“Death Valley Duel” puts ultra racing at the center of deadly “accidents”

Chuck returned his attention to the check-in site as more runners streamed in from the trail. He assessed the racers as they arrived. Considering that they’d just run thirty miles nonstop, they appeared remarkably fresh. They offered warm smiles to Marian as they recited their racer numbers to her, and graciously accepted the cups of water Doug offered them. Several runners grabbed packaged snacks—energy bars, bags of chips, packets of cookies—from the table before departing for their respective aid stations.

“They make it look easy,” Chuck marveled during a break between runners.

“For now,” said Doug. “But just you wait. Things will begin to get interesting at around the hundred-mile mark. That’s when the you-know-what will really start to hit the fan—the blisters, the cramps, the nausea.”

“And the hallucinations,” Marian added. “Don’t forget about them.”

Doug tipped his head to her. “As I’m sure you know, we don’t allow pacers,” he said to Chuck, referring to noncompeting runners allowed to accompany racers during the latter stages of most ultra races, helping them stay on course when their minds began to break down near the end of competitions. “We don’t want to make it too easy.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” Chuck said dryly, glancing at the heat waves dancing above the valley floor.

Doug grinned. “We like to think of the Whitney to Death 150 as an individual endeavor, man vs. the elements.”

“Or woman,” Marian said.

“In place of pacers, our racers often use each other for support along the way, running together for periods of time. But they always break up before the end of the race and duel it out at the finish.”

“Have you ever lost anyone?” Clarence asked. “Per the name of your race, I mean: Whitney to Death.”

“Never.” Doug rapped the side of his head with his knuckles. “Knock on wood.”

“Most of our runners have been doing this a long time,” Marian told Clarence. “When they begin to lose it mentally, they know to slow down until they regain their faculties. If their senses still don’t come back, they know to stop.”

“Either that,” Clarence said, “or they don’t have enough strength left to take another step.”

Marian chuckled. “There’s a lot of that, too, of course. But there’s something more. I’ve witnessed it time after time. When they come into the last two check-in points, the ones who are in trouble have a certain look in their eyes. I can tell the race is over for them just from that look. Invariably, they never leave their aid stations. They sit down and are incapable of getting back up again. It’s not their crews telling them to stop, it’s their bodies.”

“Or their minds,” Doug said.

“Or that,” Marian agreed.

Chuck looked out at the sun-blasted desert stretching away to the mountain ranges bounding both sides of the valley. Given Carmelita’s inexperience with ultra racing combined with her high motivation level, would she really be willing to stop twenty-four or thirty-six hours from now if she needed to?

“But that’s still to come,” Doug said to Clarence. “At the end of the race. We’ll all be hallucinating by then, we’ll be so sleep-deprived.”

At his aid station, Kelsey stood up from his folding chair and pulled on his running vest. It hung heavily from his shoulders, its pockets bulging. He jogged away from his cheering two-person crew and descended the gentle slope toward the bed of the former lake, running on the dirt road cutting between the bare northern half and planted southern half of the lakebed. Seconds later, Waitimu set out after Kelsey to the cheers of his youthful crew. Soon after, Matt Sharon and Domenico Lyons left their aid stations, cheered by their crews as well.

In less than a minute, the four race leaders were small figures shimmering in the distance as they traversed the empty lake.

Waiting at the check-in site with Clarence, Chuck monitored Carmelita’s progress on the realtime map, clicking her green dot over and over again to make her racer number appear on his phone and assure himself she was still on course.

Finally, the moving dot that corresponded with her number neared the blue square denoting the check-in point, and she appeared in the distance, running through the ricegrass.

Emotion flooded Chuck’s veins—pride at her accomplishment thus far in the race, relief that she had made it through the initial thirty miles of the competition, and a sharp jolt of trepidation at what she faced in the long hours and 120 miles of running still to come.

She drew closer, her shoulders erect and her arms swinging smoothly back and forth, running comfortably on the trail.

Like the other runners before her, she jogged straight up to the race check-in site.

“Thirty-two,” she said, stopping before Marian.

“Gotcha,” Marian said.

“Hip, hip!” Doug cheered. “You made it! How are you feeling?”

“Pretty good,” Carmelita said. She raised her foot behind her and grabbed her ankle with one hand, balancing on her other foot and stretching her quadriceps, then repeated the movement with her other foot, loosening both thighs. “The real question is, how are you doing?” she asked Doug as she accepted the cup of water he offered her.

“I’ve felt better, I admit,” Doug said. “But I’ll survive.”

“I was worrying about you while I was running.”

“Don’t you be doing that. You’ve got yourself to be worrying about.”

“I’d rather worry about you than me.”

“Well, then, feel free to worry about me all you want. But I’m doing fine, really I am.”

Chuck pointed down the road at Rosie and Liza waiting next to the truck. “Ready?”

