(Photo: Elizabeth Moore)Īt 32, Heather Brooks is long and lean, with the calf muscles of a mountain athlete and a swagger carried over from her college basketball days. Heather Brooks runs near her home in Missoula, Montana. Brooks got in with one ticket, which she earned after her first 100-miler. Most Hardrockers have run multiple qualifiers and waited several years to finally get a spot on the starting line. However, if you get fried by lightning, your running career may end on the spot.” Brooks wasn’t ready for that her career was only just beginning.īrooks’s footprint in the running community is relatively small, especially for a Hardrock participant.
EASY CONTOUR DRAWING HANDROCK ON MANUAL
As the race manual states: “You can hunker down in a valley for 2-4 hours and still finish. Of all the precarious scenarios Brooks prepared for, lightning was what she feared most. Runners have been hypothermic, hospitalized and in 2014 one runner was even struck by dispersed lightning. The Hardrock course meanders through loose scree, sprints up steep mountainsides and winds along narrow paths (some lined by sheer drop-offs), all within Colorado’s high country. Here, the general concerns of a 100-miler are amplified, and for good reason. Brooks was a sensible runner, a meticulous planner, and this was Hardrock, a race that covers 100 miles at an average elevation of 11,000 feet and takes place each year in a fickle pocket of time just after the winter snowmelt and before the summer “monsoon” season. She had never been so close to a massive lightning show, certainly never close enough to see the end of a jagged bolt glow red as it struck the earth.īrooks worried about several things when it came to Hardrock 100: fatigue, nutrition, altitude, weather, wildlife, and physical injury. Over the next couple days, Brooks laid low in her condo in Ouray as thunder boomed and heavy rain pummeled the mountainsides. But-after waiting to run Hardrock for three years in the wake of two canceled races-here she was.
Part of the thrill of Hardrock 100 is running along blue sky on some of the tallest ridgelines in the U.S., not pushing past thick curtains of brown smoke. As Heather Brooks drove into the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, she noticed thick smoke cloaking the panorama of 14,000-foot peaks she had been so excited to see.
0 kommentar(er)
