Running on Empty Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  PART I - Desert

  Chapter 1. - As Far As I Can, As Fast As I Can

  Chapter 2. - Legacy

  Chapter 3. - It’s Just Who I Am

  Chapter 4. - Fool’s Errand

  Chapter 5. - Running Machine

  PART II - Heartland

  Chapter 6. - Coming Home

  Chapter 7. - This Is Not My Foot

  Chapter 8. - States of Mind

  Chapter 9. - The 400-Mile Workweek

  Chapter 10. - Competitive Spirit

  PART III - Liberty

  Chapter 11. - Stop Crapping in Cornfields

  Chapter 12. - Running Out

  Chapter 13. - Rest

  Running America

  Appendix A - Training Schedule

  Appendix B - Course Statistics

  Appendix C - Nutrition and Diet

  Appendix D - Injuries, Ailments, and Treatments

  Appendix E - Supplies, Clothing, and Gear

  Appendix F - Charities, Sponsors, and Partners

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Praise for Running on Empty

  “Marshall is The Man. Definitively. His run across America at the age of fifty-seven sealed that distinction forever. He’s living proof that endurance never sleeps, never gets old, never tires. Nothing can stop him, and that gives us all hope, gives us resolve to keep trying.”

  —DEAN KARNAZES, acclaimed endurance athlete and bestselling author of Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner

  “Marshall and I go way back to the first Eco-Challenge in 1995. An athlete of astonishing grit both then and now, he never fails to push the limits of his sport, no matter what extreme endurance event he’s chosen. Running on Empty tells the story of Marshall’s greatest test: reading it, you get a sense of how tough this man is, but there’s also a bit of Everyman in Marsh. He’s an inspiration to all of us.”

  —MARK BURNETT, Emmy Award–winning producer of Survivor, Eco-Challenge,

  The Apprentice, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? and other programs

  “Riveting—the man has endured more, experienced more, accomplished more than you can imagine. You have to read it to believe it.”

  —AMBY BURFOOT, winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon and editor at large, Runner’s World

  “You can learn from every race, even the ones you read about instead of run yourself. Marshall is a master of mental toughness, an endurance legend, and exactly the kind of example our country needs right now.”

  —KARA GOUCHER, American middle- and long-distance runner, Olympian and World Championships medalist

  “I’m always secretly envious of guys like Marshall, who run for adventure and cover extreme distances. What goes on inside their heads? How do they keep going, on and on, into the night, for days on end? What do they experience that the rest of us don’t? Running on Empty tells it all, giving a rare glimpse into the world of ultrarunning and into the life of a man who epitomizes his sport’s doctrine of ‘never say quit.’”

  —RYAN HALL, first U.S. runner to finish the half-marathon in under an hour and current U.S. record holder

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2011 by Marshall Ulrich

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Excerpt from “Desert Places” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1947, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright 1975 by Lesley Frost Ballantine.

  Excerpt from “Living Like Weasels” from Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters by Annie Dillard. Copyright 1982 by Annie Dillard.

  Excerpt from “The Shore and the Sea” from Further Fables for Our Time by James Thurber. Copyright 1956 by Rosemary A. Thurber. Thurber and The Barbara Hogenson Agency. All rights reserved.

  The poem “Running America” was written in Marshall Ulrich’s honor by Joanne Gabbin, Ph.D, director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Copyright 2009 by Joanne V. Gabbin. Reprinted with her permission.

  The guidelines for the world-record attempt (fastest crossing of the United States on foot) have been provided courtesy Guinness World Records Limited.

  Most Avery books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Special Markets, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ulrich, Marshall.

  Running on empty: an ultramarathoner’s story of love, loss, and a record-setting run across America / Marshall Ulrich.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-51385-9

  1. Ulrich, Marshall. 2. Long-distance runners—United States—Biography. 3. Long-distance running—United States. I. Title.

  GV1061.15.U47A

  796.42092—dc22

  [B]

  Neither the publisher nor the author is engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the individual reader. The ideas, procedures, and suggestions contained in this book are not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician. All matters regarding your health require medical supervision. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestion in this book.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will go to support the Religious Teachers Filippini, a not-for-profit humanitarian organization devoted to empowering women and children around the world.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

  In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;

  howev however, the story, the experiences, and the words

  are the author’s alone.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Mom, who let me dream

  Dad, who taught me discipline

  Rory, my biggest fan
>
  and Heather, who held me up

  Foreword

  Marsh, honey, you’re running in your sleep again. Rest, sweetheart.

