It is 8:20, and sunset is approaching by the time Nutter is climbing the steep hill leading to Michigan Bluff. She has been running for more than 15 hours and is still better than two hours ahead of the 30-hour cutoff. She is exhausted and looks forward to taking more of a rest and to getting something to eat.
The nurses peel off her sticky shoes and socks and work gently over her feet, massaging the bony ridges, flexing her toes, kneading up her leg while she sinks into relaxation.
Suddenly, her pacer John Davis is there admonishing her to ”get going. You`ve got to get up now and go. You`re on this mark.” Then he is off, which confuses Nutter because the plan has been to run together beginning at Michigan Bluff. But while he is there, she sees him being ordered around by an older man, a handler for a friend of hers. This man, whom she would not identify, ”laid out the plans, which he thought was his job as a handler.”
This moment is the beginning of a bad psychological break. Nutter has been looking forward to seeing someone she knows, someone to give her the warmth and comfort and encouragement she needs.
The man lays her down on a lawn chair and says: ”You have to wear this shirt. Put it on two miles before the end of the race. You`ve got to come running across the finish line in this shirt.” He wants her to wear the shirt with his company`s name on it so his wife can take the finish-line photograph showing he was her sponsor. But the man isn`t her sponsor; she has none-and serving the needs of commerce is the farthest thing from her mind now. All she wants is moleskin for her blisters, which she keeps in her drop bag along with Vaseline, flashlights, batteries and powder.
”Wait! Give me my bag! My batteries are in there! That`s what I need.” But it does no good; the man will not look for her bag. ”I was so geared down,” Nutter says. ”I had it so planned out. I kept asking for the bag, for my salve, my candy, my aspirin, but he said, `No, you`ve got to keep going.` ”
Forced out of the chair by the man, she takes off down the trail. No moleskin, no flashlight, no candy, no jacket. Nothing is coming together for her. The foulup regarding Davis and the incident with the older man pull the plug on her enthusiasm, and the negative thoughts start building. Her mind then drifts off, and she loses the trail. She has wandered a mile and a half from it.
She starts yelling, ”Are there any runners around here? Any runners?”
No voices come back to her. She mentally sorts through the list of things that didn`t come together, and then the realization strikes her: Where is my pacer? I am doing this by myself! Of course, I`m doing this by myself. That`s what this is all about. It`s what I came out here to do. When she starts convincing herself that it is no one else`s responsibility for her to get through, and that, yes, she is here alone, she calms down enough to find her way back to the trail. There Davis finds her. The only thing she remembers is coming out of the panic and feeling relieved to see him. She is tired, so tired, and she has been crying. On one of the loops she tenses up so much that she has to pick up her own thigh and put it down one step ahead. Once again on the trail, there are more uphills and downhills to confront.
She has been fighting with herself for an hour. Should she turn in?
Should she keep going? The rocky downhills are killing her. Davis, concerned about the sweeper, chatters on about the constellations and Greek mythology, hoping small talk will egg her on, but Nutter is numb to the conversation.
It is so terrible to decide, but once she does, she is relieved, feeling she can`t postpone her inclination to quit any longer. It is around midnight when the mounted rangers come up behind her, and she asks them to carry her in. She is so exhausted that she falls asleep while they`re slinging her up on the horse. She has come 72 miles and still would have had more than a marathon to go. She has been shivering the last 20 miles and is rundown, depleted and dehydrated, feeling feverish. She has stopped drinking altogether. The medical staff at the crash tent coaxes her to take in enough fluids, and she rehydrates orally.
The next station is the Rucky Chucky River Crossing, 78 miles. Gutterman is crossing the river on foot, exhausted, with a pair of dry shoes hanging around his neck. There is no way around-only through. One hand grabs a guide rope that stretches between the two shores, the other hand holds his fanny pack high above the current. Rodriguez, his pacer, is behind him.
It is 3:42 a.m. Normally it would be pitch black in the canyon, but for race day a generator has been brought in for lighting.
Gutterman has been running since 5 a.m. the previous day. For 22 hours he has carried his own water. For 6 1/2 hours he has run in total darkness. Aside from pushing down an egg-salad sandwich and a cheese sandwich, which are forced on him by the nurses at Forest Hill, he has eaten almost nothing. (At the previous checkpoint, 65 miles, while Gutterman was refueling to regain the seven pounds of lost weight, the lead runner, Chuck Jones, at 9:37 p.m., was 35 miles ahead, crossing the finish line.)
Back at Rucky Chucky, everyone is on his or her own. Gutterman`s right foot, totally submerged, searches for a depression in the rock to push from. Then his left foot does the same. The water, says the Placer County Mounted Search and Rescue Squad, is approximately 56 degrees. Crossing the river means he has come 78 miles and that roughly one more marathon remains. Because of the damage the trail has suffered from heavy storms, there are rock slides and uncovered mine-shaft holes, dangerous terrain that has to be traversed with a flashlight at night. Sunrise is still a few hours away.
