Last night I was able to attend an event hosted by the Boulder Trail Runners at Sherpa's in downtown Boulder. The event was a roundtable question and answer session with four of the best trail ultra-runners in the world, Scott Jurek, Tony Krupicka, Dave Mackey and Geoff Roes.
I won't get into everything they said, I wouldn't be able to do it justice, but I'll cover a few highlights. The nature of the sport seems to keep these guys very grounded and human. They're still very competitive and have healthy egos but the lack of big money in ultrarunning seems to keep them more normal and approachable than you might expect.
One of the best questions of the evening could be summed up in a single word... "Why?" The answers they gave for why they do what they do were simple and fairly straight forward yet still bore a lot of meaning. The endorphin rush, love of nature, ego, because it's there. One of them, Jurek I believe, observed that he had never come back from a run and thought afterwards "I wish I hadn't done that." There were a lot of heads nodding in the room to that comment, mine among them.
At the end of the evening as people dribbled out of the restaurant, the foursome continued chatting with the attendees who had packed the upstairs area almost to bursting, and by the time I left my mind was abuzz with ideas and thoughts so that when I went to bed I lay there almost ninety minutes before finally finding sleep. Those ideas are still churning in my mind, we'll see where they lead to.
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