast. I thought it made the most sense to save it for another day.
I lost the trail on the way down, and then I lost my footing on some some steep, loose, crumbling granite. It was a little scary for a few moments. I saw the trail, and to get to it I was going to need to head straight through a bunch of yucca on a loose slope…or I could find my way back up. I’m not much of a climber. The ground was very loose, and I was afraid I might lose my footing and slide down the mountain into the canyon below, through a bunch of yucca. My best idea was to pull myself up by grabbing onto brush, which meant pulling myself up through the brush. I’m pretty sure it was dragging myself through the brush that result in my legs getting kind of sliced up. I found the trail, headed back down, losing my footing only a few times, and as I neared the bottom I noticed I was pretty bloody.
Oh well.
I stopped at the bottom to empty some rocks out of my shoe. Some mountain bikers were at the top of Ken Burton. They offered me first aid. I checked my legs. They were bleeding pretty badly, but it was just some shallow cuts across my thighs and knees. No big deal. I thanked them but declined the offer and started running back down the trail.
I don’t mind bleeding. It’s the sign of a good run. If I manage to get cut up without falling and without breaking any bones, that is completely awesome!
First blood of 2019!
This is 2019’s first blood. It was fresh, and bright, and flowing, and free of Hep C, good stuff, this blood, the stuff that keeps me alive. Good old kick ass blood. I like being able to bleed. I like being able to slice my legs up on a grey January afternoon, scrambling up the side of a mountain on a super sketchy trail. I like that there are so many people who don’t know me offering to help. Thank you all.
Back in the car after this 14 mile run, I felt great. I felt alive. I felt excited, and kind of blissful too, and that, I guess, is the runner’s high so many people talk about, “a feeling of euphoria coupled with reduced anxiety and a lessened ability to feel pain” which an article in Scientific American says is not just about endorphins but may also be about the brain’s endocannabinoid system, which is the same thing that pot smoking effects, except that the main effect pot had on me was it made me paranoid, and paranoia is kind of the opposite of euphoria, reduced anxiety and a lessened ability to feel pain. Also, pot heads don’t do much except eat pizza and watch TV, which is pretty much the opposite of running up a mountain. Pot was not one of the drugs I enjoyed. But I am digressing…again.
Not every run is without anxiety. I’ve DNF’ed more than a few races not because of injury but because I got into a dark place I could not pull out of, or else panicked for some reason or another. Upon learning I had Aspergers, a friend I’ve know for 30 years, who dated me back in the 80s, said “Yeah, that makes sense. It explains why you sometimes get overwhelmed by just existing.” My meltdowns happen more frequently in races than they do just in runs. This might be because I’m seldom at mile 80 on an afternoon training run. It might also be because I take racing seriously, for some silly reason, whereas today’s scramble up the ridge of Brown Mountain was done on a whim.
Most often, runs like today’s are just about getting out and getting moving. My body feels best when it’s in motion, and my mind often feels best when my body feels best. This is a best that includes hurt, that includes blood, that includes a tight right achilles and a resultant sore heel, a best that requires I stop to stretch, a best that involves sore and battered quads and the realization that my V02 max and my V02 min are pretty close to the same number (or maybe I’m just lazy) which is why I don’t run the hills like I probably should. My body and mind feel at their best because when my quads and lungs are burning, and my knees are bleeding, and I’m feeling beat up and nearing physical exhaustion, because I have once again shown myself just how fucking ALIVE I am, against all odds, too, when you get right down to it.
Sitting in the car with my bloody leg, feeling gently but definitely euphoric, without a care in the world, is a pretty great way to be. It’s pretty far from the depression that seems to haunt me when I’m down in the city surrounded by people and noise and obligation, (even though I am one of the least obligated people I know who doesn’t live in a van).
For this moment, and these past few hours, life has been awesome.
Cuyamaca 100K Race Report – 2018
Me, mile 50
Here we go again.
I’d put myself on the waiting list for this always sold out race sometime back in the spring. It seemed unlikely that my name would ever come up. I was a few weeks out from running Stagecoach 100 when I got the invite to do Cuyamaca, two weeks later. I accepted, and then cancelled Stagecoach.
In my typically impulsive, disorganized way, driving down to Flagstaff from Salida, Colorado, having spent a few days on the Continental Divide Trail, I decided I wanted to run Stagecoach after all, so I could run through the aspen around Humphrey’s Peak. RD Ian Torrence made room, I ran a solid race even after getting lost in the woods for over an hour, and hit the starting line for Cuyamaca on tired legs.
What is the secret to running a decent 100K two weeks after PRing at 100 miles? Stupidity, mostly.
An active recovery between the two races helped a lot, too. Recovery from something like a 100 mile race is helped by keeping the blood flowing to the muscles, which speeds up the repair process. It’s the same reason that doctors now encourage patients to get moving (gently) as soon as they can after surgery. The human body is built to move, and the stimulation of movement can be a crucial part of recovery from injury, surgery, or a 100 mile race. The risk of overdoing it is greater with some athletes than it is with me, as I am pretty much a natural underachiever. Proper recovery is crucial now that myp sring chicken days are long behind me, and proper recovery mostly involves easy-does-it movement and lots of sleep.
My two week taper for Cuyamaca 100K was pretty much exactly what it would have been had I not run a 100 mile race two weeks before. One important thing to note, though: two weeks of good recovery does not put you in peak condition. I started Cuyamaca 100K on tired legs, and the first 15 miles or so involved a lot of careful assessment of just how hard I might be able to push it.
Cuyamaca 100K – start (photo: Andrea Feucht)
The race began slowly, a traffic jam as 250 runners funneled onto single track. The miles slowed almost immediately as we started a seven mile gentle downhill to the first aid station. That was fine. I’d created some splits, given them to Andrea, and promptly forgot them. Later, when Andrea would tell me how I was doing relative to these splits, I’d have to ask her what my target time was.
