
As I began to write this at 4:59 a.m. on August 21, 2017 I feel well rested, but sore. I crossed the finish line in Leadville, CO less than 24 hours ago at about 8:15 a.m. on August 20th, 2017. From Saturday August 19, 2017 at 4:00 a.m. when the start gun (yes a real gun) was fired off... I had run and power hiked continuously for a period of 28 hours and 17 minutes with only minor stops at aid stations, the not sleeping challenge was just one of the many challenges faced that I will go into below. It’s still pretty early after the event to begin typing about it because I'm still processing a lot of it, but here goes and I am sorry for jumping around a bit (definitely not literally considering my present lack of mobility).
Many people have never heard of an “ultra marathon,” I hadn't either until I read a book about 4 or 5 years ago called “Born to Run” that was given to me by a friend and former neighbor of mine who I had done a few trail runs with and who subsequently began putting on a trail race called “A Mild Sprain” (it’s called that since it’s only about 5 miles and takes place in a park called the Sprain Brook Park). Many trail runners simply call it “the book,” (as in “have you read ‘the book’) because after all it was a best-seller and it caused somewhat of a boom in the sport of trail running since it was published. When I first read it I was not in good health, I weighed over 200 lbs. and had been diagnosed with hypothyroidism and high cholesterol, I now weigh about 160 and live much more conscientiously about my health. The book introduces the reader to the Leadville 100 trail race in the first few chapters and describes the race like this:
Leadville 100, high in the mountains of Colorado, [is like] ‘running the Boston Marathon two times in a row with a sock stuffed in your mouth’—then hiking ‘to the top of Pike’s Peak’—and then doing it all over again, ‘this time with your eyes closed.’
That’s pretty much what [the race] boils down to: nearly four full marathons, half of them in the dark, with twin twenty-six-hundred-foot climbs in the middle. Leadville’s starting line is twice as high as the altitude where planes pressurize their cabins, and from there you only go up.
(Source: https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2010-spring/christopher-mcdougall/)
I have run a bunch of road marathons, but running in trails to me is always more fun than roads, it’s just nicer to be surrounded by nature. The North Face Bear Mountain 50K was the first trail “ultra marathon” I ran and that was in 2013, I went up from there to a 50 miler the following year and then the year after that did the Leadville 100 MTB, the two wheel version of the trail run, with a team of about 5 other guys 3 of which I had trained with on basically a daily basis.

I had started that training cycle for the mountain bike race basically having no experience in cycling. As I learned recently the bike course is basically parallel to the trail run course, but there is a lot less single track and it’s much less technical.
My family and I never came back to our home in Westchester County, NY after the Leadville 100 MTB race. We moved from Westchester where I had an excellent group of training buddies (as mentioned and pictured above) to NJ near where I had grown up, but I had no friends that were into running and biking. The cause of the move is a long story I won’t go into here. In my new locale I looked into running groups and triathlon groups and found 2, well 3 sorta. First, was the South Mountain Runners (SMR), a group that I have not spent nearly enough time getting together with on runs due mainly to scheduling issues, the second is MAPSO multi-sport which has a number of impressive triathlon members, and last the pre-school we sent my daughter to was part of Temple B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills and they have a “brotherhood,” which included a few people who were training the associate Rabbi Joshua Stanton with who was running the NYC Marathon and I had gone on a few runs with. Those groups were great, but I never had anything consistent going on nor did I have any events in my calendar that I was excited about training for and was just working out to maintain a decent base level of fitness.
Still new to the area I had seen maybe on a SMR group email something called the “Febapple” trail race, which came in 10 mile, 20 mile, and 50 mile options which were loops of South Mountain Reservation, I was a race day signup for the 20 mile option, but asked the race director if I could start with the 50 mile people since it was earlier and therefore I’d be home sooner and therefore could help my wife with the kids, the race director said that it was okay to do that. I had gone about 8 miles or so when there was an unleashed dog in the middle of the trail I was running on and as I was veering out of it’s way it started to position itself aggressively and block me. I asked the owner of the dog if he could put the dog on a leash and he said something to the effect of “this dog has a right to be here.” I responded “Well if he’s going to be aggressive or assault people he should be on a leash,” the dog owner then called me a “pussy.” Rather than continuing to engage him I ran off and continued back to the start of the race, but the altercation I just had was really demoralizing and I was ready to just stop running, maybe even altogether since I just wasn’t having fun, I was cold, felt very alone, and that interaction just left me feeling sour. That’s when someone pulled up to the aid station and heard me telling the race director about the frustrating experience I just had with the guy and his dog. The guy at the aid station said to me “don’t give up, run the next 10 mile loop with me and I guarantee you’ll be in a better state.” He was right, I got his email address and schedule a run with him a week or so later. On that next run or maybe another after that he said that he was going to do the Western States Endurance Run, another 100 mile “ultra marathon” that was mentioned in “the book.” Western States goes from Squaw Valley near Lake Tahoe, CA over the mountains to the foothills on the western side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I said that I knew it was very forward but I would like to pace him on that race, to my surprise he loved the idea and I began training with him going on some very fun and epic training runs on some great trails I was learning about in NJ such as Mt. Tammany by the Delaware Water Gap and up in a place called Stonetown, NJ to name a few, these are some of the best places to go around us to “run steep and get high” speaking purely in the altitudinal sense.
