Photo courtesy Rick Barraff.

Ever wonder what it would be like to pound sand 16 hours a day in 100-degree weather? Me neither, but now I know.

Dave Heckman and I just returned from stashing our food, water, and supplies for our July circumnavigation of Death Valley National Park. He swung the pick, and I wielded the shovel, and together we dug about one hole an hour, 38 holes in all.

We met five years ago at a training camp I was running in Death Valley, and Dave impressed me as guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously and lives on a pretty even keel, without a lot of highs and lows. In time, I also got to see how damn funny he can be.

I’m thinking his dry sense of humor should come in handy out in the desert. Ba-dump-bump.

Dave Heckman

Neither of us are clock-watchers, and we were in sync when we were digging, especially about just getting the job done no matter how long it took. I’m looking forward to getting this expedition underway with him and appreciate the expertise he brings: as a fire fighter and medic who’s worked at the Badwater Ultramarathon for several years, there’s a degree of calm under pressure that’s invaluable. (BTW, we leave for the circumnavigation just a couple of days after Badwater, where I’ll make my attempt at a 24th crossing, wearing bib #24.) He’s also an athlete, of course, especially into endurance running and cycling.  One of his favorite activities is camping in Death Valley National Park, and he’s spent many days there and in the surrounding desert. Plus, plus, plus.

Dave’s also a family man, happily married to his wife Vanessa, and from what I’ve seen, Dave’s a great dad. After finishing our big dig and returning to Dave’s home in Northern California, we took his two young ones, Dylan (a few months) and Jack (3 years), on a long walk around Half Moon Bay, and I loved watching him interact with these little guys! So positive and encouraging, never a cross word, and it was obvious Jack had picked up on all that and helped to entertain Dylan, making him laugh as they rode side-by-side in a stroller for well over an hour.

Holes

Photo courtesy Rick Barraff.

Most of our stashes are 8-12 miles apart, although in the China Lakes area, it’s much farther than that. They’re all around two feet deep, nearly half are two feet by 18 inches, and the rest are trenches about the size of a short person’s grave. (We probably looked highly suspicious to passers-by. What passers-by? I’m sure those kangaroo rats and scorpions would have raised their eyebrows at us if they’d had eyebrows.) The bigger holes hold our caches for our overnight stays, while the smaller ones have just the water we need on the move. We had to make two caches in rock piles, because there wasn’t any suitable place to dig down.

In all, we buried 350 gallons of water and expect to drink about 2/3 of it. In the southern parts of our route, where temps will be over 120 degrees, we’ll need a gallon an hour to stay properly hydrated. We also put in a bunch of freeze-dried meals our sponsor RacingThePlanet gave us: Expedition Foods, including a bunch “formulated for Asian tastes,” which means we’ll get to enjoy some traditional Chinese flavors along with our Dinty Moore stew. To protect the stashes from critters, we spread some cayenne pepper in and around each hole.

Meanwhile, folks on Facebook have been asking a few questions about how this is going to work:

How will you know where you’ve buried your stuff?

The sites are unmarked, but we noted GPS coordinates and took photos of the surroundings, as well as stepped off and recorded the distance from some significant landmark, like an identifiable rock.

How will you keep the water cool?

That’s one of the benefits of burying the water. It should be 40 to 50 degrees cooler than the air temperature.

What will you do with trash?

We’re bagging up anything unused or left over from each cache and leaving it at a designated spot for Heather and some helpers to pick up after us. We intend to follow the credo of “leave no trace,” making sure that we leave each place as we found it or better.

Will there be a book or a film about this expedition?

We’re hoping a major magazine will cover it, and we’re laying the groundwork to produce a documentary or TV special. More than that, we do want to share the history of the Valley’s people and events, starting with the Timbisha Shoshone and including the explorers, miners, and visionaries. We’d love to convey the magic, mystery, and variety of landscapes in Death Valley National Park — this is not an empty, ugly place but rather one of the most miraculous and beautiful.

