BADWATER - AdventureCORPS

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BADWATER
135 miles. 125 degrees. 3 mountain ranges. 2 days. No
IVs. No prize money. It could only be ...
By Mark Zeigler
UNION-TRIBUNE Staff Writer
July 13, 2003
In nine days, 61 men
and 16 women will
attempt the 26th
annual Badwater
Ultramarathon, billed
as "the most
demanding and
extreme running race
offered anywhere on
the planet." Last year,
the Union-Tribune's
Mark Zeigler and Sean
M. Haffey followed the
Badwater from start to
finish. This is their
story:
SEAN M. HAFFEY / Union-Tribune
Ultramarathon veteran Barbara Elia of Modesto sopts
to have blisters examined at Towne Pass, the first
major climb out of the desert.
DEATH VALLEY – First, a quick lesson in geography and meteorology.
As ocean breezes move inland from the California coast, they encounter
several mountain ranges, moving up and over each one. Two things
happen along the way.
The air is sapped of its moisture, because as air rises it condenses into
clouds and deposits its moisture in the form of rain or snow. The air
also gets progressively warmer with each climb and descent, since the
descending air generally heats at a faster rate than the rising air had
cooled.
So a parcel of air going over a particular mountain range, for instance,
might be 80 degrees on one side – and 90 on the other.
Now factor in four steep
mountain ranges, one of
which includes Mount
Whitney, at 14,494 feet the
highest peak in the
contiguous 48 states. And on
the other side, barely 100
miles away, you have Death
Valley, at 282 feet below sea
level the lowest point in the
Western Hemisphere.
Badwater milestones
1973: Paxton Beale and Ken
Crutchlow complete a 150-mile
relay run from Badwater to the
top of Mount Whitney.
1977: Al Arnold completes the
route solo in 84 hours.
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The result: very dry air, and
very hot air. Drier and
hotter, in fact, than
anywhere on the planet. A
comfortable ocean breeze
becomes an inferno; 70
degrees Fahrenheit becomes
125.
Mother Nature's pottery kiln.
Now try running 135 miles in
it. In July.
1981: Jay Birmingham breaks
record (75 hours, 34 minutes).
1987: Crutchlow organizes the
first head-to-head race between
Americans and Brits.
1988: Hi-Tec begins
sponsoring the race, now called
the Badwater 146, to promote
its newest running shoe.
1989: Tom Crawford and
Richard Benyo complete the
first Badwater double – from
Badwater to the top of Whitney
and back. It takes126 and 170

9:45 a.m., Badwater, 100
degrees.
If the geography isn't
forbidding and foreboding
enough, there are the names.
Dante's View. Coffin Peak.
Funeral Mountains. Devil's
Golf Course. Desolation
Wash. Dead Man Pass. Hell's
Gate. Death Valley.
Badwater is aptly named as
well. There is water here,
and it is bad – a toxic, putrid
stew of alkalis that would kill
you if you drank enough of it.
and back. It takes126 and 170
hours, respectively.
1996: The time required to
earn a Badwater belt buckle is
raised from 45 to 48 hours.
2000: Anatoli Kruglikov of
Russia sets the 135-mile course
record of 25:09:05.
2002: Pam Reed lowers the
women's record to 27:56:47.
2003 Badwater
Ultarmarathon
When: July 22-24
Who: 61 men, 16 women from
around the world
Live Webcast:
www.badwaterultra.com.
It is here that the Badwater
135 road race begins, next to
a smelly pond and a wooden
sign that says you are 280
feet below sea level. The
tradition is for the competitors to pose around the wooden sign, then
walk 50 yards to the road and begin their 135-mile odyssey through the
desert, over two mountain passes, across an endless valley and finally –
one, two, sometimes three days later – halfway up Mount Whitney.
Assuming you get that far.
Racers face temperature
changes of up to 90
degrees, and 13,000 feet
in cumulative altitude
gains and 4,700 feet in
knee-crunching
descents. There are
sidewinder rattlesnakes
just off the road,
coyotes, scorpions,
tarantulas and
mountains lions. One
year a racer was buzzed
by a rabid bat. Another
year a family of bears
was spotted near the
finish line at Whitney
Portal.
SEAN M. HAFFEY / Union-Tribune
135 miles. 125 degrees. 3 mountain ranges. 2 days.
