Leadville, Colo. -- To Manuel Luna Guitierez, there's only one good reason to run a 100-mile race. "I run for my pueblo," said the 31-year old Tarahumara Indian, an indigenous native of northwest Mexico's Copper Canyon. "I run for the food we will win."

But to the nearly 300 other runners in today's Leadville Race to the Sky, the impetus for undertaking one of the most grueling foot-races in the world is less practical. Mostly Americans in their 30s, 40s and even 50s, most ultra-runners are successful professionals: engineers, nurses, business consultants. And though a few top runners are sponsored by Nike and other corporations, the race's lack of prize money ensures that the vast majority are strictly amateurs.

"They're just looking for another dragon to slay," said race organizer Ken Chlouber, who is also a competitor. "Money isn't what it's all about. In fact, I don't think you could pay people to endure the discomfort, pain and sickness a race like this takes."

But at 4:00 a.m. this morning, Guitierez, Chlouber and the rest of the field lined up at the starting gate and began their arduous trek together. From nearly 10,000 feet in elevation, they slogged through a cold rain over 12,600-foot Hope Pass, forded icy alpine streams and jumped across boulder-strewn slopes. Then they began the whole loop again, and will finish the race by moonlight around midnight tonight.

Guitierez and six other Tarahumaras came from Mexico at the behest of Rick Fisher, who has promised to deliver one ton of corn and a half ton of beans to the winners' villages. An outdoor guide and quasi-anthropologist who has led trips into the canyon for 15 years, Fisher has hoped to inspire Guitierez and his 40,000 Tarahumara brethren to revive their ages-old running race tradition called Ralajipame, a team-based endurance contest played with a wooden ball that's kicked around a course until the losing team gives up from exhaustion. The races often last for days and can cover 100 miles or more. Wagering up to a quarter of each village's collective wealth, opposing sides begin the competition with an intense a gambling fest that can last almost as long as the race itself.

"It's more than a game to them," said John Kennedy, a retired anthropology professor who has written several books on the Tarahumara. "It's obviously a pleasant diversion, but it's also an economic activity, a force for social cohesion and a channel for aggression. If it were removed from Tarahumara life, the effect would be greater than if some sporting activity were dropped from our own culture."

Farmer-herders who live in the deep canyons and pine-covered plateaus of Mexico's 35,000-square-mile Sierra de Tarahumara wilderness, their running culture evolved from a need to travel great distances to herd goats and coax corn and beans from the canyon's rocky, unproductive soil. They spend their lives on the run, traveling between the 9,000-foot elevation canyon rim and tropical canyon bottoms, where they winter. With a high-carbohydrate, low-fat vegetarian diet that would make any athlete jealous, the svelte Tarahumara are perfectly adapted for endurance running. Renowned by early American explorers for their remarkable endurance in carrying supplies and mail, the Tarahumara have twice raced in Olympic marathons, though culture shock left them out of the running.

But with increased road building due to aggressive logging in the region, many younger Tarahumara have abandoned their running tradition, opting instead to hitch rides on passing trucks. Over the last decade, running challenges between villages have dwindled from an intense competition between 40 villages to occasional races among only a few.

Wary of being perceived as a huckster but desperate to raise awareness of the Tarahumara's plight, Fisher says he has brought the Tarahumaras to the race for the past three years for one reason only: Because they wanted to come. "People are always trying to sell them on something, but almost nobody has gone onto Indian land and looked at what the Indians were interested in. These people call themselves the Raramuri, the 'foot racers.' It's amazing the lack of attention paid to this by other whites. I could work to build a hospital or a school, but the people I work with don't want those things."

More interested in Tarahumara culture than in ultra-running, Fisher's first foray into coaching the Tarahumara proved disastrous. On their first trip to the Leadville race in 1992, not a single Indian finished the course. Accustomed to running in their huarache sandals homemade from old tires and leather, the runners' feet swelled in the Converse Chuck Taylor high-top sneakers Fisher had supplied them. And like the torches they carry at night in their homeland, they held the flashlights provided for the Leadville race facing skyward.

But their ultimate undoing may have been their lack of understanding of American-style racing, where individual effort replaces teams and speed is equally important as endurance.

Thirty miles into the race, Chlouber came across the Tarahumaras sitting at the edge of the trail admiring the surrounding view. "I was trotting along and I saw two of them sitting on their haunches looking at the valley," he said. "I thought to myself, 'They're a lot smarter than I am.' "

When the Tarahumara returned a year later, Fisher brought them to a Leadville junkyard, where they made new huaraches from abandoned tires. Before the race, he also explained to them that unlike their competitions, where they may only accept food and water from their own villagers, they should take sustenance from race volunteers at the checkpoints along the Leadville course.