I suspected I was going too slow in these first eight miles, but that didn’t really matter. There was no way to force my way through the crowd without expending energy I’d probably need later. My habit of starting well in the back half of the pack and slowly moving forward isn’t helpful in situations like this, but I do it anyway.
I had vague memories of running the race in 2015. The opening climb was long and gentle, through a field of tall yellow grass up to the top of Cuyamaca Peak and the second aid station. Beautiful, and an oddly calming climb. The weather was also gentle, enough sun to keep things warm, enough clouds to prevent it from getting hot, Goldilocks style, just right. I recognized the stretch where I’d stopped to tie my shoelaces in 2015. I’d set my waterbottles on the trail while tying my shoes, forests got all over the waterbottles and stung my hands badly. The ants were still thick through that section in 2018, but there were no shoelace problems.
First aid station.
View from Cuyamaca Peak
This climb was followed by a rocky, technical downhill, the sort I used to really enjoy three years ago, but three years ago I was about fifteen years younger than I am now, and a few spills and broken bones and aging vision have made me extremely cautious on this stuff, so I picked my way slowly through the loose rocks, probably losing more time, but it didn’t really matter. I had plenty of excuses I could use for underperforming, chief among them age and the 100 miler I’d run two weeks earlier. My spring chicken days ended a long time ago. I don’t have the recovery abilities I did when I was in my teens. I was happy just to be out there.
Conejos Trail, by Paksit Photo
The race is three different loops that begin and end where the race itself begins and ends. This is also the main aid station, and the only one with drop bags. The first loop is 32 miles. The second is 12, and the third 18.
The second loop begins with long gentle stretches through tall grass meadows, and who doesn’t like a meadow? Just the word itself is calming. I was reminded a bit of the Canadian prairie that I grew up on, except that the Canadian prairie seems endlessly flat and expansive, and these were gentle climbs with visible ends. To me, things always seem more reassuring on a run when the horizon is nearby. After this, there’s a dusty and sometimes rocky, sometimes steep descent down to the aid station, a little more than two thirds of the way through the loop, the approach marked mostly by Barbra Streisand posters. Because it was the weekend of the highly contentious Brett Kavanaugh confirmation vote, there was also a few “I liked beer. I still like beer” posters that made me laugh even while thinking it unfortunate that the most unqualified ever Supreme Court Justice has become more-or-less nothing but a Bro meme.
Loop 2
Andrea joined me on the 18 mile long third loop. This began as all the loops did, and then about a mile in started to climb. Eventually we hit fire road, a nice, mostly flat and mostly runnable few miles as the sun was getting low before spilling onto single track and a mostly climb up to the Sunrise aid station. The last time I ran this race, I hit this aid station just at dark. This time, on older and very tired legs, the lights came out a half mile or so before. On the fireroad we’d been all alone. On this sometimes rocky single track there were lots of people. We passed a few, and quite a few more passed us.
Sunrise is also a major aid station at San Diego 100, both in the beginning of the race and towards the end of it. I’d become quite familiar with it in the years since I first ran Cuyamaca, and with the trails around it, too. We’d even done a few miles out here the day before the race, just to shake the legs out, and met the elderly couple in charge of the aid station. They had an RV twice the size of my apartment, flying a big Trump MAGA flag. Oh well. This is San Diego, after all.
Backwards
Me, mile 50
We joined up with the San Diego course about a half mile in from the aid station, at about the point it got dark. It was starting to get cold and windy, too. I felt like I spent a few minutes too many at this aid station, trying to warm my hands, but it seems that others spent more time than we did, because despite being passed by many more people than passed me on this last loop, I finished in the same position I started in, which means I passed them all back at the aid stations. This is significant. If twenty runners passed me on the trails, I passed twenty in aid stations. That means I passed more than 10% of the runners left on the course in a small handful of aid stations on the last loop. Efficiency in aid stations makes a big difference, especially when you are old and slow.
The wind was much colder than I remembered it from 2015, and strong, and I was getting uncomfortable in a hurry. Getting uncomfortable was just about the only thing I was doing in a hurry. Andrea’s encouragement to run was met with resistance, in part because I’ve lost confidence in my night vision these past few years. I was also tired, knew I was not going to make my target time, and also knew I had hours to spare before the cut-off to qualify for Western States. Aside from getting out of the cold, there didn’t seem to be any rush.
We came upon a gate that I remembered from my last time at Cuyamaca. It was at this gate in 2015 that I’d decided to turn it on, and passed a bunch of people in the last few miles. Aside from the runners who passed us coming up to the gate, there seemed no one else to pass, which might have been just as well as I’m not sure I had it in me. We shuffled the last few miles to the finish. I ran the last few hundred yards kind of hard, just in case anyone was watching.
Finisher’s medal and dirty leg
Lost in the Dark: Stagecoach 100 Race Report
Stagecoach 100 Buckle
Salida, Colorado
I’d spent the week camping in near Monarch Pass, in the Sawatch range of Colorado, where only six weeks earlier I’d tried and failed at High Lonesome 100, dropping out angry, frightened, and miserable in the middle of a dark night.
I’d seen photos of the areas I’d run through at night because Andrea had hiked the Colorado Trail the year before. I had no idea that outside of the cone of light from my headlamp were lakes, and passes, and stunning views. All I’d seen was a dimly lit rock strewn trail, sometimes obscured by scree and talus fields. I wanted to see those areas again, to have them in my memory if and when I pass through again at night, next August, and it seemed like this might be the last chance I’d have before the weather turned.
The views were all I’d hoped. It was stunning, but it was more. I was able to disconnect completely from the city, from work, from anxieties. In the fall colors and the aspen I found myself transported back to childhood on the edge of the Canadian prairie, and in the foothills of the rockies. It was a beautiful place to be, and I got to experience a realignment of values, if only temporary.