Pacing my friend in the Western States Endurance Run gave me a first hand fully submersive experience with the Ultramarathon culture. The pacing was set to begin at mile 62, the first spot that pacers were allowed if I recall correctly, but I planned on meeting him along with his family at around mile 50. I ran about 4 miles down the trail from there to see my friend and cheer him on and when he got there he was down in the dumps saying that his training was inadequate, his race strategy had been all wrong, etc. I ran / hiked with him back to the mile 50 aid station where he met up with his family and got some of his blisters taken care of by a medical support staff. He got back on the trail, but it was clear that he was demoralized to the point of almost having been defeated. At mile 62 and many hours later he said he was ready to quit, I told him to just come with me to the next aid station, which was about 5 miles or so away, and then make a decision. The next 5 miles, in the dark along a dirt trail I saw a man who was staring into an abyss. Over the next 8 or 9 hours along the trail I saw him experience lows and highs like I’ve never really seen anyone go through before, but with grit, determination, and perseverance he made it through. Pretty much every ultra runner I have met, and there are a lot that I have met, talks about this, the physical element is not even the half of it.

Everyone has heard of a “runner's high’ and also “hitting the wall,” in an ultra marathon those highs and lows are exponentially greater by a factor of about a million. The motto of the Leadville 100 Trail Run is "you are better than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can,” and the race organizer gives a speech known as the “Dig Deeper” speech which is pretty legendary and I highly recommend viewing it on YouTube, I'll summarize the speech like this: within each of you is a well made up of grit, guts, determination and resolve… to reach it you must dig deep, and when you think you have nothing left, when you think you are at the bottom, that's when you have to dig deeper. This is very easy to say… but when you are 60 or so miles into a 100 mile race and it feels as though you can barely move your legs anymore you need to put those words into action and figure out what you are made of. When the lows are really low that is when you need to work the hardest
I began exploring the depths of my “well” at an aid station at about mile 45 called the “Hopeless” aid station where I, for some reason I can’t explain, but some chemical reaction was going on in my body that made it so I was having a hard time holding back tears. The compassion of the race volunteers, these strangers who were there to provide assistance to the runners who have voluntarily signed up for the pain they were now enduring was amazing. This is when the race actually began for me, because that is when the mental and physical challenges became much more extreme. Almost immediately as we left that aid station the clouds darkened, the temperature dropped like a rock, and the wind began gusting like crazy. We had 800 more feet of vertical to climb over the next 2/3rds of a mile or so. When the hail storm occurred, I was wearing a tank top, 2” split shorts, and a hat with sun protecting flaps (this is what my friend would call part of my mystique). Teeth chattering I rubbed my arms with my hands and continued to climb using a guy just ahead of me sort of as a human shield from the hail. The storm lasted 10 to 15 minutes, I slowly got my body temperature back up and 20 minutes after that the temperature was in the upper 70’s.
My buddy who I paced at the Western States and I made it another 5 miles to the next aid station and turn around point, we made it in 11 hours and 15 minutes, which if duplicated would be a 22:30 finish time. This seemed plausible to me at the time, we had been through a lot in the first 50 miles, I knew we would be through a lot in the next 50, but we were strong and would persevere I thought. I grabbed my friend from the back of his head, put his forehead directly on mine, stared into his eyes and said “we can duplicate that effort and get a big belt buckle.” I. WAS. DEAD. WRONG. Coming out of the aid station, about a mile or 2 later is the inbound trek up Hope Pass, about 2500 feet of climbing over the course of about 2 or 3 miles. Legs cramping, heart pounding, breath strained and short. Those miles took over two hours to get through. The relative high of getting to the aid station in a great time was overtaken by the demoralization of the arduous climb back up to the top of Hope Pass. Coming back down was just as painful on the knee joints and quadriceps making it feel next to impossible to aggressively take on the trail. When we got back to the Hopeless aid station one of the race volunteers, a 70+ year old woman named Allison who I had never met before gave me a hug which was very sorely needed and she knew that just by looking at my sorry state. Don't ever take for granted the power of human contact, we are social animals and need each other's support and that is common to everyone regardless of who you are, where you come from, or your station in life. You don't have to run 100 miles to come to that realization, but the visceral experience of it is truly unforgettable, that's living, that is a lot of what the ultramararathon community is about…
Getting back to the race… The altitude was always a huge factor and I did experience some hypoxia symptoms such as nausea, dizziness, shortness of breath, at various intervals and at various intensity over the course of the race. The only thing to do was to keep on pushing forward one step at a time even though it hurt. Unfortunately, something that I had heard over and over I was now experiencing first hand, people who live in low lying lands are at huge disadvantages when competing in endurance events at altitude. Also, the cautions of my pulmonologist father-in-law about potentially fatal pulmonary edema from what I was embarking on were now weighing heavily on my mind.
