THE SPORTING mind has always been seduced by athletic speed, racing, getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Human against human, human against the clock, we are a species of racing and records.
A few years ago, a New Zealand biophysicist plotted the progression of the men's mile record over a 70-year period. Extrapolation then led him to predict that on Aug. 1, 2528, the mile will be run in no time, "a feat," he remarked, "which would presumably ruin athletics as a spectator sport." Within the humor of that comment lies an implacable truth: All speed records are moving toward finite limits.
That's the bad news. The good news is that if we can't go faster, we can always go longer. Speed doesn't become irrelevant--we still race, still keep records--but the sheer distance of the race becomes so great that merely finishing is a formidable challenge. Such is the domain of ultra-sport--beyond long, beyond endurance and, some would say, beyond reason.
Ultra-sport pioneers Tom Warren, Gordon Ainsleigh and John Marino, all of California, have redefined notions of what is possible in the realm of human endurance. Warren's event, the 140.6-mile Hawaii Ironman Triathlon, will be conducted for the 10th time this October. The race was virtually unheard of when Warren won it in 1979. Now there are annual Ironman contests modeled after the Hawaii event in Japan, West Germany, New Zealand and Canada, and the sport in general has erupted: Some 2,000 triathlons will be staged in the United States this year, most consisting of a 1.4-kilometer swim, a 40K cycling leg and a 10K run. The Ironman is considered an "ultra" triathlon, an event in which competitors swim at least 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles and run 26.2 miles. Other competitions that fall under the ultra label include cycling events of 200 miles ("double century" rides) or more and running races longer than a standard 26.2-mile marathon.
Ainsleigh ran 100 miles through the Sierra Nevada in 1974, and now hundreds of people want to do it. The organizers of next Saturday's 12th Western States Endurance Run have, as usual, had to stave off would-be participants with an entry lottery. The rejected applicants needn't sit home; they now have four other annual 100-mile trail races to choose from, to say nothing of about 300 other ultra-distance races in the United States this year.
For his part, Marino rode a bicycle across the United States faster than anyone had ever done it and then challenged others to do the same. This morning's start in San Francisco of the 3,100-mile Race Across America marks the seventh staging of the annual ultra-cycling event Marino created in 1982 and has directed ever since. Though the race, which ends at the Washington Monument, is widely regarded as one of the most god-awful crucibles ever devised for purposes other than punishment, a record 320 cyclists vied in grueling 600-mile qualifying races for a spot in this year's field. Forty-four made it.
In following their own passions, Warren, Ainsleigh and Marino have altered the face of participatory sports. in America. Here's how they did it--and why.
GORDON AINSLEIGH WHEN Gordon Ainsleigh competed in the 1974 Western States 100-Mile Ride, a popular horse-and-rider event in California's rugged Sierra Nevada backcountry, he lacked a vital piece of equipment. His prized mare had come up lame six weeks before, and his efforts to find a worthy replacement had proved futile.
The inconvenience of traversing 100 miles of an equestrian mountain route without benefit of a horse wasn't lost on the man. "The hardest thing was when I got out about 15 or 20 miles and realized I was approaching exhaustion," he recalls. A normal fellow would have quit, but then a normal fellow wouldn't have been out there in the first place. It's just that the novelty and challenge appealed to the then-27-year-old woodcutter and juvenile counselor. He plodded on, occasionally telling himself: "Well, I don't have to quit right now. I can still take another few steps, so let's see what happens."
What happened is this: Ainsleigh finished the race and started an era. His seminal run with the horses spawned the annual Western States Endurance Run (a.k.a. the Western States 100), which in turn spawned at least six similar races, four of which are staged annually: the Old Dominion 100-Mile Endurance Run in Virginia; the Leadville Trail 100-Mile Run in Colorado; the Wasatch Front 100-Mile Endurance Run in Utah, and, locally, the Angeles Crest 100-Mile Endurance Run from Wrightwood to the Rose Bowl.
The Western States 100 is ultra-running's crown jewel. Every year on a weekend in late June or early July, several hundred bold runners follow in Ainsleigh's footsteps, essentially the same 100 miles he did from the Squaw Valley ski resort, near Lake Tahoe, to the foothill province of Auburn, 35 miles east of Sacramento. For some it's 20 or 30 miles of High Sierra splendor followed by searing regret, but more than half finish what they start. Owing to logistical and environmental-impact considerations, the field is winnowed by lottery to a manageable horde. Nearly half of this year's record 865 applicants were turned away.