Do you have any questions about the expedition? I’m happy to answer them here.

Photo courtesy Rick Barraff.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dave Mackey, 2011 North American ultrarunner of the year,
hitting the trail and the road in his Hoka One One shoes

Admittedly, I was intensely skeptical when a good friend of mine, Dave Mackey, suggested I try a pair of Hoka One One running shoes.

I mean, have you seen these things? Even to an anti-minimalist like me (no sandals or rubbery toe shoes touch these feet), they looked like broad and bulky clodhoppers. I was expecting a heavy, unstable shoe that would have me tripping over myself.

Don’t let looks deceive you, too, though, or you might deprive yourself of some of the best running of your life.

Lighter, More Stable, Lasts Longer

Depending on the model, the Hoka One One (pronounced Ho-kah Oh-nay Oh-nay, meaning “Time to Fly” in Māori) shoes weigh in somewhere between 10 and just over 11 ounces, about 15% LIGHTER than most. How do they do this? Turns out that the midsole is comprised of an ultralight, durable, stable (up to 20mm of  compression) material that absorbs up to 80% of the shock caused by running. I asked around and discovered that the midsole foam is something new that the HOO crew figured out would make a great running shoe.

And although the tread looks like it isn’t aggressive enough, when I wore the shoes out on a trail, I started to think that the more surface area on the dirt the better, and more stability comes from a larger footprint as well as your foot sitting well down in the footbed. The grip of the shoe was some of the best I’ve encountered. Another pleasant surprise came when I was running on rocks: instead of stepping over and around, I suddenly felt confident and ran OVER the rocks, barely feeling them at all.

I pronate, and my usual shoes break down in less than 200 miles — and those are the ones with support for pronation. I noticed that the Hokas are a neutral shoe with the prescribed 4mm lift. So I ran and I ran, and I wound up getting about twice the mileage on these shoes with virtually no wear on the outer tread.

The more I ran with them, the more I liked them. I found myself covering about twice the distance with essentially NO muscle fatigue. The rocker-type construction allows the foot to settle into a natural heel-to-toe movement and improves form while you are running, which allows a faster recovery even when you’re coming off a hard training or racing event.

Now for the real proof in the pudding: Having run in these for several months, I forgot to put them in my car once. After driving to the start of my route, I found that I did at least have some old favorites in the backseat. Slipping them on and taking off down the road, I felt impact … much more than normal. Then the next day, my muscles were sore and my knees hurt for the first time in ages. I thought this was all in my head, but when it happened again, after forgetting them a second time, I knew I was onto something. And I knew I’d better get a few extra pairs of Hokas so that doesn’t happen ever again.

So are there any drawbacks? About the only thing that bothered me was the lacing on the uppers, but with a few tweaks I found that skipping an eyelet did the trick. But that’s not even an issue anymore: recently, when I got a new pair, I noticed that they’ve fixed the lacing system.

When I describe these shoes to other people, I usually say things like, “They are as close to riding a bike as you can get with a running shoe,” “They allow the foot to perform as if you were running without shoes at all,” “These are the bomb,” and “Finally! A running shoe that will change the industry for the better.”

Truly, give them a try, and you’ll thank me. I can’t imagine running in anything else.

Have you already tried any of the Hoka One One shoes? If so, which ones, and what was your experience?

In case you’re wondering what a couple of people need to survive an expedition like this, here’s what we’re dropping into about 30 holes we’ll dig in the sand:

• Water: 500 gallons, most of which will be stashed in pairs of 1-gallon containers about 10 miles apart (however, around China Lakes, we’re looking at five 1-gallon containers about 25 miles apart)
• Food: mostly freeze dried Expedition Food provided by our sponsor, RacingThePlanet, plus a few MREs and canned meals to supplement
• Miscellaneous: toothpaste, sunscreen, Sportslick, batteries for our GPS, and Sustain electrolyte tablets

Each stash will also have a note:

“Please don’t disturb. We are making a 500-mile circumnavigation of this area during the summer 2012. Our lives depend on our access to this food and water.”

