By Stay Corless

The Alabma Hills monster is just one challenge of the Wild Wild West Race. All photos MMIn Mammoth, it’s hard to impress people with your athletic prowess, especially when it comes to running: just jog through Shady Rest and have Meb or Deena (or one of their lightening fast Mammoth Track Club teammates whom we don’t know on a first-name basis) shoot by like you’re standing still—and you might want to trade in your New Balance for a pack of Camels.

The good thing is that it’s easy to find people with whom you can improve your athletic prowess. I learned this lesson twice while running the Wild Wild West, an all-trail race that heads toward Whitney Portal before descending through pastureland into the Alabama Hills to Lone Pine. A small but loyal and slightly fanatical field of racers has converged every May since 1978 to run a 10-mile, marathon or 50K.

I’ve never been a runner for the competition. I don’t know anything about splits or heart rates or pacing—it’s the scenery, comraderie and  hyperactive dogs that keep me on the trails. But in 2004, my crazy running girlfriends (led by the head girlfriend, Julie Duff) decided to do the Wild Wild West (which, for many of them, was merely training for a rim-to-rim Grand Canyon run). It was my first marathon, a race not usually recommended for newbies. When the air horn sounded at 6am, our girl gang dispersed and I was left to my own inadequate devices.

It's much easier to drive up the Whiteny Portal Road than to run it.They say the Lone Pine 26.2 miler is considered an ultra (beyond a marathon) run because of the nasty elevation gain and loss. They also say that many ultra runners are recovering addicts. In the first few miles, huffing straight up a fire road, then a deer track, toward Whitney Portal, I fell in with a crowd that hadn’t quite taken addiction to recovery. In between my increasingly ragged breaths, I heard the flapping of plastic behind me. A slender man wearing a clear dry cleaning bag in lieu of a windbreaker fell in step with me. He asked “How’re we doing?” with a Ned Flanders perkiness. I told him it was my first marathon, and so he took me under his martinized wing for a while. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “just keep running, no matter how slow you go” was Jeff’s advice. Pretty soon, a couple of his buddies showed up—all members of a So-Cal branch of the Hashtown Harriers, an international “drinking club with a running problem.” I liked them immediately, and knew at that moment I would be fine. At the second aid station at about 8.5 miles—just after the course crosses Whitney Portal Road and finally heads downhill on Hogback Creek Road—some of the Lone Pine locals at an aid station were enjoying a 7:30am brewski. “Hey, that looks pretty good,” Jeff said. He’d ditched the dry cleaning bag now that the sun was over the Inyos. “Do you want to split one?” I said no, but he cracked the can open and downed the whole thing. That was the last I saw of Jeff. When I finished at high noon—a six hour-plus time—Jeff and the Harriers were waiting (and drinking) in the shade of Lone Pine park, ready to cheer my slow-but-steady finish.

This year, there was no beer (although  I wore a “Got Beer?” hat, courtesy of Spike at Mammoth Liquor, just in case I saw Jeff and the Harriers). This year, I had Julie. A formidable runner usually at the head of the pack, she promised to hang back and pace me—and shave a big chunk of minutes off my time.

I ran the whole miserable 2500 foot climb in the first eight miles. When Julie said attack the downhill, I attacked. When she said eat an energy bar, I ate. Ignoring the sharp protest in my thighs and ankles, I was thrilled at 14 miles to see that we were well on pace to finish in five hours—very respectable for Lone Pine, where even strong runners typically add 35% to their street marathon time. When I started bonking at mile 16, Julie inspired me with gruesome ultra race stories (Dan Meyers is a man to fear and awe). That got me through the mile 20 aid station—just past the plastic skeleton wearing running shorts and a sign that says “no really, I’m fine.”
Whitney Portal Store.
Julie had won Lone Pine and other tough trail races when she wasn’t coaxing and coaching slower friends like me. Most of them turned on her at this point—cursing and blaming her for their misery. I’d vowed not to do that, and frankly, I didn’t have the energy. But I could feel her losing confidence in me. Things were a little too quiet for the next couple miles out of the Alabama Hills onto a desolate, rolling horse track. That’s when we found Jason, a.k.a. Viper. He’d just lapsed into walking, his mind in some self-described “dark world,” not looking for company. Julie jogged up behind him and he stepped aside. “No, no, no,” she said, tapping his arm to get him back on the trail. He obeyed, and for the next mile we yo-yoed behind and in front of him. At the 22 mile aid station, Julie said we could still get close to our five-hour goal. I said I was going to vomit. Jason, a marine captain from Quantico and a seven-year Wild West veteran, said he’d run with us.

 Our collective mood brightened as we ran (finally) down toward the green grid of Lone Pine. When I started to fade again in the flats, “Viper” told me how he’d earned his nickname.

“Wanna hear about the time I crapped on a snake?”

My own situation instantly improved as I pictured the hapless reptile who’d hidden himself in a granite toilet bowl along the course of the Bishop High Sierra race. Viper told more stories, about coming in second to last on that 50 miler, about fighting in the Gulf War, and how any day he wasn’t being shot at was a good one.

The final mile came amazingly fast.  We took the cruel right turn onto the shoulder of 395 (after 25.5 miles with no spectators, you get highway face time), headed to the park. Jason sprinted ahead. Julie dutifully crossed the finish line at my side, clocking in at five hours and 24 minutes.

After finsihing the Wild Wild West, the best thing to do is reward yourself with a beer at Jake's Saloon.As we relaxed in the park that afternoon, each of us thanked the other for pulling through. Jason put it best in the race story he told on his blog at www.grose.us: “Neither one of us was in any shape to tell our life stories but there was some kind of unspoken connection borne of the fact that we were both in the hurt locker and might be able to get to the finish line if the other kept going.”

For three days, I shuffled around like Redd Fox as Fred Sanford. I lost several toenails. And despite what I said at about 11:30am on May 6, 2006, I’ll do the Wild Wild West again. Addiction? Maybe. Here’s what I think: Each race, each run is its own little life, a real-time reincarnation in which you soar, fall, succeed, fail, connect, break free, win and lose. And it’s all about who you know while you’re out there.