Chapter 9
Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone.
—KEN CHLOUBER,
Colorado miner and creator of the Leadville Trail 100
THE BIG, fat flaw in Rick Fisher’s plan was the fact that the Leadville race happens to be held in Leadville.
Hunkered in a valley two miles up in the Colorado Rockies, Leadville is the highest city in North America and, many days, the coldest (the fire company couldn’t ring its bell come winter, afraid it would shatter). One look at those peaks had the first settlers shaking in their coonskins. “For there, before their unbelieving eyes, loomed the most powerful and forbidding geological phenomenom they had ever seen,” recounts Leadville historian Christian Buys. “They might as well have been on another planet. It was that remote and threatening to all but the most adventuresome.”
Of course, things have improved since then: the fire company now uses a horn. Otherwise, well… “Leadville is a home for miners, muckers, and mean motherf*ckers,” says Ken Chlouber, who was an out-of-work, bronco-busting, Harley-riding, hard-rock miner when he created the Leadville Trail 100, in 1982. “Folks who live at ten thousand feet are cut from a different kind of leather.”
Dog-toy-tough or not, when Leadville’s top physician heard what Ken had in mind, he was outraged. “You cannot let people run a hundred miles at this altitude,” railed Dr. Robert Woodward. He was so pissed off he had a finger in Ken’s face, which didn’t bode well for his finger. If you’ve seen Ken, with those steel-toed boots on his size 13 stompers and that mug as craggy as the rock he blasted for a living, you figure out pretty quick you don’t put a hand near his face unless you’re dead drunk or dead serious.
Doc Woodward wasn’t drunk. “You’re going to kill anyone foolish enough to follow you!”
“Tough shit!” Ken shot back. “Maybe killing a few folks will get us back on the map.”
Shortly before Ken’s showdown with Doc Woodward on that cold autumn day in 1982, the Climax Molybdenum mine had suddenly shut down, taking with it nearly every paycheck in Leadville. “Moly” is a mineral used to strengthen steel for battleships and tanks, so once the Cold War fizzled, so did the moly market. Almost overnight, Leadville stopped being a bustling little burg with an old-timey ice-cream parlor on its old-timey main street and was transformed into the most desperate, jobless city in North America. Eight out of every ten workers in Leadville punched the clock at Climax, and the few who didn’t depended on the ones who did. Once boasting the highest per capita income in Colorado, it soon found itself the county seat of one of the poorest counties in the state.
It couldn’t get worse. And then it did.
Ken’s neighbors were drinking hard, punching their wives, sinking into depression, or fleeing town. A sort of mass psychosis was overwhelming the city, an early stage of civic death: first, people lose the means to stick it out; then, after the knife fights, arrests, and foreclosure warnings, they lose the desire.
“People were packing up and leaving by the hundreds,” recalls Dr. John Perna, who ran Leadville’s emergency room. His ER was as busy as a MASH unit and confronting an ugly new trend of injuries; instead of job-site ankle sprains and smashed fingers, Dr. Perna was amputating toes from drunk miners who’d passed out in the snow, and calling the police for wives who arrived in the middle of the night with broken cheekbones and scared children.
“We were slipping into lethal doldrums,” Dr. Perna told me. “Ultimately, we faced the disappearance of the city.” So many miners had already left, the last citizens of Leadville couldn’t fill the bleachers at a minor-league ballpark.
Leadville’s only hope was tourism, which was no hope at all. What kind of idiot would vacation in a place with nine months of freezing weather, no slopes worth skiing, and air so thin that breathing counted as a cardio workout? Leadville’s backcountry was so brutal that the army’s elite 10th Mountain Division used to train there for Alpine combat.
Making things worse, Leadville’s reputation was as scary as its geography. For decades, it was the wildest city in the Wild West, “an absolute death trap,” as one chronicler put it, “that seemed to take pride in its own depravity.” Doc Holliday, the dentist turned gun-slinging gambler, used to hang out in the Leadville saloons with his quick-drawin’ O.K. Corral buddy Wyatt Earp. Jesse James used to slink through as well, attracted by the stages loaded with gold and excellent hideouts just a lick away in the mountains. Even as late as the 1940s, the 10th Mountain Division commandos were forbidden to set foot in downtown Leadville; they might be fierce enough for the Nazis, but not for the cutthroat gamblers and prostitutes who ruled State Street.