Continental Divide Trail above Monarch Pass Colorado
I’d signed up for Stagecoach 100 – officially known as “Flagstaff to Grand Canyon Stagecoach Line 100 Mile, 55K and Relays” in the aftermath of my High Lonesome DNF, as redemption, just to get a 100 miler in. In the weeks after, I’d come up with more doubts even than usual about my ability to finish the race. The runability was a drawback, I said to myself (and anyone else around to listen), because recently I’d demonstrated no ability to run any distance at all. I was pretty sure I would fail. I wasn’t sure I had a 31 hour hundred miler left in me. When I unexpectedly came off the Cuyamaca 100K waitlist I took the opportunity to withdraw from Stagecoach. Instead of running, I would crew Andrea.
Now, driving down to Flagstaff through the Rockies, through these long high plains – cattle grazing on BLM land that seemed like prairie more than anything, but at 9,000+ feet high, mountains dusted with snow from the night before in the distance, on either side, driving down a two lane highway, rich smells of freshly cut straw, bright patches of yellow and red aspen leaves on the mountain sides, amid all the evergreens, and I just wasn’t worried about all the crap I normally worry about. All I really wanted to do was run the first 20 miles of the Stagecoach race, the miles that go around Humphrey’s Peak, through the trees, maybe as they turned color, plenty of aspen there. It wasn’t about running a race. It was just about running.
Autumn Leaves below Hancock Pass
Humphreys Peak: miles 1 – 34
The race begins with a long and very gentle climb as it winds along the flanks of Humphreys Peak, the tallest (at 12,633 ft) of the San Francisco Peaks, a range of dormant volcanos in Northern Arizona. Our high point would be 8,666 feet, far short of the summit as we followed the Arizona Trail along the western slope of the mountain, smooth singletrack through tall, tall aspen, with stretches of prairie-like grassland. This was the section I’d come to run, and while the leaves hadn’t turned yet on this first day of autumn, it was still beautiful, and felt like fall.
Mile Six
Fall Colors
At the top of the climb were a handful of folks with cowbells, cheering us on. The descent was steeper than the climb, and rocky. Some sections were a little hard to run. The 55K runners and the 100 mile relay teams started passing us up here. There were a lot of them, but they were moving much quicker than we were, and gone soon.
The first aid station, at 9.5 miles, was Hart Prairie, amongst log cabins in a wide open, grassy meadow. There was a mixture of single and double track here. I honestly don’t remember much. It was wide open and beautiful and I just took it in as I moved through it.
I came upon Andrea at some point in here. She was struggling to relace her shoes to relieve pressure on top of her feet. I was a little worried to see her, as I expected her to be well ahead of me. She might not have been happy to see me, too, for the same reason. I was ahead of schedule and told her so.
Andrea had made a decision not to have any change of shoes in any of her drop bags. I felt guilty. Having backed out of the race, I was supposed to be crewing her, and if I was crewing her and she was running into gear problems, her race would not be derailed; we could swap out at the next crew aid station, which was coming up soon. She was gunning for a sub 24 hour race, which would be her first, and it really meant a lot to her. She’d been nervously chattering about pace and race strategy all through the day before.
On the other hand, I did not really have a race strategy of any kind. I hadn’t had time to think of one in the day-and-a-half between the time I entered the race and was running it. This was Andrea’s big race; race strategy was her business. Instead, I had decided on an arbitrary 15 minute per mile pace, which I reckoned would get me to the finish somewhere in the 25 hour ranch if I could sustain it. It’s also a good number because it divides nicely; doing the math would never be hard.
Trees and Meadow
Junction with the Arizona Trail. Photo by Deborah Lee Soltesz, USFS, Coconino National Forest.
Andrea caught up to and passed me. We continued winding through the forest. The next aid station was Kelly Tank, at mile 21. followed by Cedar Tank at mile 34. In between was a small aid station manned by Rob Krar and his wife. Rob Krar kind of burst onto the ultrarunning scene a few years ago with some spectacular performances many of which have subsequently surpassed by fellow Flagstaff runner Jim Walmsley, who seems to be Krar’s temperamental opposite. Walmsley does everything in a big way. His 100 mile successes are epic; his 100 mile blowups are equally spectacular and much more frequent, and there’s very little in between. There’s a sense of urgency to Walmsley that makes me nervous. It reminds me of the urgency I felt when racing in high school, except that I was not desperate to win. I was terrified of losing, and in winning there seemed some sort of essential, fundamental safety to a frightened, inwardly feral teenage me. All of this drama was kept tightly internal, unnoticed by the outside world, even though in my highschool moment I was a regional star. Jim, on the other hand, is excruciatingly public.
Rob Krar was handing out popsicles. Popsicles are excellent race food.
Rob Krar
Babbitt Ranch, miles 34 – 55
Cedar Ranch, at the beginning of the Babbitt Ranch section, was also the finish of the 55K. It was a zoo. I was looking for a place to toss some trash and headed towards the trash can containing a keg Jim Walmsley was guarding the beer. “That’s beer!!” he cried out in alarm when I mistook the keg container for a trash can. “That stuff is sacred! It’s not trash!”
Babbitt Ranch is a huge private livestock ranch. The first 20-something miles of the course were mostly on singletrack in tall aspen and ponderosa pine, with sections of doubletrack and mostly smooth, soft, nicely graded forest service road. The Babbitt Ranch section of the AZT consists of twenty miles of dirt roads in various conditions – some good gravel roads with lots of washboard, that will accommodate cars easily enough, and some pretty primitive jeep road and double track.
Rocky road
Some roads were washboard and gravel. Some were rocky. Some were dusty. All were roads. It was all wide open space, as befits a ranch. The runners were widely spread out, and you could see for miles in the distance.
It was early afternoon at the start of the Babbitt Ranch section. There were enough clouds in the sky to keep things mercifully cool. When the sun did shine down on us unobscured it got toasty in a hurry, but those moments were short lived and few. This can be a windy section, but we were lucky there, too – a strong breeze that was enough to keep us cool, never so strong to slow us down.
I don’t remember much about the next three aid stations. One offered whiskey and a chance to shoot guns. One was just a bunch of five gallon jugs of water by the side of the road, help yourself. One was to the left just before a hill.