Seven times the event's redoubtable founding father has entered the contest he launched 14 years ago, and seven times he has finished. Ainsleigh is 40 now, a confirmed bachelor residing in the Sierra foothills near Colfax, where he lived as a youth. A chiropractor by profession, by avocation and temperament he is a rock climber and karate black belt still possessed of some of his youthful hellfire. Once, as teen-agers, he and a friend grabbed a couple of sledgehammers, hopped into an old car the friend owned, and headed out a back road. Every quarter mile or so they stopped, jumped out, whaled on the car with the sledgehammers for a few seconds, hopped back in and drove on. It just seemed like a good idea. That was Ainsleigh.
Faculty and staff at Portland's Western States Chiropractic College might never forget the man. Frustrated one day by a dull saw while trying to dismember a cadaver in anatomy lab, Ainsleigh cast the ineffectual tool aside and went at the corpse with a chain saw And it was Ainsleigh who formed the school's infamous Carnivore Club, which he remembers fondly as a cadre of rabble-rousers serving as "a necessary first line of defense against the forces of militant vegetarianism."
Easy to understand, then, that a man of Ainsleigh's bent might have felt called to run where other men would ride. He had ridden in the contest and others like it a number of times, but at 6-foot-3 and more than 200 pounds he had always taken pains to spare his horse. "When I came to an uphill, I would get off and hold onto the horse's tail," he explains, "and when I came to a downhill I would usually pile off and run ahead of the horse. Since the Western States is more up and down than it is flat, I spent more time off the horse than I did on the horse." People who knew Ainsleigh figured it was just a matter of time before he left the horse in the barn.
The Western States trail, even in summer, is no meadowland stroll, rising and falling like a blacksmith's hammer, freezing in the high country, broiling on the canyon floors, remote, rugged and unrelenting. Ainsleigh remembers exactly how he felt on the eve of his pioneering run: "I was afraid."
The high temperature that August day was 109. For so avid an outdoorsman, Ainsleigh was remarkably unprepared for the elements, taking none of the precautions routine among today's Western States runners. He didn't wet his shirt, didn't carry a water bottle, wore no hat. "My brain was just baking," he recounts. As he approached the course's midpoint he encountered a rider whose horse had collapsed at the bottom of a hot, stagnant river canyon. "Up to that point it had never even occurred to me that I might be risking my life," he reflects. "But it was clear to me that that horse was dying, and I thought, 'My God, if the horses are dying. . . .' "
The stricken animal never regained its feet, but Ainsleigh persevered and reached the finish in 23 hours, 42 minutes. Though his run was later deemed several miles shy of 100 (the Western States 100 course has been measured and appropriately lengthened since), the 24-hour mark remains the standard to shoot for. By 1977, Ainsleigh's solitary folly had become a race with 15 entrants; in 1978, it expanded to 60 runners. The silver belt buckle reserved for those who finish the race is considered by many the most prestigious cachet in ultra-running. Ainsleigh owns seven of them.
If the 1974 run has evolved as the meridian of Ainsleigh's life, his legacy transcends the annual race he created. In the mid-'70s, ultra-distance races were few and far between, the exclusive domain of a handful of gaunt enthusiasts generally regarded as obsessive oddballs. Fourteen years later they are still regarded as obsessive oddballs, but there are more of them--hundreds instead of dozens--and more races. Some 300 ultra-distance races will be held in this country this year. In the Southwest about three-quarters of them will be staged on trails, old logging roads and the like. The Western States 100 wasn't the first such event, but it was the most visible and undoubtedly had the most impact on the evolution of ultra-distance running. Ainsleigh is most proud of that influence. "I got people off the roads and onto the trails," he says.
In the course of a 100-mile ordeal, those trails often lead not only to the finish line but to epiphanies of self-realization. The Western States 100, Ainsleigh philosophized at an awards dinner several years ago, "gives you a chance to face your best friend, which is yourself. You face your worst enemy and deal with him as best you can, and you face your best friend and embrace him."
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