No IVs. No prize money. It could only be ...
Badwater. Above, blurred by the heat radiating off
the pavement, Ian Parker, a Badwater rookie from
Irvine, learns firsthand the toll Death Valley exacts.
In the Owens Valley, fighter jets from Edwards Air Force Base appear
out of nowhere and make strafing runs at perilously low heights, which
causes all sorts of psychological havoc on physically exhausted, sleepdeprived,
severely dehydrated runners prone to vivid hallucinations.
There is also the swirling wind, and the occasional sand storm or
lightning strike. In this race, two fires on the other side of the Sierra
send their choking smoke into racers' lungs.
But mostly there is the raw heat. Relentless. Merciless. Endless. It
drains your body of precious water. It fries your mind's motherboard
and shuts down its circuitry. It evaporates your inner will, one drop of
sweat at a time.
Rubber soles melt. Air heel cushions burst. Raw skin bubbles. One
competitor talks wistfully about the record-setting heat in 1998, when
air temperatures reached 130 and "my toenails exploded like kernels of
popcorn." Most racers bring seven, eight, nine pairs of running shoes in
progressively larger sizes because their feet swell so much.
Did we mention that IVs are prohibited during the race and there are
no official aid stations?
"If you had aid stations," race director Chris Kostman says, "first of all
the people in the aid stations would die."
The 80 competitors are divided into three flights, with 6, 8 and 10 a.m.
starts. The 10 a.m. group gathers around the wooden sign and looks
back at Kostman and his camera.
"We've already had our first 911 call," Kostman tells the competitors in

a monotone as dry as the air around them. "Let's hope it's our only one
today. Someone has already passed out a couple of times. On that note,
welcome to the 25th Badwater 135.
"Smile, guys."
His name is Derek McCarrick. He is from Isle of Sheppey, England.
He is a 67-year-old coal miner-turned-taxi driver, and he runs
marathons and other ultradistance events as a hobby. He raises money
for charities, mostly for breast cancer (which claimed his wife) and
leukemia (which claimed a friend's daughter).
His schtick is that he wears a rabbit suit, with furry pants and a furry
top and a furry rabbit head with floppy ears. He's run the London
Marathon 21 times and is known simply as "Roger Rabbit" to fans and
race organizers. Kids lining the course love him.
In the months before the 2002 Badwater, Kostman receives
McCarrick's entry application. Kostman calls him and explains that he
meets all the necessary qualifications, but "you can't possibly wear that
rabbit outfit here."
No problem, McCarrick tells Kostman. He has a special desert suit. He
wore it in the Marathon des Sables, a six-day, 151-mile event across the
Sahara in April.
"So I sort of pictured a (baseball) hat with small bunny ears on it and a
bunny silk-screened on his shirt, shorts and running shoes," Kostman
says.
McCarrick shows up for his 6 a.m. start with long, furry pants, floppy
rabbit feet over his shoes and a giant green bow. That is his first
mistake. His second: Drinking only 1-1/2 liters of water over the first
nine miles, when most medical experts recommend a liter per mile.
Three hours into the race, McCarrick is slumped in the passenger seat
of his crew's minivan, comatose. When his condition does not improve
markedly over the next several hours, he withdraws to avoid becoming
the first person in race history to die.
Kostman shakes his head. Another year, another victim.
"This race is just so far beyond any other running event that it's just in
a league of its own," says Kostman, whose adventureCORPS company
organizes several other endurance events. "Most of the top 100-mile
runners won't do this race because they're scared. They're afraid they'll
discover they're out of their element, afraid to discover they won't be
competitive.
"One-hundred-mile racers, their paradigm is that what they do is the
toughest thing. They're like an ostrich with their head stuck in the
sand, because what they do is not the toughest thing. This is."
Ann Trason is considered the queen of ultrarunning, having won the
women's division of the grueling Western States 100 a record 14 times.
She tried Badwater once – as part of someone's support crew that
follows a racer in a minivan. She wants no part of racing it.
"It's more of a hike, a 130-degree-in-a-sandstorm hike, a torture-fest
that I don't want to repeat," Trason told Ultrarunning magazine. "I like
adventure, but this is an out-of-this-world experience. I drank more
crewing Badwater than I did running Western States.
"I felt like I was in 'Star Trek' – and I wanted to be beamed out."