Tree on Babbitt Ranch
I kept moving steadily through. The wide open space encouraged wide open thought. A thought or thought pattern could persist for a long time, which made it perfect for a running meditation, which is basically a walking meditation but faster, and less deliberate. The road/trail rolled gently, and I’d locked into a concentration meditation that involved counting the breaths, up and then back down, running on the down count, switching off on occasion to focus my attention instead on various sensations in the body, mostly the legs, observing without judgment that my right achilles was tight, or my quads were starting to feel a bit of ache. This is a practice I learned years ago, and I need to get back to it. When I do it, nothing sneaks up on me. I find myself getting fascinated by my various aches and pains, and I just move through them with curiosity as I feel their ebb and flow. Hours passed this way, and soon it was getting dark and I was coming upon more runners.
The sun was getting low when I came upon a relay runner who seemed to be struggling a little. She was afraid it would get dark before she got to the next aid station, and didn’t have a light. She hadn’t planned on being out that long. I did not have a spare light to loan her, and wanted to put as much trail behind me as I could before it got dark, so I didn’t slow down to walk her in. There were plenty of runners behind her, I reckoned. A mile or so later I felt guilty.
It was dark by the time I got to Boundary. I sat down next to a guy – Jeff – with whom I’d run briefly at the beginning of the race, before he surged ahead. At Boundary, he was not feeling good, and talking about dropping. This was just past the midpoint of the race, and I took a few minutes longer than usual, changing into clean socks and taking in some food before heading back out.
Sunset and livestock gate, Babbitt Ranch
Where the Wild Things Are. Miles 55 – 85
The course switched from dirt road to trail and moved back into the woods, continuing along the Arizona Trail, singletrack winding through forest, sometimes nice and smooth, oftentimes rocky. The minimal and not reflective course markings were harder to find at night, and I became reliant on the AZT signs, which did reflect. There were frequent unmarked intersection with other human and game trails, and it was seldom difficult to figure out which way to go, but you needed to be paying attention.
Night running is difficult for me, and I slipped into a low spot here that would more or less continue until sunrise. I feel a little claustrophobic only being able to see what’s in the cone of light from my headlamp. I’ve never gotten used to that feeling. I usually prefer running alone, but at night I start feeling a real loneliness.
Elk were bugling, loudly, and they sounded nearby. There were a lot of them. This is the Rut, which is the mating season for elk, unusual because most other mammals mate in the spring but the elk want their calves to be born when the grass is greenest and most plentiful. Bull elk are all about displaying their dominance. The bigger the bugle, the bigger the bull. The bulls have wallowed through mud and sprayed themselves with their own urine; the bigger the smell, the bigger the bull. The point of it all is to attract female elk, or cows. The cows are looking for the biggest, baddest bull who will give them the biggest, strongest calf. The bull gathers his cows in harems, and then works hard to keep those harems together, aggressively making sure cows don’t wander off. The display of dominance is also to keep other younger, smaller bulls away. Fights are not unusual.
The rut is not a time to get in between an elk bull and the object of his affection. All that bugling was making me nervous, especially because vision is limited at night, and we humans don’t have much in the way of other senses. I slowed down my pace a little to make sure there were other headlamps in sight. I probably wasn’t the only one doing this. In the Babbitt Ranch section, where we could see for miles, runners were mostly spread out and running alone, but at night they seemed to coalesce at aid stations and form packs.
Alone in the dark.
There are some aid stations at every race that seem to be these vital spots for runners to meet with crew, have emotional meltdowns, try to get their shit together, and hopefully push forward to finish the race. Usually but not always, they come somewhere around the 3/4 mark. Runners get there in the early hours of the morning, cold and exhausted, when their strength is low and their doubts are high. There are few worse places for me to be. I have a history in races of getting overwhelmed by other people’s emotions. I’ve arrived at aid stations doing just fine only to get infected by the mob panic and drop from the race.
It’s even worse if I’m in a bad mood myself, and as I approached Hull I was in a bad mood. The steep downhill on road was not fun, and it seemed to go on and on and on, this because I missed a sharp left turn that was marked by a large but not reflective wooden sign that I did not see because I was running with my head down. I saw headlamps to my left, above me, and backtracked up the hill. Once I reached the aid station I was pissed off, and I did not want to snap at any of the volunteers and feel worse, so I called out my number and then turned around and headed back out. There was nothing I needed in my drop bag anyhow except maybe a 5 hour energy drink.
Soon enough I was back on a rocky trail that wound through the forest. The bugling elk seemed mostly behind me, which was good. It was around 4:30 in the morning, and something happened that has never happened to me before in a 100 mile race: I started falling asleep on my feet. Maybe I should’ve taken that 5 hour energy thing.
Some guy passed me. He was running well. I stopped to have a gel, and sat for a moment. When I got back up I took a wrong turn and headed up some other trail. At some point, the trail fizzled out. I came upon the bleached skeleton of some animal, maybe a cow: the skull, backbone and ribs all attached. It was kind of awesome, and kind of gruesome. I figured I’d gotten off trail somehow and turned around to head back. I trudged down the trail for a while, shining my flashlight around, hoping the light would catch on one of the reflective AZT markers. Nothing. I kept walking. The trail petered out in this other direction, too, which made no sense as I’d obviously been on the AZT only a few minutes before.
Spine, from Black Canyon, 2015
There were all sorts of trails crossing back and forth. I’m not great at orienteering. The moon was visible, which gave me some sense of direction, except that I really didn;t know what direction I was going in when I got lost. I was tired. I wandered around a little more. Every trail that looked promising sort of vanished after 100 yards or so. Maybe if I could get back to the skeleton at least I would know I was close, but I couldn’t find it either. I looked around for headlamps. Nothing. I tried yelling for help. Nothing. A while had passed. I sat on a stump and thought about things. The moon went down. Soon enough it would be daylight, and it might get hot. Eventually someone would notice I was long overdue at the next aid station and maybe they would start sending out search and rescue. At Hull I’d concluded I had enough water to get me to Waterson, but I wasn’t sure I had enough to get me through a hot Arizona Sunday. I yelled a few more times. Eventually I decided I should stop this, too, and preserve my voice.
