IN THE LONG RUN

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Ultra—extreme distance trail running—is so taxing that many competitors don't show up. Todd Pitock meets its leading exponent ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, November/December 2011

Before 4am on August 20th, Ryan Sandes slipped on a pair of trail-running shoes, red as Dorothy’s on the way to Oz, and joined 624 other people waiting to start the 2011 Leadville Trail 100 Run in the Colorado Rockies. He knew what the rest of the day held: long trails, long climbs, precipitous descents, cold skin, internal overheating, muscle spasms, cramps, nausea, exhaustion and raw, throbbing pain.

“It’s important to be positive about the experience,” Sandes told me before the race. “There are times when you’re running and just feel at peace with the world, you’re all chilled out, and you can enjoy the challenge. I mean, you’re the one who chose to do it.” He acknowledged that there are also times when the agony hunts down the ecstasy, and “you want the world to open up and just swallow you.”

Sandes’s sport is ultramarathon running, or ultra. Pain is its defining characteristic. “They say that pain is weakness leaving the body,” the race medical director, Dr John Hill, told the runners. “Some of you will have a lot of that leave tomorrow.”

Sandes, a 29-year-old from Cape Town, is unusual in being good at this sport in his 20s. “Ultra was always something older guys ran,” he said, “because mentally it was tough to keep on going. I don’t think you can teach yourself to go beyond the pain barrier. You’re either born with it and have the attitude about staying positive. I know guys who go to ‘head coaches’, but I don’t know, someone else telling you that you can do it doesn’t work for me.”

To register for the 100-mile race, runners had to shell out at least $250; 803 people did this, but 178 of them didn’t show up. Sandes, too, was nervous. He had never run more than 62 miles in a single race before. The field included figures who were well known in the ultra community, and when the experts handicapped the race, his name wasn’t mentioned.

The runners set off in the dark, wearing headlamps. When a shotgun blast sent the pack charging, they looked, from a distance, like a plague of fireflies whizzing through the forest. Most of them just hoped to go the distance within the 30-hour time limit, but Sandes was different. He intended to win, as he had in five of his first seven ultra events.

He is the only person to win all of the Four Deserts Series, the grand slam of ultra—150-mile races over seven days in some of the world’s most forbidding places, including Antarctica, the Gobi desert in China, the Sahara in Egypt and the Atacama in Chile. The pace for each is a marathon a day, except for a middle-stage ultra of 100 kilometres (62 miles). Participants carry everything they need on their backs, except water. Only 81 people have completed all four runs.

It wasn’t the prospect of extreme running that got Sandes into the sport. “It’s been a way for me to see new places,” he said. He only began running four years ago, when a group of friends invited him to try a half-marathon with them. The list for the half was closed, so he agreed to do the full marathon. He was not, it turned out, a great marathoner. Light and slight, at 5ft 10in and 10 stone, he preferred running trails to roads, and at 26.2 miles, he was just getting started.

In the world of ultras, distance is only part of the battle, and none of the races Sandes competed in was especially long. The TransEurope-Footrace is 2,600 miles, with 64 stages that take place from August to October. There are races in Nepal and Namibia, Mont Blanc and the Sierra Madre. Every race has its special challenges. The Jungle [ultra] Marathon in the Brazilian Amazon features drenching humidity, jaguars, piranhas, large carnivorous snakes and deadly microscopic creatures called carneros.