I wasn’t really surprised to learn that running 50 miles in a day is hard.  Especially if it’s on rocky, high-mountain trails.  

My Mom and Dad came up from Oklahoma to watch and cheer — and to hold me up for a minute after the finish!   (Thanks to Mike Short for most of these pictures!)

A dirty little secret about the Leadville Silver Rush 50 Trail Run is that it isn’t really 50 miles – it’s more like 47.  Maybe they’re counting the fact that there was a vertical mile and a half of climb (7,400 ft) and the same amount of descent.  Most of the race was on  “jeep” or fire-service roads, and most of it was between 11,000 and 12,000 feet in elevation – up where the air gets really thin and trees can’t survive on the mountainsides.  That amount of climb is the rough equivalent of climbing up and down a 12-storey building during each mile – or of scaling the Empire State Building six times during the race.

The race starts at the bottom of the local ski slope and heads right straight up.

The absolute highlight of the race was my support “crew.”  At least 20 times over the fifty-mile course I was greeted by a group of my friends and family – sometimes as many as nine of them, all of whom had somehow found their way to Leadville that weekend and spent their day cheering and helping me.  Mike Short was my personal photographer (taking most of the pictures on this page).  My top supporters for the last 48 years (my Mom and Dad) chased me on their ATV.  Bjorn Hegelman (there with wife Jodie) was my biggest (literally) supporter (see photo below if you don’t get this joke).  Dr. Don Wilsey (a friend I met during my Bolivia experience) drove over from Colorado Springs.

Shane and Michele Merz and Scott Humphries were my roving pit crew — chasing me on ATVs with Gatorade and food and going above and beyond my imaginings even for SuperFans.  When I caught sight of them up the trail (or heard their cowbells through the woods), I could yell, “I need sunscreen, baby wipes, and crackers!”  No problem.  “Chapstick, and bug spray!?”  Here you go.  “Diet coke and cookies?”  Coming right up.  They were so great it was absurd.  I might – MIGHT – have been able to finish without all that support, but it surely wouldn’t have been as happy, fast, or fun.

My support crew at 5:30a.m.! (Not shown: Mike Short, who took most of these pictures).

Spending a summer in Leadville demonstrates a persistent fact of life:  no matter what you do — there’s always somebody doing twice as well,  going twice as far, twice as fast, twice as tough or as often . . . something.  Several hundred great mountain bikers do the fifty-mile race, only to have hundreds of runners cover exactly the same course the next day without the benefit of a bicycle.  Celebrate your fifty-mile run and you’ll still be consigned to a backseat behind the folks who’ll run a HUNDRED miles here over even-tougher terrain in August.  Seriously.  Running “just” the 50 mile race gets only modest respect in Leadville.

Before last weekend, I’d never run more than 26.2 miles in a day, so committing to run 50 – especially in Leadville — was a big leap.  I was emboldened by the fact that I’ve done several events in the past that took 11 to 13 hours each (Ironman triathlons and 100-mile mountain bike races).  I’d done an Ironman triathlon just a month before, so I thought I could get away with minimal extra training.  My theories mostly panned out fine, with the possible exception that I didn’t fully realize how hard a rocky Rocky Mountain mountain trail can be on your feet and ankles.

Already above the tree line, with a long ways to go, this was one of four separate climbs up to 12,000 ft. (This is one of just a couple of pictures I took myself with a tiny camera I carried on part of the trip.)

Minutes after the Oklahoma 4A Girls Championship game, I got to hear my niece introduced as “State Champion Grace Parker” for the second year in a row.  Don’t let those pretty blue eyes fool you:  she’s a warrior out there.  The “Lady Tigers” had to win four games in eight days to be the first back-to-back champs since Oklahoma girls started playing five-on-five basketball.

Grace Parker with the Championship Trophy

If you want to see some disciplined, composed 17-year-old girls, head for Fort Gibson.  The Lady Tigers were down by as much as 16 late in the third quarter.  Moms and dads (and uncles) in the crowd were quietly starting to remind themselves that second place is still something to be proud of.  But the girls had different plans.

Oklahoma Class 4A Girls State Championships, State Fair Arena, just before the half as Fort Gibson trailed by 12.

They whittled the lead very gradually, but with about three minutes to play, Anadarko still had a 7-point lead and the ball.  In what one newspaper called the “key play of the comeback,” my niece, Grace steals the ball from one of the Anadarko star players, drives the length of the court, makes the layup and draws a foul for a three-point play that made it a four-point game with lots of time left.  Suddenly, they were back in the game.

A couple of minutes later, some great play by teammates Desiree Phipps and Savanah Gray had tied the game with about ten seconds left.  Grace’s lifelong best friend Allie Glover catches a pass just over the midcourt stripe, dribbles up a few steps, and launches a nothing-but-net 30-foot dagger that brought the house down and the gold hardware back to Fort Gibson for another year.  (That’s Allie smooching the trophy in the picture below).

Allie Glover, minutes after she sank a game-winning three point shot with four seconds to play in the State Championship

Fort Gibson has been to the finals 7 of the last 9 years; they’ve won three of the last four.  One tradition they’ve developed is that after a Championship win, the Seniors hop aboard the large bronze horse statue in front of the State Fair Arena.  That may have been an ominous sight for Fort Gibson’s competition:  the back-to-back defending State Champs had just one senior (Savanah Gray) on the team.  Grace and Allie and Des and Jaymie and Cheyenne and Susie will all be back next year.  Get ready for the Three-peat in March 2015.  I’ll be there.

Fort Gibson’s lone Senior Savannah Gray — a State Champ three of the past four years — celebrates with a gold ball and a bronze horse in front of the State Fair Arena

As always, I hope the rest of the team will forgive me for ‘focusing’ on my niece, Grace.  The team has plenty of stars and is loaded with great girls.  As I said last year, I hope each of them has an uncle just as proud of her as Grace’s.  In that vein, the picture at bottom may be my favorite from the whole trip.