Animal skeleton. Maybe it wasn’t triceratops. Maybe it was a cow.
Dawn came. I continued listening carefully for sounds of runners. I thought I heard voices. I yelled again: “Hello… anybody… runners… I’m lost… help”
And somebody responded. The voice came from the exact opposite direction I though the trail was in. I thought I saw a headlamp. I yelled again “I’m lost. Please wave your headlamp” They did, and they yelled back. Had I not been so tired I’d’ve been ecstatic. I started heading through the woods in a straight line to the person. It turned out to be a group of people, about 10 runners and their pacers.
One of them said “We thought you were some camper who had lost his dog.” Others had earbuds in, and didn’t hear anything. They looked at me wearily and continued trudging.
The trail here was so obvious I couldn’t understand how I’d gotten lost. The runners were headed opposite the direction I expected. I was stoked to realize that I only had about 15 miles left in the race, and that it was possible to still actually finish with a good time. I was also kind of delighted to be delighted, since I am not known as a guy who deals well with this kind of stuff. I’ve dropped out of races for things a lot less serious than being lost for hours. But there was no point in dropping. That would have just made a shitty situation worse.
I figured maybe it was karma for not helping the relay runner who was running out of light because I did not want to sacrifice my race for her bad planning. I tried to blame poor course markings, but that didn’t really work because I knew long before I was lost that the course was sparsely marked and it was up to me to stay on trail.
And then we were done.
I was overjoyed at having been found. I looked around at my rescuers. There were a few fresh looking pacers, and a pack of runners who looked exhausted. The runners did not give a rat’s ass that they’d rescued somebody. They just wanted to get the race finished.
I started running gently, slowly pulling away from the pack. I spotted this guy Jeff who I’d chatted with a bit in the first 15 miles or so and had last seen at Boundary, where it looked as though he would drop.
We got to the mile 88 aid station. I dumped as much stuff as I could, so that I’d be light for these last miles. This took a few minutes. I passed a few people and then the adrenaline surge from having been lost and rescued wore off and I slowed to a walk. My legs were sore. I wasn’t going to have a spectacular time, but I would still finish and possibly even PR. Those last 12 miles took a long time.
Jeff and I, last miles, photo by Kristin Wilson
How did I feel when I finished? Relieved? No – relief is what I felt when I spotted those other runners. Relief is what I felt when I got to the last aid station, 12 miles left to, knowing I would finish with plenty of time left on the clock when not too much earlier I was wondering how late in the day it would get before I was found.
Ecstatic? Overjoyed? No – those were things I felt when I found the other runners, or they found me, got back on the trail, got to mile 88… I was manic when I hit that aid station. There was lots of adrenaline flowing. The adrenaline dissipated in the miles soon after the last aid station. My muscles tightened up, and I was content to hike it in, even though this delayed getting to the finish line, and I’d reached a point where I wanted the race to be over sooner rather than later.
Once across the finish line I was mostly just satisfied.
This race had been a huge “shit happens” situation, and dealing with a shit happens situation is probably better for me than a good race time, because I had finally proven to myself that I can handle some genuine adversity in a race, and that I can also handle being frightened, since fear is usually what derails things.Running a sub 24 hour 100 miler or setting some other PR is much less of a priority than overcoming my fears and frustrations. I had failed to do this at High Lonesome, just as I’ve failed at AC100. At Stagecoach I had been genuinely lost, and there was, for once, real reason to be afraid, and I’d responded well, for a change.
Finish, photo by Andrea Feucht
Ultrarunning is something I choose to do, not something I have to do. Long training runs alone up in the mountains give me the escape into quiet that I need almost like food and oxygen. Hundred mile races present mental and emotional challenges that I’ve too frequently not been ready for. The physical challenges are not as big a deal, because the mental always gets me first. As best I can tell, I’ve never run anywhere near my physical limits, not since those 400 meter days in high school.
I’d set a PR, but I was still at least an hour and a half short of what it could have been, had I not gotten lost. I was content with that, and contentment is one of the gentlest of emotions. Andrea was at the finish. She’d gotten her sub 24. She wandered off to sleep and I got some food.
Next day selfie, with buckles
Goat Rodeo: High Lonesome 100 Race Report
Me at unnamed pass, by mile 90 photography
August 3, 2018, near Buena Vista, Colorado, in a field at the base of Mt. Princeton, 6am. This was the start of the second running of High Lonesome 100, up in the Sawatch Mountains of Colorado.
It seemed the entire Southwest on fire. Smoke was thick through southern Utah and even thicker around Montrose Colorado when I’d driven through a few days earlier. The daily monsoon rains had lessened it here in the Sawatch Mountains, but we could still taste a little smoke in the air as about 100 of us headed down Rodeo Road just after sunrise.
I didn’t remember signing up for the race. A friend reminded me I was on the waitlist, although pretty far down for such a small field, but a month or so before the race I got in. Since that day, it had been a crash course in elevation training up in the Eastern Sierra. I wasn’t sure I was ready, but there I was, running down Rodeo Road, figuring I’d soon catch my breath. We turned on CR162 for 3 miles before turning onto singletrack. The road sections and the singletrack are all part of the Colorado Trail, segment 13. This singletrack heads up and then levels off at Raspberry aid station, mile 7. The road segments are no fun, and the pack of 100 runners had to dodge a huge pickup truck that refused to move over and sent us all diving into the ditch. There would be many more encounters with folks on motorized stuff – mostly ATVs and dirtbikes on the many miles of jeep road on the course, but those guys were all respectful and shared the trail. The singletrack took us through a few miles of beautiful aspen trees.