They started the race at the back of the pack, trotting along in near effortless Ever-ready battery bunny steps. But as more than half the field gave way to exhaustion, the three Tarahumara who entered slowly made their way to the front of the pack. By the eightieth mile, the first Tarahumara runner, 55-year-old Victoriano Churro, took the lead. He and his comrades finished first, second and fifth, with Churro finishing 40 minutes ahead of the nearest competitor and running the second half of the race almost as fast as he'd completed the first.

"It was amazing," said Harry Dupre, 56, of Mustang, Oklahoma, who has run the Leadville race 12 times. "They seemed to move with the ground. Kind of like a cloud or a fog moving across the mountains. Here were these little guys wearing sandals, who never actually trained for the race. And they blew away some on the best long-distance runners in the world."

When they came to accept their winning trophy, however, they appeared rather miffed. "I think they were looking for something a little more utilitarian than a pan full of fool's gold," said Chlouber sheepishly, "although one did say he thought the pan would be good for eating out of."

For today's race, Fisher made sure the Tarahumara's would have plenty of incentive to win. Gathering runners from three competing villages, he offered the winner a four-month supply of grain. He also arranged for a grant from Rockport, which paid for travel costs and supplied the Tarahumara with high-tech cross-training shoes. "They're good," said Guitierez as he unstitched the boots after a trail-familiarization run to revel deeply callused, almost hoof-like feet. "But I will use my huaraches. They bring me good luck."

Said a bemused Chlouber: "Kind of makes me wonder whether I should throw out those hundred dollar running shoes of mine."

NEWS BRIEF
Leadville, Colorado - In a stunning triumph of endurance and speed, 25-year old Juan Herrara of Mexico won the 100-mile Leadville Race to the Sky ultramarathon in 17 hours and 30 minutes, smashing the course record by seventeen minutes and beating the nearest competitor, Anne Trason, by nearly twice that. Trason's 18 hour and eight minute finished was the fastest ever recorded by a woman. Scampering to the finish line in his homemade huarache sandals, Herrara was mauled

Playing a cat-and-mouse game, the two runners were neck and neck at the halfway point, but Hererra pulled away in the last miles on the grueling Sugarloaf uphill, which ascend to 12,000 feet in elevation. Asked how she felt about losing in only the final 13 miles, Trason responded, "Sometimes you need a woman to bring out the best in a man." Sitting at the corner of the finishing tent, Hererra nodded his head in agreement with a tired but mischievous smile. "I never lose to a woman," he said sheepishly.

END

It was the quintessential Vail date. In a town where the ski mountain is the predominate social institution and dinner-and-a-movie trysts are as rare as overtures of candy or flowers, Mike Harvey invited his new flame to compete in last month's Vail Hill Climb, the annual 10K run that rises 3,000 grueling feet up the side of Vail Mountain. As usual, more than 600 locals---about a quarter of the town's population---showed up to compete.

The two jockeyed for a starting position at the front of the pack and began to jog. "I haven't run in this big of a crowd in years," Harvey told his svelte companion. "The last time I did anything like this was the New York Marathon," she replied. Harvey gulped. The New York Marathon? Though he worked at Vail's chic Cascade Athletic Club and considered himself something of a hardbody, he suddenly envisioned his worst nightmare: getting dusted by his date.

Romance is like everything else in this high-powered ski town. "If you can't keep up, don't bother showing up," says resident Kirsten Coil, whose choice in boyfriends leans heavily toward the toned and fast. "We work hard, we play hard and we party hard. A lot of people can't deal with that."

Since its inception, this resort town has defined itself by the competitive zeal its residents bring to nearly everything they do. Never content playing second fiddle to nearby Aspen, Vailites have aggressively recruited everything from high-profile sporting events like the World Alpine Skiing Championships to tony cultural doings like the Bolshoi Ballet Academy.

When resort managers targeted mountain-biking as a key to attracting off-season visitors, they immediately set about securing the sport's premier event, the World Mountain-Biking Championships, now scheduled for Vail Mountain this September. "Why go for the number-two event, when we can go for number-one?" says Vail Valley Foundation president John Garnsey, who spearheaded the campaign. "Vailites want the best."

