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sponsorships. Early on, single-event entry fees started at about $15,000 per team, and during the late 1990s they steadily rose to about $25,000 per team. We were grateful to have corporate support from Pharmanex (a division of Nu Skin) for our Morocco and Patagonia adventures and later from DuPont, which underwrote numerous races and for which we tested clothing and fibers. Incidentally, there was no financial profit in it for us athletes—not that we cared, as we were doing what we loved on someone else’s dime. But the agent made some good money, and the corporate sponsors got exposure when MTV, the Discovery Channel, USA Network, ESPN, or Nat Geo broadcast the Eco-Challenges or Raids Gauloises.
    Altogether, the running and the adventure racing took me away from home and work three to six weeks out of the year, not an unreasonable amount of time, I thought. Still, training runs and local races that ranged from fifty kilometers to one hundred miles consumed most of my “downtime,” leaving little for family or a social life. It was extremely rare for me to read a book, go to the movies, or watch TV. Today, it surprises me when I discover some sitcom of which I was completely unaware during the eighties. I still find “new” episodes of Seinfeld hilarious.
    So I worked. I spent time with my kids. I ran. I raced. And I thought up new ways of torturing myself, wanting to do something each year that no one else had ever done before.
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    It felt as if 120-volt shocks probed my legs with every step. Arriving at the top of Towne’s Pass in Death Valley National Park, I’d already been running for five days straight, more than three hundred miles across the desert floor and up Mount Whitney—and I still had over two hundred miles and another summit of Mount Whitney to go. People surrounded me, giving me advice. But I was in a fog, stumbling around in my own world with memories and voices from the past floating through the haze. Self-doubt clouded my mind: I can’t do it anymore. The pain is too much. I have to stop.
    In July 2001, in honor of my fiftieth birthday, I was attempting to complete the first-ever Badwater Quad: running the Death Valley course four times in a row, plus tacking on a few extra miles so I could climb the mountain twice. When I was done, it would be four crossings, 584 miles, and a total elevation change of 96,000 feet, essentially nonstop.
    A little more than halfway through and after 130 hours, I was feeling completely used up, suffering from severe tendonitis. No wonder. During one course completion at Badwater, your feet strike the ground more than three hundred thousand times, absorbing the impact of four million pounds—the equivalent of hitting the pavement after falling three thousand feet, or being struck in a head-on collision with a jumbo jet. Ask around at your local running shop, and they’ll tell you runner’s tendonitis is a “typical overuse injury.” Well, sure, I was in a state of overuse, but that’s where ultrarunners live, in that place where you feel as if there’s nothing left, no more energy, no more reason, no more sanity, no more will to go farther. Then you push forward anyway, step after step, even though every cell in your body tells you to stop. And you discover that you can go on.
    At this time in my life, I was running on empty in a larger sense, too, still punishing myself, still trying to prove that I could survive just about anything, still trying to outrun my mortality. In the twenty years since Jean’s death, I’d racked up a list of accomplishments as I’d strived to fulfill my definition of success and compensate for what I perceived as my personal shortcomings. Nearly all of my family relationships were strained. My dad, brother, and sister thought I was crazy for all the time I devoted to running, and they didn’t like that it took me away from our business. Dad had loaned me start-up