Leadville Trail 100. Brutal. Brilliant. Heartbreaking

If you look up the results of the Leadville Trail 100 this year, you’ll see “DNF” beside Katie Lovis’s name. It’s the cruellest abbreviation in trail running. DNF. Did Not Finish.

But there’s so much those three letters can’t convey. The sacrifice it takes to put in the work just to get to the start line. The effort required on the day. The adversity faced.

The Leadville result for Katie may have been a DNF, but in this case it’s at least as much Did Not Fail as Did Not Finish. Completing 115k of this 164k race run above 10,000 feet of elevation doesn’t constitute failure.

Neither does climbing Hope Pass (for context, at 12,500 feet that’s not quite twice the height of Australia’s highest peak, Mt Kosciuszko), then turning around and climbing it again.

Failing isn’t carrying on while you’re bleeding from the nose and your vision is narrowing to the point where you’re struggling to stay on the trail. And you’re in such bad shape you start falling over. And your blood oxygen has reached the point where, for a normal person at sea level, it would be a medical emergency.

Under these conditions, being medically withdrawn from the race isn’t failure. It’s a DNF and a sorry end to what remains an astonishing achievement. But there’s no way that’s what failure looks like.

What’s Leadville and who’s Katie?

Time for a quick recap… Katie Lovis is an ultra runner sponsored by Altra who is originally from WA but who now lives in Brisbane. She’s tough. She once ran more than 300k on a broken leg, part of an attempt to run the 660k Gibb River Road in WA’s north.

Leadville is her dream race. She won a place through the lottery in 2024 but had to defer due to pregnancy. Baby Alex, who turns 1 in October, was part of the crew who travelled with her to the US as she took on the event this August.

She needed the support - Leadville is one of the most gruelling races in the world. It’s a miler - 100 miles/164 kilometres - and being raced at altitude cranks the degree of difficulty up to 11.

I wrote about Katie’s running career in a piece earlier in the year and about the “dream team” she took to Leadville in another. They will tell you more about both Katie and the race - and how it quite literally saved the town after the closure of the local mine.

Love of the Wild West

The US gets a bad rap these days, and in many ways deservedly so. But Katie is an unashamed lover of the USA. She has family in Colorado Springs, second cousin Amanda and her husband Jerry. The city is a couple of hours from Leadville, so Katie, her partner Brad and baby Alex spent a week there ahead of the race.

At 7,000 feet above sea level, it gave Katie’s body a chance to start to get used to operating at altitude. And for them to be tourists. “We did the Barr Trail, which is at the bottom of Pike's Peak and takes you up to the top of Manitou Incline, which is fairly iconic in the world of ultras… So we hiked up that with Alex,” Katie says.

At the top came the first reminder that life’s a bit different at that sort of elevation. “When we went up Pike's Peak, the ranger was like, ‘Don't let Alex fall asleep because babies suffocate at 14,000 feet.’ And that's when I thought this is actually quite a big deal.”

When they arrived in Leadville Katie felt an instant connection. “I’m obviously biased, but I instantly loved it. The town is so cool. I think different personalities are going to be drawn to different kinds of races and what does appeal to me about Leadville is it's really grassroots,” she says.

“So the town itself feels like the ‘Wild West’.
It's full of really old school buildings, really cool character homes with little painted tiles all over them. You're at the base of these incredible mountains and I think the fact that people are living at that height - it just brings something different.

“The town is a really different kind of place and I enjoyed that a lot. I loved just walking around and seeing what was going on and meeting the people that lived there,” she says.

By the time she attended the race brief, Katie’s excitement started to approach boiling point. “I've watched that race brief before, so to be there in person felt really special. Ken and Merrilee, who started the event, are really grassroots - he's ex-mining she was a travel agent and they saved the town. It's a real small town story,” she says.

“They say in the race brief, and people always say you don't know it until you've done it, but once you've come to Leadville you're part of the Leadville family. And they really work to make that the case.

“And you do feel like that. I feel like I've been to Leadville, now I'm part of Leadville. I can go back to Leadville. Even though I didn't finish, I still feel like my experience got me there, got me a better understanding. That was super cool.

“And race brief wise, they don't mince their words. They're like, ‘Just don't be a cry-baby. Just finish.’ Which I like.” Katie says the race, like many in the US, puts a lot of personal responsibility on the runners themselves. “There's no mandatory kit. There’s suggested kit, and the list is quite long. But you don't have to carry it. And I think that makes sense.”