”Woodruff, No. 471,” a registered nurse shouts into her radio.
”Completely dehydrated. He`s on the California Loop. About nine miles from here.” Dehydration is Woodruff`s ”fallout”; it knocks him out of the race. The nurse sends the search-and-rescue horses, but No. 471 is too weak to get on the horse. ”Get him to an ambulance. Send paramedics with a stretcher and an IV.”
Other runners suffering from exhaustion and dehydration are stuffed into sleeping bags and forced to drink liquids. If they don`t rehydrate orally but require intravenous fluids, they are finished.
Rucky Chucky may resemble a vast wildflowered alpine meadow by day, but at this godawful hour of the night it looks like 1944 Germany-a peripheral airfield near the Ruhr. There are sophisticated radio communications, a rescue helicopter on standby and mounted search-and-rescue personnel, but out on the trail there is still no absolute assurance that aid will arrive in time if a runner is incapacitated.
Although Gutterman seems confident and unintimidated by the trail, he fears his downfall will be time. It will take his last shreds of strength to cross the final 22 miles. To see the finish line in Auburn, Calif., by the 11 a.m. cutoff time, he`ll have to run for seven straight hours.
Gutterman, Rodriguez relates, is quiet and reserved at this point.
”Somewhere between 78 miles and where the sun came up at 85 you could see him move more slowly. If he were to stop, he would have cramped, and it would have been all over. So I fed him potatoes, and we talked about camping, his work, my work, our marriages, how we both suffered. Just to keep his mind off the race.” Together they are a smooth duet. A kind of shorthand language develops between them, evolving into a familiar private pattern.
At 85 miles, when night turns to day, the transition to get back into running-Gutterman has been walking a lot-comes without his knowing it. He regains his confidence, probably because he can see his footing. Nothing but sheer determination is driving him. Sheer faith and determination are driving him to run through the pain of the ordeal. ”You`ve got to get out of here in 15 minutes, or you`ll be cut off.” These words to himself drive him, give him some margin.
”It hit me that I might be pulled, so I picked up,” Gutterman says. ”I started jogging everything-the flats, the downhills, all except the steep uphills, which I walked.” Two miles before Hwy. 49, at 93 miles, Don Adolf, Nequin`s pacer, trots up and reports that Nequin is just behind.
Gutterman doesn`t want Nequin to finish in front of him, and the feeling swells up, subsides, then swells up again, dividing his feelings between finishing with a friend or ahead of a friend. Nequin is 17 minutes behind, but Gutterman doesn`t realize his lead is that great, so he converts his feelings into speed and accelerates.
Nequin changes shoes at Hwy. 49 so he can expend the least amount of effort to make the 30-hour cutoff time. The shoes he changes into, shoes he has trained in, have the toes cut out. He knows from past years that there are no more rocks on the trail, and he doesn`t want to be slowed by painful toenails and blisters.
Rodriguez wants Gutterman to run the rest of the way to Auburn, and he has all kinds of tricks and encouragement to keep him going, such as pointing out the families who have come out to greet runners several miles ahead of the finish. Though Gutterman is weary, he is aware that only a few people have passed him since sunrise. He looks at his watch much more often, but it isn`t until 97 miles that he realizes he can walk to Auburn. It is at 99.7 miles, entering the stadium, when Rodriguez says, ”This is your mile. Do what you want.” At last he is ready for the homecoming scene he has been looking for all night long. He could have passed three people, but he wants to walk into the stadium and then break into a run. And that`s what he does.
It is 10:07, exactly 53 minutes before the 30-hour cutoff, when Sam Gutterman, with Rodriguez trailing, can feel, in a way that he never has before, the simultaneous euphoria and exhaustion of victory. He is so happy, so content to have put everything on this one throw of the dice and won everything he needed to win, including that last little push to beat his friend Nequin to the finish line.
As difficult as it is to collect his feelings, it isn`t the mere metal alone-the bronze buckle for finishing under 30 hours-that rewards him. He has achieved more, he says, whether it is victory or defeat, than if he had stayed home to risk neither.
In the 1987 race, Lynn Nutter began the race with a stress fracture and race-walked as far as she could-44 miles.
Noel Nequin, suffering from heat exhaustion from the 110-degree temperature, found Nutter at 44 miles and suggested that they both call it quits.
Sam Gutterman was not accepted by the lottery.
Dennis Hagele, who finished in 23:38 in 1986, was not accepted by the lottery but went anyway and paced runner Don Adolf for the last 38 miles.
