Battle of sexes yields record at 24 Hours of Frisco

Click to Enlarge Browse and Buy Summit Daily Photos Solo female runner Julie Hagen from Dumont heads down toward the finish line Sunday morning on her last lap of the third annual Salomon 24 Hours of Frisco. Hagen finished fifth among solo females, completing 10 laps (about 60 miles) in 23 hours, 8 minutes and 10 seconds. Summit Daily/Alex McGregor Get Sports Feeds

BY DEVON O'NEIL
summit daily news
October 1, 2006

Comments
Print Email

FRISCO - Twenty-two hours into a 24-hour battle of the sexes, the sexes decided they'd rather be friends than rivals. Didn't matter to the record book, however; the 22 hours of heated competition was still plenty to help shatter the old mark at the 24 Hours of Frisco trail-running odyssey Saturday and Sunday.

The men vs. women competition at the third annual race began as a friendly feud between Adam Chase's GoFast! foursome and Danelle Ballengee's AATRA/Spyder Women squad. Plenty of trash talking in jest led up to the race's 9:30 a.m. Saturday start, and then the rabbits took off.

With each foursome wasting nary a second, they took turns holding the lead deep into the night on the Frisco peninsula trails. Sprained ankles were taped up and shrugged off. Sleep was a goal, but far from a guarantee.

The urgent running on the 6-mile loop persisted into the morning hours until, around 7:30 a.m., with each team struggling to maintain pace and suffering through everpresent pain, they decided to call it off. Instead, they ran the last two hours together, finishing with the same number of laps, 32, and miles, 192, in the same amount of time.

The previous record, held by a Salomon squad put together by Chase, was 29 laps.

"The cool thing about it is that we all did eight laps," said Ballengee, a world-class mountain runner competing in the event for the first time. "All the girls, all the guys. And we were all trashed - it's harder than I thought putting in all those miles. We all put in 48 miles as fast as we could."

There were quips afterward - "I think they were afraid of being beaten by girls," joked Breckenridge's Helen Cospolich, another elite ultrarunner who was joined on Spyder Women by Anita Ortiz and Keri Nelson - but both teams respected the other and were satisfied with the draw.

"We would've probably won," said Jason Poole of GoFast!, a sentiment echoed by Ballengee, "but it was a good insurance policy just to call it a truce."

"They are obviously an incredibly talented group of women," added GoFast!'s Ryan "Flyboy" Padilla, who ran the fastest lap at the event, a 36-minute, 2-second zipper on Saturday morning.

David Wilcox of Summit Cove was the only non-Front Ranger on Chase's squad, but even his altitude-adjusted lungs were hurting (he had bronchitis). Chase, too, pushed through a rare running obstacle when he suddenly struggled to see where he was going in the middle of the night.

For men's solo winner Hal Clark, the biggest problem came at the end of the competition, on Sunday morning. Exhausted from traveling 90 miles on foot, Clark, 31, prepared to drag his 140-pound body to work, at Safeway in Frisco.

"I have to go do payroll," the Breckenridge resident said. "I always get myself into these predicaments. Put that in the paper, so my boss knows. He's on vacation right now."

Clark eked out his victory over David Hersey of Westminster, who entered as "Fat Boy." While sitting near the makeshift campsites at the Frisco Nordic Center on Sunday morning, Clark said he walked much of the last 15 miles to victory because, well, "I had to. After about 75 miles I was no good anymore. Sometimes you gotta keep plugging along, though."

Women's solo winner Laurie Nakauchi-Hawn (Team Snail), a teacher from Arvada who runs ultramarathons in her spare time, used a similar strategy.

"I just put my head down and run," she said after finishing with 16 laps (96 miles), best among all solo competitors. "I don't consider myself fast. I'm just consistent or stubborn - or both."

After kicking off in 2004 with only 18 total entrants, this year's 24 Hours drew 39 entrants, solos and teams combined. Participants were allowed to register in teams of up to eight, and so they did; one team, in fact, entered as "Eight Isn't Enough."

Snowhome Properties Steamboat won the 2-4 Person Coed division with 27 laps, six more than Will Run For Beer. Recoverin' Endurance Addicts claimed top honors in the 6-8 Person Coed class, finishing with 28 laps. Eight Isn't Enough had 26, while Benny and the Jets and the MSO Divas each notched 24.

The Summit County Rescue squad, which began competing a couple of years ago to kill time while fulfilling their medical support duties at the event, edged the Evergreen-based Intravenous Cornflakes to avoid sixth place in the six-team 6-8 Coed division.

"Our motto is 'Committed to placing dead last,'" explained Anna DeBattiste, an SAR member who has competed in past years with the group but was unable to take part this weekend. "Although," she added with a grin, "this year the Evergreen team is dead last."

Paul Grimm of Littleton won the men's six-hour race with seven laps, while Jean DeMoss of Denver won the women's six-hour race with six laps. Scott Oberbreckling of Boulder triumphed in the inaugural Salomon Six (one loop on the course), with Sharron Galpin topping the women.



Devon O'Neil can be contacted at (970) 668-4633, or at doneil@summitdaily.com.