Submitted by admin on Thu, 2005-10-06 20:00. ::
It is an undertaking so brutal that in the 19 years since its insidious inception, it has been accomplished only 187 times. Of those 187 finishers, 161 have been men and 26 have been women.
This year, nine runners completed the harrowing task, of which, two were women. One of those was Burlington-Edison High School graduate Krissy Moehl Sybrowsky.
"It's kind of fun because going into the last race, I was kind of sad because the other three had gone so well," Sybrowsky said. "I was sad to see it come to a finish. I am happy, however. It feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders."
In the end, she was the top woman to complete the Grand Slam, placed second overall and ran the second fasted elapsed time for all four races (88 hours, 11 minutes, 48 seconds) ever by a woman.
"I was going to do it no matter what," she said. "There were some times when I had some questions. A lot of people that don't make the Grand Slam do so because they can't make the time cutoff. You have to be at certain aid stations by certain times.
After Sybrowsky told her mom she was interested in completing the Grand Slam, Peggy took matters into her own hands. She crewed on her daughter's team a year earlier at Wasatch and knew what attempting the Grand Slam was going to entail. She told her daughter she'd be willing to crew at all four of the races.
"I told her I'd think about it," Sybrowsky said. "In the meantime, she asked me the dates of the races. The next thing I knew, she had all her vacation scheduled around the Grand Slam. I was like, ‘Well, I guess I'm going to be running the Grand Slam this summer.'"
Sybrowsky was a little nervous about the first race in the series. There were other factors besides the 16,000 feet of elevation gain and 18,000 feet of loss that awaited her.
"I was super nervous," she admitted. "It's a really competitive race. It's an event. The event has a presence all its own. There were huge expectations."
The race began with an ascent from the Squaw Valley (Calif.) floor (elevation 6,200 feet) to Emigrant Pass (elevation 8,750 feet), a climb of 2,550 feet in the first 41Ľ2 miles. From the pass, following trails used by gold and silver miners of the 1850s, runners climbed another 15,540 feet and descended 22,970 feet before reaching the finish line in Auburn.
"The climb was definitely the prettiest part of the course," Sybrowsky said. "I actually really enjoyed it. The rest is just really well-groomed, single-trail of soft dirt. Not a lot of rocks.
"This one, I won," Sybrowsky said with a smile. "It's more of a road race because 70 percent of it is on Forest Service roads, which are two-track wide. There was a little bit of mud in the first three miles, but after that it was really like running on a highway."
"Surprisingly, I lost my quads," Sybrowsky said. "I think I got behind on calories at one point at about mile 60 and I started to feel it. At about mile 90, I couldn't run downhill."
"I was just trying not to topple over," she said. "I was sitting way back and remember laughing so hard because it was so comical. For a course that is really known as the easiest of the four, that one definitely hurt the most."
"This race had the toughest start for me," she said. "I think it was something like 40 miles before I really felt good. Then I started feeling pretty good right before Hope Pass, that was at mile 45, I think. My system for some reason just wouldn't go. But I just kept going."
"She wouldn't let me stop," Sybrowsky said. "We were on this downhill road section and I was just walking, feeling miserable, and she just kept running. I was like, ‘OK, I'll just go with her.' She pulled me back around and I got my head on straight."
Running an out-and-back race can seem tedious. Sybrowsky, however, doesn't mind retracing her steps. She explained that the trail is always different.
"But it is hard," she said, "knowing that you have to repeat what you've just done. It does kind of prepare you for the different sections of the race. There is a three-mile road section in Leadville and it's just long and straight. Mentally, that can kill you if you aren't prepared for it."
"Leadville was hard, but to have it turn into such a good race was great," she said. "At the end, my tendons were really starting to hurt. I only had a few weeks before Wasatch and I really started to wonder how that was going to be."
"My knees started hurting and knowing that I had 70 miles to go and that I had to finish, it was rough," she said. "There was never any doubt that I would finish, but it was how long and how bad was I going to hurt."
"My poor mom," she said. "When she looked at me, she could tell how bad I was hurting. That really brought it on. I started to cry, telling her it hurt so bad."
Fortunately for Sybrowsky, David Horton, who had just finished running the Pacific Crest Trail in record time, was a member of her crew. He looked at the shape Sybrowsky was in, asked a couple of questions, handed her three ibuprofen and told her she'd feel better at the next aid station.
"Twenty minutes, I can make up 20 minutes," Sybrowsky recalled. "So I pushed really hard and then all of a sudden everything just sort of fell apart, not my knees, but my breathing, my mental state. I just couldn't go."
Brandon ran the entire race at her side. A ultrarunner himself, his legs were undertrained for running the course's entire length. On the flip side, his wife's legs were overtrained and she was about to crash.
"He'd normally kick my butt," she said. "He stuck with me. This was the most time we'd spent together in a couple of months. But it was crazy. I'd run through certain sections of the course and I'd remember how fast we'd ran them the year before. But this time, I was going so slow."
"I'd never had the sun come up on me," Sybrowsky said. "I've always finished sub-24 hours. But we came in 261Ľ2 hours, so the sun came up on us while we were out there. I was like, ‘Whoa, this is a little different.'"
Believe it or not, Sybrowsky is looking forward to running the Slam again — in about 10 years. Or she may set her sights on the Rocky Mountain Slam.
While the Grand Slam is the four oldest 100-mile races, the Rocky Mountain Slam is the four toughest. It includes the Bighorn, Hard Rock, Wasatch and Bear races.
"I have other goals to reach," Sybrowsky said. "One is to try Hardrock, which is the toughest 100-miler. It has 33,000 feet of gain. There is a 48-hour cutoff, so that shows you how tough it is."
"This was a whole different experience," she said. "But that is what long distance races are. Some have said it is like an entire life summed up in a single day. There are so many ups and downs and different emotions and pain and elation. This is just something different that I love to do."
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