Running on Empty

by Marshall Ulrich

  So, sure, I’d raced at all the major events, won some, and broken records. In my thirties, I’d discovered my talent for ultrarunning; in my forties, I’d taken it to another level with my creative extremes, and diversified with adventure racing; now, as I entered my fifties, I was something of a celebrity among endurance athletes. Trail Runner magazine would call me one of the legends of the trail, Outside would crown me “Endurance King,” and Adventure Sports would highlight me as an athlete “Over Fifty and Kicking Your Butt.”

  Good for me. I was a badass.

  At least my exploits had taught me ways to get myself through tough spots like the one I was experiencing on Towne’s Pass, such as using my athletic pursuits to raise money for a charity I cared about, a religious order of sisters serving women and children. On that day, I pushed through the pain by reminding myself that I wasn’t doing it only for me. My suffering had a purpose. Anyone who’s walked or run a few miles to benefit a cause knows how motivating this can be. Just when you start to feel as if you have nothing left to give, you remember how difficult someone else’s life is, and you can keep going. Perspective does wonders. (I love this sign, spotted at a marathon to benefit cancer research: “Blisters don’t require chemo.”) So I strapped a bag of ice onto each shin and slogged it out for the final 232 miles, my legs the center of my universe, tormenting me for the next five days, all the way to the finish.

  Badwater Quad, check. Now just a couple of goals nagged at me still, like some kind of extreme bucket list. Before I departed this earth, I wanted to climb Mount Everest and realize my boyhood dream. And I had this other ambition to run across the United States, something I considered the ultimate ultra: more than three thousand miles from shore to shore, across all kinds of terrain. It would be the run of a lifetime, the most extreme challenge I’d ever attempted. In the same way I’d thrilled to the early stories of the Everest mountaineers, I found the travails of those who’d managed to cross our country on foot completely riveting. I wanted to experience all of that for myself, firsthand.

  The month after my Badwater Quad, I was still so burnt from it that I couldn’t compete in that year’s Leadville Trail 100, so I was happy to help a friend get the job done. When I first started ultrarunning, there were no coaches, no experts, no manuals, no playbooks. Sometimes, there wasn’t even a marked course—you just had to get yourself from point A to point B, from starting line to finish line, however you saw fit to go. Forget frequent water stations and cheering onlookers. Ultrarunning is all about going it alone—or, if you’re smart, you might draft a friend or two to pace you by running alongside you, or to “crew” you by providing first aid or any other assistance you might need, from blister care to icing you down. When you’re out in the middle of nowhere, with runners miles apart and covering extreme distances on trails few other folks ever get the chance to see, it’s an advantage to have someone else with you, ideally someone with endurance and experience.

  Although by 2001 the Leadville race had become more organized, Theresa Daus-Weber had asked me to crew and then pace her back over Sugar Loaf Pass because of my wealth of experience on the Leadville course. Waiting for her to arrive at an aid station, I met Theresa’s friend, Heather Vose, who introduced herself and her dog. While Ripley sniffed me out, Heather told me she’d gotten to know Theresa at their place of work, an environmental consulting firm in Denver. She’d come out to watch Theresa and was curious about “this ultrarunning thing,” which she’d heard of only recently.

  Smart and sexy, Heather intrigued me. She was also younger than I, at least ten years my junior if I guessed right. Maybe more. Does it matter? Over the next fifteen hours of the race, I thought about that. And her. A lot. So I was pleased when I saw Heather again as Theresa crossed the finish line, making her one of only two women who’ve completed the course eleven times. Heather and I quietly celebrated our friend’s victory, and I found myself growing more and more attracted to her. What an extraordinary woman!

