GL
ENDELAMN,^ LIFE
TIME54 WOMEN’S RUNNING SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019
On June 15, 2019, Goucher toed the start
line of the Leadville trail marathon...
She had a plan. She was going to start at
10:30 pace, knowing that 9:30–10:30 pace
traditionally landed women on the podium.
The revised course started with the first 6
miles uphill. She had to be smart. She had
to hold back if she was going to feel strong
the whole way.
During her training, Goucher’s coaches
(Wetmore and Heather Burroughs) hadn't
been super involved. “Literally the only thing
they said to me was: ‘Go out slow, and then
when you think you’re going slow, go slow-
er,’” she said. “And I did the exact opposite.”
She ran her first mile in 7:50. At the 10K
mark, she wanted to see something be-
tween 62–65 minutes on her watch. She
saw 51. “I knew I was running fast, but so
was everyone else,” she said. “Either I was
going to blow up, or do something epic.”
On a steep incline a few miles later, she
charged up it even though the men around
her were walking.
So much for not burning up all her fuel
in the beginning. “I remember thinking this
was the most pain I had ever been in in my
life—more than giving birth—and then I
looked down at my Garmin and it said 11.6
miles,” she said. “I thought, Oh my God. I
don’t know if I’m going to make it. I knew
the race was over for me.”
Around mile 15, she started to see spots.
She started to throw up. She started to walk.
“I would have cried if I hadn’t felt so sick,”
she said. “I started to wonder why I signed
up for this. I started to think about how I’d
never run again. I knew I wasn’t going to fin-
ish and I knew I’d never enter a race again.”
But just before mile 19, as the course
turned around and started heading back
down the mountain toward the finish line,
it was like the winds suddenly shifted.
“People started passing me, but unlike
in my past races, they would give me words
of encouragement. ‘Keep fighting,’ they
would tell me. ‘This will pass.’ ‘You can do
it.’ ‘Embrace the suck.’ People waited for me
while I puked and then ran another half
mile with me. People showed me acts of
kindness like I have never, in my 40 years
of life, been shown before,” Goucher said.
Their encouragement was like oxygen,
each cheer delivering a desperate boost of
energy that propeled Goucher forward—oneslow and painful step at a time. By that
point, there was no doubt in her mind: She
had to finish. “I had been given the strength
from strangers, and I was going to get there
if it was the last thing I did.”
And she did. With a time of 3:54.06,
Goucher finished the Leadville Trail Mar-
athon—the fifth overall female, and the
first in her 40–49 age group.goucher has pushed her pain threshold
in plenty of races before....
There was her first half marathon in 2007—
the Great North Run in England—where she
beat marathon world record holder Paula
Radcliffe. (“I really didn’t know what I was
doing,” she said. “I ran 66:57, but I was sick
for a good six hours afterwards.”) There was
the New York Marathon in 2008, her debut
at the distance, where she became the first
American on the podium since 1994. (“I
had never felt that sort of fatigue before.”)
And yet none of them come close to
Leadville. “I can’t even put it into words,”
she said. “It was so much harder. It was the
darkest I’ve ever been. I can go back and look
at my text messages with my family right
after I finished and I told them ‘I wouldn’t
wish that on my worst enemy.’”
She's arguably the most accomplished
road athlete to make a competitive switch
onto trails, so Goucher was well aware of the
attention and analysis that would follow. “I
was on a panel with an ultrarunner leading
up to the race,” she said. “He was like, ‘I feel
so bad for you. You can’t just go and run. If
you don’t win, they’re going to make fun of
you.’” And I was like, yeah, I know.”
But the fear of ridicule or criticism was
not what pushed Goucher through those
tough miles at Leadville. Instead, it was
a simple-yet-poignant phrase penned on
her left forearm in black marker: Brave
Like Gabe.
Like so many in the running community,
Goucher had been deeply inspired for years
by fellow professional runner Gabrielle
Grunewald, who was diagnosed with ad-
enoid cystic carcinoma 10 years ago, and
passed away just days before the race. “I
was really heavy that week. I couldn’t stop
crying,” Goucher said. “We all want to leave
the world having impacted it and leaving it
a better place, but she really did it.”
“She just makes me want to face things,
you know? Like do hard things,” Gouchercontinued. “One of the best quotes was
her saying, ‘I want to be nervous to race
again. I remember when I was nervous to
race, and now I’m nervous about what’s
the scan going to say.’ That just put so
much into perspective for me. I’m afraid
people are going to say bad things about
me if I don’t run well in Leadville? Who
effing cares?”
So yes, she ran Leadville like a total
rookie (her words, not ours). She didn’t
train as much as she should have and she
probably underestimated the altitude