The carnage is not reserved for 67-year-old Isle of Sheppey cabbies in
furry bunny suits. (Or for a Japanese doctor who is studying the effects
of heat on runners and passes out herself, despite spending most of the
day in an air-conditioned car.)
The leader for the first 50 miles, John Quinn, had painstakingly
developed calluses on his feet so blisters wouldn't end his race as they
had in the past. Instead he develops blisters underneath his calluses on
the way up 4,965-foot Towne Pass, can't drain them with a hypodermic
needle and withdraws.
There is Germany's Achim Heukemes. Six weeks earlier he had run
1,000 miles over 11 days through the streets of Hamburg, stopping for
2-1/2 hours each night to sleep. In 2001 he covered 234 miles in a 48-
hour event in a French stadium, which was eight miles short of the

ecord he set two years earlier. He shows up in Death Valley and tells
people two things, that he's going to run the entire 135 miles without
stopping and that he's going to win.
He doesn't make it to the 72-mile checkpoint, either. His body shuts
down and refuses to digest food.
"You feel good, good, good, and then you break down," Heukemes says.
"Usually you rest an hour and you come back. But here, you don't
come back."
Or there is Brazil's Manoel de Jesus Mendes, another of the prerace
favorites who says on his entry form that "being able to surpass the
limits of my body and mind has become my main objective in life." At
midnight the first day, he is lying in a fetal position on the side of the
road, sobbing.
Assesses the race's medic: "He just emotionally grenaded."
The 10 a.m. flight of runners stands at the start and listens to the
national anthem played from a car stereo. Someone in the back of a
pickup truck holds aloft an American flag, which hangs limp in the
already suffocating heat.
There is no starter's pistol. There is a 10-second countdown and a tall,
aging man says: "Bang."
The man is 75-year-old Al Arnold, the godfather of Badwater. "I see
more cars in the parking lot right now than I did during the entire race
in 1977," he says, "and that's counting through traffic along the roads. I
had no clue this thing would ever take off."
Arnold uses the term "race" loosely. Back then, the Badwater was less a
competition than a challenge – less an organized test of endurance
than a barroom dare.
In 1973 Arnold heard about two men completing a 150-mile relay run
from Badwater to the top of Mount Whitney in the dead of summer.
Being something of an adventure junkie himself, Arnold persuaded
buddy David Gabor to do it with him in 1974 – only not as a relay.
Gabor lasted 5-1/2 miles.
"It hit him like a ton of bricks," Arnold says. "His entire nervous
system shut down and he went into shock. He almost died. They took
him to the Furnace Creek Ranch (hotel) and filled a bathtub with ice
and stuck him in it for 10 hours. He was very sick for about a year after
that."
Worried about the welfare of his friend, Arnold quit a few hours later.
He tried again the following year, preparing for the desert ferocity by
riding a stationary bike in a 165-degree sauna, but his knee went out
on Towne Pass and he quit again.
In 1977 Arnold returned in even better shape. This time, he cranked up
the sauna to 200 degrees and made daily runs up Mount Diablo near
his home in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Eighty-four hours after leaving Badwater, he was standing on top of
Whitney. He had lost 17 pounds.
He never did it again, but he didn't need to. He had created a monster.
For the next decade, the Badwater was a solo "race" against the clock.
The first head-to-head competition was in 1987 and it was called the
Badwater 146, the extra 11 miles being the distance between Whitney
Portal and the peak.
In 1989, the U.S. Forest Service forced the race to end at Whitney
Portal, elevation 8,360 feet – something about not holding athletic
competitions in designated wilderness areas. Each year a few nostalgic
competitors will obtain their own hiking permits and complete the old
route; most, however, figure they've made their point when they cross
the finish line adjacent to the Whitney trailhead.
And exactly what is that point?
It's a simple question, and a complex one. Why?
There is no prize money in the Badwater. There is no live TV and there

is minimal newspaper coverage. You get a T-shirt for entering and a
belt buckle if you finish under 48 hours.
You are required to sign a medical waiver that begins: I acknowledge
that this athletic event is an extreme test of a person's physical and
mental limits and carries with it the potential for death.
You pay $250 in entry fees (plus $2,000 or $3,000 in crewing
expenses) for the privilege of running through a desert in late July and
halfway up the Lower 48's highest peak. Most people take vacation
from stable jobs to do it.
