He jogged a three-quarter victory lap, and dove into a forward roll over the finish line, cementing his achievement.
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Her sincere apologies were no replacement for the comfortable rescue Gordy had anticipated.īy the time Gordy entered the fairgrounds at 4:32 a.m., he had been running for 23 hours and 42 minutes. She had been unable to find the shoes in her camper (she only located them months later). But when he reached Helen, she was empty-handed. Gordy desperately looked forward to mile 29, where his friend Helen would be waiting with fresh shoes-a pair of Adidas Gazelles which were more cushioned than the lightly padded Adidas SL 72s he’d chosen for the first third of the race. He’d burned through precious energy reserves from his breakfast-a bowl of shredded wheat doused in buttermilk-much too early. When the path widened 25 miles later, Gordy was exhausted. So Gordy ran single-file with the horses at their trotting pace-roughly 7 minutes and 30 seconds per mile. Around mile four, the path narrowed to single-track there was nowhere to step aside to let them pass. Then, the horse riders caught up with him. “Good luck, Gordy,” the head timers echoed back.įor the first two dozen miles of the race, Gordy walked uphill out of Squaw Valley, mostly on a graded service road for the ski lifts. “I guess I’ll be going now,” he called out. He stood alone in the predawn darkness while his fellow racers-198 riders- prepared their horses for their 5 a.m. He pulled on yellow shorts and a makeshift bib: the number “zero” handwritten above “WSTR” with a black sharpie on a white cotton shirt.Ī few minutes before his start time of 4:50 a.m., Gordy walked to the start in Squaw Valley. It took 10 days before he could walk without a limp.) To keep the ends of the pantyhose from rolling, he wrapped white athletic tape around each thigh. (He’d learned that lesson the hard way he participated in the Western States 100 on a bareback pad without stirrups in 1971. Then he got up, slipped on cut-off pantyhose, protection against chafing. He lay for a half hour longer thinking about the unruly challenge he had voluntarily gotten himself into.
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His girlfriend Pat had chosen to go to jalopy races that night, rather than seeing him off-a dismissive reaction to his monumental mission, he felt.Īt 3:30 a.m., his sleep was interrupted by the sound of Valentina chomping on grain. He lay in the darkness, feeling anxious, lonely, and a little bitter. But Gordy was not a person who liked to quit.Ħ Effective Core Exercises All Runners Should Do The race was hard enough while mounted on a horse, as all the other competitors were. Gordy was attempting to do something no runner in history had done before: complete the race now known as the Western States 100 on foot. Join Runner's World+ for unlimited access to the best training tips for runners Now, as he started running up Devil’s Thumb, a 1,800-foot ascent over 1.8 miles, he feared for his own survival. The horse was unresponsive, and it was evident to Gordy that it was dying. Perhaps a bit more sanity-that one in particular would have helped a few hours ago, when he started this hundred-mile run through the Sierra Nevada Mountains’ rocky trails.įive miles back he’d attempted to help rescue a horse that had collapsed in the Middle Fork of the American River. The sweat that had streaked down the 27-year-old’s face from his shaggy blond hair has evaporated, leaving a crust of salt behind. He’s been running for 55 miles through the California wilderness and he desperately wants to sit. It’s August 3, 1974, and pain slices across the balls of Gordy Ainsleigh’s feet in sharp, unrelenting stabs.