We could certainly survive if someone felt they just HAD to pinch our toothpaste.

Have you done an adventure run in Iceland? Me neither. Yet.

If you spend any time fooling around with Facebook, you’ve probably seen the so-called challenge lists:

“How many of these books have you read?”

“How many of these countries have you visited?”

“How many of these beers have you tried?”

Pick a topic, and there’s probably some list.

But instead of checking items off of someone else’s challenge list, why not make your own? Do you have a bucket list, or life list, or 100-things-I’ve-gotta-see list — or anything like that?

I do. When I was five, there was only one thing on it: climb Mt. Everest. It took me until I was 52 to check that one off. You can see my much longer adult list in my book, at the start of Chapter 2. Once I checked the last box on that one — completing the run across America — I confess I didn’t quite know what was next. Would I stop running? I knew I’d never attempt that kind of distance again, and I was determined to slow down a bit, to savor each experience in a way that I hadn’t done before. But what the hell was I supposed to DO?

If you haven’t made a personal challenge list, it may be because you’re feeling the same way. What would I put on it? Here’s what you do: pick anywhere from three to ten things — adventures, places, books, athletic accomplishments, intellectual pursuits, artistic expressions, family activities, sights, sounds, feelings — whatever turns you on and makes you say, “That! Now that would be amazing.”

And then, once you have a list, you pick just one item and go for it. Don’t let up. Chase it like your life depends on it, because in many ways it does. What’s that saying? It’s not the number of years in your life that counts. It’s the life in your years.

When I allowed myself to start thinking this way again, it didn’t take long to start rebuilding the tick list, including the upcoming first-ever circumnavigation of Death Valley National Park, as well as a spectacular adventure run in Iceland, put on by RacingThePlanet. Because I gravitate to gorgeous scenery, remarkable geography, and unique sensory experiences, these two are at the top right now.

What’s next on your list? Please post it in the comments below. I’d love to see it, and you might spark some ideas for others, too.

See another story like this that ran on USA Today digital earlier this month.

Later, I would find out that Micah True was born Michael Randall Hickman, but this and other tidbits from his bio never overshadowed my first impression, or the man he ultimately became.

Today, I was thinking about one race we had together, the now defunct “Doc Holiday” 35-miler, when I chased Scott Demaree (a sub-6-hour 50-mile runner) and Micah up and down the trails around Glenwood Springs, Colorado.  Neither of them looked much like runners (other than having the lean body type), Micah with his long unkempt hair and Scott sometimes wearing street pants — back then, there were really no good tights or high tech Gore-Tex cover, or at least any that any of us could afford.

Scott and Micah would battle for the lead and I would be a few places back, sucking wind and marveling at how fast those guys in front could fly. Only when we got to the Leadville 100 race could I outpace them. (One year during that run on the Winfield or the backside of Hope Pass, at about 45 miles into the race, I watched Micah clutching his quads, grinning from ear to ear knowing that he had gone out, as he said, “a bit fast.”)

Recently, I read an article that averred “Micah True wasn’t the fastest or best runner,” but believe me, back then, he had speed. And after the races he would disappear back to Nederland, Colorado, a quirky little city that now hosts “Frozen Dead Guy Days,” where he was living  at the time.

Later on in the mid-1990s, Micah was introduced to the Rarámuri, a.k.a. Tarahumara Indians, at the Leadville 100 and paced them (so, yes, he had to have had good speed). Chris McDougall wrote extensively about their relationship in Born to Run, and I believe that Micah helped pace the Rarámuri in more ways than running. He became someone they could trust.

