October/November 2024

Running Right Through It

John Trent
Oct 2024
The author talks with his daughter Katie during the Bighorn 100. courtesy author

Voices from the past often surface when you least expect them to and you start to wonder, 29 years after your first ultra, if, in the blink of half of your lifetime, it is all still worth it.

I can still remember my first official ultra in 1995. A race that no longer exists, the PCT 50K, that started and finished in the parking lot of what is today’s Palisades Tahoe resort in Olympic Valley, California. A guy named “Big Al,” from the Bay Area was the race director. He was deeply tanned, wore colorful sunglasses, tight running shorts and a pair of sandals that suggested that he’d already finished his workout for the day.

The course took us high above the site of the 1960 Winter Olympics, onto the rugged and wooded PCT, near Sugar Bowl Ski Resort, before turning around and running back to where we started.

It was early fall, and I remember starting conservatively as the chilled morning began to warm up. Working my way past several runners, I was surprised as I crested the exposed ridgeline of 8,949-foot Tinker’s Knob for the second time, my legs still lively with a spring to them. With only about 8 miles remaining, I was not only going to finish my first official ultra, but I was going to finish strong.

When it was over, Big Al greeted me.

“You’ve done yourself a great service today by finishing this race!” he said, voice booming so loud he sounded like he was on a loudspeaker. “Whether you know it or not, you’re an ultrarunner now!”

I smiled, and although his words sounded a bit too lofty, I went ahead and welcomed them.

There is always an energizing thunder that seems to clap after finishing an important race, one that won’t let you go and spurs you to return again and again. This, strangely, was mine – the bellowing voice of a guy in a pair of day-glow sunglasses.

I was in my early 30s back then, and unbeknownst to me, my running adventure was just beginning.

WHEN I HEARD THE POP back in late March of this year, I knew something had gone terribly wrong.

It had been raining and snowing the night before and by Saturday morning, as our group gathered for a long trail run in the fog-shrouded hills above west Reno, we knew we might be in for a slippery experience.

I was rounding into shape, having discovered that, at age 61, the early training season of 2024 was requiring more from me in order to prepare for a summer of 100-mile and 100k races. As runners grow older, the challenges become much more personal and elemental. How do I keep going? Do I want to keep going? Or, as the late running writer Dr. George Sheehan once put it so eloquently, “We’re doing the best we can with what we have. We’re still out here giving our all. No one can do more, nor should do less.”

I was trying to do a little more on that snowy and muddy morning, hoping to run at least 26 miles. I’d fallen behind our group a bit and heading up a hill, I attempted to sidestep a mud puddle. My right foot slid out from underneath me and the left instinctively compensated, a reflex that, now in retrospect, seems violent, in a valiant effort to keep me upright. That’s when I heard a loud pop. I felt an immediate, searing pain in my left knee and crumpled to the ground. Rolling around on the mix of snow and mud, I began moaning in a forlorn way that was less about pain and more about the realization that nothing good was going to come from what had just happened.

Luckily, I had my phone and called to alert my friends who were part of our group run that morning. They arrived within minutes. I couldn’t bend my knee, nor could I put any substantial pressure on it, so, I draped my arms around my friends Ken and Brandon – who both had battled a series of health and injury problems over the years – and they proceeded to carry me back down the mountain.

The author is all smiles before surgery. courtesy author

Visiting an orthopedic urgent care center that afternoon, the medical staff suggested that I had likely ruptured my left quadricep’s tendon. After an MRI a few days later, it was confirmed. On the afternoon of April 9, I had surgery to sew the tendon back together.

Dr. Dobbs performed the surgery, and I knew him well. Seventeen years ago, I had kicked a rock at the Miwok 100K and shredded a lot of the articular cartilage in my right knee. Dr. Dobbs, then a young surgeon, performed a microfracture procedure that essentially saved my running.

“This is a really serious injury,” Dr. Dobbs told me during my first post-op visit following the recent surgery. By then, I was on crutches and in a full knee brace. He said I would have to remain on crutches and in the brace for two full months. “This is the type of injury that sometimes takes a professional athlete a year, or a year -and-a-half, to fully recover from. You’re going to have to be extremely patient.”

Then he paused and smiled.

Dr. Dobbs has a few gray hairs now, but he still retains the rhythmic speech of the young man I met in 2007. He often smiles and finds humor in light conversation. He also understands the character of the people he treats, particularly runners, and knows how to be honest in assessing the road ahead.

“I know you well enough that it’s not that you won’t be willing to do the work to return to running,” he said. “But just know you can’t do too much, too soon. You’re going to have to listen very carefully to yourself as you recover.”

IN APRIL, THE VOICE ON THE OTHER END of the phone in April came from someone I hadn’t heard from in a long while. Her name was Dee McKim, and she was making a return to Silver State, Nevada’s oldest ultra and the race her husband, Ken, had co-founded with Roland Martin back in 1986.

