What Trail Running In Wyoming With Serious Pros Taught Me About Life, Endurance and Competition
The first run that my fellow visiting amateur Grace Cook (who runs seriously) and I did was difficult (for me at least); the altitude was stinging, and the conditions were wet and snowy in spots. We did 7 miles or so, and the pros finished long before I made it. Because it’s an individual sport and these people are hard-wired to compete, it felt friendly but still competitive. They made it look easy, gliding across the rocks and mud effortlessly.
I buddied up with two of the pros pretty quickly: Stian Dahl Sommerseth, a sinewy blonde from Oslo, Norway, works full time as a legal advisor to the Norwegian Transportation Department, and Max Jolliffe from Costa Mesa, California, an apparel designer. Sommerseth looked like a runner, tall and thin, and wore clothes like a ’90s Prada model. Jolliffe was smaller and fit, almost like a SoCal surfer and skater who hit his thirties and took up jiujitsu. They happily answered all my questions about the sport, the training, recovery, diet, and sponsors. After Cook and I completed a snow and ice-filled morning run, I hit the on-site sauna (it was simply a sauna trailer, brought in by truck and dropped there —genius business idea) with Jolliffe, where I learned that he had self-financed a documentary called King of Moab, directed by Tylor Wolter, about him winning the Moab 240, a grueling 238.8 mile ultra marathon race that takes several days to complete and traverses desert canyons, mountain ranges, and red rock mesas.
After twenty minutes, it was time for a cold plunge, something I’ve tried in the past but haven’t been able to master. We stumbled out of the sauna into the crisp Wyoming air and went to the two metal tubs full of ice and water. Jolliffe said We’re doing three minutes, just breathe with me. Not wanting to humiliate myself in front of another ex-drug addict with tattoos, I jumped in, and the panic set in almost immediately. But as we went on, Max’s calm but sure voice kept my breathing monitored, and the three minutes went by quickly. We did this—20 minutes in the sauna, 3 minutes cold plunge—two more times. I went back to my room feeling high. My body was vibrating.
I watched King of Moab on YouTube and instantly understood the sport I had been trying to comprehend since I had arrived in Jackson Hole. It is brutal, physical, and deeply intense, but it seems like a mind-over-matter situation. Sure, there is strategy and training involved, but my takeaway from the film and the retreat was that these people are wired differently, willing to endure pain and mental exhaustion for little more than the glory inherent in doing something hard. (The trail runners I met all seemed to have full-time jobs: coaching amateurs, UX design, engineering at Spotify.)
Sommerseth has been running since college, temperature training by running for hours in layers of clothes and then getting into the sauna; Jolliffe has only been running for four years. But they have both won prestigious races. Doing something at the highest level just because you want to is something we should all admire. Most of us, me especially, are driven by money, power, or success. Maybe the key is to find something you love and do it until it kills you. I left Wyoming tired, sore, but deeply grateful to experience something genuinely new. I won’t be signing up for Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, but I will cheer on my new friends.
