What Courtney Dauwalter Learned within the Pain Cave

After working for 60 miles via snow, up steep, root-filled switchbacks with 1000’s of ft of elevation achieve, Courtney Dauwalter entered what she calls her ache cave. For the subsequent 40 miles of the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run via California’s Sierra Nevada, she imagined she was holding a chisel and chipping away on the furthest reaches of her ache, whereas staying targeted on each step she took. By the time Dauwalter crossed the end line in 15 hours, 29 minutes and 33 seconds, she had obliterated the ladies’s course document by greater than an hour and had run the Twenty third-fastest time, by anybody, within the race’s 45-year historical past.

To put Dauwalter’s time in perspective, it will have gained the boys’s division of Western States — arguably essentially the most aggressive 100-mile race on the earth — yearly from 1978 via 2009. Scott Jurek gained Western States seven occasions (most just lately in 2005) however by no means as soon as ran as quick as Dauwalter did this 12 months. She beat a 1994 Western State document set by Ann Trason, who gained the race 14 occasions, by greater than two hours.

Dauwalter is among the most colourful characters in ultrarunning. She is thought for her love of sweet, nachos and beer, in addition to her free shorts and her vivid on-course hallucinations, that are illustrated on hats and T-shirts. In the previous 10 years, she has gained greater than 50 races of 30 miles or longer. In 2017, she gained a 240-mile race in Moab, Utah, by 10 hours. In successful Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra in 2020, she ran 283 miles and hallucinated that Mickey Mouse was standing on a circus stage handing out T-shirts to a crowd.

Now she is making an attempt to do one thing even essentially the most achieved ultrarunners would contemplate extraordinary: win three extremely aggressive 100-mile races in a single summer season. Twenty days after her efficiency at Western States, she gained the grueling Hardrock 100 in Silverton, Colo., breaking her personal document by 20 minutes and inserting fourth general. This weekend, seven weeks after successful Hardrock, she is going to toe the road on the Ultra Trail du Mont-Blanc, a brutally steep, 106-mile race in Chamonix, France, with terrain extra suited to billy goats than people. She has gained the race twice and at the moment holds the ladies’s document.

“In general, I am pretty tired,” stated Dauwalter, whose mottos when issues get powerful in a race are “This is fine” and “Be brave and believe.” She stated working all three races was not the plan at first, however that she simply needed to strive it.

“I am so curious what will happen and excited to test myself,” she stated.

Lanky and blond, with a deep tan, expressive blue eyes and everlasting snort traces, Dauwalter, 38, believes one of many biggest evolutions in her working profession has been her embrace of the “pain cave.” Initially, she considered it because the place the place she might not bear the struggling and must cease working. Indeed, she stop the primary 100-mile race she tried in 2012 as a result of she was overwhelmed by ache. But as she ran extra races, she began to grasp that she might work via it. She stated she envisioned herself in a tough hat, wielding a chisel and “going to town, trying to make it a dust pile while I am in there.”

She continued: “It feels like this is a special opportunity every time it arrives because we can’t summon it whenever we want. We have to be doing something hard, push ourselves, and then maybe we will get the chance to go in. And if we do, we should celebrate that we get to be there.”

Sitting on a deck that overlooks the Rockies at her residence in Leadville, Colo., on a sunny, mid-August afternoon, Dauwalter sipped a fruity seltzer and pointed to 2 14,000-foot mountains that she usually runs to from her home. In a sport the place most elite runners have a coach and map out their coaching schedules weeks upfront, Dauwalter trains herself and doesn’t know what number of miles she is going to run on any given day. Her mornings normally start round 4 a.m. with a cup of espresso with vanilla crunch creamer. She responds to emails, then does about 40 minutes of energy coaching. By 7 a.m., she hits the path and runs for an hour to 5 hours. She usually provides a motorcycle experience and a second run together with her husband, Kevin Schmidt.

“I try and go into every week really open to whatever happens so that I will actually tune into my body and listen to it,” stated Dauwalter, who wears a working watch however doesn’t submit her exercises on widespread working apps like Strava, as many ultrarunners do. “If I go into a week thinking it is going to be a really big mileage week or I have all these grand ideas about it, then I find it harder to listen to my body and actually respond to what it is telling me.” Her massive mileage weeks are sometimes 140 miles.

Schmidt, a software program engineer who stated he didn’t learn about ultramarathons till he met Dauwalter over a decade in the past, tracks the potential mile splits she might have and meticulously plans the assist stations alongside the course. Though Schmidt units time objectives, the couple doesn’t concentrate on them or get too assured a few race till Dauwalter is on the end line. In 2019, she was main Western States, however needed to drop out at mile 80 due to a leg harm. In 2021, her abdomen points have been so extreme at Hardrock that she couldn’t go on. Even when all goes as deliberate, random occasions can intervene, like when Dauwalter needed to go astray to keep away from a moose or misplaced her imaginative and prescient when her corneas swelled from the mud on the path.

