A local runner joins a very unique group of athletes, who suffer one of the toughest ultra marathons in the country, and not only finishes the 135-mile race, but comes out with only one small blister on his toe.
By Laura Tate Editor
Challenge. Passion. Identity. That’s what drove Malibuite Chris Frost, a lean-muscled 51-year-old, to compete in one of the most brutal ultramarathons in the world-the 25th annual Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile run that starts at 282 feet below sea level in Badwater, Death Valley and goes through the desert in scorching highs of 140 degrees, and then up to Whitney Portals at 8,360 feet high on Mt. Whitney.
It’s not a run, but a “torture-fest,” is how this marathon, which took place July 23-25, has been described.
Frost, a veteran of more than 25 marathons and more than 100 triathlons, including three Ironmans, was a rookie in this race, but finished 17th place overall with a time of 43 hours, 14 minutes, and 56 seconds. He was well within the 48-hour requirement to go home with a Badwater Ultramarathon buckle.
Pam Reed, a 41-year-old mother of three from Tucson, Ariz. came first overall in the race, breaking the women’s record by 2 hours.
“We were all in awe,” Frost wrote afterward in an account of the race.
Indeed, anyone who would participate in such a grueling and punishing marathon would leave many in awe as well as wondering why. Why would anyone do such a thing?
“It’s a challenge, a real accomplishment,” Frost at first explains.
But that still doesn’t go deep enough. People running, walking, sometimes crawling in 140-degree heat? Leaving some retching as their stomachs heaved up whatever food and liquids they tried to cram into their systems to keep them going?
As one of Frost’s crew, Georgine Pantelas, puts it, “It’s a little weird, a little extreme.”
Pantelas is a triathlete.
However, she says, “It’s all relative.”
Frost later explained it as a “passion,” something that you just have to do, that’s in you that gives you a “sense of identity.”
Frost, a Realtor in Malibu, began his passion of running about 25 years ago when a friend challenged him to run from Paradise Cove to the market, about a 6-mile trek.
“I enjoyed it,” recalls Frost, who describes the “big family” of runners as “very different people.”
“It is like being in a training world where there is a purpose.”
Frost decided to enter the Badwater race after reading about it in “Competitor Magazine,” while on a plane. His interest was piqued, and then in what may have been the inevitable, Frost attended a wedding and was seated next to a man who had been an official at two Badwater races, Jeff Bell. Bell is also a veteran of the Furnace Creek 508 Bicycle Race, another grueling desert race. The Badwater and the Furnace Creek, completed in the same year, comprise what is called the Death Valley Cup.
Bell became one of Frost’s crewmembers along with Frost’s fianc, Tracy Breen, who was crew chief and who, Frost says, was there every step of the way, refusing to leave him during the race. Other members of the crew were George Toberman, a USA Triathlon team member for 2002, Luis Manzano, a Ventura Country fireman and paramedic, and Gary Morris, the third person to cross Death Valley in the early ’80s. Georgine Pantelas with father Harry Pantelas, whom Frost calls, “a sort of a guru” when it comes to running, completed the team. Lisa Smith, a four-time runner of Badwater, coached Frost.
Training for Frost, who is a firefighter in Parker, Ariz. where he has a home, consisted of six months of running, biking and swimming six days a week. Frost ran a 70-mile race in 90-degree weather in Bishop, Ariz. to prepare for the ultramarathon.
But that heat was nothing compared to the Badwater starting time heat of near 100 degrees at 10 a.m. The starting times for the race were 6 a.m., 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., with a total of 80 runners. Frost was in the last group, which he says worked out better because the earliest group would be going through the most grueling part of the race-from Furnace Creek (18 miles in) to Stovepipe Wells (42 miles into the course), in the absolute hottest part of the day. During this part of the race, Frost says temperatures reached near 140 degrees in the sun.
“It’s [a] killer,” Frost describes, “because other runners are sick, with severe stomach problems.
“[They’re] literally cooking out there.”
They key, says Frost, is to get to Stovepipe intact-your feet, stomach and head in good shape.
To keep Frost’s head in good shape, his crew kept him wet, with ice in his hat and around his neck, in a bandanna. To stay hydrated, he drank two 16-ounce bottles of liquid per hour.
Frost arrived at Stovepipe at 8:21 p.m. and after crewing out-where his team members do “damage control,” checking his physical condition and giving him a change of night running clothes-he charged 18 miles up to Towns’ Pass by 1 a.m. for a major crew out.
With a full moon, Frost and another runner he befriended, David Lazenby, a firefighter from England, headed the eight miles down to Panamint Valley. At the bottom, the two ran into Rick Nawrocki, a cancer survivor and previous Badwater runner, who had finished the previous year only five months after a stem cell transplant.
The runners now faced the “big, bad climb,” a six-hour trek uphill to the Darwin checkpoint, which Frost made at 12:02 p.m. (about 26 hours into the race), accompanied by Harry and Georgine Pantelas. Partway up the climb, Frost ate his first solid food since he started the race. It “takes too much” to digest food before this point, explains Frost, pointing out that many runners drop out of the race with stomach problems because they ate too soon.
After reaching Lone Pine about 11 hours later, which he had to do through a cloud of smoke from a fire in the Sierras, Frost only had 13 miles to go.
Frost wrote of the last part of his run, again with a full moon, “Everything became very clear, and the haze of exhaustion seemed to disappear.”
His crew joined up near the end so they could run to the finish line with Frost at Whitney Portals.
“I felt like a million bucks,” Frost wrote.
Frost says he never thought of quitting the race.
“I knew I could do it,” he says. “I have a personality that will finish things.”
But, he admits, “There were times where I laughed at myself,” thinking, “This is incredible. How many people would do this?”
Frost plans to complete the Death Valley Cup by running the Furnace Creek 508 in October, and has entered the “Hurt” in Hawaii-a 100-mile endurance run in a mountainous, tropical rainforest in January.