Yeah, Leadville was a tough place, Ken knew. Full of tough men, and even tougher women, and—
And damn! Goddamn! That was it.
If all Leadville had left to sell was grit, then step right up for your hot grits. Ken had heard about this guy in California, a long-haired mountain man named Gordy Ainsleigh, whose mare went lame right before the world’s premier horse endurance event, the Western States Trail Ride. Gordy decided to race anyway. He showed up at the starting line in sneakers and set out to run all one hundred miles through the Sierra Nevada on foot. He slurped water from creeks, got his vitals checked by veterinarians at the medical stops, and beat the twenty-four-hour cutoff for all horses with seventeen minutes to spare. Naturally, Gordy wasn’t the only lunatic in California, so the next year, another runner crashed the horse race … and another the year after that… until, by 1977, the horses were crowded out and Western States became the world’s first one-hundred-mile footrace.
Ken had never even run a marathon himself, but if some California hippie could go one hundred miles, how hard could it be? Besides, a normal race wouldn’t cut it; if Leadville was going to survive, it needed an event with serious holy-shit power, something to set it apart from all the identical, ho-hum, done-one-done-’em-all 26.2- milers out there.
So instead of a marathon, Ken created a monster.
To get a sense of what he came up with, try running the Boston Marathon two times in a row with a sock stuffed in your mouth and then hike to the top of Pikes Peak.
Done?
Great. Now do it all again, this time with your eyes closed. That’s pretty much what the Leadville Trail 100 boils down to: nearly four full marathons, half of them in the dark, with twin twenty-six-hundred-foot climbs smack in the middle. Leadville’s starting line is twice as high as the altitude where planes pressurize their cabins, and from there you only go up.
“The hospital does make a lot of money off us,” Ken Chlouber happily agrees today, twenty-five years after the inaugural race and his showdown with Doc Woodward. “It’s the only weekend when all the beds in the hotels and the emergency room are full at the same time.”
Ken should know; he’s run every Leadville race, despite having been hospitalized with hypothermia during his first attempt. Leadville racers routinely fall off bluffs, break ankles, suffer over exposure, get weird heart arrhythmias and altitude sickness.
Fingers crossed, Leadville has yet to polish anyone off, probably because it beats most runners into submission before they collapse. Dean Karnazes, the self-styled Ultramarathon Man, couldn’t finish it the first two times he tried; after watching him drop out twice, the Leadville folks gave him their own nickname: “Ofer” (“O fer one, O fer two …”). Less than half the field makes it to the finish every year.
Not surprisingly, an event with more flameouts than finishers tends to attract a rare breed of athlete. For five years, Leadville’s reigning champion was Steve Peterson, a member of a Colorado higher-consciousness cult called Divine Madness, which seeks nirvana through sex parties, extreme trail running, and affordable housecleaning. One Leadville legend is Marshall Ulrich, an affable dog-food tycoon who perked up his times by having his toenails surgically removed. “They kept falling off anyway,” Marshall said.
When Ken met Aron Ralston, the rock climber who sawed off his own hand with the chipped blade of a multitool after getting pinned by a boulder, Ken made an astonishing offer: if Aron ever wanted to run Leadville, he wouldn’t have to pay. Ken’s invitation stunned everyone who heard about it. The defending champ has to pay his way back into the race. Heroic grand master Ed Williams still has to pay. Ken has to pay. But Aron got a free ride—and why?
“He’s the essence of Leadville,” Ken said. “We’ve got a motto here—you’re tougher than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can. Guy like Aron, he shows the rest of us what we can do if we dig deep.”
You might think poor Aron had already suffered enough, but little more than a year after his accident, he took Ken up on the offer. New prosthetic swinging by his side, Aron made it to the finish under the thirty-hour cutoff and went home with a silver belt buckle, thereby stating better than Ken ever could what it takes to toe the line at Leadville:
You don’t have to be fast. But you’d better be fearless.