  Years ago, I’d decided I wasn’t marriage material: With my track record, I didn’t want to subject any more women to being tied to me that way. But who’d said anything about marriage? I just wanted to talk to Heather again. Sadly, I anticipated I’d never get the chance. As we said our good-byes, I hugged her and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

  After the race, though, Heather and I exchanged some e-mail messages, and a few months later, I joined her, Theresa, and another friend for Christmas dinner in the mountains near Leadville. We went snowshoeing, shared some laughs, and told stories while Heather and I checked each other out surreptitiously. At the end of the day, I drove Heather home, we stood on her doorstep, and feeling uncharacteristically bold, I took her in my arms for our first kiss. As she returned my embrace, Heather’s snowshoes clattered to the ground, and that was the beginning of our romance.

  In April, Heather asked if she could move in with me; we were spending so much time together that it just made sense. I hadn’t expected to be ready for something like that so soon in our relationship, or ever—hell, I was fifty and set in my ways—but this straightforward, passionate woman brought out feelings long dormant in me, and I agreed, happy to have her near.

  A month later, she kissed me good-bye when I left to embark on my first mountaineering experience. Sometime before, professional mountaineer Gary Scott had called me after reading an article in Outside magazine that mentioned my desire to scale Mount Everest. We’d never met, but he was interested in helping me gain some experience, and he advised me that although I was already skilled with some climbing from my adventure racing, I’d better go up a few seriously big mountains before attempting Everest. He’d be happy to guide me, he said, and then suggested we put together a team to climb Denali; at just over 20,000 feet in elevation, it’s the highest peak in North America, the perfect place to start my training, and we could do this expedition inexpensively. Great! As usual, I’d lucked into the cheapest way possible to try something new. I contacted some friends I knew from adventure racing, Charlie Engle and Tony DiZinno, and Gary contacted a young man with some mountaineering experience, Aron Ralston. We got sponsors, too, who gave us backpacks and climbing gear, and Gary led us to the top. When I handled the altitude well, it gave me the confidence I needed to climb Aconcagua, the highest peak in South America, less than a year after that. I was on my way to Everest, mountain by mountain, now determined to climb all Seven Summits.

  In another year, I’d changed my mind completely about getting married again, and on Christmas Day in 2002, I gave Heather a stuffed moose with an engagement ring hung on a gold chain around its neck. At first, she thought the moose was all there was to it, but then she noticed the ring and I made my proposal. To my relief and excitement, she said yes. With a wink at my checkered romantic past, we exchanged our vows on April Fools’ Day, 2003, and enjoyed a delayed honeymoon trip to Africa in July, where we summited Kilimanjaro together. I’d found a partner in her, a woman who loved me in spite of my flaws and who was even willing to join me in a few of my obsessions. We’d both entered this relationship with serious misgivings, but by the time we were standing on that mountaintop together, we’d let the walls down. I’d come to understand what made her who she was, and what she’d been through in her own life, and I’d shared my own story. She’d already convinced me that I wasn’t unfit to be her husband, and was helping me to finally deal with my grief over Jean’s death and my shortcomings as a father. Through my guilt and regret and other messy feelings, she was undeterred. She’d become emotional ballast for me, my refuge and my rock.

  A year after our summit of Kilimanjaro, I was making plans for us to climb Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe, when I came across something startling, a website for “Everest 10000.” What’s this? Sitting at my computer, I read about a Russian adventure team, led by Alex Abramov, and its Everest expedition, which would cost me $10,000 (a bargain!) to join if they accepted me. I called Alex right away to express my enthusiasm, share my athletic r�
�sumé with him, and ask for a place on his team.

  “One spot open, sure. You send money right away.”

  Four weeks later, I was sitting in base camp in Tibet at 17,160 feet with the Russians, ready to attempt the climb to summit the highest mountain in the world.

  Mount Everest, check. I came home with all ten toes and fingers but lost a few brain cells to sleep deprivation and oxygen deprivation. Despite temperatures that plummeted well below zero, winds that whipped us at thirty or more miles per hour, claustrophobia, weight loss, and nearly being swept away in a torrential glacial stream, I made it back down alive, my lifelong dream fulfilled. Heather met me on the trail just outside base camp, where she’d waited for my return with her father. We held each other quietly. Nothing else mattered to me in that moment but that we were together, and even Everest seemed suddenly insignificant.