The pair stated that vitamin is now an enormous a part of their plan. A buddy who works as a dietitian stated Dauwalter had abdomen issues in races as a result of she was not getting sufficient energy. Dauwalter now picks up a plastic bag at every assist station full of an assortment of gels and power waffles and carries water and a sports activities drink. Her job is at hand again a bag with empty wrappers.

Schmidt believes Dauwalter’s supportive household and her athletic background in her residence state of Minnesota helped her study to pay attention to what she was feeling. She ran cross-country in highschool and was a state champion Nordic skier, which earned her a snowboarding scholarship to the University of Denver.

“She had fantastic parents who raised her really well, encouraged her to be competitive and didn’t put restrictions on her, so she never felt like she couldn’t compete against her brothers,” Schmidt stated. “And she had really great coaches who taught her how to be in tune with her body, which I think has helped her have this very unstructured training format that works for her.”

Meghan Hicks, the editor in chief of iRunFar, an ultrarunning web site, stated many runners unintentionally set limitations on themselves by specializing in a course document and the splits it is going to take to beat it.

“Courtney does not work that way,” she stated. “She goes and runs by the way she is feeling.”

Hicks stated Dauwalter has “a wide-open approach that you don’t see a lot of runners doing and I think that is perhaps part of her key to success.”

Dauwalter’s performances have led some to wonder if girls will turn out to be quicker than males as distances get longer. Dr. Sandra Hunter, the director for the Athletic and Human Performance Research Center at Marquette University, stated they won’t. Men’s physiological and anatomical benefits, together with much less physique fats, larger hemoglobin and better oxygen uptake, imply that they are going to all the time be quicker general, she stated.

For instance, Jim Walmsley, who holds the boys’s document for Western States with a time that’s about 9 % quicker than Dauwalter’s. According to an article in Sports Medicine, in main extremely path races the place the perfect women and men are current, this quantity hardly ever dips under 8 %. That was the distinction between Dauwalter’s time and the quickest males’s time at Ultra Trail du Mont-Blanc in 2021. The hole between the perfect female and male performances for working occasions from sprints to marathons normally hovers round 10 to 12 %.

“There is a fundamental sex difference between males and females that won’t go away,” Hunter stated. But Hicks stated girls have reached a spot in ultrarunning the place they needn’t be in comparison with males as a result of their performances are legitimate with out that comparability — a view extensively held by girls within the sport.

Hunter stated Dauwalter’s working economic system, which is measured by the oxygen consumption of a runner at a set pace and infrequently improves as runners grow old, could also be superior to most different individuals within the sport. While there was a increase of ladies ultramarathoners, there are nonetheless far fewer girls than males in extremely working, they usually normally run shorter distances just like the 50K. Hunter stated that Dauwalter’s stellar efficiency exhibits that there’s nonetheless a substantial amount of room for girls to evolve.

Dauwalter, who is thought for being beneficiant together with her time and cheering on the individuals round her, continues to raise others within the sport, particularly girls, Hicks stated. In 2020, when Hicks set the quickest identified supported girls’s time in a roughly 90-mile problem referred to as Nolan’s 14, which includes mountain climbing and working 14 14,000-foot mountains, Dauwalter paced her via the night time, telling jokes and tales to make the time cross. Around midnight, she requested Hicks if she wished a chunk of pizza and pulled out a slice wrapped in tinfoil from her pack.

“Who does that?” Hicks requested. “Maybe your husband or your best friend? But who in the top of the sport is doing that?”

Dauwalter’s strategy to the enterprise of working displays her need to carry others within the sport. She used her sponsorship with Salomon to affect a brand new line of ladies’s working shorts which can be longer and looser than most shorts in the marketplace. Dauwalter hopes that the shorts will give girls one other choice to be snug and that possibly “the length is the thing that makes someone get out on the trail and try.”

She additionally desires to inject some humor into what may be an intense pursuit. Recently, Tailwind Nutrition debuted a “Make New Friends” line of T-shirts and hats that includes photos that Dauwalter has seen in hallucinations on the path: a large cowboy, puppets on a swing set, a giraffe.

John Medinger, the previous writer of UltraRunning Magazine, has been at each Western States since 1983 and has collected statistics on the race for over 4 a long time. Dauwalter’s efficiency can’t be quantified, he stated. No runner has posted occasions like hers in such a variety of races — quick ones, steep ones, terribly lengthy ones and races of attrition through which the final particular person standing wins.

“There are courses for horses and horses for courses, but I’m not sure there’s a course that isn’t a good one for Courtney,” he stated.