Erin Quinn

A 100-mile Race in the Desert

One hundred. The number can seem daunting. Then you add on “miles,” and it seems even more arduous. Then, just for shits and giggles, you tack on “run,” and it starts to seem, well, just like a spin around crazy-town. And that’s what a 100-mile run kind of is— a very long and grueling and unbearably beautiful funhouse ride on your own two legs. At least, that’s what my race felt like—The Zion 100—an all-night, human-powered party in the Utah desert complete with food, drink and a trailside vomit-fest.

When I first heard about ultrarunning (any race beyond the traditional 26.2-mile marathon distance,) I was intrigued. Having been a lifelong runner, I wanted to know how it was physically possible and if it was physically possible, how did you train for it? Once you’ve discovered how to go about training for something like that, how in God’s name do you pull it off? As a journalist, I had been able to interview a few people who had ventured into crazy-town and, with their encouragement (some might call it a cult initiation,) I decided to try my hand at one.

I first dipped my toes in with a 50K in Moab, Utah in March of 2022 and nearly died from heat stroke.  Still, I finished it, which gave me some confidence. Then I continued to train for and complete the Dead Horse 50-mile Ultra, also near Moab in November of 2022 and felt exhilarated to be running in cooler temps. I was able to run further and go faster than I had in the 50K. With two finish lines underneath my beltless shorts, I decided to sign up for the Zion 100 in March of 2023 thinking, why the hell not? What’s the worst that can happen?

I loved the challenge. I loved the training. I loved the thought of being able to cover more than 100-miles of ground with on my own two feet.  I had the opportunity to pace my friend for the last 40-miles of her 100-mile race in February and got to see, first-hand, just how formidable of a task running a 100-miles really was and it only got me more excited.

It was like this giant physical, mental and tactical jig-saw puzzle that you had to put together, not only on the day (or days) of the race, but throughout the training. I had to learn about carrying a hydration vest and eating gels and chews and miniature waffles that I could carry in my pack. I learned the hard-way that to avoid serious chub-rub I had to fully coat myself in an anti-chaffing body glide. I had to get a headlamp and backup batteries and a portable charger for my watch and phone to make it through the night. I had to study maps and elevation and do hill strides and pick-ups and long runs and then back-to-back long runs and my favorite, rest days. There was so much to do and to learn!

In most longer ultramarathons the racers are allowed pacers and crew at a certain point. While I had assembled a world-class crew (my two childhood besties Amy and Kristen and my boyfriend Kip,) none of them were runners. In fact, all three were adamant that they were not going to pace me for any length of the course, but that they did believe I needed a pacer for safety reasons in the night. “We will clean the vomit from your hair and reapply the body glide underneath your armpits but we’re not pacing,” said Kristen. “We think you should have a pacer,” added Amy, who was busy listening up on all of the ultrarunning podcasts on how to be a good pacer and/or crew member, “but it’s not going to be us.”

What they didn’t realize, was that just knowing they were there when I was going to take on something this challenging, was all that I needed from them. Yes, it was so helpful to have Kristen tracking me and telling me when I went of course (several times) and Amy mixing my electrolytes into my water bottles and refilling my pack and all of them telling me how great I was doing and how good I looked. Kip made sure that I had backup headlamps and batteries and hooking everything up when I was too bleary eyed to see straight. But it was way more than that. It was knowing that they were there, with me, on this wild journey. A crew is a lot of things and when it comes to ultrarunning they have a lot of specific duties, but the one that can’t be quantified is that these were my people, part of my tribe and even when I was lost out there (tacking on bonus miles) and hurting or tired or nauseous (sometimes all at once,) I knew that if I kept moving forward I would eventually get back to them near some aid-station tent in the middle of the desert and that made everything okay.

I’m not going to say that running a 100-miles is not hard. It is hard. It’s very hard. But it’s not the hardest thing I’ve done. There are those marathons that we run that we do not have the ability to train for—like illness and loss and heartbreak or hopelessness. Those are things that have no clear start point or end point and you don’t know if there will be any aid stations and if there are, when you’ll reach one. Will you make it? As I hit mile 60 and 70 and 80 and went into the unknown, I kept thinking that I chose this hard. That, in and of itself, was empowering. I was able to go for a big adventure in the desert and bring some friends along with me. How cool is that?

The Start

Once everyone had landed and we were in our Quality Sleep Inn hotel, we all went to the Zion Ultra Expo, the day before the race to get a lay of the land and pick up my race packet. There were so many interesting tattoos covering calves and forearms of very fit looking individuals milling about that I felt kind of naked without one. We discovered that the Zion Ultra was not actually in Zion National Park but would begin at the Apple Valley Ranch near Zion, within a Bureau of Land Management Parcel. They had a 100-mile, 100K, 50K and ½ marathon all slated to go off one after another over a two-day period, with the 100-miler starting first.