  2.

  Legacy

  ☑ “The Last Great Race”—complete all six hundred-mile trail races in one season ( finished in the top ten in five of them, first person to do so)

  ☑ Badwater 146 (many times, four wins and course records, current record holder for the summit of Mount Whitney)

  ☑ Pikes Peak Quad (one of the first, and only person to do it twice)

  ☑ Run across Colorado (three times, current record holder)

  ☑ Leadville Trail 100 and Pikes Peak Marathon in the same weekend (only person to do it)

  ☑ Eco-Challenges (one of only three people to compete in all nine)

  ☑ Badwater solo, unaided and self-contained crossing (first and only person to do it)

  ☑ Badwater Quad (first person to do it)

  ☑ Summit Mount Everest (reached the top of all Seven Summits on first attempts)

  ☐ Run across America

  Now, there was just one item remaining unchecked on my extreme to-do list: the transcontinental run. At almost sixty years old, if I didn’t get moving soon, would I ever do it?

  Like my dream of climbing Mount Everest, I’d been thinking about this for a long time, always intrigued by the pioneers who’d made their way across the United States in covered wagons. Stories of the western expansion, with its hardships and the people’s perseverance, had riveted me since childhood. Captains Lewis and Clark, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, and others: legends, every one, but real men, just the same. In imaginary play as a boy, my brother and I had become them, wearing faux coonskin caps and firing cork rifles through the bushes and around the corners of our house. Some part of the frontier character cried out for expression in my adulthood, too. Back in my early forties, I’d signed up to do the “Trans Am ’92,” an organized race that would follow a historic route and pit me against a few other acclaimed ultrarunners, but in the end, I’d decided not to go, because of family and work obligations. At the time, my kids were too young for me to take off for two months, plus I was in the process of getting my first divorce and still actively building my business.

  By 2006, though, I’d resigned from managing Fort Morgan Pet Foods, my youngest, Ali, was nearly driving age, and I had Heather by my side. The timing just might be perfect.

  Besides, I was gripped by my recent conversations with Ted Corbitt, my mentor and a modern pioneer, one of the founders and architects of ultrarunning. He’d described in depth a transcontinental race held in 1928, nicknamed the Bunion Derby—the very race that had inspired the Trans Am from which I’d had to bow out. Among the Bunion Derby’s 199 starters were sons of clergy and sons of former slaves, men who were known for their prowess as runners and men who’d never run much at all, guys of all ages, ones who came with financial backing and ones who came only with the clothes on their backs.

  As an African-American born in 1919 in South Carolina, and a child when the bunioneers made their cross-country trek, Ted was especially impressed by how egalitarian that footrace had been—no one was excluded. Growing up and becoming an elite athlete, he’d experienced plenty of racism and been banned from a few competitions because of his skin color. Although Ted recalled his own trials with humor and grace, he didn’t discount how significant it was that the field of runners in 1928 was composed of people from all walks of life. The Bunion Derby, with its diverse competitors, had sparked something in him, an ideal that kept him going when he faced obstacles of his own.

  Like me, Ted had started running on his family farm. As an adult, he’d competed in the 1952 Olympics, helped found the New York Road Runners Club, set standards for course measurements, organized a thirty-miler in the five boroughs that was the precursor to the New York City Marathon, held distance records throughout his running career, and even coined the term ultrarunning. He achieved idol status in the admittedly small world of ultramarathons, especially for his athletic achievements after age forty, when he was competing in the masters’ category. At age eighty-three, he walked 303 miles in a six-day running race, covering just over fifty miles a day. His accomplishments earned him the titles “father of ultrarunning” and “spiritual elder of the modern running clan.”

  Ted was in his late eighties when we met, and he told me that he’d long dreamed of running across America himself, although he was never in a position to make an attempt. Finances and work had kept him from it, but the extreme distance and the athleticism required to pull off a record-setting finish fascinated him. We talked about this, and about how those guys in 1928 had run across a still-segregated country mostly on dirt and gravel, wearing leather-soled shoes and street clothes. One wore flannel underwear.