"You say Badwater and no one has ever heard of it," says Kostman, the
race director. "They're not doing it to bring recognition from the public
at large, because the public at large doesn't know about it. And if you
try to explain it to people, they can't fathom it. People do this for their
own personal reasons."
There are cancer survivors here, intent on taking their invincibility a
step further. There are recovering alcoholics. There are political
refugees from oppressive foreign regimes. There are people who do it
because, as one man says, "equipment, status and personal wealth have
little do with one's success in this sport." There are people who do it
because, as a Badwater veteran puts it, "I'm good at it."
There are people who started running 10ks, then graduated to
marathons, then graduated to ultramarathons, then find themselves
standing beside a smelly pond and a wooden sign in the depths of
Death Valley in late July.
"Maybe there's some masochistic element in your makeup that makes
you want to do it," says Ben Jones, a physician in nearby Lone Pine
and the so-called mayor of Badwater. "It's like why did Norgay and
Hillary climb Everest – because it was there. I think people do this to
see if they can get away with it."
Ten minutes before the 10 a.m. start, 53-year-old Steven Silver of El
Paso, Texas, walks up to Arnold and shakes his hand.
"I've done this five times, Al, and I want to thank you," Silver says.
"I could have been sitting in my office right now, getting ready to eat
lunch, with a beautiful secretary. Instead I'm out here.
"Thank you."
5 p.m., Stovepipe Wells, 125 degrees.
Reg Richard is lying in the pool at the Stovepipe Wells Village, a motel
at mile 42 that sits at the base of the race's first major climb. The pool
water is close to 90 degrees. Richard is shivering uncontrollably.
Richard's fiancee, Mary Berry, met him at a hospital in Dayton, Ohio,
where she's a nurse and he's a physical therapist. Being medically
proficient (and conscientious), Berry has been meticulously charting
her 51-year-old fiance's progress through the desert.
Every 20 minutes she gives him a new plastic bottle with 20 ounces of
fluid and records how much is left in the old one. She also conducts a
periodic roadside urinalysis, using a test strip to measure his levels of
glucose, bilirubin, urobilirubin, ketone, specific gravity, blood, pH
protein, nitrate and leukocytes.
The charts are clear. Richard is crashing.
For the first few hours after his 8 a.m. start, he returns every water
bottle empty. Then there is a little left in the bottom, then a little more.
At 11:30 he stops urinating. At 1:45 p.m. he drinks only four of 20
ounces.
Then he vomits five times, is helped into his crew's car and passes out.
It is almost exactly the same place he bonked the year before.
Each competitor is given a numbered wooden stake, which he or she
can stick into the side of the road if they want to leave the course and
rest. When Richard's body temperature soars to 104, Berry pounds in
the stake at 4:30 p.m. and drives him to the motel at Stovepipe.
Richard spends the next few hours in and out of the pool in an effort to
lower his body temperature. It's a tedious process. Every time Richard
starts shivering, Berry pulls him out and lays him on a lounge chair

with wet towels covering him. The shivering is counterproductive
because it requires energy and thus burns fuel, which raises the body's
temperature again.
Richard stops shivering and slides back into the pool.
"I can't comprehend the mentality of wanting to do this," Berry says.
"But what I could see in the last seven months together was how
important this is to him ... He says it's a feeling of accomplishment.
But we agree this would be the last time (at Badwater).
"Because this is scary. What makes it hard is when you love somebody,
because you lose your objectivity a little bit."
Richard had trained by running around his Ohio neighborhood on
steamy afternoons wearing three sweaters and a ski cap. He spent
hours sitting in a sauna at 211 degrees. He ran seven hours straight on
the hospital's treadmill.
Nothing, though, can simulate the mental and physical toll Death
Valley exacts in July, the monotonous hours spent shuffling past sage
brush and salt flats and sand dunes, accompanied only by the sound of
shoes crunching on the scorching pavement and coarse gasps for
breath.
It is a cruel choice. Run through the desert and you risk pushing your
body to collapse. Walk though the desert and you spend more time in
the crushing heat.
And you never really escape it, even when you climb to higher
elevations. The temperature in Lone Pine (elev. 3,610 feet) on the
race's two days is 96 and 95.
