Rick Trujillo Trains in the Rockies, Not on the Roads
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Rick Trujillo trains in the Rockies, not on the roads. He chases elk, not PRs. He fuels up on Oreos, not PowerBars. He loves running. But is it possible to love it too much? BY Steve Friedman PHOTOGRAPHS BY Ture Lillegraven 86 JANUARY 2009 0109TRUILLO_finREV.indd 86 11112008143925 11/11/08 2:38:33 PM HIGHER CALLING Trujillo, overlooking Telluride, Colorado, has spent his life running the trails of the San Juan Mountains. 0109TRUILLO_fin.indd 87 11102008155723 11/10/08 3:56:35 PM CLIFFHANGER Trujillo pauses along Bear Creek Trail, part of the Hardrock 100 course. He won that race in 1996. avid Horton is a 58-year-old professor of kinesiology who has devoted much of his life to running courses so long, steep, and absurdly brutal that many other merely elite runners—marathon champions, for example—chuckle and shake their heads when they read of his exploits. Horton set a speed record by running the 2,175-mile length of the Appalachian Trail in 1991 in 52 days, nine hours, and 41 minutes, and he in- Dspired a movie when he set a record running the Pacific Crest Trail in 2005, all 2,650 miles of it (he did it in 66 days, seven hours, and 16 minutes, a record that still stands). Horton, whose nickname in the trail and mountain running They met in Ouray, Colorado, where the geologist lived, and communities is, simply, “The Runner,” believes in optimism they headed toward snowy peaks. They ran for a long time. They and toughness and in the men and women who embrace these ran up very steep slopes. Horton doesn’t remember exactly how traits in their quest to run ridiculous distances over laughably long, or how far, or how steep, because it happened 16 years ago, difficult terrain. and because, even though measurements like 2,650 miles mean In the summer of 1992, Horton heard of one such man, a ge- something to men like Horton, the distance a man can go in a ologist who lived in the San Juan Mountains of Southwestern day is too trivial to pay much mind. (Mountain runners, like Colorado and who, according to legend, trained by running with trail runners, avoid paved roads and regular mileage markers. elk. Horton figured that any man who could inspire such a The routes that mountain runners travel, though, are often un- comically tall, patently impossible tale would be a man worth marked and just happen to slither up mountains.) What Horton running up a mountain with. remembers most vividly is that when the two men arrived at a 88 JANUARY 2009 0109TRUILLO_fin.indd 88 11102008154951 11/10/08 3:48:38 PM Twilight of the Mountain God cliff face that no human would ever consider running, Horton where Trujillo ordered a plate of chicken nuggets. “I don’t un- stopped and he did what mountain runners did. derstand how people spend lots of money on stuff that’s going “What are you doing?” the geologist asked. to be gone the next day,” he said, when I inquired—this was an “I’m walking,” Horton replied. “Isn’t that what you do when expense account meal, after all—whether he wouldn’t prefer you get to a place in the mountains that’s impossible to run? something a little fancier. “People ask me what my diet is, and I Isn’t this how you do it?” say, whatever’s available. Iguana, goat. I eat what’s there.” No, the geologist said, that’s not how he did it. He was 59 but looked 45. He had black hair slicked back, a face Well, Horton wondered, how did he do it? of granite slabs, and he bore a vague resemblance to Jack Palance. “I keep running,” the geologist said. “And when I get to a place He was 5'11" (“I used to be closer to six-foot-one”) and weighed I can’t run anymore, I turn around and I run home.” 155 pounds, the same he had weighed since his first year in col- That was the day Horton understood where he fit in the firma- lege, despite an appetite for sugar and sweets that baffles those ment of mountain runners. That was the day “The Runner” who know him well. He bought ice cream by the gallon. “What- started believing the stories about the man who ran with elk. ever flavor is there. Whatever brand is cheapest.” He ate it by the half gallon. “The one thing I can’t do without is cookies.” He hitched his jeans up high, wore light-sensitive aviator glasses, I had heard stories about Rick Trujillo beginning in had three pens stuck in his dark green cotton T-shirt. the mid-’90s, when I first visited the southern San