Throughout the late 1980s, Dee, who was then in her 30s, attempted to finish Western States unsuccessfully. It wasn’t for a lack of trying. In 1986, Dee ended up in a medical tent with an IV in her arm after reaching the 70-mile mark following 20 miles of intermittent vomiting. At Western States in 1987, she was mistakenly pulled by a race official at the 78-mile river crossing even though she was about 30 minutes ahead of the cutoff.

After another DNF at Western States in 1988, Dee told John Schumacher of the Reno Gazette-Journal that she wasn’t sure if she would ever attempt to run the race again: “I don’t know right now. Once you get addicted, you get addicted. I guess it’s just a matter of forgetting. It’s like having a baby… I probably will never quit running ultras. You drive past an area you ran and you look over the edge and say, ‘Did I really do that?’”

Dee hadn’t run an ultra in nearly three decades, but she was turning 70 in 2024, and felt the pull of Silver State as the year began. She had often accompanied Ken and Roland (who was among the original 18 finishers in the inaugural Hardrock 100 in 1992 and a legend in northern Nevada ultra circles before he died in 2018) in laying out the original Silver State course.

“It would be great to be able to do the race again for my 70th birthday,” Dee said as we talked that day on the phone. “I’m not sure if I can make it. But I want to give it a try. John, what do you think? Do you think I can do it?”

Without hesitation, I replied, “Absolutely, Dee. You know Silver State like nobody else.”

Talking to Dee that day reminded me that time had passed in other ways, too. Throughout her days of chasing an elusive Western States finish, Ken had always been Dee’s biggest supporter, driving her to long runs and training with her, worrying incessantly about her during each run at Western States, and then afterward, encouraging her to try running the race that had broken her heart yet again.

Now, their roles were somewhat reversed. It was Dee who was looking out for her husband who has been sidelined with health issues.

I was still on crutches and in a full knee brace – a race director who really wasn’t capable of all that much – when we assembled on a picture-perfect Saturday morning for the 39th Silver State Endurance Runs.

Dee was entered in the 50k. At the start, she was the same optimistic, cheery and determined person I’d always remembered. She had assembled a team of friends and family to help her, including her mentor and pacer, 83-year-old Floyd Whiting, whose life in ultras stretched back to the early 1980s. Floyd would run from the top of Peavine Mountain with Dee for the final 11 miles.

After she finished the race in about 10-and-a-half hours, Dee sat on a folding chair, not far from the finish, and I crutched my way over to see her. She was sweaty and tired and had streaks of mountain dirt running down her arms, but she was happy, surrounded by Ken and her friends. Floyd, with more than 100 career ultra finishes, including the magical summer of 1992 when he successfully completed the Grand Slam of Ultrarunning, sat near Dee. From beneath a salt-stained forehead, he beamed his approval and respect for a woman who wasn’t all that sure she could go the distance a few weeks earlier.

“I made it!” Dee exclaimed after I’d congratulated her.

“You sure did,” I said. “Your finish was the highlight of our race.”

“Thank you for encouraging me,” Dee added. “It’s always nice to know when someone believes in you.”

BY EARLY JUNE, I WAS OFF MY CRUTCHES, out of my knee brace and well into regular physical therapy sessions. I walked with a limp at first, and remember the day in early July when I was able to ride an exercise bike for the first time for a grand total of 6 minutes. Dr. Dobbs was pleased, but cautious: “Keep telling yourself you’ve got a ways to go yet. Be patient. Don’t get carried away.”

In early August, I went for a 9-mile hike, near a wildflower-lined drainage from the Mount Rose Wilderness known as Thomas Creek. Toward the end of my hike, a young man behind me on the trail eventually broke into a trot and caught up to me.

He was in his early 30s and had come to Thomas Creek after months of inactivity. He had a busy job as a mechanical engineer and found it hard to find the time to go hiking.

As we talked, it wasn’t long before he was asking me questions about my injury, and how he could find ways to better round himself into shape.

“I go out for a long hike like this,” he said, “and my knees kill me the next day.”

“I can tell you with absolute certainty if you keep coming out here, and keep active, the knee thing will go away,” I said. “Just keep plugging away at it.”

“You’re determined to make it back. You sound like a person who loves running,” he said.

“I do,” I said. “I really do.”

We neared the trailhead and parted ways, and then I continued on, a little further up the trail, with the waters of Thomas Creek murmuring quietly next to me.

I thought about my injury, and the voices from the past, from the beginning bullhorn of “Big Al” to the long-term strength and determination of Dee McKim and wondered what the future held for me.

I could’ve sworn that in that moment of hearing voices from the past, everything that had happened over the past few months seemed to neatly merge into one place, with my life – my running life – running right through it.

I heard the waters of Thomas Creek speaking to me in a soft, wise voice that seemed to know full well that I still have a long way to go, but also affirming something that will forever be a part of me.

Because I love running, I do. I really do.

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