“I am 150k into the 330k challenge. It’s trying to kill me but I am not done,” Haines resident Jennifer Hughes texted the CVN last month, hunkered down in the Italian Alps during the Tor de Géants, or “Tour of Giants,” a notoriously difficult mountain race.
A few days later, a blizzard struck while Hughes was nearing the final summit of the more than-200-mile race. Hughes had 15 miles to go, but organizers deemed the snow and ice too strong and called off the rest of the event.
“Mentally there is no way to describe how depleted and screwed up we were at that point,” said Hughes, an ultra-marathoner who has lived in Haines for about two and a half years.
Hughes, 44, has been running mind-shatteringly long races for more than decade. But the Tor, which took place about two weeks ago, was the hardest race she had ever done. According to Runner’s World, it’s one of the most challenging mountain races in the world, gaining over 75,000 feet in elevation across 25 mountain passes.
“My friends kept saying this race will break your heart. And it will,” Hughes said. “It’s like a wall that’s as tall as heaven and as wide as the universe, and we were just throwing ourselves at it, kind of like medieval soldiers.”
The Tor was the second of two extreme endurance races Hughes completed this summer – the two most challenging of her life. The other, called the Hardrock 100, is a 100-mile run in the Rocky Mountains near Silverton, Colorado. Widely considered as one of the hardest ultra marathons in the U.S., it features climbing 33,000 feet and navigating peaks that rise almost three miles above sea level.
“Moving outside is how I manage my crazy,” she said. “My journey has very much been an intersection of mothering and mountains. I started to run to deal with the challenges of mothering.”
Hughes has two sons – Colin Aldassy, 15, and Ansel Spring, 2. She started doing endurance races when Colin was young, competing all over the world, including in Nepal, Jordan, Australia and Patagonia. “In particular I found a lot of joy in doing the really long-distance runs. If I were going to do a race it would pretty much be a 100-mile race. I could go do 50k on my own,” Hughes said.
As Colin grew older, Hughes took a break from racing to devote more time to parenting. But the Hardrock 100 was always on her wishlist. She had applied to compete for several years and never got past the race’s restrictive lottery system. (About 2,400 people apply each year for 145 spots, she said.)
After five years off, and a year after having Ansel, she decided to go for it again. “I got in and it was just this amazing full circle moment. A dozen years later and another kid,” Hughes said. She moved to Silverton for three months last spring to train.
Hughes completed the July race in 40 hours and 31 minutes, with no sleep.
During the Tor, she said she slept for a total of seven hours in six and a half days. “Most of that was like 30 minutes at a time under a table in a barn,” she said.
Hughes called her training plan the “Haines Scotch Tape Training Method” because she’d link together the major summits around town: She’d start at 7 Mile Haines Highway, run up over Peak 3920 and Mount Ripinsky, down into town, over to Battery Point, up Mount Riley before descending to Mud Bay Road. She also referred to training in Haines as the “Sisyphus model,” in reference to the repetition of going up all the trails on Mount Ripinsky – in a single day. “Roll the rock up, roll it back down, roll it back up.”
In winter she said she trained on the treadmill, Stair Master and Jacobs Ladder – “this torture thing that’s at Thor’s Gym.”
Although Hughes checked both the Hardrock 100 and Tor de Géantes off her bucket list this summer, she said she’d like to do each of them again. Running the Tor taught her a lesson that she wants to apply earlier in the race.
“I struggled for four days with just my mind. You are either going to be eaten alive and quit and go home, or you’re going to find a radical new way of life. Pushing is not the answer. You have to find flow. There has to be a portal into that wall instead of just flinging yourself at it,” she said. “That lesson was so hard to learn. Even as I come back to my regular life, I feel it slipping away.”