It was the afternoon before the race, and I’d just finished the check-in process. I’d retrieved my drop bags from my car, and was carrying them to the designated area. That’s when I saw Jovica. He was up a small slope from me, standing where all 150 of the runners would soon gather to hear the pre-race briefing.

Jovica and I were too far apart for me to say anything. I could have shouted, but it seemed like that would have been obnoxious since we didn’t know each other very well. Instead, I waved. He waved back. His face was unmoved. Stoic.

I wasn’t sure how to read his lack of an expression. We’d been the first and second place competitors for the first 140 miles of last year’s Tahoe 200 race, so I thought that maybe he viewed me as an opponent rather than as a friend. I wanted to respect his feelings even if I didn’t understand them, so I decided I should just give him his space.

I finished the short walk to the drop bag area without another glance up.

​I didn’t see Jovica again until we found ourselves standing side by side near the starting line the next morning in the gradually increasing light of the rising sun. Still trying to respect his space, I remained silent. We stood there for several long moments before he broke the ice by saying hi. We exchanged well-wishes for the coming race, then the horn blew and the race began.

Helgi Olafson is a hilarious dude.

He also happens to be a beast of an athlete, competing in 2018's Triple Crown of 200s series, which involves running three 200 mile mountain races in the span of roughly two and a half months - the Bigfoot 200, the Tahoe 200, and the Moab 200 (which, just for funsies, actually covers 240 miles).

And he's doing it all despite having ankylosing spondylitis (AS), which in his words is "a degenerative autoimmune arthritis involving fusion of joints resulting from inflammation of the attachment points of ligaments and tendons to bone. In layman's terms...if I don't MOVE IT...I will lose it.”

We were lucky enough to get to know him a bit at the 2018 Bigfoot 200, midway through the race when his feet looked like hamburger and he hadn't slept in days. He finished the race, and I was stoked to find out afterwards that he'd put together a piece of my favorite style of internet literature - idiosyncratic reports on the nitty gritty details of unusual adventure experiences. The type of thing that really allows you to dig into the emotional experience of what it takes, and what it feels like, to do something really hard and weird - like running the 2018 Bigfoot 200. 

He calls it a race report, but what Helgi actually put together is a page turning mini-novella that has enough humor, background, and personal insight that it'll be interesting for someone with no experience of these things at all, but also enough detail that it'll be useful to someone in the planning stages of running this race, or another 200, themselves.

Helgi manages to reference the Truffle Shuffle, Scott Bakula from Quantum Leap, and his apple bong, but my particular favorite anecdote from the report was his description of an interaction around mile 160:

This thing's full of these sorts of gems, so do yourself a favor and take the time when you have it to read the whole thing. It's classic literature: Helgi Olafson's Bigfoot 200 Race Report.

Just a couple of weeks after finishing Bigfoot, Helgi ran, and finished the Tahoe 200 - an adventure that he had essentially completed solo earlier in the year when he completed the Tahoe Rim Trail in the snow in not much more than race cutoffs would allow. He offers some humorous background on that experience, as well as another great write-up of his experience at the second of the Triple Crown races.

You can, and should, read that Tahoe 200 Race Report here.

In my opinion, this is Helgi's magnum opus. It's 50 densely packed pages of pictures, stories, and reflections from his experience of the entire Triple Crown of 200s, and a leg by leg recounting of the Moab experience. It's characterized by his usual offbeat humor and inspiring personality, and concludes with an announcement about a major upcoming adventure project in 2020 that will include all three of the 200 mile races. 

Helgi's Report on the Moab 240.

Angel took on the medical director role for Destination Trail's series of 200 mile ultramarathons, and our first event was the Bigfoot 200 near Mount St Helens. We were stoked because that also allowed us to do a bunch of race recording with the goal of sharing the 200 mile ultramarathon experience with you all.

As our friends in New Zealand say, we're completely gutted to say that the day after the race, the phone that contained all of our audio and a bunch of our photos from the 2018 Bigfoot 200 went kaput during a run in Capitol Forest, WA, and the audio can't be recovered. 

We lost a wealth of good material, runner and volunteer interviews, and humorous interludes, but the thing I regret the most is that we won't be able to share audio of Helgi Olafson screaming while Angel hacked in to one of his blisters with a pair of toenail clippers at mile 140.

Lemonade from lemons and all that, so at least this gave us a practice run at telling the story of a big event like this in the lead up to the next race, the Tahoe 200. We won't be able to put together a podcast episode from Bigfoot material this year, but as a consolation prize, here are 4 takeaways from our experience running medical at the 2018 Bigfoot 200 Mile Endurance Run. 

For the uninitiated, the Bigfoot 200 is a 206 mile point to point foot race through the Cascade Mountains, running roughly from Mount St Helens towards Mt Adams on remote trails and a little bit of forest service road. Participants have 105 hours (4 days, 9 hours) to complete the course, and it's not a stage race - meaning the clock never stops ticking, so racers are encouraged to sleep as little as possible and move as fast as they can. It's arguably the hardest, most scenic 200 mile race in the United States. Sure, there's not that much competition for that title, and there aren't really any easy 200 milers, but you get the picture - it's really something.

You might be wondering how a person might be able to complete that sort of thing. I am too. I can say as a bystander and someone who's also run very long distances in the past that it looked hard. More on that in a bit.

But stepping behind the curtain, the thing that stood out was that getting runners through that course was a massive production involving multiple paid professionals, and literally hundreds of volunteers, crew, and pacers doing thousands of hours of work. Being part of it felt a bit like being a member of a pit crew at a NASCAR race. The runners were driving, but a churning mass of coordinated humanity held things together to get the through the course. Communication alone involved the week-long presence of 40 volunteer HAM Radio operators stationed at various remote locations in the mountains. I heard that the Costco bill for aid stations was over $10,000, and there were volunteers who flew in for a week just to feed and support the other volunteers.