I prefer to think of Micah as just Micah, and not Michael or Caballo Blanco. I recollect him as someone who devoted a big part of himself to helping or bettering the lives of those people he’d become so familiar with, and who’d become so familiar with him. I love what he had to say about that — a sentiment worth remembering him for:

“The Rarámuri are not ’super-human’ as depicted by some.
They are very real people facing very real problems and issues,
like all of us. We are all much more alike than different.” 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why so happy? (Do you remember? Navin thinks he’s a “real person” once his name appears in print. Am I so different?)

My 2011 memoir, Running on Empty, has just been released in paperback!
Available now from all the cool places:

Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Books-A-Million | iTunes | Indiebound

* * *

Some of the nice things people have been saying about the book:

Few on this planet can match Ulrich’s extraordinary athletic accomplishments. He is nearly superhuman in his stamina and his willingness to endure mental and physical pain.
–The Denver Post

Ulrich pours his heart and soul into this page-turner.
–Running Times

Marshall is The Man. Definitively. His run across America at the age of fifty-seven sealed that distinction forever. … Nothing can stop him, and that gives us all hope, gives us resolve to keep trying.
–Dean Karnazes

From the back cover:

… Ulrich’s memoir imbues an incredible read with a universal message for athletes and nonathletes alike: face the toughest challenges, overcome debilitating setbacks, and find deep fulfillment in something greater than achievement.

Every July, about 90 hardcore athletes go there to participate in a 135-mile footrace National Geographic has called the toughest in the world, the Badwater Ultramarathon. Since my first showing in 1990, I’ve finished this race 17 times and won it four times, and I hold the record for the old course of 146 miles, which ends at the top of Mt. Whitney. I love this event and the people it attracts — they’re like a second family to me.

Death Valley has been a proving ground, too: years ago, I was the first to run the course four times in a row, and the first to conquer it unaided and unassisted.

Forgive me for reciting my resume. My point isn’t to brag, but to give you some context for this next part:

When my buddy, firefighter Dave Heckman, who also serves as a medic at the Badwater race, revealed his plans to make his way around the perimeter of Death Valley National Park, I thought, That’s f*&@ing nuts.

In other words, given all the time I’ve spent out there, given all the experience I’ve amassed in this and other desert races, this circumnavigation sounded insane. Over-the-top crazy, nearly 500 miles of lunacy. No, thank you. Good luck to you, my friend, and good day.

But the “impossible” tends to get my attention, and after some deliberation about the merits of this adventure, I decided to join him. So this July, we’ll attempt the first-ever circumnavigation of Death Valley National Park together.

To succeed, we’ll need to

1. overcome the threat of deadly dehydration and severe heat exhaustion (both fatal in the desert),
2. navigate through tough terrain and over several mountain ranges up to 5,000 feet (the exertion required to do this makes number 1 more ominous), and
3. be self-reliant for the most part, as the route takes us into remote areas where medical or other support won’t be available. (Get stung by a scorpion? Best to wash with soap and water and hope for the best.)

“I have heard complaint that the thermometer failed
to show the true heat because the mercury dried up. Everything dries; wagons dry; men dry; chickens dry; there is no juice left in anything living or dead, by the close of summer.”

— J. R. Ross, for the first U.S. mineral resources
survey of Death Valley in 1868

But just because the desert is inhospitable, that doesn’t mean we can’t survive it.

A mature Mesquite

Unusual desert creatures, like the nearly extinct Desert’s Hole pupfish and the Mesquite tree, have found ways to endure the arid heat.

The pupfish makes its home in shallow, hot water — or mud, when the surface moisture evaporates in winter — that can be three times saltier than the ocean. (Its population has shrunk to less than 200, however, since the introduction of groundwater pollution.) Mesquite trees sink their roots as much as 60 feet into the desert floor to find water.

People, too, have gotten by with much less than the food, water and other provisions we will have stashed in advance.