During a particularly dark point in the race I felt that everything was going wrong. The lyrics from the Dylan song “Knocking on Heavens Door” were on my mind just as of the first signs of dusk were appearing and the shadows of the mountains made the trails ominously darker and more difficult to navigate. That was the mental state that I began battling and would continue to battle for another 15 or so hours again “that's living.”
When you’re staring down at that darkness, and this sounds very mushy and cheesy, the only thing that can pull you out of it is love. I began to think about my wife and family and how much I love them. I began to think about how I want to achieve, accomplish, and do something extraordinary to make them proud and to inspire them to strive for excellence and greatness and to always just try to be better in everything we do. I began to think about the hours spent training away from them and how while it can seem selfish, it is all for what I have just written directly above, to be better, to inspire, and to do it purely for love.
To me and I think it is fair to say most ultra runners, these events are more than just sport, they are a microcosm of life. The challenges we face whether they be mental or physical are all capable of being overcome, you can't let the pain and fear overwhelm hope and the desire to achieve something big. Have faith, have enormous faith that things are going to be okay and you will get through the hardest moments, most importantly have faith in yourself. Have determination, have enormous determination that you can achieve what you set out to achieve despite how impossible it sounds to pretty much everybody you speak to, don’t let anyone or anything break your will, spirit, and determination. The winners of these 100 mile races are all pretty humble (with the notable exception of Dean Karnazes who wrote a book “Ultra Marathon Man”) in general they are passionate and have a fire that burns in them that you can sense from being in there presence. While they strive to win and be great, they are also pretty great people who participate in this sport that takes its athletes through some of the most majestic places on Earth.
Back to the race, the strategy my friend and I employed was supposed to be to keep it chill for the first 40 miles, battle through the toughest part of the course on miles 40 to 60, and then treat the final 40 miles as a new race. We were going to go aid station to aid station and re-assess at each. The problem is that it is very difficult to predict just what emotional and physical condition you are going to be in during any portion of the race, that probably is because this was my first 100 mile race. Also because the times can vary so much as well as the weather having a good drop bag strategy is important, I did not have such a good strategy on the clothing front as exemplified by the hail storm mentioned above.

During one of the dark times over the course of the race in the “pain cave” as it's been called I questioned the adequacy of my training. I began training in earnest in February 2017 running the Ft. Lauderdale marathon, which is a hot flat otherwise uninspiring road race, so to spice it up I decided I was going to do it with nothing on other than board shorts and sunglasses, and instead of running shoes I wore thong sandals. Other than some chafing that all worked out.
The training that followed was pretty typical between speed, strength, and endurance / time on feet. My buddy and I had one major training race in the calendar that we were going to do as a tune-up, that race was called the Laurel Highlands Ultramarathon trail race, a 70.5 mile trek from Ohiopyle, PA to Johnstown, PA. We absolutely rocked that race, ran it smart and finished extremely strong in the top 25. We were pretty much as ready as we could be and the only variable that we were unsure about was the altitude, which we had debated about how to handle for months and ultimately decided not to take anything to counter the adverse effects of.
All of the effort put into training aside, I don't know what can be done to prepare for dealing with the kind of pain that you experience, especially in the latter part of the race. I have tried my best to give you a sense of it, but these words don't do it justice, it's something you just have to experience for yourself. Similarly there aren't adequate words for the euphoric feelings you have from the physical exertion, the mountain air, the unbelievable views, the beauty of the lakes, rivers, streams, mountain valleys, meadows, and vast open expanses. We live in a beautiful world and it is all around us everywhere, but it's also really easy to miss if you are bogged down and don't have a positive attitude.
This race report would not be complete without noting that while it is an individual effort that carries you from the start to the finish, the support of friends and family are essential. My friend and training partner, Konstantin Walmsley has a well that knows no bottom, he digs deep and encouraged me to do the same when I was scraping the bottom of my well and unsure about whether I could go on. My friend from college who paced us the last 20 miles but also met up with us at about mile 55 and 60 and helped me immensely at aid stations by grabbing food and supplies for us so we could sit down for a moment and showed a sense of kindness, compassion, and humor that helped me to carry on in the middle of the night in rough mountain trails. The most thanks I can of course give goes to my wife who didn't come out for the race, but has been supportive throughout the training… Finding the right balance is not an easy task and I know that she made sacrifices and experienced more hardships than she would have otherwise so that I could do this… I love her as deep as my well goes and judging by the events that took place during the time period of August 19th at 4 a.m. to August 20th at 8:15 a.m., I don't know if it has any bounds, but I am going to keep digging deep. Love is the force that carries you to and across the finish line, I am very proud of finishing the race and I could not have done it without the love and support from friends and family.