​I'm not just saying this - it was a genuinely mind boggling thing to witness, and it gave me huge respect for Candice Burt and the crew who pull off three of these in three months, and huge appreciation for the volunteers who donate weeks of vacation time to hang out with a bunch of smelly runners trying to accomplish something ridiculous. 

From my perspective, this was one of the things I loved about the experience. The whole philosophy of this Boldly Went thing is that it's community that makes adventure. This was a big ol' week-long illustration of that.

And yeah, I guess the lunatics doing actually running these things deserve some amount of credit as well. These people are gritty.

The best, most representative lost story from our audio recording, in my opinion, is from Nick Davis, who's participated in the race all four years since it's inception. At mile 140, he asked me to look at his ankle, where he had intense point tenderness at the base of his (oversized) calf, and pain that had been getting worse for hours. I'm no physio, so I asked Angel to check him out, and she diagnosed him with a likely partially torn Achilles, and made the recommendation that he drop due to the possibility of serious long-term damage. He decided to sleep on it, and when he woke up, he told me he was going to try to go on, but wanted to build a heel lift and asked if we had any cork or similar. 

After digging through the back of our car, I came across these nice, soft foam novelty Hulk hands:

I cut out a heel-sized chunk of Hulk using trauma shears, stuck it in his shoe, and Nick headed out for two more nights in the wilderness.

No sensible adult would argue that this was a good decision, but when Angel and I rolled in to the finish line, Nick had just come through, Hulk-flesh still in his shoe, having hobbled 66 miles past where we last saw him.

These people are resilient.  Even more than other long, slow races, the game in 200 milers seems to be to just keep moving, managing nutrition and sleep deprivation and nausea and feet and soft tissue injuries and the entirely rational desire to quit. The most successful runners, in my experience, kept a sense of humor and perspective about the whole hardcore but patently ridiculous endeavor, pampered their feet like babies, slept when they started to get psychotic symptoms, and spent days on end convincing themselves not to quit until eventually they finished.

Exhaustion makes you regress, so runners would flop themselves into aid stations like over-extended toddlers into their parents arms, and put themselves at the mercy of crew and volunteers to feed them and fix their feet and convince them that they could actually do this before stumbling off into the woods offering profuse and mildly incoherent thanks. I can't speak to what happened out there in the woods, but from the view of the aid station, it's a scene.

​People push through for up to 4 1/2 days on end with little to no sleep and nearly constant movement. That's gritty.

Don't read this the wrong way - we kept people safe during this whole thing - but in order to be a medic in a 200 mile ultramarathon, I had to adjust my mindset a bit.

As a hospital-trained nurse, my goals at work are pretty simple: provide care and encourage people to do what they need to in order to get better as quickly as possible.

But as a medic at Bigfoot, where people are pushing themselves right up to the edge of their abilities, the goal was to help them hold it together long enough to get through the race safely. 

So, while my inner clinical nurse would advise any patient with gnarly blisters, sleep deprivation, dehydration and strained muscles to take a shower, clean their wounds, drink some water and go the hell to sleep for a couple of days, as a race medic my job was to assess for safety, and patch them up and send them out into the elements as they weren't on the cusp of a medical emergency. A few runners quit the race with infected blisters and soft tissue injuries, but most of our job consisted of cleaning people up, slapping on bandages and tape, and telling them to keep moving. If they were hallucinating, sleep until they stopped, and then get back out there. 

Hospital management would frown, but four days of well-managed and emotionally-supported suffering is essentially what people paid for in entering this race. Being a medic meant patching people up so they could safely keep hurting for a few hours longer.

Every outdoor and endurance discipline has its challenges. As someone who's thru hiked, run up to 100 miles, and moved up to 36 hours at a time, I was wondering what this experience would be about. I'm a bit of a natural skeptic, so part of me thought the number was a bit of a novelty - that it would just be standard ultra running, only longer. But, at least from the outside, it really did feel like its own game.

The endeavor obviously requires an extremely high level of physical fitness to complete - one of the medical volunteers was a long-time medic for the US Marine Corps, and he said that these runners fitness levels were on average much higher. But all ultra runners are extremely fit, and most of these runners aren't training differently for a 200 than they would a 100, at least physically. It's the mental game that seemed different, and the race required a huge amount of strategy and preplanning around sleep, foot care, injury management, and mental commitment to completing the race. 

The most comparable experience, physically, seems to be thru hiking for speed or Fastest Known Time attempts on long trails like the John Muir or Arizona Trails. But the event happens with support and in a crowd, so there are hamburgers and friendship. 

And that crowd piece is what made it feel important. My image is that the ultra running community at its core is a bunch of eccentrics doing niche activities on the edge of what's possible. While the trail and ultra communities have grown exponentially in recent years, making 100 miles feel human, if not normal, this crowd felt like an emerging expression of that spirit. Not mainstream yet, by any means, but still a bunch of hardcore oddballs creating something intriguing and weird enough to be important. It still feels like people are figuring out how to do it, so it's generative and experimental, and the formulas haven't quite been set yet.  But people are clearly being sucked in. Participants were the types of people who'd done it all in other areas of running - local legends and international notables, and people came to the race from at least 8 countries and dozens of states. By report the Tahoe 200, which has about 100 more participants, is even more diverse.

In short, as someone experiencing this for the first time, 200's feel like a thing in the adventure world - gritty, nearly impossible, absurd, and innovative.