But she said alongside that is a very supportive vibe that runs through the whole event. Race organisers, volunteers and even other competitors all work together to give everyone the greatest chance of success on the trails. And that spirit of camaraderie was also a big drawcard for Katie.

Race day

Leadville is a little unusual in that the race starts before sunrise and that meant an early alarm call for Katie so she could have her morning coffee and make sure everything was ready before heading down to the race precinct.

“It was the coolest start line I've ever been part of… They sing the national anthem and people get really into it. It's a very American sporting event kind of atmosphere,” Katie says.

“Then at 4am the race started, and I was a little teary because I’ve watched [the race start from afar] so many times. And it was even better than I thought it was going to be. Everyone was out of their houses. They lined the streets, the whole run out of town there were people cheering and music and costumes… It was so exciting.

“It's four in the morning and families with kids are all out on the street… It really feels like you're all in it together and it's just a very cool thing.” That connection between the race, the runners and the town is something Katie really identifies with. She says the feeling is visceral when you’re at the event.

Then, with the closing strains of the Star Spangled Banner still ringing in her ears, along with the cheers of the locals, and with a tear or two in the corner of her eye, all those months of prep were over, and the race was on.

And it started fast. After breaking the course record last year, David Roche was back and he was on a mission that would eventually see him break his own course record. So when the gun went off he took off, and the rest of the field followed.

Katie resisted the urge to get sucked into too fast a start though. She had a race plan, and she was determined to stick to it. “I wanted to stay at a perceived rate of exertion of about six… And I was comfortable, [in the early part of the race] that that's what I was doing. So I wasn't worried about what anyone else around me was doing.”

As dawn approached, the course hit Turquoise Lake, and with it came the first surprise for Katie - a section of single track that wound around the lake shore. Katie loves single track but she was expecting it to be few and far between at Leadville.

In fact, she said the course far exceeded her expectations. “There was far more single track than I thought, and the single track was brilliant, runnable and fun.

“For sure there are grindy fire trails and climbs in the sand, but there's more single track than I realised, which was super cool… I didn't realise it but, you get to this lake and you have kilometres of single track along the lake and it's backed by mountains and that was where the sun rose for me.”

It was early in the race, but everything was going to plan. “I was so happy with how I was running. It was hard, but I knew running at altitude would be hard.
So it didn't stress me out. I was like, ‘Yeah, it's meant to be harder. That's fine.’ So I was averaging, 6 minute 30 second kilometres. I felt totally fine, and that was at a 6 perceived rate of exertion.”

At 20k in she blew through the first aid station, May Queen. In and out pretty quickly as she didn’t need much. Back onto single track before a “grindy” climb up a fire trail. And here Katie put the second part of her strategy into play.

“It's a climb up and I had an interesting learning during that because I had committed to hiking any hills that pushed me up to a 7 [RPE]. So I hiked good chunks of it. Any time I dropped back down [to an RPE of 6], though I would run again,” she says.

Katie says she had immediate validation of this approach. “There was a girl near me who obviously wanted to run the whole thing. She ran and I hiked, and she made next to no ground on me. And on the descent, I just went straight past her and I was like, ‘Good learning. You're expending less energy hiking, but you're not losing much speed at all.’”

From the top of that climb, Katie could see the next aid station, Outward Bound, where her crew would be waiting. The sight gave her a real boost. “It's this stretch of road with tents and music and lights and you can hear it and you can see it and that's the first time you're seeing your crew. So I was like, ‘Sick, I'm almost there.’

“I ran down Powerline and
I felt really good. I was descending well.” But it wasn’t all happy thoughts. While running down Powerline looked like fun, Leadville is an out and back course, which meant she’d have to run back up it later in the race. She was thinking, “Holy shit, this is gonna be so hard coming home.”

It was a boost for Katie to see Brad, Alex, Amanda and Jerry at the aid station. She dumped her head torch and picked up some sunglasses.

“I have black tinted Goodrs, but I don't like not being able to see the trail, so I typically don't run with sunglasses, but it was so glary Brad gave me his Oakleys which are the real flashy, racing mask ones. I felt like a bit of a muppet wearing those, but I could see really well and it really helped with the glare. So that was good.”

One of the rare flat sections on the course is out of Outward Bound and here Katie got another taste of just how local this race is. “I was running and there was this old woman and she was like, ‘Katie, Katie!’
I literally met her on the street the day before and she remembered me. That was the atmosphere.”

Being an Australian added novelty value too when chatting with other runners. “People would say, ‘Oh, I’m back with the Aussie again!’ So it was really fun.”