High Lonesome Start, me on right, Ken Gordon second from left
Next comes the first long climb, 4,000 feet in 7 miles, up to a pass at 13,200 feet on Mt. Antero. The first five miles or so are through forest, and as you rise in the forest, you start to catch glimpses of Tabeguache through the trees on your left (south). It’s a raw, rugged slab of grey rock; impressive, and one of Nolan’s 14, a route of 14 14’ers in the Sawatch Range. Finally you break through the trees and then there are a couple of false summits after which you hit the top of the pass. Views here are stunning. There were storm clouds above. The trail was rough and rocky, but nowhere near unrunnable. To the right, single track snakes up the side of the mountain to the peak of Antero. I despaired when I saw this but then realized that no runners were going up it. Tabeguache summit is at 14,155 ft, Antero, 14,269 ft, but the pass between them is mercifully a thousand feet lower, at 13,200. This would be the highest elevation of the race. The air was thin. Breathing was a little difficult. I knew I was up high.
Approaching Antero Pass, 13,200 feet
The pass was difficult. It was also stunning. I looked around and laughed, delighted by the views, the air, my ability to get up there. Life was exceptional at that point, even if I hurt a little.
Next came a long switchbacking jeep road down to Antero aid station. This section was good for sustained running, if you were careful not to blow out your quads, but the road was pretty rutted and steep. I took more than a few short walk breaks.
This was not a section of the course that particularly filled me with delight. Jeep roads just don’t ever seem to do that. Nor did it particularly suck. It was just a bad jeep road, no more, no less. A life full of bad jeep roads still beats a life full of pavement, both in reality and in metaphor.
From the top of the pass at 15 miles through the Antero aid station to a half mile or so beyond St. Elmo aid station, mile 25 – 26, we stayed on the jeep road. This stretch is about 10 miles long. The last few miles are slightly uphill, gaining about 1000 feet in about 3-4 miles. Elevation bottoms out at 9,300 feet.
Antero was the second aid station on the course, and after the long climb and elevation, some runners were already having trouble. I was not yet one of them. My train would not derail for another forty miles.
Me cresting Antero Pass, by Mile 90 photography.
Antero Jeep Road near the Pass
Antero jeep road switchbacking down the mountain
I started to see a lot of atvs on this section, and wondered a few times if in their dusty wakes I’d missed a turn onto trail. It seemed like a lot of road. The course was well marked, though, so I never needed to go much more than half a mile before seeing another ribbon.
St. Elmo is a ghost town that’s popular with the ATV and dirtbike crowd. The dirt roads were full of these guys, and they weren’t doing much to get out of anybody’s way. The course markers were harder to find in this mess, but following the main road through the town worked. St Elmo aid station was located just outside of town.
Ruins in St. Elmo
St. Elmo to Cottonwood is an out-and-back section, 6 miles long in each direction. It starts with a somewhat rooty, more-or-less flat, trail through the forest. About a mile up the trail I started to see the front runners on their return. They were running it pretty hard. The trail is runnable, too, especially near the bottom. You follow a stream up. After about 2.5 – 3 miles of climbing, you get above tree line. The climb gets steeper as you get higher, and the trail is rocky and rutted. Rain hit on this climb, but I was prepared and the light shower did not bother me at all, nor should it if I were a normal human being, but it seems I am not. I’m a wired a little different, with an atypical operating system, one that struggles a bit with tactile sensations such as getting wet, wind against me skin, or sadistically placed clothing labels. Being wet kind kind of freaks me out.
The St. Elmo to Cottonwood climb gets steep above tree line, and the trail is a rocky trench, not easy running. You gain 2,200 feet in those 4 miles, topping out at 12,200 at the unnamed pass. It was still stunning up at this pass, but I was feeling a bit more miserable than I had my last time above tree line. I was also not taking in enough calories, and probably bonking. At the high point I was somewhere near 29 miles into the run.
Selfie in the rain
Descending into Cottonwood, by mile 90 photography
Monkey let the hogs out.
At the top of the unnamed pass is when I first started thinking about a DNF, and for a while stopped enjoying the course. The grade on the way down is steep and rocky and a pretty tough run. We dropped quickly into thick forest. The trail was rocky and difficult.
I came into Cottonwood tired and unhappy. I was carrying a lot of gels, which meant I hadn’t been eating properly and was bonking, which might explain my misery…or, perhaps, the awfulness of the trail did – I had not expected the course to be so unrunnable. I told Andrea she might want to get a run in before she saw me next at Hancock, just to make sure she got her time on the trails because pacing me from Monarch seemed unlikely. She made me eat and change socks. Chris Price suggested the worst was over, Blake Wood did as well, and they are all people worth listening to. I headed back up the unnamed pass.
The way back from Cottonwood to St Elmo is not as bad. The rain had stopped (it was actually pretty warm) and the climb up to the unnamed pass is shorter in the return direction, but also steeper: Cottonwood is not that much higher than St. Elmo. I took in the beauty again and started heading back down.
Ken Gordon was at St. Elmo looking pretty shaky. I left St. Elmo feeling determined. Tin Cup was a water and tailwind only aid station 3 miles up a gentle fire road. There were campers all along the left of the road, in the grassy stretch between the road and Chalk Creek. This was a beautiful stretch.
At Tin Cup, the course rejoins the Colorado Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail, on the Collegiate West section, a newer, alternate stretch that takes you higher than the traditional Collegiate East. I felt good at Tin Cup, and relieved to be getting back on the Colorado Trail, which at this point was relatively smooth. I was not quite halfway done, and dusk was approaching. This had without question been the slowest 43 miles I’d ever done, but there’d also been a lot of climbing and all at elevation. Things were looking up.
Colorado Trail at Tin Cup
From Tin Cup came a few miles of switchbacks through forest up to Chalk Creek Pass. Elevation here was a little over 12,000 feet. I’d reached a difficult mental spot with elevation. I was sufficiently acclimated that I wasn’t really aware that I was cruising along at 12,000 feet. There was no shortage of breath, nothing to really remind me of how high I was. I was, however, nowhere near at full sea level strength. There was a lot more hiking and a lot less running going on. My muscles would be really tired at the top of climbs. It would have been better had I understood what was causing this exhaustion. Instead, I attributed it being undertrained and getting old.
