Ultrarunning for Beginners: What It’s Like to Run a 52 Mile Race

I’m covered in mud. Wet, sticky, muddy. And blood, and salt from sweat and tears. But I’m still moving. Limping like I’m on my way to breakfast in a nursing home, but still moving.

The wind blows dirt into my face and the sun beats down on my head. My knee hurts so bad I can’t even jog slowly, and when I step off, I get lightning bolts of pain in my leg. I keep thinking about the 8,000 feet of elevation I still have to descend.

I’m getting closer to the second of the two places where someone can easily drop out and remove themselves from the Bighorn Trail Runa 52-mile race over rocky, muddy, dusty, snowy, and wet trails in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming.

And I’m thinking about quitting.

In a few miles I see my husband and daughter. They have our truck and I can slip away. Of the 200 people who lined up this morning to start the race, about a third will drop out or be pulled.

But I don’t want to give up. Nobody does.

I trained for this ultra mountain race for months, running in blizzards, rain, and 50 mph winds on the Wyoming prairie near my home. I woke up early Saturday mornings to hunt turkeys and skipped fishing to run 20 miles. I have to stay in the race to justify all those sacrifices.

But then there’s also the possibility that I’m messing up my knee. That the pop I felt behind my kneecap weeks earlier wasn’t just a tight hamstring, but a torn meniscus.

But even then, I don’t know whether I’ll be angrier at myself for pulling out of a race I committed to, or for forcing myself to finish a race knowing that the rest of my summer backpacking trips will be canceled.

And with that calculation, I realized what it meant to run, walk, and hobble 52 miles a day. I thought I could do it, as a relative newcomer to ultra running (but not to suffering).

Now I’m not so sure anymore.

“I hallucinated myself to death”

For much of the world, ultra races—longer than the classic 26.2-mile marathon distance—seem pointless at best, stupid at worst. They’re agonies. Opportunities to crush knees, ankles, and feet, not to mention the digestive tract.

The race I’m competing in is notoriously muddy and rocky. It starts at nearly 9,000 feet and climbs nearly 8,000 feet and descends more than 12,000 feet over the course of 52 miles. The rugged trails provide even more opportunities for tired legs to trip over rocks and roots, sending the runner tumbling down the trail as I did at mile 17.

But for some reason, ultra races are becoming more and more popular. These include 32-mile, 50-mile, 100-mile races and the even newer phenomenon of 200- to 250-mile races.

The times for these events vary greatly, depending on the runner, the terrain, and the conditions. The winner of the Bighorn 52-mile race, for example, finished in just over eight hours. The rest of us have 15 hours to do it. If you miss the cutoffs, which are carefully calculated to ensure that people can finish within the allotted time, you’re taken out of the race. 100-mile races can be spread out over two days, and 200-mile races can last more than three days. Pennsylvania-based ultrarunner Eric Quallen took 82 hours to complete the Tahoe 200, with only a few 30- to 40-minute naps to keep himself somewhat in touch with reality.

Even then, he says, “I was hallucinating like crazy.”

But they were benign hallucinations, he says, like the time he thought a pile of rocks was a cooler full of drinks dropped off by a trail angel. He never completely lost himself, like a runner in the Moab 240 who mistook a tree root for a snake and refused to move, or another racer who was forced to rest by medics because lack of sleep had made him violent and combative.

None of my fellow racers, some 20 miles from the finish, seemed to be having a good time. The 100-mile racers who finished on the same 52-mile course as us looked like they had gone from human to zombie.

Why, we rightly ask, do people pay hundreds of dollars to push their bodies to such extremes?

For Quallen, the answer is simple: “There’s really nothing like figuring out exactly how far you can go, and it’s always further than you think. There’s no other place in my professional or personal life where I can push myself to those limits.”

Suffering in the Wilderness

There is also a perverse joy in suffering in community (at least when the suffering is chosen and not forced). That’s what I told myself as my sister-in-law and I sat together in the misty, 5 a.m. light at the start of the 52-mile race. We both ran the 32-mile version of this race last year, swore we’d never do it again, and then signed up for the same race, just 20 miles longer.

I signed up for a long combination of reasons. It gave me a goal to train for. Running—spending time outdoors in general—in the early spring in my hometown on the high plains, where the winds regularly blow 50 to 70 mph as they whip over mountains and pound the prairie, is often about as appealing as a root canal. But preventing future suffering is a huge motivator, so I load up the dogs and go, and eventually I even start to enjoy those long training runs.