At this point Katie was still feeling good, but the course plays a trick on runners between Outward Bound and the next aid station, Half Pipe. After a flat section, it starts to climb. “I was running along and I was like, ‘God, this is feeling like it’s quite difficult.’ I didn't realise that I'd been climbing... It's a 15 kilometre climb, but just at that gradient where you can run,” Katie says.

But from that point, it’s downhill - via more single track - to the big aid station at Twin Lakes, where Katie saw her crew Renee, Kim and Jay, plus Brad and Jerry who’d been able to catch a shuttle bus into the site.

This is an important stop, because ahead of runners from here is what Katie describes as “the most difficult trail I’ve ever done in my life”, the double ascent of Hope Pass, 12,500 feet above sea level. So preparation for that challenge is key.

Katie’s crew had everything ready for her, but there were two key things that happened here that turned into learnings. The first is the fact she was already falling behind her planned calorie intake. Altitude suppresses appetite and clearly ultra running requires A LOT of energy. So this was a problem.

And secondly, Katie took the seemingly sensible decision to carry all her cold weather gear up with her from this point, despite the weather being benign. While this was a safety-first approach, she paid a price for carrying the extra weight.

Hope Pass

This is where the race gets serious. “I ran out of Twin Lakes, there’s a little river crossing and then a longer flat. Then, when you see the sign for Hope Pass, the whole trail narrows and you're on technical, narrow single track. And it just goes straight up a mountain, like STRAIGHT UP. People were dropping like flies.”

One of them was a guy called Cam, who was basically weeping on the side of the mountain when Katie reached him. Some other runners were trying to help him but he was telling them to go on, saying he was just going to hold them back.

But Katie told him she had no intention of doing anything other than walking to the top of the pass, and so he wouldn’t be holding her back, he’d be keeping her “on task”. So Cam, Katie and a fellow traveller worked together to get to the top of the pass outbound.

It was tough. “There was a point where I put my poles down and the bottom of my poles were at my eye height and I was like, ‘I just don't actually know if I can keep going.’
I kept feeling like I was going to fall over backwards. It's legitimately gnarly.”

Once the trail reaches the treeline, there is a reprieve because instead of going straight up the incline, it follows a series of switchbacks to the summit. Another boost for runners were the donkeys that were keeping the aid station volunteers company at the summit aid station.

At this point Katie left Cam to it so she could run the descent. “So I started running. I felt fairly good. I recognised how difficult what I'd just done was and I was definitely suffering.” She was also struggling with her nutrition. She knew she wasn’t taking on enough food, but she just couldn’t get it in. Despite that, the descent to the half-way mark went well.

“I ran down to Winfield, and by the time I got to Winfield, I was really starting to struggle. And it was calories. I still did a fairly quick change there though. I took on some food, I sat down and I topped everything up and I got caffeinated electrolyte, which I think was really the only thing that got me back up and over [Hope Pass] again.

“And then knowing that I had to go back, I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’” Katie says she hadn’t been getting passed much on the first climb over Hope Pass, but on the way back she was struggling more and more and some of the more experienced runners were starting to come past her.

“But I got myself up. There was definitely a point where it was like, ‘You have no choice but to go forward.’ And all I wanted to do was stop. But there’s nowhere to stop, you just can't. So you’ve got no other option.

“I somehow got myself to the top again. And honestly, I don't know how. I look back on that and it was so hard. That trail was just… I've been up 14ers [14,000 foot peaks] before, I've lived in the mountains before, so it's not like complete ignorance, but that trail is, yeah. Really difficult.

“So I got to the summit again, I was happy, but by that stage, I was really running on fumes.” Despite that, Katie was confident she could find a fix. “So I stopped at the aid station at Hope Pass with the donkeys and I took on a cup-a-soup, a bunch of Coke, I topped up my gear again and I tried to get some more food in.

“And then I was able to run the descent. So that felt good. I was ticking along okay. It's a bit of a blur, but I wasn't walking too much. But I was still struggling to get the food in.” She’d also started coughing up blood - courtesy of the membranes in her nasal passages succumbing to the altitude.

At this point, things were starting to fall apart. “So I ran down Hope Pass, but by the time I got to the bottom and I had to run along the flat, I could barely run, and I was like, ‘Okay, you've got a problem here.’”

She hadn’t lost the motivation to run, or the desire to problem solve. But the lack of nutrition was starting to compound, and while she didn’t know it at this point, her body was starting to suffer the symptoms of altitude sickness.

At Twin Lakes the second time around she saw Renee and Kim again, and Kim was able to join her as a pacer - a person who can run alongside a competitor, in part as a safety measure in the closing stages of races.

