A Crazy Tough First 100-Mile Ultra
A friend's adventure in Montana at the inaugural Crazy Mountain 100
Welcome back, subscribers—or, if this is your first time here, I hope you’ll consider subscribing. Since the last three posts detailed my experience at the High Lonesome 100, I want to spotlight someone and something else this week. I hope you enjoy reading about a talented ultrarunner who lives in my region and her first attempt at 100 miles at an extremely tough new race in Montana.
Before we journey north with her story, however, I encourage Colorado readers to take this fun, informative “how Colorado are you?” quiz that the Colorado Sun (one of my favorite sources for state news) ran for Colorado Day on August 1. I scored 8 out of 10. No cheating with Google!
When a client or friend asks my advice on choosing a first 100-mile ultra, I suggest they pick a race that’s reliable and familiar. They should be able to count on the race management to provide good support, and ideally they can train on the trails in advance of race day. It’s best to have it relatively close to home to avoid travel fatigue.
For example, back when I lived in the Bay Area, I chose Rio Del Lago in Northern California as my first 100. It’s a well-established event with plenty of aid stations that were easy for my pacer and crew to access. I had trained and raced on those trails for other shorter events. I ended up having a best-case-scenario first 100, running strong through the night to finish in 21 hours, 43 minutes. (For comparison, my mountain 100 a couple of weeks ago took 35 hours!)
Cristal Hibbard, a runner friend whom I’ve coached, didn’t follow that advice at all. She signed up for a true adventure—an inaugural event in a remote, rugged location: the July 29 Crazy Mountain 100, the first 100-mile ultra in the state of Montana. I reached out to her to learn about the race and hear about her experience as a rookie at the distance.
I got to know Cristal, who’s 34, in late 2020 when I coached a women’s winter running group. The following year, I helped her prepare for her first 100K. Cristal is an environmental engineer working on mine remediation and lives in Rico, a small mining town about 40 minutes south of Telluride.
For the first half of this year, we were on similar training paths as we both trained for a 100-miler in late July. We both ran the Desert Rats trail festival in Fruita this spring and the San Juan Solstice 50 in late June. She ran a really strong 50-miler at San Juan Solstice, finishing an hour and a half ahead of me.
Each time I asked about her upcoming 100-mile race, the words “crazy” and “Montana” stuck out. I hadn’t heard of it and couldn’t really picture it. I didn’t want to discourage her, but I felt like saying, there are so many good 100s in Colorado (here’s a list at the end of this post), why are you going all the way up there?
A few days ago, we talked about what makes the destination special and how it went for her.
The Crazy Mountains are in the northern part of the Rockies in south-central Montana, above the Yellowstone River Valley, with jagged summits and significant vert. According to this article, numerous myths persist about how and why the Crazies got their name; the most widely accepted story says it relates to a massacre between a pioneer family and members of the Blackfeet tribe, prompting a woman to scream with rage and attack the tribe upon seeing her family members killed.
The mountains are sacred to the Crow people, who call themselves Apsaalooke. They’re also home to large private ranches, making public access to the region’s backcountry difficult and mostly limited to non-vehicle travel by foot or horse.
The event’s website states: “The Crazy Mountain 100 has been a culmination of many people willing to come together and offer up access to their land and resources. Two family-owned and operated cattle ranches host the start and finish. … The race course navigates through the indigenous lands of the Apsaalooke, private, and public land. To the Apsaalooke people, this range is called Awaxaawippíia, ‘Awaxaawi’ meaning mountain, ‘ppíia’ meaning ominous or angry.”
Cristal said she wasn’t necessarily looking to get into running 100s; in other words, it wasn’t a longtime driving goal. Rather, the intrigue of this race drew her to it. She thought to herself, “If I'm going to go through the whole process of training and executing a 100, I might as well pick a doozy since it could be the only one!”
She first visited the region when her then-boyfriend, now-husband Alex was attending Montana State University in Bozeman. While visiting him, “I climbed the M hill where the college’s letter is, and I was like, ‘What’s that?’ And he said, ‘Those are the Crazy Mountains,’ and I remembered him being really excited about them. … This race is a unique opportunity to see the bulk of the range. The race director coordinated with six different private landowners to connect the route.”
The race route has about 25,000 feet of elevation gain, topping out on high points just above 10,000 feet. Runners are encouraged to carry a water filter and bear spray.
Cristal’s race unfolded similarly to my High Lonesome experience—a strong first day, followed by a slow, treacherous overnight, then a slogging Day 2. “The first 20 miles were on dirt road and new mountain bike single track that was very runnable,” she said. “I was worried that I had gone out way too fast running most of that with a big group of runners, but I was happy to have banked that time when I slowed down on the rocky climbs. I found the technical trails slow going during the night, and my feet were pretty beat up from all the rocks, but I felt like I could keep going just fine.”