  Of course, there were others who came before and after. Walkers, runners, people who crossed east or west in pursuit of, well, a different objective for each of them, I suppose. Like Ted, I wanted to retrace these people’s steps, too. In places where the land remained unchanged, I wanted to see what they’d seen. Where modernization had won out, I wanted to marvel at our inventions and consider whether so-called progress had, indeed, moved us forward. I wanted to meet people as I ran, get a sense of the American character, if there really was such a thing. I was itching to get out there on our nation’s roads and test myself against the elements that had battered my forerunners, and I wanted to prevail. I wanted to set a new world record.

  THE REQUIREMENTS

  Guinness World Record Guidelines

  This record is for crossing the U.S.A. in the shortest time on foot–the participant may run or walk as desired.

  The attempt should start at City Hall New York and finish at City Hall Los Angeles or San Francisco (or vice versa). The mileage covered is not relevant to the attempt—it is up to the participant to choose the most suitable or shortest route between these two points.

  1. The run should only proceed on roads where it is safe and/or legal to run. The breaking of any laws during the journey will result in disqualification.

  2. The record will be timed from the moment the runner sets off to the moment he/she arrives at their final destination. Breaks may be taken as desired, but at no time will the clock stop.

  3. The runner is allowed the benefit of a support team, but at no time may he/she be transported towards his/her destination by the support vehicle. Each leg of the journey should resume at the exact point at which the last leg ended.

  At the beginning of 2007, I clicked through the Guinness World Records site to receive information about qualifying for an attempt to break the transcontinental record. I knew I wanted to do it, but I hadn’t figured out the particulars yet. Who would finance it? I doubted I could foot the bill all by myself for the route detailing, support team/crew, food, lodging, vehicles, gas, medical care, and whatever else we’d need.

  That winter, it was as if someone fired a start gun when I heard that Charlie Engle (my Denali climbing teammate, with whom I’d also adventure raced in Fiji and Vietnam) was running across the Sahara Desert with another friend, Ray Zahab, as well as Kevin Lin. Their 4,500-mile journey was being underwritten by a documentary of their experience, which would be titled, simply, Running the Sahara. Narrated by Ma
tt Damon, it would capture the spirit of the three runners, the desert environment, and the obstacles they’d face, and it would bring awareness to the water crisis in that area. Running the Sahara would be in the tradition of other great extreme sports films—as could be a film about my own transcontinental run, I imagined. It would be like the 2005 BBC documentary I’d watched fairly recently, about a group of men who re-created Robert F. Scott and Roald Amundsen’s treks to the South Pole, racing each other and using Greenland as a backdrop. Or like Jon Muir’s tale, made into the film Alone Across Australia: A Story About a Man Who Takes His Dog for a Walk. (Don’t let the title fool you, as this is an amazing adventure, a 2,500-mile, self-sufficient crossing of the Australian outback—even the dog dies!) There’d been a few films about ultrarunning, such as The Distance of Truth and Running on the Sun, both about the Badwater 135. But I envisioned something on an epic scale that would be about more than running.

  Extreme sports documentaries were becoming more and more popular, and I knew a transcontinental run could make a great addition to the genre. My theory was that people would love to see a film about unadorned athleticism that would also be positive and motivational, and this one would reveal the many faces of America, its landmarks and landscape, some running history, and even a bit of what our pioneers experienced in their push westward. What better way to do all that than to film a run nearly straight across the whole damn U.S. of A.?

  Because Ray was more accessible by e-mail than Charlie while they were in the Sahara, I sent a message through him to ask Charlie if he’d be interested in brokering a deal with any of his film or corporate contacts so that I could gain media interest, financing, or product support for a run across America. I suspected that this idea of a transcon—and of me doing it at my “advanced age”—might catch Charlie’s eye; he respected me, I believed, plus he had a reputation of being a smooth operator, someone who could sell ice to an Inuit, exactly the kind of guy I wanted on my team if I was going to get the cross-country ultrarun under way now.