Going the (ultra) distance
Ruth Croft says running 100 miles was fun at times – particularly when she was joined by three pals in dinosaur suits. Tony Smith reports.
The sight of three towering ‘dinosaurs’ shadowing her down the home straight had Kiwi ultramarathoner Ruth Croft cracking up after running 160km in searing heat.
Croft crossed the finish line last weekend to win the Western States Endurance Run – a 100-mile slog over California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range billed as one of the world’s toughest running races.
It was a personal triumph for the 33-year-old West Coaster whose pre-race buildup had been blighted by an Achilles tendon strain, two sprained ankles and catching Covid.
Yet, despite the attendant aches and pains from running for 17 hours 21 minutes and 30 seconds, she still managed a big grin as she was ‘‘chased by dinosaurs’’ for the final 300m on the Placer High School athletics track in Auburn, California, near Sacramento.
Inside the colourful dinosaur suits were her ‘‘awesome support crew’’ – her French partner Martin Gaffuri and Americans Alex Varner and David Thompson.
‘‘They crewed for me last year too and they said if I was doing well this year they would get into dinosaur costumes,’’ Croft told Stuff before heading for a beach break in Mexico.
Gaffuri paced her for the last 30km, but near the finish went ahead, and donned his dinosaur clobber to join the similarly clad Varner and Thompson in the finish chute.
The mere thought of running 160km in a searing hot American summer would send more sedentary Kiwis clamouring for the comforts of the couch.
But Croft – a professional ultrarunner for seven years – says ‘‘having fun’’ is a big part of her racing mojo.
‘‘Ultra running isn’t only about putting one foot in front of the other, it’s what we make of it,’’ Croft wrote on Instagram. ‘‘You can make it long, hard, challenging, damaging . . . I choose to make it fun.’’
‘‘I love what I do and I take it seriously,’’ she later told Stuff. ‘‘But I also like to have fun too. Think about it, running 100 miles is a bloody long way if you don’t have fun doing it.’’
During last weekend’s race, Croft shrugged off the inevitable down moments and instead enjoyed meeting her crew at various waypoints, running for around 35km with her Adidas Terrex team-mate Emily Hawgood, and having a laugh and interesting conversations with Varner, as they crossed the American River at Rucky Chucky, near a set of rapids. Then, there was the close encounter with her pals dressed like Jurassic World Dominion movie extras.
Costume-donning isn’t a new ruse for Team Croft. While supporting New Zealand’s Coast-to-Coast race last summer, she dressed as the Pink Panther and Gaffuri wore a devil’s garb. They had hoped to hire cougar suits for the Western States, but had to settle for dinosaur ensembles. The Tyrannosaurus Rex outfit proved an apt fit, with Croft running for an Adidas Terrex-sponsored team.
It all added up to an unforgettable experience for a woman who vowed she’d never do the Western States 100 again after finishing second at her first attempt last year.
California’s classical race is the longest she’d tackled by 40km. ‘‘I’d done 120k before and had run for 14 hours, but this is another three hours, and that’s massive.
‘‘I felt destroyed after last year’s race. It’s a massive thing you are doing to your body, running 100 miles. It took me a long time to recover from that.’’
But, as Croft said in a pre-race interview with Irunfar.com last week ‘‘runner amnesia kicks in’’ after the pain subsides, and ‘‘you think of ways you can do it better’’. So she signed on.
Her buildup, however, wasn’t all plain sailing. Croft spent last summer in New Zealand, winning the Kepler Challenge 60km race in Fiordland and the 55km Three Peaks run in Dunedin.
But just before she left to train in Flagstaff, Arizona in early May, she ‘‘had an achilles flareup. I had a week off running, it was painful just walking. When that happens eight weeks out [from the Western States 100], it’s not ideal.’’
After she was able to resume running, Croft suffered a couple of sprained ankles. ‘‘Then I got Covid in Flagstaff, about five weeks out from the race, around the time I was aiming to do my peak mileage in training.’’
‘‘Think about it, running 100 miles is a bloody long way if you don’t have fun doing it.’’
Ruth Croft, receiving her medal from race director Craig Thornley
She kept her challenges to herself until after the race, however, after ‘‘good advice from my coach Jono’’, New Zealand’s six-time former world mountain running champion Jonathan Wyatt.
‘‘He told me not to talk about it, he didn’t want it to become a mental thing. He suggested I just move on and forget about it. Once you start telling people about it, you can talk yourself out of the possibility of having a good race.’’
So Croft kept quiet as she worked hard on the mental side of preparing for her strength-sapping Sierras slog.
With 2021 women’s champion Beth Pascall not defending her title, Croft was one of the pre-race favourites as she lined up at 5am with 383 male and female athletes from 32 countries.
The race began in the Olympic Valley, at an elevation of 1890m (6200 feet). The first 7.2km required runners to climb 762m (2550 feet) to Emigrant Pass (2667m or 8750 feet above sea-level).
Good hydration is vital. Athletes each get around 4km of ice to pack in their vests at each of the 16 aid stations.
Croft’s cooling systems were a lot better this year than last. She kept herself fuelled by eating plenty of energy gels, and she got a mental uplift from running with Hawgood from the Robinson Flat (48km from the start) to Devil’s Thumb (75km).
At one stage the pair were at race record pace, but Croft later said it ‘‘felt like a Sunday long run’’ with her teammate for company. ‘‘I felt as if I wasn’t running with Emily; those miles would have felt a lot tougher’’.
A refreshing ‘‘full body immersion’’ at El Dorado Creek after taking the outright lead got Croft into race mode and she began to feel stronger on the climbs.
Still, there was a tough moment at Pointed Rocks, two stages from the finish, when ‘‘Martin was trying to get me to eat more, but I was checked out at that point’’. Yet, the woman who grew up racing her family in the bush-flanked Paparoa Ranges tapped into her inner resilience to win, 25 minutes ahead of her nearest rival.
Winning was ‘‘definitely a big thrill’’, with her parents and aunt from New Zealand there to share the big moment. ‘‘They don’t often get a chance to watch me race.’’ It made all the resultant pains and strains worth it.
Speaking to Stuff two days later, Croft was beginning to feel she was ‘‘going in the right direction. My stomach is able to take some food, which is good, and the legs are feeling a bit better.’’
Her winning time was the third-fastest by a woman in the race’s 49-year history, but she’s not tempted to take another crack at the 16hr 47min 11sec record set by Ellie Greenwood in 2012.
‘‘The record is very dependent on the weather. When it was set, there was a high of 78 degrees [Fahrenheit]. The high for us was 99 degrees [37deg Celsius]. You can go out to have a crack at the record, but you might get a super hot year. I’m not saying it can’t be done when it’s really hot, but it makes it pretty hard.’’
After heading to a beach in Mexico, she plans to go to Greenland with friends to run the Arctic Circle trail – just for fun.
Then, she’ll head to Chamonix in France to join her Adidas Terrex team at the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB) race in late August, ‘‘not to run, just to support my team-mates’’.
Croft will return in NovemberDecember to New Zealand, where she splits her time between Wā naka and Greymouth, but she’s not ready to commit to any events here yet.