There are hard races, and then there is the Badwater 135, and then there is doing it 19 times, LAist reports in a profile of the Southern California runner attempting exactly that.
The race
The Badwater 135 is a 135-mile ultramarathon that starts in Death Valley and finishes at the Mount Whitney Portal, crossing two mountain ranges along the way. It is run in July, on purpose, in daytime temperatures well over 115 degrees and nighttime lows still in the high 90s. It is routinely described as one of the hardest foot races in the world, and the description is not marketing.
This year the race got measurably harder. The traditional finishing deadline of 48 hours was cut to 45, and runners must also reach a 2,000-foot elevation sign at Towne Pass, near the 50-mile mark, within 14 hours or be pulled. For most of the 98 athletes competing, that is a tightening of an already brutal standard. For one of them, it is personal arithmetic.
The runner
Danny Westergaard is 67, a retired aerospace engineer from Palos Verdes Estates, and he holds the longest streak of consecutive Badwater finishes in the event's history. He first finished in 2007, placing 12th in a time of 32 hours and 22 minutes, and he has finished every year since, 18 in a row. This summer he is going for 19.
The shortened cutoff lands squarely on him, because his most recent finish took 45 hours and 29 minutes, which under the new 45-hour rule would not have counted. The margin he has been running against for years just disappeared, and then some. To give himself the most time against the cutoffs, he starts in the first wave, at 8 p.m.
His own explanation of why anyone does this is admirably free of romance. "It's a masochist thing," he said, "but the harder the training, the easier the race." That is the whole ethos of the distance in one line: there is no way to make the race easy, only a way to arrive slightly less unready for it.
Why it is a Los Angeles story
Badwater is a Death Valley race, but its longest-running character is an Angeleno, a South Bay retiree who has spent nearly two decades turning one of the planet's most punishing events into an annual ritual. There is something very Southern California about it, the aerospace engineer's precision applied to heat, pace and cutoff math, and the sheer stubbornness of showing up year after year to a race that only gets harder.
Whether the streak reaches 19 comes down to three hours he no longer has and a course that has never given anything back. The Herald will note how Westergaard's attempt finishes.
