All in the Head
September 30th, 2009 at 10:07 pm (Endurance Running, Home)
The following is an excerpt from Born to Run and it tells of Scott Jurek’s first ever 135 mile Badwater Ultramarathon experience in 2005.
By mile 60, Scott was vomiting and shaky. His hands dropped to his knees, then his knees dropped to the pavement. He collapsed by the side of the road, lying in his own sweat and spittle…his friends didn’t bother trying to help him up; they knew there was no voice in the world more persuasive than the one inside Scott’s own mind.
Scott lay there, thinking how hopeless it all was. He wasn’t even halfway done, and Sweeney (the race leader) was already too far ahead for him to see. And the wind! It was like running into the blast of a jet engine.
“There’s no way,” Scott told himself. “You’re done. You’d have to do something totally sick to win this thing now.”
“Like what?”
“Like starting all over again. Like pretending you just woke up from a great night’s sleep and the race hasn’t even started yet. You’d have to run the next 80 miles as fast as you’ve ever run 80 miles in your life.”
“No chance.”
“Yeah, I know.”
For ten minutes, Scott lay like a corpse. Then he got up and did it, shattering the Badwater record with a time of 24:36:08.
For the uninitiated, the infamous Badwater Ultramarathon, held in the middle of summer in Death Valley, is the ultimate in ultra running. The region is a big shimmering sea of salt ringed mountains that bottle up the heat and force it back down on your skull. The average air temperature hovers around 50 degrees Celsius and once the sun rises and begins broiling the desert floor, the ground hits a toasty 90 degrees Celsius that has the runners toeing the white lines on the road so the soles of their running shoes don’t melt.
Lovely.