Winner’s Margin Jolts Fellow Ultra Runners

On day three, Pam Reed went for a little jog.

After running clear through one day and into the next, she couldn’t have been blamed if she had just cooled her heels on the day after. She’d already become the first woman to win the Badwater Ultramarathon, the 135-mile footrace across Death Valley. Her time of 27 hours, 56 minutes shattered a women’s record seen as untouchable, blowing away the rest of the 79-racer field, including all the men. She finished nearly five hours ahead of the second-place finisher and became one of only a few women to win a 100-mile-plus “ultra” event outright.

But after crashing hard Wednesday night at a motel on the outskirts of this high desert town near the finish line, the 41-year-old Reed rose early Thursday--and went running.

Said Reed with a shrug: “This is what I do.”

This was a particularly tough year for the Badwater, one of the most grueling endurance events in the world. Temperatures were considered average--reaching 123 degrees at one point. But a stiff headwind quickly dehydrated and slowed the athletes. Several “name” extreme-racers struggled early and dropped out. Nearly two dozen racers found the dreaded “DNF” label next to their names on the leader board: Did Not Finish.

Into this morass of masochism and misery stepped the sprightly Reed. A mother of three boys and stepmother of two more, she electrified the nation’s ultra-endurance competitors with her performance in her first Badwater run. One aficionado called it “stunning.”

Reed, director of the annual Tucson, Ariz., marathon, prevailed by living up to another acronym of extreme racing: RFM, Relentless Forward Motion.

For most competitors this week, that was an unattainable goal. Every other racer stopped along the side of the road for a catnap, a massage, a quick meal. Reed never sat down. She stopped once, for about 30 seconds.

“I had a rock in my shoe,” she said. “So I took the shoe off to shake it out. It wasn’t a rock.”

It was a bloated blood blister that covered her entire big toe on her right foot. She popped it, drained it, put her shoe back on and started anew.

“I don’t stop unless I have to throw up,” she said. “And I never did.”

The Badwater is considered a “run,” but the truth is that most athletes run only about a third of the race. The rest of the time, they walk and lurch, fighting vomiting, diarrhea and delirium.

Reed, who has finished 25 races of 100 miles or more, simply set out for a jog Tuesday. She wound up running, albeit slowly at times, for more than 100 miles, even as the temperature of the asphalt neared an estimated 200 degrees. She ate once without losing stride--half a peanut butter and honey sandwich. At 5 feet 3, she weighed 104 pounds at the start and lost more than six pounds by the end.

Reed seemed genuinely unimpressed by her victory, genuinely perplexed that she beat much of the field by more than 24 hours, genuinely agog that some racers walked and ran for 2 1/2 days before they finished Thursday evening.

At the finish line, almost 9,000 feet up Mt. Whitney, the tallest peak in the contiguous United States, many said it was as if Reed had competed in a different event.

“She did a running race,” said Susy Bacal, Reed’s best friend and crew chief. “These [other] people are doing a sleep-deprivation walk.”

Even her crew had failed to grasp the significance of the race.

“We just gossiped and gabbed the whole time,” Bacal said. “Now that it’s over, people keep asking me, ‘What about her glycogen levels? Did you check that? Did you ask her how her feet felt?’ I didn’t. It never occurred to me.”

While there is still a statistical gap between the performance of men and women in events that are based on strength and speed, women are now some of the best endurance athletes in the world.

Women typically have more fat reservoirs in their bodies. During a quick run, athletes use carbohydrates as their source of energy. But after many hours, the body begins using stored fat as a primary energy source. Women are more efficient at metabolizing fat as fuel.

Some women dominate extreme long-distance swimming events, for instance. And, occasionally, a woman competes for a top spot on the worldwide ultra circuit. Ann Trason, for example, considered the greatest female ultra runner in the country, won the USA 24 Hour Championship in Queens, N.Y., in 1989 when she ran 143 miles.

Though there is no central clearinghouse for results of ultra events, after Trason’s victory in Queens, Reed’s win may be the second outright victory by a woman in a “major” 100-mile-plus ultra footrace, said Ryan Lammpa, a researcher with USA Track & Field, the sport’s national governing body. Equally impressive is that Reed broke the women’s record--set two years ago by a Russian considered among the best in the world--by nearly two hours.

“This is a stunning achievement,” said Dan Brennan, the executive director of the New Jersey-based American Ultrarunning Assn.

Still, the gender split seeps into these races.

Tuesday morning, the 17 women invited to the Badwater this year were lumped into the 6 a.m. starting block, the first of three staggered starting times. That was done, race organizers said, largely because women typically run slower than men. The 6 a.m. block was rounded out with 13 men, a few of whom grumbled about being stuck in the “women’s bracket.”

While an air of camaraderie and all-for-one prevails around the Badwater, an undercurrent of machismo is not entirely concealed.

“I always figured that if a woman won, we’d have to check her chromosomes,” said Ben Jones, a three-time Badwater competitor who now serves as the race’s unofficial “mayor.”

Even during the race, as Reed took an early lead, most athletes assumed that she had underestimated the power of the heat and would soon wilt.

“There is no way she can be running that fast,” Lisa Smith-Batchen, one of the top runners at the Badwater, said about halfway through the race. “It can’t last.”

But it did. Because of the staggered starting times, the long distance and the lack of communication in the desert, no one was sure Reed was going to win outright until she neared the end. Two men who had been hot on her heels were driven to the sidelines by the heat. At the finish line, she wept.

“I hate to cry,” she said. “I’m no good at it.”

Running, Reed said, “is my sanity.” Five weeks after delivering her last child, stitches from a caesarian section still in her belly, she finished another ultramarathon.

Reed did not suggest that the Badwater was a cinch, not by a long shot. The blisters on her feet were still swelling, so much so that she jogged Thursday in thick socks and her husband’s size-9 shoes. She wears a women’s 7.

“It was hot and it was scary,” she said. “I didn’t know what was going to happen to my body. I have no interest in killing myself.”

She will not be back at Badwater, she said. Reed ran, as she put it, “the perfect race,” and can’t bear the thought of doing it again without beating her time.

So, after her morning jog Thursday, she decided to take in the sights before heading back to Tucson. At the finish line, she chatted with race organizers, as other athletes were still finishing, more than a day after her triumph.

Then she and Bacal set out for a long hike from the finish line toward the peak of Mt. Whitney--walking, initially, in the wrong direction until a friend caught them and steered them toward the proper trailhead.

A man heading toward a nearby campground shook his head as he walked by.

“Just like a woman,” he said.