The pass was gorgeous. I hit it just after sunset. The light was low, and I stopped to get my headlamp out. One genuine age related problem is that I don’t have the vision I had in my twenties. I need a lot of light. Training at night would probably be a great idea, helping me get familiar with running by headlamp, but for some reason I never seem to do it, and so I always slow down a lot at night. I was moving pretty well through this stretch and down into Hancock Aid Station at mile 49, pretty much the middle of the race.
Coming out of the trees
It hadn’t ever taken me as long to get to the middle of a race, and I was about an hour behind schedule. I’m not sure, but I believe the aid station is near the Hancock Lakes. I was very cold and bundled up quickly at the aid station. At Cottonwood, twenty miles earlier, I’d been miserable. Here, I was just determined and kind of in a hurry to get back on the trail. Andrea got me on my way and then headed off somewhere to sleep so that she would be ready to pace me at Monarch.
From photos I’ve seen, the stretch from Hancock to Monarch is some of the most beautiful stuff on the course. In person, I couldn’t see a thing except for the small circle lit by my headlamp and handheld, a handheld I’d bought the evening before at Walmart because a battery had swollen in my fenix and we hadn’t been able to get it out to change it. This light had never been tested. It turned out to go through batteries in a hurry.
I could see that the trail was on the edge of a drop off. Whether it dropped 20 feet or 200 I’ve no idea. I could also see headlamps not too far ahead but very high above me, which let me know there was another pass just ahead. Once I reached the top of it my legs were aching.
Nutrition: My garmin had died, so I was guessing at the intervals in which to take another gel. I was trying to take a gel every half an hour, and the closer I stuck to that schedule (I’d gotten well off it coming into Cottonwood) the better I felt and the better my mood. In the dark, on a trail that seemed to be getting despairingly worse after the false hope the stretch after Tin Cup gave me, avoiding a foul or frightened mood was imperative.
I’d made several nutrition mistakes. I was using a single flavor of V-Fuel, and that never works because whatever flavor I’m using, it starts to disgust me pretty quickly and I need to keep mixing them up. I was also using V-Fuel, which has no electrolytes, instead of the GU I normally use, so to balance that I was drinking more Tailwind than usual. Tailwind also disgusts me in a hurry, and washing GU down with Tailwind means more calories going down than the body can digest at once while trying to hurry through the mountains, which probably explains why I suddenly started feeling really, really nauseous. Lack of oxygen due to thin air at 12,000 feet might also explain some of the digestion problems. I was not nauseous enough to puke – I am not a puker – but nauseous enough to make me back off on liquid and have a hard time swallowing down that every-half-an-hour gel. Also, neither the V-Fuel nor the Tailwind had any caffeine. Usually by nightfall I’ve started using gels with caffeine in them. Perhaps this was even more important in an especially slow and tiring 100 miler at 12,000 feet above sea level.
I tried to pick up speed after the pass, but soon enough I hit a scree and talus field. This slowed me to a crawl. I couldn’t see any signs of trail, so I would shine my light around until I found the next trail marker and try to pick a good line to it. I’m not sure the lines I picked were the good ones. The trail was very well marked in this area, which was really important.
I was relieved once I got out of the scree and talus field…and then I hit another scree and talus field. At some point I slipped and fell. No damage was done, but I was feeling less and less sure of myself. At the third scree and talus field I decided I’d had enough.
I’ve been to three state fairs and a goat f*cking.
“I’ve been to three state fairs and a goat fucking” is southern colloquialism meaning “I’ve seen many wondrous sights” or, more appropriate in my case, “I’ve seen almost everything and can say with authority that shit is about to get weird.” A goat fucking, or a goat rodeo if you are feeling a bit more genteel, is a situation that is hopelessly fucked up. Divine Intervention usually seems like the only way out of a goat fuck. If you don’t believe in God, this can be a problem. No matter how self reliant you may be, self reliance does not seem to contain any answers when you are stuck in the middle of a goat fucking.
Surrender, perhaps to a higher authority, whether it’s God or your pacer, is sometimes your only way out. This may be doubly true if you are an Aspie, for those of us with Aspergers often demand that areas of doubt and uncertainty be rigidly defined. It seems it takes a lot less for things to turn into goat fuckings for us. Surrendering to that reality isn’t always easy.
So there I was, picking my way through a scree in talus field in the pitch black dead of night. This was taking me deep into areas of doubt and uncertainty, and I was quickly getting miserable and panicked. The panic was not just about the terrain itself, which was giving me problems and seeming dangerous, but also about the uncertainty. I was not expecting any of this. I had no idea how long it would last. I had been told by a well meaning friend nearly 30 miles back that the worst part of the course was over, and while that helped get me out of the aid station at Cottonwood, it had proven to be wrong. Because I couldn’t see more than 50 feet ahead of me in the dark, I couldn’t even gather information on the fly. Am I on a ridge? In a canyon? Was that drop-off I just passed ten feet, or a thousand? Where the fuck am I? How much worse will this get?
In what might very well have been and 35 – 36 hour race, an hour of pure misery isn’t all that much. An hour of pure misery in the middle of the night with no vision and a trail that was starting to seem frightening is a little more serious, especially if you are an Aspie who panics a little when things go wrong. Humans deal with change only slightly better than cats do, and people with aspergers are notable even for humans at really struggling with change and uncontrollable circumstances. For those of us with Aspergers, “Change, whether in one’s self or the environment, typically causes sensory overload, since change affects the person’s ability to process the sensations accompanying that change.”(click here for more).
I got passed by a couple of guys. “How old are you?” one of them asked me. “Fifty-eight”. “Oh wow. That’s awesome. My dad is your age, and he could never do anything like this!”