Katie had completed 100k including the crux of the course. But the final 60k was going to be tough. “I got into Twin Lakes and I was like, ‘Guys, the wheels are falling off a little bit, and something doesn’t feel right.’ I said to Renee I think if I lie down with my legs up I can get some blood into my lungs because my legs are fine but I don’t feel well.”

In retrospect, at this point Katie could have done with very much a “cruel to be kind” approach from the crew. She needed to get some food in - even if that meant being more or less force fed. But she didn’t.

Instead, she set off with Kim pacing, knowing it was 15k of uphill to the next aid station. “But then as we started hiking, things just started very quickly getting worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, and not in that slow way like when you're out of calories.

“They started to get real bad. So first, my nose started bleeding because I’d burst the capillaries in my nose… And then my vision started to go. It started on the periphery and it just started to get like closer and closer until it was basically a pin prick on the floor.

“So by the time I was… about 10k in I'd almost completely lost my vision. Kim had to stand on my shoulder, so I knew I was on the trail. I was like, ‘Just make sure I can feel you touching me.’”

Katie was also cold. She’d layer up, but then she’d be too warm, so she’d shed some layers. And by this time she was keeping nothing down, not even water. And she was falling over. Things were looking pretty grim.

When they reached the aid station, Kim asked for the medic. Then she got on the phone to Brad and Renee, trying to come up with a plan. They told Kim to tell Katie to stay in the aid station, take on calories and recover. She was so far ahead of cut-off pace, the one thing she had on her side was time.

But by this stage it was too late. At the third attempt the medic had gotten a blood oxygen reading from Katie and it was too low. “He said the vision thing’s actually fairly common, and as unpleasant as it is, it will right itself. But my blood oxygen was so low my blood was being pulled from everywhere to get to my lungs and my organs.

“He's like, ‘I'm not willing to let you carry on down the hill,’ which was the right call.” And that was that. Medical withdrawal at 115k.

Reflections

I’m meeting Katie four weeks after the race. She’s had time to reflect, and during our conversation she gets a little emotional (saying at one point “Yeah, it’s kind of hard to replay a little bit.”). But it‘s steely, what could have been emotion. There’s no hint of self-pity.

Despite the disappointment, when I ask her to sum up the experience, she says, “Oh look, in one word, brilliant. Even though I DNFed, it was brilliant.”

She knows she completed the toughest part of the course, and it wasn’t her body that failed her, it was the influence of the altitude on her body, and the fact she wasn’t able to acclimatise.

“The fact that I did the double Hope Pass has really taken the sting out of DNFing because that to me is the crux of the course and I finished it,” she says.

“I got into Twin Lakes, which is 100ks, at about 15 and a half hours. I'm pumped with that time for that terrain, for that altitude, for that distance. So I was really, really happy with that first 100 kilometres.”

She’s grateful for the dedication of her crew, both those who were in the US with her, and those who were supporting from home. “I thought of a lot of friends when I was out there and people who, while they might not have been in my immediate crew, they were all a part of my [broader support] crew,” she says.

Coming home was hard. “You kind of hope you’re going to come back and be like, ‘I did the thing!’ And everyone’s like, ‘That’s great!’ But at the same time, you know within a week that everyone just moves on with their lives, whether you finish or don’t finish,” she says with a laugh.

That’s the thing about doing hard things. Sometimes you fall short of the ultimate objective. And that’s kind of the point. If everything we ever did was always a total success, when would we ever learn anything? After all, there’s no growth in the comfort zone.

Ultimately it was the altitude that got Katie, not an inability to perform. If this had been a 115k race it would have been a triumph. But it’s clear not being able to knock off that final 50k is eating at her.

She says the kindness her trail running mates have shown her since she’s been back has helped, especially as they have an understanding of what she achieved before the altitude sickness really kicked in.

Will there be a sequel?

The obvious question is: Will she go back? The answer is maybe… probably… depends on life circumstances.

“I’d really like to show Alex what hard work and commitment looks like. He won’t remember these trips, I’m sure, but to be able to say I did this thing and the first time I tried it didn’t work out, but I went back and learned from my mistakes… I think that’s a really good life lesson, and I’d like to be that person for him and for myself,” she says.

“Leadville feels important to me. I know it probably doesn’t make sense to a lot of people, but it just feels like an important thing that I want to do in my lifetime.”

Upcoming Events

There are way too many events for me to list everything that’s happening around the country, but here is a selection of upcoming races (with a bias towards South East Queensland).

The Running Calendar website is a great source if you want a comprehensive understanding of what’s available around Australia.