  —Heather Ulrich, late one night during Marshall’s dramatic race across America

  The problem with the best Marshall Ulrich stories is that you never seem to hear them from Marshall Ulrich. He’s one of America’s greatest living adventurers and an expert without peer in human endurance, yet most Ulrich lore is passed along only by spoken word, making him a hero in other people’s Greatest Hits collections and a figure who comes across less like a real human and more like a mythological creature who ferries drowning men to shore before vanishing back into the sea. Travel around the Rocky Mountains or Death Valley at the right time of year—the right time, of course, being 4:00 a.m. in a hailstorm or high noon on a 120-degree day—and you’ll find endurance daredevils testing themselves against tales like these:

  “You know the Pikes Peak Marathon? Thirteen miles straight up the side of a 14,000-foot mountain and thirteen miles back down again. You can’t do Pikes and the Leadville Trail 100 in the same year when they’re both on the same weekend, because you’d never be able to complete the hundred and then get to Colorado Springs in time, much less do the marathon. Then one summer, just as they’re counting down for the start at Pikes, a Datsun comes roaring up and screeches to a stop. This guy comes tumbling out, all caked in trail dust and grime. He jumps into the race just as the gun booms. Marshall had finished the hundred-mile Leadville race in under twenty-four hours, then floored the three-hour drive to Colorado Springs because the race director was a buddy of his. No one else has ever done it. I don’t think anyone else has even tried.”

  “Know how Marsh spent his fiftieth birthday? Raising money for orphans by running across Death Valley—four times in a row. That’s nearly six hundred miles, back and forth across the hottest place on earth and up and down Mount Whitney. He challenged the course, both the desert and the mountain, another time by stuffing his gear and water in a hot dog cart so he could run across Death Valley alone.”

  My favorite is one I heard from Frank McKinney, a Florida real estate developer with heavy-metal hair and an ocean-view treehouse for an office. McKinney wasn’t a runner—he preferred tennis, if anything—and he knew nothing about mountains or desert heat. But he found out about the Badwater Ultramarathon and got the idea that running 135 miles in awful desert heat would be kind of a kick. Somehow he got in, so off he set on race day, trotting through the salt flats in his head-to-toe sun whites. By mile seventy-five or so, McKinney had gotten the fun smacked out of him; head spinning, muscles knotting, he was a panting mess by the side of the road. He lay in the shade of his support team’s van, mustering the strength to get inside and head the hell home. He wasn’t just exhausted and overheated—he was scared. People die in Death Valley all the time, their brains slowly convection-cooking inside their skulls.

  And that’s when a shadow blocked out the sun. A man stood over him, then squatted down. His voice was calm, quiet, lighthearted. He wasn’t trying to buck McKinney up so much as talk the race down. Not a big deal, he told McKinney; get some water down your throat, maybe some tapioca pudding, and then look around. Isn’t this place awesome? How many other people get a chance to see this? We’re a couple of lucky guys, you and I. . . . Did you finish that pudding? Good, try a banana....

  The year before, Marshall had come straight to Badwater after reaching the top of Mount Everest. Marshall had always wanted to make the climb, and the only window had opened before Badwater. Rather than choose between the challenges of a lifetime for anyone else, he’d once again decided to just live a little harder than anyone else. He knew the consequences: No matter who you are, you’re half the man you were by the time you get down from Everest. You’ve lost at least one-third of your muscle mass, and count yourself lucky if you’re not dehydrated, frostbitten, malnourished, and snow-blind. Somehow, Marshall had managed to hustle his muscle-depleted self off the Himalayas, and then, for good measure, he headed to Russia to reach the summit of Mount Elbrus before returning halfway around the globe to complete Badwater.

  The year he met Frank McKinney was mild by Marshall’s standards; all he’d done was complete the Seven Summits, including climbing Mount Vinson in Antarctica, before coming here to squat on 200-degree asphalt with some guy who really wished he’d go away.

  Marshall chatted with McKinney for an hour. A full hour, in the middle of a race that he’d won four times and exactly at a time when he should have been worrying about title number five instead of teaching Badwater 101 to an inexperienced freshman. But it worked; bit by bit, McKinney began to feel better. He got to his feet and tested his legs. Not totally like wet newspaper. He began to shuffle, then jog, then run—and he kept going until he crossed the finish line more than a day later.

