After running and sometimes stumbling through a desert for the better part of a day, Reid Roberts was starting to hallucinate.
Using the light of pacer Gwen Preston's headlight to illuminate the trail a few metres in front of him, with the finish line of the 160-kilometre Zion 100 off-road race still 40 kilometres away, Roberts spotted an animal running just ahead of them.
"I was seeing all sorts of things out there, I thought I saw a black wolf in front of Gwen and had to take another look and of course it disappeared," said Roberts, who also saw an imaginary black cat and whisps of smoke during his epic run.
Roberts fought back nausea, sleep deprivation and exhaustion to complete the course in 22 hours 29 minutes 13 seconds to finish 19th overall in the 100-mile event. Adam Zastro of Oakland, Calif., won it in 17:29:12.
Two other Prince George racers took part in the fourth annual Zion 100. Damian Pighin, 34, finished sixth overall in the 100-kilometre race, posting a time of 12:33:37, while Cindy Hartford, 44, finished 47th overall (20th fastest woman) in 18:53:11.
The race started Friday morning at 6 a.m. near Zion national park in southern Utah, following a spectacular desert course on narrow single-track trails lined with sage brush vegetation and strange rock formations. The race-day temperatures climbed into the mid-20s C under sunny skies, which added to the difficulty of the race.
"It's like running through the Cache Creek area, but then you climb up these mesas and get on to this slick rock, which looks like the moon -- it's up and down and you can't get a pace going and you don't want to wipe out because it's like sandpaper," said Roberts. "I tripped a lot in the last 20K but I didn't fall."
Pacers are allowed to join runners after the 80 km checkpoint in the ultramarathon to help guide them over the trails. Roberts was glad he had Preston, a friend from Vancouver, and her boyfriend Doug to show him the way through the dark in the late stages of the race. Roberts's own headlamp died and he didn't bother replacing the batteries because the lights of his pacers were sufficient.
"Gwen ran about a 35 K loop with me and then Doug picked me up for 10K and then Gwen picked me up again for 30K," said Roberts, who finished just before 4:30 a.m. Saturday morning. "They were 10 metres in front of me and I just followed them. If I ran, they ran, and if I stopped and walked they walked. At that point, the brain is so scrambled, trying to find the trail markers is just one added stress to you."
Roberts ate along the way at the aid stations, fueling his five-foot-nine, 145-pound body with bananas, oranges, electrolyte protein gels, ginger ale, soup broth and noodles. He admits he contemplated dropping out of the race about 120 km in but decided to suffer through the pain.
"I was running top-10 for the first 100 km, I was actually doing really well, but my stomach turned and I was dry-heaving for the last 60 km and puking for the last 10 km," Roberts said. "I lost quite a bit of ground resting at the aid stations just getting my stomach on track again. Going down hills is what hurts the most when your legs are shot. It forces yourself to run and that juggles up the stomach even more."
The last 40 km were excruciating because it required the runners to go out on three different 10 km loops, returning to the same aid station three times. For Roberts, every time he saw that aid station it felt like he was no closer to the finish line. He wanted to sleep every time he reached the station and had to refuse an offer by the attendant to use a cot to rest because he was afraid he'd sleep too long.
"The last 10K I got one km out and started puking and I was forced to just power walk the last nine km in," he said. "I was falling asleep as I was walking and weaving all over the place. My eyes would shut and I'd have a one-second power nap and then snap myself out of it. If someone saw they would have thought I was drunk."
At the finish line, he slept for about 15 minutes before he returned to the hotel for a five-hour sleep. Roberts, a gym teacher at D.P. Todd secondary school, flew back to Prince George Sunday afternoon.
"Surprisingly, the legs feel pretty normal today, no worse than any other race so I'm pretty happy about that," he said. "My goal was to go 24 hours and besides finishing, that was my biggest goal."
Of the 185 who started the 100-miler, 135 finished within the 24-hour cutoff time.
Roberts phoned his wife Chelsea after the race and told her he would never again race a 100-mile event. Because of the training involved, Roberts had to sacrifice a lot of time with his wife and their two children, Kiona 7, and Sawyer, 4. He started training for the Zion race soon after he finished second at the Fat Dog race in Manning provincial park last August. His longest race before Zion was the Sinister Seven 147 km off-road race he ran three years ago.
"It's such a commitment training for one of these things and my wife has been phenomenal with allowing me to train as much as I do and then going on this trip which was five days away from home," said Roberts. "This distance is so tough physically and mentally. To go out and do a five- or six-hour run on a Saturday, you're expecting your spouse to have the kids all day. I think I'm better suited to the 100K distance where you don't need as much training."
Roberts was impressed with the 100km results of Pighin and Hartford.
"Damian had a fabulous race," said Roberts. He had a few issues early on with stomach cramps but he had a strong finish and picked off runners at the end. I ran the 100K last year and did it in 12 hours and they changed it and added one big climb and he did it in 12:30 and that's a great time. That's his longest distance over 64 K and that was Cindy's first crack at that distance. She did great."
