<p> <body bgcolor=#ffffff> <table width=75% align=center><tr><td> <br> <br> <b>135 miles. 125 degrees. 3 mountain ranges. 2 days. No IVs. No prize money. It could only be...</b> <p> <h3>BADWATER<br><hr></h3> <p> <b>By Mark Zeigler</b><br> Staff Writer </b> <p> <b>July 13, 2003</b> <p> <i>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:</i> <p> DEATH VALLEY - First, a quick lesson in geography and meteorology. <p> <p> 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. <p> The air is sapped of its moisture, <p> 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. <p> <hr> <p> Badwater milestones <p> 1973: Paxton Beale and Ken Crutchlow complete a 150-mile relay run from Badwater to the top of Mount Whitney. <p> 1977: Al Arnold completes the route solo in 84 hours. <p> 1981: Jay Birmingham breaks record (75 hours, 34 minutes). <p> 1987: Crutchlow organizes the first head-to-head race between Americans and Brits. <p> 1988: Hi-Tec begins sponsoring the race, now called the Badwater 146, to promote its newest running shoe. <p> 1989: Tom Crawford and Richard Benyo complete the first Badwater double - from Badwater to the top of Whitney and back. It takes126 and 170 hours, respectively. <p> 1996: The time required to earn a Badwater belt buckle is raised from 45 to 48 hours. <p> 2000: Anatoli Kruglikov of Russia sets the 135-mile course record of 25:09:05. <p> 2002: Pam Reed lowers the women's record to 27:56:47. <p> 2003 Badwater Ultarmarathon <p> When: July 22-24 <p> Who: 61 men, 16 women from around the world <p> Live Webcast: www.badwaterultra.com. <p> <hr> <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> Mother Nature's pottery kiln. <p> Now try running 135 miles in it. In July. <p><hr align=left width=5%><p> 9:45 a.m., Badwater, 100 degrees. <p> 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. <p> Death Valley. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> Assuming you get that far. <p> 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. <p> 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, sleep-deprived, severely dehydrated runners prone to vivid hallucinations. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> Did we mention that IVs are prohibited during the race and there are no official aid stations? <p> "If you had aid stations," race director Chris Kostman says, "first of all the people in the aid stations would die." <p> 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. <p> "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. <p> "Smile, guys." <p><hr align=left width=5%><p> His name is Derek McCarrick. He is from Isle of Sheppey, England. <p> 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). <p> 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. <p> 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." <p> 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. <p> "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. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> Kostman shakes his head. Another year, another victim. <p> "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. <p> "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." <p> 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. <p> "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. <p> "I felt like I was in 'Star Trek' - and I wanted to be beamed out." <p> 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.) <p> 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. <p> 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 record 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. <p> <p> He doesn't make it to the 72-mile checkpoint, either. His body shuts down and refuses to digest food. <p> "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." <p> 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. <p> Assesses the race's medic: "He just emotionally grenaded." <p><hr align=left width=5%><p> 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. <p> There is no starter's pistol. There is a 10-second countdown and a tall, aging man says: "Bang." <p> 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." <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> Gabor lasted 5-1/2 miles. <p> "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." <p> Worried about the welfare of his friend, Arnold quit a few hours later. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> Eighty-four hours after leaving Badwater, he was standing on top of Whitney. He had lost 17 pounds. <p> He never did it again, but he didn't need to. He had created a monster. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> And exactly what is that point? <p> It's a simple question, and a complex one. Why? <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> "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." <p> 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." <p> 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. <p> "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." <p> 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. <p> "I've done this five times, Al, and I want to thank you," Silver says. <p> "I could have been sitting in my office right now, getting ready to eat lunch, with a beautiful secretary. Instead I'm out here. <p> "Thank you." <p><hr align=left width=5%><p> 5 p.m., Stovepipe Wells, 125 degrees. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> The charts are clear. Richard is crashing. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> Richard stops shivering and slides back into the pool. <p> "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). <p> "Because this is scary. What makes it hard is when you love somebody, because you lose your objectivity a little bit." <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> "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. <p> "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." <p> 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. <p> The desert has won again. <p><hr align=left width=5%><p> 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. <p> The winner is a 41-year-old ultramarathon veteran from Tucson. <p> The winner is a 5-foot-3, 100-pound Badwater rookie. <p> The winner is a woman. <p> 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. <p> She loses only 6 pounds, which also has to be some kind of Badwater record. <p> "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." <p> Reed wakes up the following day, returns to the finish line and hikes up the rest of Whitney with a friend. <p> 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. <p> "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?' " <p> Most crews use minivans, stuffed with food, water and a mind-boggling 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. <p> By the time they reach the base of Mount Whitney, they are imagining things, too. <p> 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." <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> 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. <p> "We must sit down a little bit," Weber says after celebrating briefly at the finish line. <p> There is also Vito Bialla, a 53-year-old Badwater rookie. <p> 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." <p> Plants turn into dinosaurs. <p> He swears there's a piano in the middle of the road. <p> At 5:52 a.m. on Thursday, nearly two full days after he starts, he reaches Whitney Portal. <p> "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. <p> "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." <p> <hr> <p> Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co. <p> </td></tr></table> </body> </html>