Wes Kessenich doesn’t look crazy.
Not at all. His sandy brown hair, slightly receding, is parted neatly on the left. He’s wearing a white dress shirt,
a conservative blue and silver tie, dark slacks and black wingtip shoes. He’s about 5′ 8", 150 pounds. Watching
him stroll across the lobby of Martha Jefferson Hospital, where he visits doctors as a pharmaceutical sales
representative, you’d never guess Kessenich is a top athlete and, in some people’s estimation, a stark raving lunatic. But Kessenich isn’t nuts—he just enjoys running. And running and running and running.
On Sunday, April 18, the 42-year-old from Ruckersville cruised to victory in the second annual Charlottesville Marathon, eating up the hilly course in two hours and 45 minutes—15 minutes faster than the second-place runner and seven minutes faster than his winning time at last year’s Charlottesville Marathon.
For most athletes, a conventional 26.2-mile marathon marks the pinnacle of endurance, and age 40 marks the time that athletes are supposed to hang it up and start rambling yarns about the glory days. For Kessenich, an ultrarunner who competes in staggeringly long-distance races, 26 miles is just a warm up. He’s over the hill, but he’s picking up speed.
An ultramarathon is any race longer than a standard marathon—some ultrarace courses are 30 miles long, some are 130 or more. Kessenich has run along roads, mountain trails and even up the side of active volcanoes. He’s part of a subculture of running fanatics who no longer feel challenged by marathons and who seek out longer and more extreme tests of their endurance.
Here in Charlottesville, ultrarunning is becoming a trend, especially for athletes in their 30s, 40s and 50s. As these aging runners lose speed and strength, they gain mental toughness and new thresholds for pain. They turn to extreme races to find the competitive rush that desk jobs just don’t provide.
“It’s about personal challenge,” Kessenich says. “It used to be that marathoning was it, but now a lot of people have done marathons. You want to take it to the next level and see how many people follow you there.”
An enduring trend
Once a proving ground for elite runners, the marathon has gone mainstream. In 2002, a record 450,000 people completed at least one marathon—about 300 are held in the United States each year, according to U.S.A. Track and Field. Of those who finished, 40 percent were running their first marathon.
Today, training and nutrition programs have helped nonathletes get out of the armchair and run a marathon, everyone from 300-pounders and octogenarians to Oprah Winfrey and P. Diddy. For most people, 26 miles is as far as they’d ever want to run.
“That’s what I used to think,” says Kessenich. “Then I got bored.”
Kessenich ran his first marathon when he was 17. “I started out too fast,” he says. “By the time I got to about 18 miles, the desire to lay down and take a nap by the side of the road was tremendous.”
He got better. Since then he has run 83 marathons. Of those races, 30 have been 50 kilometers (31 miles) or more. He has run 15 50-mile races, three 100K (62 mile) races, and two 100-mile races.
Kessenich ran his first 100-mile race in 1984 in Front Royal. After 80 miles, he found himself in third place. At 92 miles, after more than 15 hours of running, he moved into third place. “Two miles later, the guy passed me like I was standing still,” Kessenich says. “But I took second, and I thought, ‘Hey, I can win these things.’”
Kessenich lived in Hawaii for six years, where he competed four times in his favorite race, the Big Island’s “Run to the Sun,” a 36-mile race from the sea to the top of a 10,000-foot volcano. He currently holds the Hawaii state record for finishing a 50K race in three hours and 10 minutes.
He attempted his first Ironman Triathlon—comprising a 2.4 mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a full 26.2-mile marathon—when he was 19. But it wasn’t long enough, so he turned to Ultramans—grueling three-day events comprising a six-mile swim, 261 miles of biking and a 52-mile run. In 1989 and 1990 he finished third and second, respectively, in Hawaii’s annual Ultraman.
“You get a kick out of it,” Kessenich says. “You get a kick out of people looking at you strange when you tell them you’ve done a 50-mile run.”
More Charlottesvillians are looking for that kick.
Rob Whittaker, a triathlete and trainer at ACAC, says more people, especially the middle-aged, are coming to him, looking to get in shape for high-endurance events.
“It’s growing more and more popular every day,” he says. “These days, the epitome of fitness is being able to do something for a long, long time.”
Local long-distance running and biking events like the Charlottesville Marathon and the Jefferson Cup get more popular every year. But the fastest-growing endurance test, Whittaker says, is triathlons.
“There’s quite a new triathlon community in town,” he says, citing the formation this winter of Charlottesville’s first triathlon club. “Our society is so focused on multi-tasking, the challenge of switching from one event to the next is very entertaining. Here in Charlottesville, you’re right in the middle of the mountains and the ocean. You have everything you need to train in the environments where these events are held,” he says.
