The Early Days

Scenes from trail running as a rookie two decades ago

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On the Bridge of Heaven summit above Ouray last Saturday, before a head cold wiped me out.

I didn’t run much this past week because I gave into illness. It’s been a full year since I was sick—when I had covid last October—and I was in denial about the symptoms. But when I hiked with my husband and dog Saturday, ascending over 3000 feet to a high point above Ouray, the symptoms moved from a sore throat to a full-blown head cold. I felt utterly depleted and stayed in bed most of Sunday, relieved that a covid test was negative. I still feel like I’m moving in slow motion, my productivity at maybe 50 percent of normal, wanting to curl up with a book to read a few pages and then nap.

Consequently, having not much to write about from last week, I’m sharing a version of an essay I wrote for my column in UltraRunning magazine. I encourage you to subscribe to this “long-running” magazine, still the bible of the sport. Some of its content is available free online, but most of it comes via a print edition or digital pdf for subscribers. (Also, please don’t miss the recommendations at the end of this post.)

The editor asked me to write about something “old school,” broadly defined. I took the opportunity to share a bit about how I started trail running way-back-when and what the scene was like.

Once upon a time, 20 years ago…

Twenty years ago, I wrote my first story for UltraRunning and ran my first trail race.

“In This Race, It’s OK to Take a Ride,” read the headline of that article. I shared my experience with the sport of ride-and-tie—a fast-paced trail race in which two runners sharing one horse team up to cover routes that sometimes stretch to ultra distances. While one runner rides ahead on the horse for a relatively short distance, the runner on the ground follows, until they switch. For the story, I quoted venerable ultrarunners who also were champs in ride-and-tie.

I was in awe of these gnarly, grizzled runners, many of whom wore Western snap-front shirts, when I began lining up with them in the late-’90s on the back of a horse owned by my ride-and-tie partner, Curt Riffle.

If ultrarunning in those days was a little-known fringe of a mainstream road-marathon boom, then ride-and-tie was the fringe of the fringe.

I had taken up running as a stressed-out graduate student in 1994, right before I turned 25, and had run a few road marathons. I knew about ultrarunning because I happened to live in the same East Bay Area neighborhood as perennial Western States 100 winner Ann Trason, and I wrote about her for a local magazine in 1996, when she was at her peak. I was ultra-curious but mostly ran paved roads and couldn’t fathom going longer than 26.2 miles.

In my heart, I would always be a horsewoman, my hobby since preschool. When I learned about ride-and-tie, it seemed like a dream combo, and I lucked out finding a partner who had a horse and trailer.

While I trotted and cantered in the saddle during a race, I could give my body a rest while my eyes frantically searched for a safe-enough tree branch to tie our horse. (In ride-and-tie, there are no pre-determined tie spots; the rider must find a tree or fence post to safely tie the horse, then start running, which can be difficult-to-impossible on long open stretches. It also means that the running partner has no idea how long he or she must run before getting to the horse.)

Mounting Majik for a ride-and-tie in 2002, when I was 33.

I’d hop off, tie up our steed—usually we rode a gray Arabian with the misspelled name Majik—and start running at a high-intensity 5K pace, not knowing how far I’d go before switching back to the saddle. Eventually, I’d hear hoofbeats and Curt calling out my name. Then we’d execute a gutsy “flying exchange” in which he’d ride up to my right side and dismount off Majik’s right while I got my foot in the left-side stirrup and mounted, the horse barely slowing its stride.

I can’t think of a more thrilling introduction to trail running.

But that running was broken up into short, fast intervals with riding in between. I didn’t learn how to settle into a steady tortoise pace, or downshift to power hiking, until I took a women’s trail-running camp in 2003 organized by the cross-country coach of Mills College. She shuttled us to remote trails, and my heart soared and feet flew through those Northern California oak-bay woodlands.

At that point, I was a mother of two in my mid-30s. I found “my thing” on those trails to balance out and escape the demands of parenting.

Toward the end of 2003, I ran my first trail race, a half marathon that ascended a couple thousand feet up Mount Diablo, in the East Bay Area suburbs. Incredibly, I won. I was more ultra-curious than ever.