They told me the scree fields were almost over, but “I’m not gonna lie,” said one of them. “It doesn’t get any better for a while. The climb up to Purgatory is really steep and rocky.” They suggested I should stick with them, but after I while I couldn’t; they were moving too fast.
Yep, this had turned into a goat rodeo.
I dropped at Wonderhut. I was physically more than capable of going on, and still a few hours ahead of cut-off, but mentally I’d had it. It was a breakdown like the one at AC100 in 2014. I hate these breakdowns. I don’t beat myself up quite so much about them because I have become somewhat resigned to them. The meditation work and half-assed Buddhist practice go a long way towards softening both the breakdowns and my subsequent reactions to them, but it seems they will never truly be gone: they are a function of the way my brain is wired.
There were many wondrous sights to see, but I could not see any of them, not in that dark.
I was not the first person to give up there. The aid station already had a number of numbers huddled under sleeping bags who’d decided they’d had enough. There would be a handful more who would quit, and then a bunch who would miss the cut-off a few hours later.
One surrendered runner’s pacer offered to pace me. I should have taken him up on it but didn’t. There was nothing wrong with me physically aside from being tired, just like everyone else was in that stretch and at that time of the night. My defeat was a mental one.
It was impossible at that moment, just two and a half hours after leaving Hancock aid station determined and in good spirits, to realize just how quickly everything had unraveled, and given that, could probably be put back together without much more than a little determination: “This too shall pass.”
At that moment, at Wonderhut aid station, I was overwhelmed and incapable of any kind of rational analysis. It seemed that everything had gone wrong because at that very moment nearly everything had.
When I am able to navigate my way out of these situations, it’s because I’ve anticipated them. With a lot of work, I’ve taught myself how to segue awkwardly into Plan B, or even Plan C if things are really going down the shitter. The problem is if I have no plan to segue to. Improvising is not one of my talents.
I need the in-case-of-emergency plan, the goat rodeo plan, and I’m really not sure what that plan looks like but it’s probably something relatively simple like I take a few deep breaths, calm myself down, recognize that I am all out of ideas, and let someone else take charge, like the guy who offered to pace me to Monarch.
Sarah Lavender Smith recently ran Ouray 100. She made it further than I did at High Lonesome, dropping at mile 75. Her mental experience was not unlike mine. She writes about it in a blog post, here. There are a couple of quotes that stand out because I relate to them so much. Arguing her case with her crew, knowing that she was physically capable of continuing but had lost all desire, determined not to be talked out of dropping, she writes “The fact that part of me knew they were right just made me … feel like more of a failure.” That is a terrible feeling. I’ve come up with all sorts of reasons why I was struggling, and all of them are right: high elevation causing weak muscles and stomach troubles, old man’s bad eyesight which had me too tentative on the technical downhills and almost blind at night, lack of experience on these types of trails, undertrained… Every one of these things was real. None of them, not even in combination, added up to anything near reason to drop.
I’ve come to appreciate my unconventionally wired Aspie brain. I enjoy seeing a world that consists of nothing but patterns. There’s an elegance to that, that I liken to the beautiful geometric patterns of Arabic art, which for religious reasons mostly avoids figurative images to avoid those becoming objects of worship; I was born in Libya and spent my teen years in Egypt, this is the art I grew up with. It’s so much more fascinating to me than, say, a landscape, or a painting of a reclining nude being fed by a cherub. I’m not terribly bothered by my inability to deal well with people who are not much more than a malfunctioning limbic system with arms, legs, a mouth and an asshole. (Those walking, talking, shitting limbic systems elected Donald Trump. Rational people did not). This is why succumbing to my own frustration and the sensory overload caused by things going in accordance with reality and in disregard of my “plans” not only derails whatever train I’m trying to drive but really fucks up my self esteem. I beat myself up for these lapses. There are wires in the Aspie brain that are just a little too live, in need of insulation to prevent melting or short circuiting. I try to use meditation as a kind of electrician’s tape, and it’s effective half the time. The other half is a fucking meltdown. This is the problem.
There is something else that Sarah Lavender Smith talks about in her Ouray 100 race report: about how much more it seemed that others wanted the race. Meeting up at an aid station with another runner who was also struggling, Sarah notes “She really cares about this race. I’m not her.” This was also true for me. I’d forgotten having registered for High Lonesome until Ken Gordon reminded me I was on the waitlist. I came off the waitlist a month before the race. I said to myself “Well, it’s worth a shot” but I was never sure that I was capable of finishing, and I started the race partially defeated by that doubt.
Here are some photos of what was around me at the moment I dropped, and what was ahead of me in the next 15 miles or so. In the dark, I’d have seen none of it, and if I run this race again next year, one thing I will make sure I do is familiarize myself with the night section of the course, both so that I know what’s coming up and fear it less, and also so that when I am standing on the ridge in the middle of the night, I can conjure up visions of it in the daylight and feel a little awe. Andrea Feucht took these while thru-hiking the Colorado Trail last year:
Photo by Andrea Feucht
Photo by Andrea Feucht
The ridge above Monarch, photo by Andrea Feucht
Seven lessons you can learn from toddlers
I imagine I will run this race again. I imagine I will finish it the next time. Those moments in the passes up above tree line were truly stunning. The not-so-fun stuff deep in the forests – well, in order to get above tree line there must first be trees – so that serves a purpose as well. There are moments in those passes and on those ridges that are absolutely freeing. I am not always up to the challenges of the unexpected and of the dark. That’s where my game needs more work.
I haven’t access to any toddlers of my own, but the internet is full of lists of lessons that those-who-can-barely-stumble-around-the-room-and-still-shit-themselves-without-making-a-big-deal-about-it can teach us. Here’s a short list:
1). It’s okay to ask for help.
2). Allowing yourself to be vulnerable will help you make friends.
3). It’s important to acknowledge your emotions.
4). You don’t know everything.
5). You can try new experiences before you’re fully prepared.
6).There’s a whole world out there to explore.
7). Acceptance without prejudice: Unfamiliar people and ideas aren’t scary.