Carmelita nodded, and he and Clarence accompanied her past the Team Chatten aid station. Margot had departed by now, and Rick, Carl, and the other crew members were busy folding the cot and lounge chair and rolling up the Persian rug.

“Wow,” Carmelita said softly, ogling Margot’s extravagant station.

“Over the top, if you ask me,” Clarence muttered. “Way over.”

Rick did not acknowledge them as they passed.

“Whoo-hoo, Carm!” Rosie cheered as they approached, filming with her upraised phone.

Carmelita handed her depleted vest to Liza and sank into the chair beneath the oversized umbrella.

“The shade feels good, doesn’t it?” Rosie asked. When Carmelita didn’t answer, she continued. “And the chair.”

“Let her rest,” Chuck urged Rosie.

But Carmelita said, “They both feel good, the chair and the shade.”

“I tested out the umbrella,” Rosie said. “I took a nap under it. I even practiced snoring, because—”

“Rosie,” Chuck cautioned.

“She’s fine,” Carmelita said to him. “It’s nice.” She looked at Rosie. “It’s good to hear your voice.”

“Was it lonely out there?”

“Not as bad as I thought. I talked to everybody I passed.”

“You sure passed a lot of people. We’ve been watching you on the map. You’re flying!”

“I’m feeling good,” Carmelita said. “So far, anyway.”

“What would you like to drink?” Chuck asked.

“TrailFire,” she said, naming the most popular electrolyte drink among ultra racers. “Por favor.”

“Bueno. TrailFire it is.” Chuck handed her a bottle of the bright red drink. “What about food?”

“I’m okay for now. I’ll eat at the next check-in. That’s my plan, remember? Hydration nonstop, solids at check-in points two and four.”

“You’re sure?”

She rolled her eyes at him.

He raised his hands, smiling. “Okay, okay.”

Liza refilled the empty bottles from Carmelita’s vest with water and electrolyte drink mix. “Any hot spots? Blisters?” she asked.

“My feet are fine,” Carmelita reported between gulps of TrailFire. “My legs feel good, too.”

“Your speed shows it,” Clarence said. “You passed almost half the pack in the last twenty miles.”

“Don’t forget your planned pace,” Chuck told her.

Carmelita again rolled her eyes at him.

Rosie snickered. “You must be feeling good. You’ve rolled your eyes at Dad twice now.”

Carmelita rolled her eyes at Rosie. Then she smiled. “On that note,” she said, standing up and stepping into the sun.

“So soon?” Chuck asked.

“It’s a race.”

“You said you were going to take it easy.”

“I never said anything about taking it easy. I said I was going to set my own pace—which has nothing to do with sitting around doing nothing at the check-in points.”

“But you’re not doing nothing,” Chuck said. “You’re resting. You’re—”

Clarence directed a sidelong look at him. “She knows what she’s doing, jefe.”

Rosie aimed her phone at Carmelita. “The sooner you leave, the sooner you’ll finish.”

“I won’t finish for another two days, no matter how fast I go.”

“Minus a bunch of hours already today, and a bunch of miles.”

“You got that right.” Carmelita accepted the replenished vest from Liza and pulled it on. “And . . . I’m . . . outta here,” she announced to Rosie’s upheld camera.

“You were never here to begin with,” said Rosie. “Just like the wind.”

Carmelita jogged across the county road. “See you on the other side,” she called over her shoulder as she started down the dirt road to the lakebed.

“Go, Carm, go!” Rosie yelled.

Chuck, Clarence, and Liza joined her, waving and shaking their fists and cheering for Carmelita until she was well out of earshot.

Carmelita was a tiny speck on the lakebed when Chuck checked the map on his phone a few minutes later. A number of dots were crowded close together, unmoving, at the check-in point. Ahead on the race route, dots denoting the first fifteen or so runners moved across the bed of the lake in tiny jerks and starts. He tapped the lead dot. Kelsey’s number appeared above it—the repeat winner from Salt Lake City was still in first place. Chuck tapped the second dot. Waitimu’s number appeared—the Kenyan continued to trail Kelsey in second place. He tapped the third dot, summoning Matt’s number, then the fourth dot, Domenico’s.

Well back from the four lead runners, another dot caught Chuck’s eye.

A short distance out on the lakebed, behind the dots of the lead runners and Carmelita, a dot denoting one of the racers was not moving. Chuck stared at the dot. It remained motionless on the map. He shook his phone. Still the dot stayed in place.

He looked up from his phone. In the distance, runners were spread along the dirt road, crossing the former lake. A wind-whipped cloud of dust, thicker than the wispy curtains of dirt particles that had risen off the lakebed earlier in the day, enveloped the racers as it swept across the lakebed. The dust cloud dispersed, and the racers reappeared as small spots of motion, their arms and legs churning.

All but one, that is.

Where the motionless dot on the map indicated, a runner stood ramrod straight in the center of the dirt road.

As Chuck watched, the runner toppled forward and landed face-first on the ground.

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