In the mid-1800s, when forty-niners pushed through Death Valley in search of a passageway to the promise of California gold, many people and livestock perished, but many made it. They lived by their wits, learned the safest trails, and prevailed on the wisdom and ways of the Timbisha Shoshone, the indigenous people of Death Valley.

Ancient petroglyphs

Indeed, the Shoshone were making their homes among the Mesquite more than a thousand years before the first white man arrived in the desert. Their story echoes that of so many native people: living peacefully off the land, they welcomed (however warily) the outsiders and helped them survive the harsh conditions. But their immune systems were unprepared for the attack of foreign germs, and many died from the “new” diseases brought into the desert. During several boom and bust cycles of mining for borax, salt, and various metals in Death Valley, the native people were also exploited for cheap labor.

Today, a reservation gives about 60 Timbisha Shoshone a home but little else. They struggle to support themselves economically, and the traditional ways have proven insufficient in modern times. The few remaining people, including a tribe historian, keep the customs and spiritual principles of this group alive, while their future looks as uncertain as that of the endangered pupfish.

The arrival of non-native people has taken its toll on Death Valley. Groundwater contamination, mining, and military bombing sites leave a lasting mark. Now, efforts to capitalize on the desert for more ecological energy resources, such as wind and solar power, raise new questions.

In and Around Death Valley National Park

As we depart from the lowest point in North America at Badwater Basin and head northeast to the perimeter, we’ll go counter-clockwise through the roughest parts of the trip first and make our way around the upright rectangle that outlines Death Valley National Park, and then finish back again at Badwater.

Dave running the dunes in Death Valley

The entire trip should take around a month, as we will be covering the equivalent of about a marathon per day. Some sections will require technical climbing (with ropes) to navigate exposed rock faces over the mountains. At all times, we’ll be carrying backpacks weighing between 5 and 50 pounds, depending on how much water we’re toting. (Water will be stashed every 25 miles, and we’ll need 5 gallons of water between each stash. Each gallon weighs close to 8-1/2 pounds.)

We’ll be expecting daytime temperatures between 110 and 130 degrees Fahrenheit in the lower elevations and in the 80s and 90s in the mountains. Nighttime temps may dip to the 40s or 50s at higher elevations, which will feel bitingly cold, as Dave and I will have become acclimated to intense heat during the day. We’ll sleep on the ground in bivy bags.

Unbelievably beautiful, the scenery in Death Valley National Park offers strange attractions, too. For example,

1. 

   The Death Valley "racetrack"

   On the “racetrack” in the valley between the Cottonwood and Last Chance mountain ranges, big boulders seemingly move under their own power — or is there some other force that rearranges them periodically? No one has ever seen the rocks move, but they leave tracks.

2. Stark and dramatic, at Ubehebe (Timbisha for “big basket in the rock”), a 770-foot deep and 3000-foot wide crater formed after a volcanic steam explosion thousands of years ago.
3. Police captured Charles Manson at Barker Ranch, the last hideout of the mass murderer and his “family.” At the time, they took him into custody for vandalizing the national park. It remains a site of dark tourism.
4. The great tramway over the Inyo Mountains once carried as much as 24 tons of salt per hour, up and out of the Saline Valley mines. Yet the cost of constructing the tramway stripped “the world’s purest salt” company of its profits, and when the depression hit in the 1940s, it ceased operation after just 7 years. However, the structure still stands.
5. Badwater Basin, the second hottest place on earth, the lowest point in North America, and the starting point for the annual Badwater race floods periodically, covering the salt pan with standing water that then evaporates quickly. The “bad water” (too salty to drink) provides habitat to such flora and fauna as the pickleweed and Badwater snail.

As we make our trek around Death Valley National Park, we’ll wear head-mounted cameras, as well as carry a small HD handheld, to capture even the most remote parts of the trip. We’ll make contact with support crew as needed at stash points, though we intend to stay as self-reliant as possible, most likely seeing another human about once every other day, or every 50 miles.

