How I Ran My 15th Old Pueblo and Got a Piece of the Rock

An Essay by gj

My morning started at about 3:45 am the morning of the run. A couple of hours later I was at the start nervously waiting to run 50 miles. Minutes before the run at about 5:55 am, Julie and Duane were presented with a memento for their efforts in putting on the most recent 8 of these Old Pueblo 50 mile runs. Theirs has been one of the best organized ultras in the nation. The course is well marked with 350 lbs. of flour and enough flagging tape to go to the moon and back. This tape is taken off of the course minutes behind the last runner, by Julie and her sweep crew. (In the months between the runs while Duane is out hiking in the mountain snow all Saturday night, Julie actually un-knots this tape and rolls it tightly back on the cardboard spools, making it ready for the next year.) In the past, we relied on the horse people to flag the course. This was always interesting because the front riders would often pull the flags to slow down their competition. But this of course would also send runners off in all directions. One year the run director, who was running (in those days 25 runners would be the norm, so the RD would join in to inflate the numbers), had to tear up his bandana to help mark the course for the runners who followed. Back then, if you were nice, the horse people would let you dip your head in the water troughs. Duane and Julie’s spread was incredible! They actually brought water in from melting glaciers in New Zealand.
So, at exactly 6:00 am, a gunshot was heard and all the runners ran away. The group was pretty tight at first, spreading out on the first hill about 30 yards into the run. This Ultra had begun! Sometime after the start, the pain began. I had been dreading this since my last run. But there was no way that I was going to stop so I kept running. After what seemed like many miles more, the pain was worse. Nothing I did would stop it. I ran leaning to one side, then the other, then I tried Chi Running, bending forward at the ankles, lifting my feet just enough to clear the rocks. It got worse. It was nearing unbearable. “How much farther to go?” I was desperate and then I thought of something Mr. Bachani had said. He said “Make pain your friend. It will make you stronger”. I had no clue what this meant, so I ran on. It hurt! I kept trying to figure out what he meant. “Make pain your friend?!” It got worse! It was unbearable! “Make pain your friend!? Make pain your friend!?” It hurts!! ….”OK! I’ll make this #@*%!*^ pain my friend!” How? Where? There he is… that big ugly guy over there. Kinda hunched over with green stuff coming out of his nose…I’ll just stick out my hand…O my gosh..he sees me! I can’t do it, so I slammed the door shut. It hurts worse now…I’ll just look out there…Oh NO! He’s gotten bigger and he has a tattoo of the Nike swoosh with blood dripping out of it on his forehead and he’s trying to beat down my door! Now he has a ramrod the size of a telephone pole…He’s going to break it down!! I hurt!! I’ll just sneak a peak out the peephole… Holy Cow! He’s transformed into an eighteen, no a twenty two wheeler revving up, belching green smoke, and with steel spikes on oversized tires aiming right at me!! I can’t hold out much longer! “Mr. Bachani what do I do??!! What do I do!??!” In desperation, I flung open the door and stood there with my arms outspread… ….Unbelievable!…Unbelievable! Rather than being creamed by a huge ugly monster, right at the threshold of my door, all of this big, ugly pain turned into a flock of butterflies! Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. Big ones.., little ones.. in all colors of the rainbow. They fluttered around me, caressing me lightly with their soft fragile wings, virtually lifting me off the ground. It was a surreal experience, to be sure. Tactile, visual and very faintly aural. I heard the refrain from ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ , “If happy little bluebirds fly Beyond the Rainbow, why O why can’t I?” “Well” I thought. “This is something new.” Cool! The pain was gone. I opened up another chocolate goo and ran on. The remaining 48.5 miles or so was the normal ultra stuff..lots of ups and downs, rocks, sore legs, some blisters and funny little people at the aid stations tending to my every need. I raced against the sun and once more I had won!

gj

Disclaimer: Some of the above is true.

Footnote: In the middle of the 1800’s two pieces of the same meteorite were dragged out of the Santa Rita mountains and were used as anvils, one inside the walls of the Tucson Presidio and one just outside the walls. The smaller of the two, ultimately named the Carleton fragment, weighed 633 lbs. while the larger, the Ring fragment of the Tucson meteorite fall, weighed in at 1400 lbs. (Nickel-iron meteorite is heavy stuff at 450 lbs. per cubic foot.) Some years later, both were taken to the Smithsonian for study and exhibition. Along the way, a 30 lb.chunk of the Ring fragment was removed.
The connection to us is the location where the fragments were found. It was near the head of a canyon named ‘puerto de los Muchachos’ in the sierra called ‘de la Madera’. We know the mountains as the Santa Ritas and the canyon as Box Canyon. For the past eight years, Old Pueblo 50 Mile Run has run up that canyon, to the dismay of many unprepared runners. Of course, if you ran the OP 50, you would know all of this, since there is a drawing of the Ring fragment on the back of the run T-shirt, and Duane included a book entitled ‘The Tucson Meteorites’ in the run packet of every runner. What you probably don’t know is that in addition to the great belt buckle that I received at the finish, the Run Directors, Duane and Julie, gave me a piece of the Ring fragment of the Tucson Meteorite in recognition of finishing my 15^th Old Pueblo!