Allen and I at mile 60 of the 2012 Leadville 100.

I’m lucky to have found Allen Wrinkle, a seasoned veteran of many 100-mile runs and a few even longer adventures. He is my mentor in the world of ultramarathons — a deep well of training advice, nutrition tips, and confidence-boosting conversations, and a good friend. We met a few years ago while carpooling to the starting line of the Zane Grey 50, and when I mentioned that I was contemplating Leadville as my first 100, he encouraged me. He also agreed to be my pacer.

I signed up the following week. I knew nothing about running a 100. Neither did my incredibly supportive but somewhat worried husband, who had agreed to be my crew. We read about llamas and Hope Pass, altitude sickness and hypothermia. I was feeling apprehensive, and didn’t seriously think that someone we had met a grand total of once would go through all the trouble of coming to Leadville. Little did we know. True to his casual promise, Allen took off work, flew out, and, without complaint, shared our impossibly cramped quarters (one of the many things we didn’t know as that hotel rooms during the Leadville 100 sell out eight month in advance). Allen also shared his vast experience, his blister kit, his wisdom. He told David where to crew, and what to carry in the crew vehicle. He convinced me to eat, listened to me whine, and paced me to the finish. Humbled, and appreciative, we asked what we owed him. Allen’s reply has stuck with me ever since:
“Just pay it forward.”

That September, I did. Lara, a woman I had met only once before asked me to pace her at the inaugural Run Rabbit Run100. Her first 100. Fresh off my first 100, I felt qualified and agreed. I was excited to do it. Allen had been right: I didn’t think twice about taking Friday off and driving eight hours each way to Steamboat Springs. The course was about 106 miles long, and confusing. Tons of runners got lost. At several points, I thought we were too, but we managed to get back on track every time. Lara was a trooper. At one point, she wanted the next aid station to appear so badly that she imagined it right ahead of us. Her descriptions were so vivid that I saw and heard it, too.

She made it, after 35 or so grueling hours. I had an epiphany then: paying it forward has its own rewards. Helping Lara cross that finish line felt almost as good as crossing the Leadville finish line had felt. We shared an experience that pushes a human being to her limits, physically and emotionally. The bond between a runner and a pacer can last a lot longer than the race that forges it. Lara and I started out as strangers but finished as close friends, which we still are.

Asking someone to be your pacer for a 100 is a little bit like asking for someone’s hand in marriage. It’s serious business, worthy of serious consideration. Emotions run high during an ultra. Fatigue makes them more intense. Pain unleashes them from politeness and social convention. You may be tempted to kill your pacer for shoving another bite of peanut butter sandwich in your face every fifteen minutes. Then again, your pacer may be tempted to kill you for complaining nonstop for forty miles. You will be stuck with this person on a lonely mountain trail, often in the dark. Trust is essential, as is compatibility — of pace, of core values, of sense of humor. You have to know yourself, and the possible dealbreakers in a pacer — pacee relationship. For me, it’s out of the question to be paced by someone one who will try to convert me to the paleo diet. Or to Christian faith. On the other hand, I’m ok with pacers who don’t find Monty Python as funny as I do, though they may look at me strangely when I start quoting random lines from the Flying Circus.

Like your spouse, your pacer will end up seeing sides of you that usually remain hidden, sometimes for good reason. Extreme exhaustion will strip you raw. I pride myself in being a tough chick. But at the infernally hot 2013 Western States, my quads seized up in the later miles. The pain was intense, and my sub-24 goal evaporated into the warm night air between Foresthill and the river crossing. For . . . ok, I admit it, a very long time, I became a whining, blubbering pity party of one, crawling forward at a ground speed even a geriatric tortoise would define as slow. My pacer was kind enough to not abandon me to the cougars, and to never tell anyone.

Sometimes, even if your pacer and your spouse are the same person, he will see an entirely unfamiliar version of you, even after twenty years of marriage. Once, David paced me for ten miles. It was three in the morning, and I was hallucinating. Trees and roots were moving. Glowsticks were talking. I was convinced we were off trail. I was also convinced that axe murderers lurked in the bushes. A psychologist I know explained to me later that these were paranoid delusions, rather than hallucinations. I have since learned to not let my blood sugar levels drop to zero, but my poor, somewhat freaked-out husband was very happy to be done with his pacing duties later that morning.

A pacer can’t be too nice. My stepson Bobby has paced me a couple of times. He’s one of the kindest, most considerate people I know. While I love and adore him for those qualities, they also make him a lousy pacer. He says things like “Do you need to take a break?”, which is the wrong thing to say at mile 80. No, a good pacer must be a good liar and heartless manipulator.

My husband David excels at both. Before anyone suggests divorce or marriage counseling, let me explain that he is a defense attorney, capable of making a jury believe anything. Normally, he is sweetness personified, but in his trial mode, which is also his pacer mode, he shrinks his heart to the size of a raisin, and throws out any respect for factual truth. He often appeals to my competitive instincts, telling me that I can catch up to the woman in front, or that someone behind me is gaining ground. After running for twenty-plus hours, it never occurs to me that he may just be making these things up. Once, we agreed that he’d let me walk all uphills, but make me run everything else. He then narrowed the definition of “uphill” to “almost vertical” and made me run all the way to the finish.

Crossing that finish line together: one of the highlights in our twenty-plus years of marriage.

Last December, I felt bummed. After much anticipation and nail-biting, I ended up getting into neither Western States nor Hardrock. But a month later, I still got lucky. Suzanne Lewis, whom I barely knew at that point, offered me the next best thing to running Hardrock, which is pacing someone at Hardrock. I didn’t have to think twice about what my answer would be. Saying that enthusiastic “Yes!!!” cured my seasonal depression in an instant.

On July 12, I picked Suzanne up Saturday morning at mile 70. She had been on her feet for over 24 hours already. We ran through lightning, thunder, hail, and hypothermia. We didn’t take lights with us from Sherman, for reasons that seemed logical at the time. We had to push our pace to reach Cunningham before dark. Suzanne, exhausted but tough as nails, kept going. We made it at dusk, picked up headlamps and warm layers, and headed out into the second night.
One of my favorite moments of that epic weekend happened during that second night, something I had not been able to imagine until then. We had climbed out of Cunningham. Silverton was just a few miles and no more mountain passes away. Suzanne knew she would finish. She found a burst of new energy, from where I have no idea. We paused at the top, on a narrow, rocky ridge. A full moon reflected on patches of snow. We suddenly felt euphoric. Intensely alive. Out there, in the middle of the night, on top of a mountain, was the best place in the world right then. We descended, sliding on our backsides part of the way. We laughed about that. And we kept laughing, for no particular reason, other than because we were happy.

Suzanne ran to an impressive finish. We are friends now, and not just on Facebook. I already know I will say yes to the next pacing request I hear. There is no better way to spend a weekend.