  When I finally got the chance to ask Marshall about it, I had one question: “Why?” Every second you spend under the Death Valley sun increases your risk of ending up in the hospital with an emergency IV in your arm, and no one knew that better than Marshall. Once, he’d watched Lisa Smith-Batchen, the supertalented desert specialist and a former winner of a six-day race across the Sahara, get pulled from Badwater and rushed to the ER. So why was he risking his race—potentially, his life—for this guy?

  Marshall didn’t know. And that’s when I discovered, absolutely by accident, the key to his superhuman strength: Marshall keeps going forward because there’s no looking back. He kept running, adventure racing, and climbing because those activities demand movement in a single direction. Even in his sleep, as his wife would discover, Marshall can rest only if he’s in motion. You can answer why only with a look in the rearview mirror, and those were two things—rear views and mirrors—that Marshall absolutely did not deal with.

  That’s how it was when I met him in 2005. I’d had the spectacular luck to attend a running camp in Idaho’s Grand Tetons organized by Marshall and Lisa. He was awe-inspiring: kind, funny, happy-go-lucky, insightful, a sharp mind with a keen biomechanical eye. Two of the greatest gifts you can give an endurance athlete are the chance to run with Marshall Ulrich and the chance to pick his brain, and I was delighted to get one because I knew the other was off the market.

  And then, something happened. After almost thirty years of keeping his eyes drilled forward and his thoughts to himself, Marshall woke up. He realized, with one of those bursts of clarity that are so frightening that you hope you never have one again, what had happened to him. All those stories he’d spent a lifetime avoiding were locking together into a tragically disturbing pattern. If only he’d realized it before . . .

  So what was it? What was it that brought Marshall Ulrich back to the world, and what has happened since then? Ordinarily, you’d have to wait for the story to pass from mouth to mouth, making the rounds of the rumor circuit. But now, for the first time, Marshall can tell you for himself.

  CHRISTOPHER McDOUGALL

  author of Born to Run

  Prologue

  Born on the fourth of July, I was always suitably independent. Stubborn, too, and competitive. By the age of ten, I’d already figured out that when my older brother and I got into trouble, whomever Dad caught first was going to get it the worst. If I could outrun Steve, sometimes I could avoid a lickin’ altogether. Dad’s legs weren’t in the best shape—he’d fought in World War II and still suffered the effects of injuries he’d sustained at the Battle of the Bulge—and I was usually way out in front of both of them, racing across the fields at top speed. Sorry, Steve.

  My family lived in a simple ranch-style house in the middle of an eighty-acre dairy farm near Kersey, Colorado. We kept a herd of about sixty cows and grew corn and alfalfa to feed them. Mom, Dad, my sister, Lonna, Steve, and I all worked to keep things going, but my brother and I were constant companions, laboring together in the fields and at the barn from the time we were big enough to wield pitchforks. At the ripe old age of eight, I taught myself to drive a
tractor when Dad wasn’t looking, and after that, Steve and I were in business. Three or four times a year, the alfalfa had to be cut, dried, baled, loaded onto a “sled” we pulled behind the tractor, then stacked in the back of a truck. In our teen years, as we grew stronger, it was a badge of honor to be able to tell our parents what we’d accomplished in a day. All on our own we could, for example, put up more than two thousand square bales—that’s a couple hundred bales, at seventy pounds each, per hour. It was hard but gratifying labor, and although our parents didn’t materially reward us for it, we certainly felt their approval.

  Sometimes it was fun, too. Steve and I made most chores into a contest: “Who can bale and stack the most hay today? Ready, set, go!” He almost always beat me at this, which I hope in some way compensates for all the punishment he took on my behalf.

  We worked seven days a week, before and after school, and all day Saturday, but Sunday afternoons were my own. My comic books, sketch-pad, and adventure novels kept me company on the back porch, my refuge year-round, even in winter when it wasn’t heated. Engrossed in a tale like The Call of the Wild, I could feel the chill and indulge myself in the fantasy of being Buck, the noble sled dog, braving the frigid Yukon. I also loved to draw, especially my comic book heroes as they performed superhuman feats, and Mom always encouraged these interests—reading and art—by keeping me in good supply of books and pencils and paper.