Not for the best racers, though. Moving high above Young, I asked to see his competition form. He Gollum’d past me, his back bent and breath measured—a simian out for a postbanana stroll. A decently fit guy, I tried to keep Young’s pace for 50 yards and nearly upchucked my breakfast frittata. Not even halfway up, sweat already spilled from my chin, and each calf was asking what the hell was going on. I slipped. Slid. Took a step. Slipped again. Ahead, Young kept moving higher. He fed off the altitude, growing more talkative as he climbed, casually mentioning how he used to roll rocks down on the competition to distract them. “Small stuff, nothing that would hurt anybody,” he said. “There’s a lot of trash going on up there.”
If it seems strange that anyone could embrace such suffering, Alaskans show no such dissonance. Each Fourth of July holiday more than 25,000 people descend on little Seward to drink beer, squint at the lame fireworks that fizz in the twilight of an Alaskan summer midnight, and watch the race. Proportionately speaking, in unpeopled Alaska, that’s close to all of Pennsylvania turning out to cheer a Punxsutawney turkey trot. Fans jostle five-deep behind the barricades at the finish line and pool at the mountain’s base like NASCAR fans bunching at turns in hopes of witnessing mayhem. The Anchorage Daily News, the state’s largest newspaper, covers the race as if it were the Kentucky Derby—dissecting course conditions, handicapping the top runners.
One beautiful ex-racer with the wonderfully Pynchonesque name of Cedar Bourgeois told me with damp eyes how the race had taught her skills she’d never had before—drive and mental discipline. Bourgeois is a local celebrity, a Seward-raised girl who won the women’s title seven times in a row. Today, she owns Nature’s Nectars, a coffee shop in the harbor that pours some of the state’s best espresso to groggy fishermen. The Mount Marathon Race, she said, had done nothing less than change her life. “I would have to equate it to motherhood.”
Young and I hit the halfway point, where jungle yielded to tundra. Above us a dim trail zippered up a hard gray forehead of shale to Race Point. The day blossomed around us—the Kenai Mountains pinned up a mouthwash-blue sky. Tour boats bound for Kenai Fjords National Park dragged their wakes up the bay.
On race day, there’s no time to sightsee. After Race Point comes a caveman’s steeplechase. Runners hurl themselves down the mountain at a full sprint. (After ascending in about 33 minutes, elite downhillers like Precosky will plunge from the top to the finish line in less than 11 minutes. The fastest on record is 10:08.) First they scramble down a long, steep snowfield at highway speeds, then run through shin-deep beds of loose shale that feel like sandboxes of shattered glass. Young flew down it with the poise of a mogul skier.
It’s a helluva staircase. Just as heart and quads are redlining, runners then hit the Chute, halfway down the mountain. It’s a tilted gun barrel filled with scree or snow that funnels down to a small gulley called the Gut. The Gut’s centerpiece: a pretty creek dotted with yellow monkey flower and three small waterfalls. Runners have to gallop down this creek, which is strewn with what feels underfoot like wet kitty litter. At one point I slipped, lunged for a lifeline, and grabbed a fistful of devil’s club, a feeling not unlike squeezing your mother’s pincushion.
By this point, “people don’t know their names,” Young said. “They are unconscious, the walking dead.” Now appeared the final obstacle between racers and the crowd’s embrace: the Cliffs, several nasty crags, perhaps 25 feet high and sometimes glazed with rain or dust. Young picked an easier line for us. I was so tweaked, I nearly crab-walked down it.
Even so, the worst part of the race is yet to come. After so much up and down, the final 1,000-meter sprint to the finish line on nearly flat asphalt is excruciating, race veterans told me. “Everybody knows how to run on the street,” Young said, “but not after you’ve been through a blender.”
Why would anyone do this? you ask. The answer is that the peril of the Mount Marathon Race and the pain it inflicts are the very things that give the event its enduring allure; you could even say they are essential. Decades before Tough Mudder began roughing up paying customers, people were slapping down their money, then falling down—hard—at the Mount Marathon Race. On the flying descent, runners have fallen and had to have six-inch spear points of shale extracted from their hindquarters. Seward fire chief Dave Squires, who has aided injured racers for 26 years, told me he has seen everything from dislocations and neck injuries to angry tattoos from sliding down snowfields. A woman once rolled her ankle while evading a pissed-off bear. Another year a man was impaled by a tree branch. One roasting July 4 in the 1980s, 53 people were treated for heat illness. Squires has seen racers suffering from compound fractures—bones actually jutting from their bodies—still running toward the finish line. “Sometimes not very good,” he said, “but they’re still running.” Among three serious injuries in last year’s race, an experienced mountain runner from Anchorage chose an unusual line above the Cliffs, tripped, fell—and suffered lasting brain trauma. A pilot from Utah slid 30 feet down a muddy ramp and off the Cliffs, lacerated her liver, and was hospitalized for five days—saved only from graver injury by a quick-thinking EMT who broke her fall.