“The multi-sport community is so welcoming, and so easy to be a part of,” he continues, describing another attraction to endurance sports—the social scene. “Everybody has the same sense of individual accomplishment.”
Plus, he says the shoes and bikes and micro-fiber blend clothes make for “a cool gear component.”
Yet all the gear in the world couldn’t get Whittaker to run alongside Kessenich on a 100-mile trail race.
“I have a lot of respect for that. Running one marathon is long enough,” says Whittaker. Ultrarunning, he says, “is a state of Zen that I can only imagine getting to.”
The Wall
Kessenich describes a 100-mile race as having a long, long conversation with one’s body.
“You have to ask yourself, How’s my breathing? Am I drinking enough? Am I eating enough?” he says.
For this interview, I met Kessenich at the Afton Mountain overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway, one of his favorite training spots. I wanted to feel an ultrarunning workout for myself. Fortunately for me, Kessenich was still recovering from the Charlottesville Marathon just four days earlier, so his workout schedule was unusually light.
Typically, Kessenich takes a few weeks off after competition—most trainers suggest taking one day off for every mile you run in a race—before resuming his normal workout schedule: biking 60 miles each week and some days running for two hours along the Appalachian Trail.
For today’s workout he’s selected about four miles along the trail. By the second mile, the trail’s steep inclines have me gasping for breath.
“You also listen to your competition for signs of weakness,” he says. “Generally, during a marathon, you want to be able to carry on a normal conversation. If they’re breathing heavy, you know it’s time to push it.”
Great.
As Kessenich bounds across a stream, the story begins to trail off. Or, more accurately, the narrator gives up. Kessenich isn’t breathing heavy—his hair isn’t even messed up, while my signs of weakness feel more like billboards. Each breath is painful and my legs feel like mushy, overripe bananas.
I’ve hit, albeit somewhat prematurely, what marathoners call “The Wall,” a physical and psychological barrier where flesh and spirit come into direct conflict. The first symptoms include rubbery legs and exhaustion. Then it gets worse.
“It’s a downward spiral of horrible physiological pain,” says Whittaker, the ACAC trainer. Hitting The Wall, bikers begin to wobble, runners begin to shuffle. They feel stiff, cramped, blistered. They become so dehydrated that they stop sweating, and they feel hungry and nauseated at the same time.
Physically, The Wall indicates a shortage of glycogen, a short-term fuel stored in muscle tissue. Once glycogen is depleted, the body starts getting energy from fat. Even a skinny person carries enough fat to run about 600 miles, but there’s a catch—the process of burning fat requires much more oxygen than the process of burning glycogen. Around mile 20 of a marathon, oxygen is in short supply. The runner has two choices—quit, or slow down and hang in there.
Spiritually, The Wall is a mental no-man’s land where runners think, “What am I doing? Why am I here? I could quit right now, and no one would ever know.” Extreme sports enthusiast and author Michael Bane describes The Wall as a place of dramatic emotional flux, from rage to fear to exhilaration—he recounts, for example, a woman who plotted to kill her new husband in the late stages of a marathon.
The only thing you can do, says Whittaker, is push past it. “You have to find a way to not let The Wall win. Then the downward spiral becomes an upward spiral.”
Coconuts and floating men
Russell Gill’s introduction to The Wall happened in 1982, when the Ironman Triathlon played on national television. He watched 23-year-old Julie Moss staggering and crawling toward the finish line, vomiting, waving away people who tried to help her. A competitor passed and beat her by 29 seconds. The next year, the number of Ironman contestants jumped to 850 from 580, and now tops 1,600.
“It just triggered something,” says Gill. “Believe it or not, that was attractive to me. I wanted to know how I would react in that position, being so exhausted. Would I quit? Would I make it to the finish line? I decided I’d never know until I started to train and entered one.”
Gill ran cross-country at Duke University, competing in three- to five-mile races, before trying marathons. He caught the attention of Asics shoe company in 1990, after finishing among the top 10 American men in the Chicago Marathon.
He was feeling burned out by road running when he moved to Virginia in 1993. Here he discovered trail running, which adds the rough terrain and steep inclines of mountain trails to the grueling distance of an ultramarathon.
Gill’s girlfriend, Francesca Conte, is one of the top-ranked female ultrarunners in the country. In July, the Discovery Channel will follow her as she runs the “Badwater” ultramarathon, a 135-mile race from Death Valley to the top of Mt. Whitney in California.
Together, Gill and Conte run Bad to the Bone Race Productions, organizing ultraraces in the Appalachian Mountains. They are two of the few ultrarunners to get corporate sponsorships. The likes of clothing manufacturer Patagonia, Cliff Bar, Petzel (which makes head lamps) and Injinji (a sock company) pay Gill and Conte a small stipend and travel expenses, and in exchange the runners agree to tout their products.