She and others slowed down significantly while tackling a ridge line in the dark along a mountain called Sunshine Peak. “That was a gnarly section. It’s a really technical rocky trail, kind of like doing a 14er in the dark. I never really felt comfortable running because it was so exposed, and the rocks are moving and sharp. I wish I could’ve seen it in the day, because I’m sure it was beautiful. But there was a ‘no fall zone’ [meaning, don’t fall or you could die] with slide-y dirt. Makiko [a woman she was running with] dropped her pole there, and it went into the abyss, there was no retrieving it. It’s kind of scary that most people went over that in the dark.”
Along these rocky single-track stretches, Cristal’s feet rebelled and ached. “I think I yelled, ‘Why is Montana so rocky?’ over and over again because I was so sick of running on the rocks.” But she and Alex, who was pacing her, made it through the night. Little did she realize that a harder section—which looked relatively easy on the course map and elevation profile–awaited her and her second pacer, Ryan.
Let me pause to mention a common trap for mountainous 100s—one that I fell into at Wasatch and High Lonesome. If a course has significant climbs on challenging terrain, you tend to focus on training to hike and descend the peaks. You also focus on the challenge of getting through the night. You look at the course’s elevation profile and see the lower-elevation rollers and flat stretches and think, “That’s the easy part.” Wrong. Especially if the “easier” part comes on Day 2, after 24 hours of effort. And, especially if it’s a hot day at lower elevation.
After Mile 70, Cristal said, “was just the worst section. We started in a field with a bunch of weeds, and someone had driven an ATV through it so you were just walking in tire tracks getting thistles in your elbows, and then they had to remove a dead cow carcass because there was a bear on it, so it smelled like dead cow for a couple of miles, and then it was just cow patty city—we were on cow trails. And then it got hot. And I was like, poor Ryan, he’s never going to come and do a race with me again.”
How hot? “There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It had to have been 95 to 100, and we were really exposed. There were no trees for shade. That hayfield where we finished, it was well over 100 degrees—it was crazy.”
What’s worse, she ran out of water and dehydrated during a long stretch between aid stations. Volunteers at the prior aid station led her to believe the next aid station would be sooner. “We were like, we should be there by now, are we lost? I learned the lesson to bring my own information and not trust what the volunteers are telling you.”
The race has a time limit of 36 hours, which Cristal didn’t worry about until she wilted in the late-afternoon sun. “I had no time goals other than to finish under 36 hours. The first half of the race went so well, I did let my mind start thinking about a 32 or 33 hour finish, because I was stupidly underestimating the rolling foothills at the end of the race.”
After a final significant climb, she ingested a Spring Energy Wolf Pack bar and more Tailwind—nausea, luckily, was not a problem for her in the race—and she and her pacer started passing others. “I was ready to be done.”
She made it through the ranch’s hot hayfield and crossed the finish in 35:13, proud to be among the 16 women who finished of the 35 who started. Overall, the race had a 56 percent finishing rate, with 73 of 129 starters making it.
Overall, Cristal recommends the event, with reservations. “I think for a first year, the race director [Megan DeHaan] did a really good job with what she had to work with,” Cristal said. But, “with it being the first year, there just wasn't that much information available about the course, especially the private property portions. I think if I had known what I do now about the second half of the course, I'm not sure I would have considered doing it—or I would have done some heat training. And I definitely would have carried more water for that section!”
For more info on the Crazy Mountain 100, check out this article in the Bozeman paper about it.
I think Cristal should feel incredibly proud to have attempted and survived such a grueling first 100. I suggested that she look for a more runnable 100 that would take her closer to 24 hours, to avoid the challenges of a second day.
Perhaps, she said, but this 100 might end up being a one-off for her. She’s taking a wait-and-see approach to future ultras. Running isn’t the only way she moves through the mountains.
“I'm excited to get on my bike now that my race is behind me! I hate the idea of hurting myself mountain biking before a big race, so my bike has been collecting dust. And I like having the freedom to run or bike or hike based on what I feel like doing each day, after so many months of structured training.”
But she and I both have a 50K coming up October 1—the Hanging Flume 50K in the high-desert country near the confluence of the San Miguel and Dolores rivers, in southwest Colorado halfway between Telluride and Moab. Registration is open, and I recommend it! I wasn’t able to run it last year (its inaugural year), but I highly recommend the region; here is an article I wrote about it.
Way to go, Cristal! Thank you for sharing your story here.
This week, another Substack trail-running newsletter featured me on their podcast. Adam Lee, who lives in British Columbia, writes a newsletter called Community Trail Running filled with short, upbeat, motivational and informative podcasts. He and I chatted about aid stations and ultra advice; you can listen here (it’s only about 15 minutes long).
I ran this race too! It was an epic adventure and I hope more people get to earn that buckle and experience our little corner of Montana!