To help us prepare, we’ll interview survival experts and people who are especially knowledgeable about the detrimental effects of the desert, such as my longtime buddy and Badwater’s official coroner, Ben Jones.

We’ll store our caches of packaged food (MREs), water, and camp supplies along the route in April and May to prepare for the journey, which will begin around July 21, 2012, less than a week after I will have attempted my 18th Badwater race and 24th Death Valley crossing.

Stay tuned for details. We’ll have a SPOT Tracker, so those who are interested can follow our progress, and we may have other ways of communicating what’s happening while we’re “out there.” Wish us luck!

A run below Death Valley's Funeral Mountains. Photo by Sean Arbabi.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s a look at the Comrades Marathon:
“This is 14,000 champions, 14,000 winners, 14,000 heroes.”

Finally, this June I’ll make my debut at the Comrades Marathon, running from Pietermaritzburg to Durban in the Kwazulu-Natal Province of South Africa.

The race, begun in 1921 by a former infantryman, memorializes World War I soldiers who died in battle. It has continued every year since then, except for four years during WWII. Everyone who’s anyone in long distance running has finished the Comrades Marathon, and I regret not having done it before now. But before, I would have been out there busting my ass to earn a bronze or silver medal, and now I’ll savor the experience and simply work toward finishing before the cut-off of 12 hours. One of the perks of being 60.

Another perk: Go Trail has asked me to give a presentation on desert racing while I’m there. (Comrades won’t be anything like the desert, though, unless you want to compare it to the Gobi, and that’s a bit of a stretch.) We’ll be covering everything from the Badwater Ultramarathon to the incomparable 4 Deserts series, probably with a few tales of Mt. Everest thrown in just to confuse them.

Then my number-one comrade, Heather, and I will vacation in South Africa for a while, reminiscent of our honeymoon trip back in 2003. So, sure, regrets? I’ve had a few. But plenty of second chances, too.

How about you? Are there any “great races” you’re putting off? Why?

Climbing together in Ecuador, February 2012

Seriously, though, this is the longest I’ve ever been married, and I intend to stay that way.

Thank goodness Heather feels the same. One of the “secrets” to our relationship is that she puts up with a lot. Obviously, that’s not under wraps, as I wrote about all of this in my book, “Running on Empty,” out in paperback a couple of days after our anniversary.

A central element in the story is how we met late in life and she taught me to love again after great personal tragedy and previous marriages. I credit her not only with helping me to become a better man (to whatever degree that’s true), but also with being crucial to my completing that epic, record-setting transcontinental run.

You can imagine that being with someone like me requires a strength of its own, a special brand of emotional endurance. Heather not only puts up with my craziness but embraces it as an essential part of me. In an interview we did with AOL in the spring, we talked about our “extreme marriage” and how much I draw on her strength.

So it’s fitting that I break it down for you, Heather-style, as we approach the latest landmark in this whole book adventure.

Here are some tips for women in a relationship with a “crazy” man. (While you could certainly flip it and use these in a relationship with a woman prone to extremes, since this is based on Heather’s example, the gender is what it is here.)

• Let men be men. All of us need to express ourselves in unique ways, and for one man, it may be running across the U.S., while for another, it may be a guys’ getaway in Baja, Mexico, and for another, it may be watching a show about Bigfoot.
• Respect that thing you think is silly or risky or even dangerous, as it can bring out the best in both of you. It isn’t anti-feminist to embrace the dreams and aspirations of men who want to test their mettle, whether that’s in sport, business, finance, or any of the other classically male area of contest. This also applies to men who want to explore the arts and other creative pursuits. The truth is that most men like to succeed, no matter their particular interest. Support them in it.
• Agree that this is a reciprocal arrangement, where both partners commit to seeing each other become the fullest versions of themselves. If you can find it in your heart to encourage him in something you’d otherwise ignore or even dismiss, he can do the same for you. Who knows what you might accomplish together?