I set off at 5:30am, Saturday morning and had a 36hr cut-off to make it back. I waved goodbye to my crew and headed out into the cool morning desert air with a headlamp on. That first 20 miles went by in a blur. There was a beautiful jeep road that rolled through desert floor for a few miles and then we hit a trail that started to really climb. The sunrise took place on a section of trail that was on top of the Gooseberry mesa with tons of slickrock and sand and tenacious little Juniper trees with sweeping vistas of the desert below and the other mesas we would eventually climb.

As the sun mounted, the sky turned from a pale violet to a silky blue. The red-saturated canyons and the sea green and blue of the grasses made me feel like I was snorkeling on land. I felt like I was diving in and out of dry water and my eyes were trying to adjust to the way the light seemed to bounce off the edge of the earth. The striations of the mesas each formed such a unique pattern that they reminded me of fingerprints and then there were the Juniper trees and Cottonwoods looking both stoic and lonely all at the same time.

Mile 25 was the first time I was able to see my crew and they were ready for me with a baseball hat and sunscreen (both of which I had forgotten,) as the sun was starting to sink its teeth into my skin. My left foot kept going numb and I had to lean on split-rail fence and swing my leg from side to side to try and relieve whatever nerve was being pinched. It was so exciting to see them and tempting to stay, but all the podcasts I’d listened warned of staying too long in an aid-station. I needed to get in and out. They helped me refill bottles and covered me in sunscreen and hugged me and off I went, running across the desert floor in the heat of the day feeling like the luckiest girl in the world.

After that 50-mile mark

Because I had done the 50-miler, I kept telling myself that this race really didn’t start until mile 51. Well, at mile 51 I hit the “Flying Monkey,” which Kristen (who, along with Amy had memorized the Runner, Pacer and Crew Manual) had watched videos of mountain bikers going down the Flying Monkey and said that it looked absolutely terrifying. Race reports alluded to this section and some called it “downright irresponsible,” but I kept thinking that it couldn’t be all that bad.

Wrong. We dropped more than a 1000ft in less than a mile on a “path” that wasn’t a path, but more like a blurred line in the sand that someone traced from the top to the bottom of the canyon. My heart rate was spiked so high trying to navigate my way down this precarious descent that at first, I didn’t hear the 3 mountain bikers with go-pros on, trying to let me know that they were coming behind me. And where was it that they wanted me to go? To the right was deadly drop-off into the abyss and to the left was crumbling sandstone and loose rock? We had less than 6 inches to navigate our feet or our wheels and I pressed myself into the side of the canyon and just started talking to Jesus as they passed me. When I turned back around, a rope appeared. I grabbed it and started rappelling down. Just as I got the hang of bouncing on and off the canyon wall the rope ended and I was again left with nothing securing my body to the planet. Finally, the pitch started to level out to a manageable degree and I could hear the cow-bells and chatter of the upcoming aid station.

Not only were my friends cheering me on but an entire group of strangers. “We’ve heard so much about you Erin!” one man said. “Kristen’s been making friends,” said Amy as she guided me towards a bag chair they had set up. “That should be illegal!” I said, pointing in the direction of the Flying Monkey as my crew helped me get cleaned up and restocked and ready for the night-time section since I wouldn’t see them again for another 25 miles. “Someone’s going to die going down that thing!”

I knew when I left, I would be heading into the unknown, the post-50-mile range and I wasn’t sure what to expect but I was going to find out.

The night time was both ethereal and stressful. I wasn’t scared of the dark but the little pink course ribbon markers were so minimally placed that I kept thinking I was going of course, or I was going off course and had to back-track. There was just the cone-shaped light from my headlamp on the slick rock and the sight of my own sneakers and the sound of my own breath to carry me forward. I was mostly alone in the night. I would see an occasional runner and their pacer, but the greater the distance, the more all 170 of us were spread out.  There were trails and roads that just wove through the desert in the night and I ran and shuffled and moved as quickly as I could, thanking the universe for carrying me this far.

I tried to follow the basic ultra-rule-of-thumb which was to try and keeping eating 200-300 calories an hour and drinking several ounces of fluid. It had worked for my previous runs and training runs but gets harder to do the longer you go because your stomach starts to revolt. There was a 7-mile stretch where I was so nauseous that all I could do was to force myself to take tiny sips of water. I was powering up a steep hillside when everything I’d been taking in suddenly came up and I stood bent-over on the side of the trail heaving until there was nothing left. I was clammy and sweaty and teary. I didn’t feel great , but at least I wasn’t nauseous anymore.  I wiped my brow with my forearm and looked up. There was this veil of stars that swept over me like a cool compress. I was going to be okay. I just had to keep going. I turned and ran down the hill towards the aid station—this oasis in the desert where my crew would be.