Me as a relatively new trail runner in the Oakland Hills, apparently thinking it’s cool to run in just a bra with no hydration, no extra layers in case of a weather change, and no safety gear. To be fair, this was a photo shoot to accompany a Trail Runner article, so the photographer and I cared more about looking good than being practical. Photo by Cory Rich

But to go farther on trails, I needed the right gear. I had been running with little more than a Timex Ironman watch, naive about safety and hydration needs for trail runs. Facebook and Ultrasignup were still several years in the future, so to figure out where to race and what to buy, I turned to UltraRunning and to a first-of-its-kind e-commerce site that had survived the dot-com bust: Zombie Runner.

I ordered hand-held water bottles whose handles had little pockets (hydration vests weren’t yet popular; fanny packs and hand-helds ruled the trails), and shorts by a company called Race Ready that had little pockets sewn around the waistband. I learned from veteran ultrarunners to tie a bandana around my neck and to put Ensure—the meal-replacement drink marketed to seniors—into things called “drop bags.”

For my first trail marathon in early 2005, back on Mount Diablo, I lined up star-struck near Scott Jurek, who was there to run and win the 50-mile division. It blew my mind to think that I, a rookie, could stand a few feet away from the best in the sport and start a race in full view of his heels. It was a mere training run for him for Western States, which he’d go on to win his seventh straight time. He and the other guys—and the group was mostly guys, but I and the smattering of women fit in—smack-talked good-naturedly. Everyone knew everyone.

At that race, I discovered how satisfying PayDay bars at aid stations tasted, and how to run and hike for more than five hours. I also discovered a scene and a feeling better than what I saw and felt at any road marathon.

Shortly thereafter, I graduated to 50Ks and longer, and it’s still my thing.

(For the story behind this story—how 2003 was a year with high highs and self-destructive low lows for me as a runner, wife, and mother—you can read this earlier post.)

Ohlone 50K 2009

I dug up this photo of me at 40 (the race director gave me the bib to match my age), racing the 2009 Ohlone 50K in the East Bay hills of Northern California. Several things date this photo and seem funny to me now:

• A visor. Most runners wore visors then. Why fry the top of your head? Eventually, I switched to caps to fully cover my head and prevent sunburn on my part line.

• Ear buds hooked over my ear, connected to an iPod shuffle.

• A first-generation hydration pack made by Nathan, with a Camelbak reservoir that was awkward to refill at aid stations. The pack looked bad and fit worse.

• Those classic Race Ready shorts with the little pockets around the waistband, in which I carried many GU gels.

• The then-“cutting edge” Garmin 305 watch that was like a mini-brick on the wrist. It imprecisely measured distance (due to fewer satellites and slower processing time) and had a significant lag time measuring pace; in other words, if you sped up or slowed down, it took a good amount of time for the watch to catch up and give a semi-accurate pace reading.

• Asics GT-2000 trail-running shoes, my favorite back then, pre-Hoka.

If you’ve been trail running for more than a decade, what “old school” things do you remember about the sport from your earlier days? Please share in the comments below!

Worth listening & reading

I heard a terrific episode of the podcast Fresh Air that interviewed Cat Bohannon, author of the new book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution. Listening to the podcast, I appreciated Bohannon’s sense of humor, which made the heavy academic topic more digestible. I recommend the podcast and plan to read her book.

She starts by covering some ground also covered by

Christine Yu

in her excellent book Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes (which I reviewed here), explaining why the male body has traditionally been considered the norm and predominantly used in medical research. But then Bohannon dives deep into the evolution of females as mammals—why we have breasts, why our reproductive system developed to be the way it is, why women think and act the way we do—and how women and men are alike and different, from an evolutionary biological perspective. This should not be viewed as a women’s book but rather a book for all humans to better understand both female and male evolution and behavior.

I’ve read and enjoyed several books having to do with evolution and anatomy, which makes me realize that perhaps I missed my calling as a young adult; if I could go back to college, I might take a path that has to do with anatomy, evolution, and physiology. If you too are interested in this vein, I recommend these books:

• The Unseen Body: A Doctor’s Journey Through the Hidden Wonders of Human Anatomy by Jonathan Reisman

• Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding by Daniel E. Lieberman

• And for dog and horse lovers: Merle’s Door by Ted Kerasote (about canine behavior and evolution); and The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble Companion (about equine behavior and evolution)

Please feel free to recommend a nonfiction book having to do with health/wellness/physiology/evolution in the comments below.

Finally, in case you missed it, I hope you’ll read this Trail Runner story “Live Through This: A young doctor compares and contrasts a 100-mile ultra with cancer treatment.” I’m proud of how it turned out and honored that Sheena and Ryan Wisler trusted me with their deeply personal story.

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