Twelve hours into the run, I was climbing out of Telluride (8750' 28.1 mi) towards Virginius Pass (13100' 33.4 mi). I had been gauging my progress against the mountains on the other side of Telluride, which I had already come through. After an hour of climbing on good road, it appeared I had covered less than a mile and gained at most 750 feet of elevation.
That was not good. For one thing, it left only three and a half hours to climb another 3600 feet to reach Virginius Pass before the 9:30 pm cutoff. I knew that much of that did not involve anything resembling "good road".
At the rate I was moving, it did not seem achievable. Attempts to push harder resulted in me going exactly the same speed, but feeling worse (nausea). Attempts to rest and recover resulted in, well, rest.
After double checking the math, I convinced myself to turn around (the first time I have ever managed to do such a thing in an event). My biggest worry on the descent was that I might discover I had made a terrible mistake, e.g. maybe I had climbed two miles instead of one and really should have continued climbing. But the return trip only took twenty minutes of gentle walking, including several stops to explain things to runners who were still climbing up the hill.
* * *
That's how my run ended, but at Hardrock, the middle signified a lot more to me than the either the beginning or the end.
In some runs, people say that the high country is incredible. They say that, or they say it that way, because the course only spends part of the time in that sort of terrain. It is different at Hardrock. The only time I left the high country was to enter the city limits of Telluride.
When running on dirt roads, I sometimes wonder why anyone would run on pavement. And when running on trails I wonder why anyone would choose dirt roads. At Hardrock, there were moments, such as traversing the rock- tundra- and wildflower-strewn slopes between Putnam-Lime and Lime-Cataract saddles, with mountain peaks in all directions (including underfoot), when I wondered why anyone would run on trail, particularly a well-groomed one. At that moment, the entire concept of trail maintenance seemed distant and irrelevant.
Later, I had other questions. After wading the first dozen streams: why would anybody go to the trouble and expense of building a footbridge across a stream that can be waded quite easily and enjoyably?
After several hours of running and hiking, and getting a more accurate estimate of the true difficulty of the run: why would an accomplished runner, who had mastered the usual sort of 100 mile run, spend years repeating the same sort of experience without attempting something more difficult or rewarding?
I also wondered about my training, which included quite a few hours through snow at medium elevation (8000-11000'). In fact, I traversed a few snow fields in training that were probably more difficult and dangerous than anything I saw at Hardrock. I spent about an hour crossing an icy slope (45 degree angle) on Rose Peak above Lake Tahoe, digging my own steps and handholds into the surface with feet and bare hands, getting sore quads from all the kicking, having to stop every five minutes or so to lean on my elbows and thaw out my fingers, and realizing I'd better hurry before the rising temperatures made holding on totally impossible. The view from Grant-Swamp pass was certainly scarier, but in reality it was probably no more dangerous.
It was the higher altitudes that were the real difficulty for me. I didn't have any dangerous symptoms or anything, just an inability to repeatedly climb 13000' passes with a certain minimum speed (at least 40 minutes per mile). It will be a challenge to remedy this inability in the next year.
Back to the Hardrock Hundred Homepage