The fancy socks and nutrition bars couldn’t help Gill when he finally lived his dream—running until he hallucinated.
In 1998, Gill ran a 70-mile race that climbed 11,000 feet in the Pennsylvania mountains. There were maybe six aid stations throughout the whole course, he says, and it was about 95 degrees with 90 percent humidity.
“I really started hurting about 40 miles into the race,” says Gill. “I could tell I
wasn’t staying hydrated, and all my electrolytes were out of whack. I was lying on my back in every creek, trying to stay cool. I threw up several times. I hallucinated—I saw coconuts rolling along in front of me on the trail. I was running along a ridge line, and I saw a guy in a white robe floating along beside me. By the time the race was over, I had lost 15 pounds.
“I got exactly what I wanted,” says Gill. “Kinda sick, isn’t it?”
Eye of the tiger
Marathoning, it seems, has followed the arc traced by many modern American endeavors. What was once the domain of elite athletes has become—through the uniquely capitalist cycle of media attention, popularity and sponsorship—something of a pop fad.
Gill says marathons have “gone corporate.” Ultrarunning evolved in the 1970s as a response to mainstream marathoning, and while the ultrarunning events are attracting more corporate sponsors, it’s still “a pretty low-key crowd,” he says.
It’s hard to believe, though, that a group of people who love to run until they barf don’t have a few quirks. In fact, both Gill and Kessenich say the scene has its share of jogging junkies who train compulsively, always in search of the next runner’s high.
Vigorous exercise floods the brain with a chemical called norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter released in stressful situations that produces feelings of euphoria.
“It’s a good thing,” says trainer Whittaker. “We encourage people to look for it because it helps them continue their exercise program.
“But some people develop overtraining syndrome,” says Whittaker. “It’s the danger zone. People who overtrain develop injuries and depression.”
In fact, ultrarunning came under scrutiny in January, when 46-year-old Mark Heinemann died after running 207 miles in a 48-hour “Across the Years” race in Arizona. Deaths and serious injuries are rare in the sport, but both Kessenich and Gill say they know plenty of endorphin addicts in danger of pushing themselves too far—although they themselves claim that, for them, a day or two without running isn’t the end of the world.
“I get somewhat obsessive when a race is imminent and I’m training for it,” Kessenich admits. He’s competitive by nature, he says, and the sense of challenge these races present is what keeps him running.
“I don’t decide to do a race until the motivation hits me, and I’m going to run as long as I’m motivated,” he says. “At this point, I’ve run enough races that if I didn’t do another one, that would be fine. But another challenge always seems to come up.”
Training days
How to proceed when one marathon just isn’t enough
It’s one of America’s many ironies—obesity has hit epidemic levels, and yet more people are gravitating to ultramarathons and other punishing sports.
Just as hucksters peddle myriad fad diets, a quick Google search reveals there’s also a good number of books, magazines and Internet sites offering different training programs that promise to have you doing marathons in as little as eight weeks.
“The sport has exploded,” says veteran running coach Mark Lorenzoni, who runs Ragged Mountain Running Shop. “People see it as attainable, something they can succeed in.”
But people’s zest for a do-it-yourself, super-size workout can backfire. Long distance running strains muscles, taxes joints and depletes nutrients the body needs, and too many workouts don’t allow enough recovery time—especially for the middle-aged men and women with whom ultrarunning is becoming more popular.
“I have two main rules—don’t get hurt, and don’t overdo it to the point you end up hating the sport,” Lorenzoni says. “Training for a marathon is like studying for an exam. You want to come in prepared, but not tired.”
Step one, says Lorenzoni, is to figure out how far you can run without hurting yourself, and commit to doing that distance once a week. Then, slowly work your way up, with a few off weeks to rest. For example, if your long run is six miles, your weekly running schedule would be:
• Week one: 6 miles
• Week two: 7 miles
• Week three: 8 miles
• Week four: 9 miles
• Week five: 6 miles
• Week six: 11 miles
• Week seven: 6 miles
• Week eight: 13 miles
And so on. Your longest run should never exceed 22 miles. The rest of your training should be a moderate run two or three times a week, Lorenzoni says.
He also warns against picking diets out of magazines and websites. “Everybody’s different, so what turns one person on might cripple someone else,” Lorenzoni says.
Your weekly long run is the time to experiment with food and clothing, and Lorenzoni urges his runners to keep a journal, recording what works for them and what doesn’t.
“What do you eat? How late? What do you take on the run? What do you wear? What do you eat after your run? When things go well, use it for the race,” he says.
If you’re serious about getting off the couch and on the road, Lorenzoni teaches a summertime running course designed to prepare new runners for everything from a 10-mile race to an ultramarathon. Call 293-3367 to sign up.—J.B.