Indeed, residents' craving for number-oneness borders on obsession. And given past results, they usually get what they want---by hook or by crook. In 1992, for example, when the resort was unseated from its long-held number-one ranking in a ski magazine poll of North America's top resorts, Vail marketers concocted a plan to stuff the next year's ballot boxes. "They pulled the plug before it got off the ground," says Snow Country Magazine senior editor Ron Rudolph, "but it just shows how badly they want to be number one. They like to think of themselves as the uber-resort: the best of everything all packaged into one."

Nowhere is Vail's competitive bent more evident than in locals' recent do-or-die campaign to host the 1999 World Alpine Skiing Championships, the second most important ski-racing event after the Winter Olympics. Going head to head with their stuffy European rivals at last June's site selection conference in Rio de Janeiro, the Vail contingent---including everyone from the mayor to the resort's chairman---filled their promotional booth with cowboy gear and went about wooing votes by proffering gourmet medallions of elk and country-western line dancing lessons. Organizers had already scored a major pr coup last winter, when Hillary Rodham Clinton donned a Vail '99 jacket while attending the Winter Olympics.

"We've always been very goal-oriented here," says Peter Seibert, the resort's 70-year old founder who "And when you exude that, you draw more and more people who fit that personality type."

To be sure, Vail has a long-history of attracting movers and shakers. The list of the resort's original partners reads like a Who's Who of American industry, including the chairmen of IBM, Kellogg's and Motorola. Their $10,000-a-piece investment in 1960, which included two acres of land, 100 shares of stock and four lifetime season ski passes, paid off in spades: Each stake is now worth more than $1 million. Of course, wealth begets wealth, and big hitters like Wall Street raider Henry Kravitz, former Shearson-Lehman chairman Peter Cohen and late Walt Disney president Frank Wells have built lavish second homes here. Then, of course, there's politicos like former President Gerald Ford and would-be commander-in-chiefs Ross Perot and Jack Kemp, who have found gushing acceptance among Vail's conservative elite.

Even the ski bums who move here are Type As. "The young guy who goes to Telluride or Crested Butte has probably heard so much crap from his old man about getting a job and succeeding that he just wants to go somewhere and hang out," says Seibert. "The guy who comes to Vail is a bit more career-oriented, at least in the back of his mind." To be sure, even those who arrive here as ski bums become infected with the entrepreneurial spirit. New businesses---many of which cater to Vail's rich and time-strapped---seem to sprout like wildflowers, bolstering a local economy that's become the second-fastest growing in the state.

But in Vail, ambition takes many forms. This, after all, is a town where more than 500 locals race in a highly competitive weekly mountain-bike series, and scores of super-fit men and women juggle professional bike racing careers in summer and pro mogul skiing in winter. "The level of athleticism is unparalleled," says 1984 Olympic bronze medal bicyclist Davis Phinney, who leads an annual summer cycling camp here with his wife, gold medalist Connie Carpenter. "I avoid the bike club's training rides because I know I'll get shellacked."

Locals have even elevated relaxation to a competitive level. Take the renowned Lawn Chair Drill Team, a military-esque band of locals who handle lounge chairs with the same precision as soldiers handle rifles. "We'll challenge anyone to a competition," says 40-year-old Josh Hall, who marched with the team in President Clinton's 1992 inaugural parade. "We've got muscles in places these all-American runners and skiers just can't imagine."

Adds team leader Craig Campbell: "In a regular town, the competition is over who has the biggest house or the best job. But here, it's all based around who's the best at recreating: who skis the most days or bikes the most miles. The drill team kind of fits right into that. We call it the pro leisure tour, and we get a lot of points for being on the team."

Attendance at the annual rite-of-fall ski-conditioning sessions is worth big points, too, if you can survive. Led through a strenuous series of workout stations by a team of trainers and professional mogul skiers, hopeful hardbodies at the Cascade Club drop like flies as the sessions stretch on. "They're health addicts here," says Annegret Howe, a Vail medical center nutritionist who dropped out of the class after a few weeks. "Between the power lunges, the plyometrics and the suicide sprints, you've got to be a superwoman just to keep up."

And where does that leave the rest of the pack? As resident Melodee Crawford found, Vail's hardbodies have little patience for laggards. "I was going out with this guy, but he dumped me after we went skiing," says the attractive 36-year-old. "He told me, 'You've got the basics down, but you're just not good enough. So our relationship isn't going to last.' I was appalled."

At This Ski Resort, It's Time to Pedal

By Alex Markels
9/11/94
New York Times Abstracts
PG Pg. 12, Col. 1

The World Mountain Biking Championships Roar Onto The Scene at Vail Mountain