"You know when you're baking cookies and you open the oven door and
that blast of heat hits you?" says Steve Teal, a firefighter and
paramedic who serves as the race medic. "It's cool because you can
close the oven door. Out here, you can't do that.
"People say you can acclimate to it. But when I turn my oven up to 350,
it still cooks that cupcake. The cupcake never gets used to it."
Richard returns to his stake in the desert that night and makes it the 10
miles to Stovepipe Wells, but he starts to fade again and finally agrees
to sleep at the motel until 9 the next morning. At noon he still can't
urinate and withdraws from the race.
The desert has won again.
Less than an hour after Richard gives up, the winner of the 25th
Badwater 135 is crossing the finish line 93 miles away at Whitney
Portal.
The winner is a 41-year-old ultramarathon veteran from Tucson.
The winner is a 5-foot-3, 100-pound Badwater rookie.
The winner is a woman.
Pam Reed finishes in 27 hours, 56 minutes, 47 seconds, breaking the
women's course record by more than an hour, which had shattered the
previous record by seven hours. She runs about 90 percent of the time,
walking only the steepest mountain grades. She doesn't eat any solid
foods (instead consuming an all-liquid diet that includes eight cans of
the energy drink Red Bull). She never vomits. She never changes shoes.
She loses only 6 pounds, which also has to be some kind of Badwater
record.
"It took me a long time, up until a couple of months ago, to realize it
was 135 miles," Reed told the Arizona Daily Star in December. "It
didn't feel that hard."
Reed wakes up the following day, returns to the finish line and hikes
up the rest of Whitney with a friend.
In many respects, her Badwater experience is an aberration, some sort
of cosmic exception. It is not a death slog over two days and three
mountains, a literal and figurative test of intestinal fortitude. She never
has so much as one hallucination, not even a single panda or
pterodactyl.

"I'm grateful for doing it as fast as I did so I didn't make my crew stay
out there any longer," Reed says. "I kept asking them, 'Am I going too
slow?' "
Most crews use minivans, stuffed with food, water and a mindboggling
array of supplies – shoes, socks, ice chests, scales, towels,
flashlights, folding chairs, umbrellas, sunscreen, first-aid kits, even
giant squirt guns to hose down racers. It is tough going, though,
leapfrogging ahead of the racer every mile and preparing for the
endless pit stops. The crew members are part medic, part nutritionist,
part chauffeur, part water boy, part equipment manager, part
psychologist.
By the time they reach the base of Mount Whitney, they are imagining
things, too.
It is another five hours before the first man reaches Whitney Portal, 31-
year-old Darren Worts of Chatham, N.J. He crosses the finish line with
a vacant look on his face, crumples into a white plastic chair and
mutters: "One tough race ... unbelievable ... just brutal."
One by one, they trudge up the mountain, the same cocktail of
desperation and determination in their eyes. There are Badwater
veterans such as Silver, who finishes in 38 hours and claims his fifth
belt buckle despite vowing to quit after his fourth. And Maj. Curt
Maples, a Marine from Oxnard who trains by wearing a Haz-Mat suit
while dragging a car tire behind him.
And Marshall Ulrich, an ultramarathoning legend who once completed
the course solo by pulling a 200-pound rickshaw with solar panels to
power flashing tail lights and a water pump.
There are Germans Uli Weber and Eberhard Frixe, who complete the
vaunted Badwater double – doing the course in reverse and arriving at
the starting line just in time to turn around.
"We must sit down a little bit," Weber says after celebrating briefly at
the finish line.
There is also Vito Bialla, a 53-year-old Badwater rookie.
The first time he trained in Death Valley, he ran four hours in 110-
degree heat and started crying "for no reason." During the race, in the
never-ending stretch of high desert before Lone Pine, he bends over to
stretch and notices "thousands of bats flapping their wings."
Plants turn into dinosaurs.
He swears there's a piano in the middle of the road.
At 5:52 a.m. on Thursday, nearly two full days after he starts, he
reaches Whitney Portal.
"I'm numb as I cross the finish line, too tired to cry," Bialla writes in a
first-person account posted on the race's Web site. "I am overwhelmed
and still not fully comprehending what has transpired. Maybe as I
unwind I'll figure it out.
"Right now as I sit on a plane back to London with family, I feel like a
servant of the gods who was allowed to play in their back yard for a
couple of days, and survive."
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