Four days and 210 miles into a 220-mile trail race, Mauricio Puerto felt relatively good, his body and his running shoes still holding up, as he scrambled through the damp darkness up Mammoth Mountain toward the summit — the final climb before descending to the finish line.
Draped in a trash bag to ward off the elements, his headlamp barely illuminating the snow-covered path ahead through thick fog, the Navy veteran and facilities team lead at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Port Hueneme Division was close to completing the inaugural Mammoth 200 ultramarathon in California’s eastern Sierra Nevada in late September.
If Puerto finished the race, it would be the longest in his two decades of running ultramarathons — races beyond traditional 26.2-mile marathons — as a side pursuit during his activity-duty and civilian careers with the Navy.
But then the foggy night sky in front of him flashed and roared — an ill-timed lightning storm — forcing him to retreat and seek shelter.
As he huddled in the restroom of a remote food shack on the backside of Mammoth with fellow runners, dabbing his soggy feet with paper towels, Puerto heard rain pouring, then hail pelting, outside the structure.
“The storm was getting worse,” he said, recalling the experience. “At that point I thought, ‘I’m done.’”
If he did not finish the race, known in the running world as a DNF, it wouldn’t be the first time in his long list of ultramarathon endeavors. He wanted to complete the Mammoth trek, but as he pondered the tempest, he reasoned, “It’s not worth getting killed for a finish and a belt buckle.”
So he sat and waited, too hyped up and caffeinated to sleep, even as the hours dragged on into the early morning.
Around 5 a.m., news came from the race director: His team would reroute the course around the mountain instead of over it, avoiding the dangerous conditions at the higher elevation.
Two hours later, Puerto and a pack of fellow competitors followed the race director as he marked the new course through about 3 inches of snow.
Puerto placed 55th out of 92 finishers, male and female. His time, which included the hours of waiting out the storm, was 99 hours, 5 minutes, 53 seconds — about 11 hours ahead of the final cutoff time.
While the planned course was 215 miles, Puerto ended up logging just over 220, according to his Garmin GPS watch. Having to backtrack on Mammoth Mountain and then take the longer detour around it accounted for the extra distance, he said.
Puerto estimated that he slept only about an hour and 20 minutes throughout his more than four days on the course. Despite that shortage of shut-eye, he said, “I felt pretty darn good at the end.”
Back in the office at NSWC PHD a few days after finishing the Mammoth 200, Puerto said running such massive distances helps him put things in perspective, at work and in life in general.
“It makes problems much smaller,” he said.
Story by Thomas McMahon.