Juan Moun- “What kind of shoes do I wear?” he said that evening, in re- tains. People said Trujillo never kept track of mileage, that he sponse to the kind of dumb questions he barely endures. “What based his stride on the movements of deer, that he had survived fits me. Whenever I find a pair that fits, I buy out the store.” He wilderness encounters with bears and mountain lions. I’d heard said people who focus on mileage and time are idiots, that peo- the elk story a number of times. People said joining him on a ple who race for records and fame are greedy, self-centered idiots. run through the surrounding peaks was like trying to keep up He said that he hated tracks, that he had run on one exactly once with a mountain goat. They said that the year he won the Hardrock 100 Endurance Run, an ultramarathon that traverses the southern San Juan Mountains, and which ascends and descends more than 66,000 feet (one of the most difficult ultramara- thons in the world), he did it by eating Oreo cookies and guzzling Mountain Dew, that even among ultramarathoners (runners who cover more than 26.2 miles in a race), a group known historically for possessing the bottom-feeding eating habits of catfish, Trujillo stood out for his gleeful and dis- gusting gluttony. They said that his favorite type of training run was called the “Dumb Dog,” which involved running as fast and as far as he possibly could, until he col- lapsed, panting on the ground. (He denies that, but a man I know who once tried to run with him swears it’s true. I suspect it’s how the man felt, in any case.) They said he was a kind of Zen master, or idiot savant, of mountain trails. We first met in July of 2007, when he had just returned from doing geology fieldwork in Mexico. He was suffering from some mild indigestion. We sat down at a barbe- cue joint in Ridgway, 10 miles from Ouray, CALL OF THE WILD Mountain running came naturally to Trujillo. “I cover real rough ground real fast. I take it for granted.” RUNNERSWORLD.COM TK 0109TRUILLO_fin.indd 89 11102008154952 11/10/08 3:48:38 PM Twilight of the Mountain God since he left college, when a friend who was worried about his whose names have never been published in a running maga- health wanted to take up jogging and asked Trujillo to help him zine—who have doubtlessly logged greater distances, at swifter run a mile. He said he didn’t like flat courses in general, and that speeds. Trujillo is not the friendliest person to have ever jogged he detested flat, hot races. He said one of his unhappiest days in into an alpine forest, nor the most decorated. And all his records running shoes was at a Florida cross-country championship. “If have been broken. these tropical places are paradise,” he told me, “I’ll take the cold, But when it comes to mountain running—which, at its most white hell of the mountains any day.” irreducible, involves following rocky trails long distances into A year later, I’ve returned to Ouray to see him again. He’s been rockier mountains—Trujillo was the first champion, and in through a lot in that time. Besides dealing with chronic tendini- many ways the most irreducible. He was—and is—a throwback, tis in his Achilles tendons and a torn meniscus in his right knee, a man whose primitive and at times dangerous approaches to he also had a stent placed in his chest. Doctors had placed it there things like nutrition and equipment and training seem positive- in October 2007, after Trujillo—worried over months of odd ly medieval by today’s standards. Yet he and his throwback ap- heartburn and episodes of breathlessness—scheduled an exam proach to what is, after all, a throwback kind of sport—lope and discovered that one of his major arteries was 90 percent through rugged terrain as fast as you can while you try to ignore blocked. It was the left anterior descending artery, known among things like lightning and lack of oxygen and the occasional hairy cardiologists as “the widow maker.” “In other words,” Trujillo predator—are still spoken of with affection and even awe by the e-mailed his friends, “I had been a candidate for a full-fledged men and women of the sport today. heart attack for more than a year but didn’t recognize it.” I want to ask Trujillo how a brush with mortality has affected Even among ultramarathoners, known him, what a health scare does to a man who spent much of his historically for possessing the existence clambering up slopes of perilously shifting scree.