Mile 78 and the Mondo Z

After I took a few minutes to clean up and regroup I hugged them and headed back out into the night. Mondo Z was waiting for me, as I knew it would be. I enjoyed my run/shuffle as long as I could until I hit the bottom of that climb, which appeared to be more an alpine ski slope than a hill one could conceivably run up.  All I could see was a long trail of headlights slowly bobbing up the mountain for what seemed like miles. “Don’t look up,” I cautioned myself. “Focus on each step. Left foot, right foot…” I kept repeating that mantra and then I would give myself five seconds to pause, put my head between my knees and then keep pushing up. It wasn’t a question will I get up the hill, but how I would get up it. Gravity was pulling me backwards, I had no poles, there was nothing to grab a hold of and the rocks and sand would slip beneath my feet as I tried to gain any traction. I side-stepped for a while and then tried to walk backwards until I tripped and fell. Then I scooted on my butt for a while then back up to the left foot, right foot routine. I asked God to guide me and to help me find my way to the top of this hill. I said “thank you,” every 10 steps because that was ten steps more than I thought I could go. Eventually I made it up. It took a long time. But here’s what I learned in an ultra; every step is closer to the finish, and it will get better, you’re just not sure when, so keep moving the best that you can.

There was an aid-station at the top and I loaded up my water bottles with Coke. It was the middle of the night; I had twenty-two miles to go and I needed to be firing on all cylinders. I hadn’t pulled an all-nighter in quite a while, but having been a mom of 3 kids four and under, plus a reporter that was constantly on deadline, I was no stranger to sleep deprivation. I actually felt some energy return was I made my way to mile 80 where I could see my crew and give them one last hug before the finish line.

Amy calmed me by saying I was well ahead of my goal split times and was 7 hours ahead of the grim reaper cut-off times. With that boost of confidence, I headed out towards the Wire Mesa and just kept repeating to myself, “run when you can and walk when you have to.”  At this point I couldn’t really run anything that even hinted at an uphill. I could run flats and gentle downhills but there wasn’t much that was gentle about Wire Mesa except for the views of the snow-capped mountains in the distance and the silhouette of Zion canyons as the sun rose.

Smelling the Barn

Time slowed here, for several reasons. One, the sunrise was so stunning that I was tempted to just sit down and watch it but knew that I had to keep going. The wind was whipping on top of the mesa and all I had was a thin shell that I could put on over my vest and hold it together with my hands. I hadn’t eaten in at least 3 hours and knew that I needed to but could not bear to look at, smell or ingest anything in my pack. I was even beyond my love of Coke and what existed after Coke? I didn’t see a soul for at least 8 miles on this mesa and I started wondering if I was just going around in circles. I started to panic that I was, indeed, going around the mesa twice and had no service or anyone to ask so I just kept pressing forward. “Okay, I told myself. You’ve already run an extra 2 miles from going off course, what’s another 8 miles?” I was trying to work my mind around tacking on another 10-miles to a 100-mile race when I finally heard some aid-station banter. I was so happy and relieved that I actually accepted a shot of pickle juice they were peddling. It felt like battery acid doing down but soon I perked up. I only had 9 more miles to go. 9 miles! That was less than 10! I could smell the hay in the barn and I started to realize as I looped back that I was alone because I had passed a lot of people that were just heading towards Wire Mesa as I was heading towards the Grafton Mesa, the last loop of the course.

 This was such a stunning trail that I tried to inhale every bit of it. I running along the edge of the mesa rim looking down at the Colorado River and these huge boulders that were worn by water, softening them and making them look like free-standing sculptures in the Gardens of the Gods. My phone had hit service and I could feel it vibrating and I knew that my friends and loved ones and kids were all sending me messages of encouragement and that helped put some life back in my legs. There was that point, where I knew, barring some sort of catastrophic mishap or injury that I was going to make it. I’m not going to say that the last few miles were easy on the body or the mind but I knew this party was about to reach its crescendo. As I got closer to the finish, I could feel all the miles in my legs start to throb and the blisters start to scream and none of it mattered because I knew I had been on this pilgrimage where all of life happened in one day and that one day happened in all of life. I was able to run in that last couple hundred feet and then collapsed into my crews’ arms and started to cry. Yes, I was proud and relieved that I had cross that finish line, but I was also so steeped in gratitude for the opportunity to go on this adventure and to have some of the people I loved most be able to share it with me.

I believe that we all have epic adventures inside of us, we just need to listen and find out what they could be.

Happy Trails—Erin Quinn