And like Montana rider Steven Brutger who was at the start in mid-June, I spend most days behind a computer. We need something that forces us to get outside on wet spring days.

Brutger grew up an activist, but when he quit his job as a wilderness guide, he realized he needed to be more purposeful. So he started running. At first he ran too fast, too far, too early. He injured himself, recovered, and ran again. He ran further, then a little further, and then one of his friends asked him to run up a mountain. Registration required only showing up, and everyone got a beer at the end.

“It was steep enough that no one was running, and it counts as trail running. It reminded me a little bit of hiking,” he says. “And I didn’t have to carry a big backpack or a moose.”

That’s the interesting reality of ultrarunning: Few people in distances of 50 miles and longer run the whole thing. They run the flats, the downhills, and the gradual climbs. Anything too steep, they walk or powerhike, making the race more about willpower and endurance than speed and splits.

Brutger then signed up for increasingly longer mountain races. He stayed in the mountains for the scenery, which is why my sister-in-law and I were there, too, instead of, say, a marathon through Chicago or New York. Trails wind through mud and snow, to be sure, but also offer unparalleled views of jagged rock faces and fields of purple lupine and bright yellow balsam root. Trails wind through meadows, forests, past aspen groves, and up canyons.

There is something natural in suffering in the wilderness.

“Which of our ancestors would run 50 miles on a road? We’re designed to move through natural terrain, and there’s something about the rough and the mud, you feel like you’re doing what you were created to do,” said Lillie Rodgers, a friend and fellow survivor who won the women’s 52-mile this year. “There’s a tremendous sense of liberation that comes from going somewhere that a vehicle or a bicycle can’t take you and being so far out in the backcountry.”

As the official start leader played the national anthem on her mobile phone, barely audible over the pre-race nerves, we set off with the rest of the group, running and shuffling through deep mud and snowdrifts before beginning the descent.

“She’s trying to get my way”

The first 17 miles or so have been great. But the first 17 miles or so are not what I was worried about. Then I fall, face down on a steep section of trail, hitting one knee on rocks and the other on hard sand. A mile later we stop at an aid station. I pull on dry socks and stuff a banana and Pringles into my mouth, hoping my stomach won’t reject them. My knee, I pray, will thank me for the relief.

That is not true.

My knee swells up and won’t budge. Even after a 3 mile hill with a few thousand feet of elevation gain and more downhill, the pain doesn’t go away.

Sixteen miles later comes the moment of decision, continue or quit. If I continue, giving up is almost impossible until almost the end. No one is going to save me from the trail because of a sore knee.

But giving up means giving up on myself and admitting that I don’t have it in me.

Up until now I thought I could do hard things. Maybe I need a reminder.

So I make friends. For miles I chat with a skinny man in his 60s from a nearby Wyoming town who is pampering his knees and walking with walking poles that I wish I had. His wife was at the 32-mile. They do this to stay fit, he says, and because why not.

For miles, I also leapfrogged Jeff, a 69-year-old who last year did the 100 miles in 33.5 hours. With about 12 miles to go, we pace ourselves for a bit, him with a stutter, me with my hobble. He says he does these kinds of races because his daughter keeps signing him up. I ask if she races, too, and he laughs.

“Hell no,” he says. “She’s trying to kill me to get my way.”

The man clearly loves running, needs no reason to keep going and is too stubborn to die, making him the perfect comic relief for a particularly hot and steep section.

I’m not sure I ever fully decide to stay in the race. I just never stop moving. One step follows another, and then another…

Finished.

I feel relief as my sister-in-law and I walk under the last arch, to the smell of grilled burgers and hugs from family. Mixed with the relief is concern about my knee, but also another feeling… something like pride.

I will never do anything like that again, I tell anyone who will listen. Nothing longer than 26.2 miles for me, if my knee heals long enough to even let me go that far.

But as I write this, after an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon who tells me that my knees, aside from some damaged cartilage and some fluid, are in remarkably good condition for a runner of, ahem, my age, I realize that I’ve only ever told people I wouldn’t do it. that breed again. Not that I would generally stop doing these ultra races.

Read more: Best running shoes for women

Because even after decades of cross-country skiing, backpacking, and marathons, these events, deep in the mountains, surrounded by equally masochistic people, might just be proof that I can still do hard things.

Or, as Rodgers tells me over coffee weeks later: “We are all so much more capable than we give ourselves credit for.”