Peak Performance

Marshall Ulrich has climbed Mount Everest, run across the country and written a book about his adventures.

Super senior Marshall Ulrich sees challenges as opportunities. At 60 years old, he’s an ultramarathoner, adventure runner and mountaineer. His résumé includes reaching the Seven Summits, including Mount Everest; running more than 100 races that average over 125 miles each; and running across America, a 3,063-mile trek in 52 days, at the age of 57. He’s also written a book about his exploits, Running on Empty.

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On a peaceful mountain above Idaho Springs, Colo. sits an idyllic custom-built cabin that overlooks an idyllic lake. Hung on the roughhewn wall of the cabin is a plaque with the words: “All those who achieve great things are great dreamers.”

Marshall Ulrich, the dreamer who lives there, has the face of a Colorado sunset—ruddy and beautiful, every line shaped and carved as if by some higher power—with a pair of piercing blue eyes peeking through to remind you of the bright light burning inside.

Those dreams, he tells me, began as a small boy. “I’m sitting in Greeley, Colo. in front of this black and white TV and see these guys climbing Everest. Or what I thought was Everest…”

Does it really matter, in the end, to a dreamer? The four-year-old sat mesmerized watching that flickering screen and the almost mythical images of men climbing something that seemed unattainable if not impossible. “They had these frostbitten fingers and toes and it so intrigued me that I thought to myself, and I remember vividly having this thought, that I wanted to experience what they were going through and get a taste of that.”

The boy waited a while, 48 years to be exact, to get that taste of Everest. There would be stepping stones to build up the needed physical experiences and mental strength to climb Everest, and there would be the winding detours that lives take, including the death of his first wife.

“For many years I was kind of going through the motions of living, but not really connecting with people.” Ulrich spent almost 25 years trying to raise a family, keep a business going, trying to survive, with a couple of failed marriages along the way.

And, all along the way, he ran.

Birth of a runner

“It’s just who I am.” Marshall Ulrich, on why he runs, from Running on Empty. “One of the reasons I started running was at the age of 28 my first wife was diagnosed with cancer.” Ulrich was living with it, too, so much so, the doctor pulled him aside and told him he’d have to either be put on drugs to reduce his blood pressure or start exercising.

So he started running.

Ulrich started small, with 5ks, but didn’t stay there long, soon graduating to 10ks. The 10ks became 10-milers and 13-milers and eventually marathons and mountain races. Eventually he turned to ultramarathons where the human body is pushed to its limits and at times even beyond those limits.

I’ve been reading Homer’s The Odyssey recently, that magical tale of Odysseus and his difficulty in returning home as he encounters the deadly Cyclops and the alluring sea nymphs, who could lure sailors to their death with their hypnotic songs. All these tales are magical, mythical, and they remind me at times of Ulrich’s own journey. Because some of the running stories of Marshall Ulrich take on the stuff of legend as well, only they’re true.

There’s the one where he stopped in Death Valley during the Badwater Ultramarathon to help a total stranger get back on his feet. Ulrich had won the race four times and was gunning for a fifth. The temperature on the asphalt was 200 degrees. There in the bowl of the desert where the air can literally steal the moisture from your body Ulrich talked the runner to his feet, willing him to finish the race. Can you imagine Lance Armstrong pulling over on the Tour de France to help a fallen competitor?

And there’s the one where Ulrich ran the grueling Leadville Trail 100, running all through the night to clear the hundred miles before motoring three hours by car to make the Pikes Peak Marathon. A 13-mile race up the mountain, to 14,000 feet, Pikes forces the runners to become more mountain goat than man as they scramble to the summit before racing back to the bottom.

The stories like these go on forever it seems just like one of Ulrich’s epic runs…

Running on empty 

When I ask Ulrich about his most famous run, the one from San Francisco to New York, he says it was “something I’d been considering since the 90s but I was unable to do it because of my kids, so I put it on hold until 2008.”

By then he was 57, no longer a spring chicken, maybe not as physically powerful as he’d been in his 30s, but strong enough and stronger mentally. And something else had taken place in his life, he was no longer running away from things, but running to them. He’d always had goals and discipline, but he had a stronger sense of purpose now. He’d met someone, Heather, and had married her. She grounded him in a way he hadn’t felt since he’d taken on these Herculean challenges. But at the same time, she set him free. 

For someone who looked at rock cliffs, mountaintops and desert vistas with curious glee, challenges that would buckle the knees of most of us, love was something else for Ulrich. Climbing Everest? He could train for that; he could prepare. But there’s no safety net, there’s no ice pick to catch your fall, when talking about the human heart. When you put it out there, really put it out there, it’s no longer yours to control. It’s in the hands of another.

Ulrich had been running from that pain of loss for decades, but with Heather’s help, he could deal with it and no longer try to outrun it. He finally had the time and the partner and the mental toughness to get him across America on his own two feet and 30 pairs of shoes.