A conversation with Sabrina Stanley on her Hardrock 100 win, mid-race pumpkin pie, and how to confront the dark place

I first met Sabrina Stanley last summer on a reporting to trip to Colorado where I was working on a piece involving her boyfriend and training partner, Avery Collins. When I mentioned the competitive aspect of winning 100-mile races, Collins shot me a look and said, “If you want to see a competitor, wait until you meet Sabrina.”

For the last few months, Sabrina and Avery have been living in the San Juan mountains on the Hardrock 100 course. With 33,000 feet of vertical gain through rugged trail, the Hardrock is one of the toughest trail races in the country.

Stanley didn’t even know she would be in the race until early June, but once she was officially in the field she let everyone know she was in it to win. The 28-year old led wire-to-wire, beating a field of veteran ultrarunners in a time of 30 hours and 23 minutes.

I caught up with Stanley a few days after her victory to talk about roughing it in the woods, eating pumpkin pies at aid stations, and the fear of being passed in the last mile.

SB Nation: I can’t get over the fact that I ate a sushi burrito with you in Boulder last summer and here you are the Hardrock 100 champion. It kind of blows my mind.

Honestly, it’s just running. Avery and I have talked about that a few times. People who run find inspiration in that, but I just like to run. That’s just what I do.

Clearly. You came into this race very confident and stated your intentions in a way that’s kind of abnormal for your world. Is that something that’s a little bit of different at this level of competition?

Definitely. For some reason the trail running world is very Kumbaya. Everybody’s friends and you’re out there to chat. I mean, you’re out there for 100 miles so of course you’re going to talk and make some friends. I wanted it to be clear, that wasn’t my goal. I was out here to race.

The trails are amazing and I wanted to appreciate the trails in training, but when I’m racing I don’t have time to stop and take pictures and be like, ‘Wow, look at that mountain.’ I grew up in a team sport atmosphere where everything was so competition-driven so I carry that over into trail racing.

Whis is it about Hardrock that makes it so hard?

There’s 33,000 feet of climbing. So, you’re basically climbing from sea level to Everest. Also the average elevation is 11,000 feet, so at points you’re at 14,000 feet. The lowest point is 7,800. You’re never really at low elevation. You’re always struggling for oxygen.

It’s a big circle and Hardrock prides itself on limited marking. They want you to be an experienced trail runner. There’s no, what they call confidence markers. They mark turns only. You could go 10 miles and not see a marker, and you just have to know you’re on the right trail. I think that’s kind of cool.

You actually lived in the San Juan mountains this summer.

Yeah, the race goes through four towns. We lived in pretty much the halfway point in Ouray so I got on the course as much as possible. I wanted there to be no doubt. I wanted to be able to run the course without markers at all.

You really lived this race. Like, literally.

We had our little camper and we’ve been camping all summer on course. We have a little Scamp. It does not have a toilet, a shower, running water, or electricity. (laughs) We had these little solar panel lights.

For $2 you can get a shower at the local hot springs in town. So we would do that and we’d go to the bathroom in the woods or at coffee shops in the morning. That was our routine. Then we’d go run for 6-8 hours every single day.

Even for your sport, is that a little bit hardcore, or is that normal?

There’s a small portion that would do that depending on the race. You have to learn how to budget really well. It’s not a luxury most people have and we don’t have kids so we were able to live off potatoes and whatever else was cheap to buy. We were very fortunate that we were able to walk away from our 9-5’s and go live in the woods for four months.

Avery had invited me to come out for the Never Summer 100K and my wife was like, ‘I think you’re going to be living in the woods, dude. Are you ready for that?’

I grew up camping, but the first few nights you’re like, ‘Oh what’s that noise out there.’ After awhile you don’t even notice. Yesterday, I was sitting in our campsite and a lynx walked 10-15 feet in front of me. It was insane. It’s been pretty surreal living in the woods. I don’t know how that’s going to be going back to society.

When does that happen?

We’ve got another month and then we’re going to Italy for a month and we don’t know what we’re doing after Italy because Avery is racing over there. (Collins will be running the 205-mile Tor des Geants in September.) So when we get back we’re going to have to figure out something.

You dropped your spot at Western States even thought you were actually not in the field for Hardock at that point?

I was fifth on the waitlist. We were told by everybody we talked to that it was guaranteed I was going to run, but I didn’t want to put all my eggs in that basket until I knew for sure. So I was training for Western and Hardrock. It got to a point where the training didn’t complement each other. I’m just going to dedicate everything to Hardrock because I didn’t want to run Western with mediocre results.

I dropped Western and within 12 hours, some guy contacted me and said, ‘Hey I’m dropping Hardrock. Are you going to represent my spot?’ So I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll win it for you. I promise.’

What is a typical day in the mountains for you gearing up for this race?

Just time on feet. It wasn’t necessarily mileage. For Hardrock, the top female times are 28-30 hours. I would wake up in the morning and have a big breakfast, and then Avery would typically go off and we’d do our own adventures. It was a lot of power hiking. The area we were in, you literally go straight up for miles and miles.

My pack would have seven granola bars and two liters of water, so it’s not like we’re moving fast through the mountains. We’re just moving constantly.

What do you eat during a 100 miler to keep your energy up?

Muir Energy, they look like gels, but it’s a nut base. There’s lots of fruits in there but it’s not a high sugar base. Unlike gels I don’t feel like I’m eating straight sugar. It’s like a puree of fruits and nuts. I’ll have one of those roughly every 30 minutes and then I have an electrolyte mix called Cranked in one water bottle. Every aid station I downed at least 300 calories.

So, real food at the aid station. What are you eating?

It depends on the race. This one had pumpkin pies, which were awesome. I had four or five pieces of pumpkin pie throughout the race. They had these rice balls that we’re filled with avocado. I would just down those as fast as possible. Pancakes are great too. Anything that’s soft and mushy that you can shove in your mouth, take a drink of water and swallow really fast.

Sounds like when my son was a toddler.

Right? People do eat baby food out there.

Let’s talk race strategy. You went out and led wire-to-wire. That wasn’t your plan, right?

Not at all. (laughs.) It’s never my plan. The first 10 miles were obnoxiously slow, I thought. It was just a nice easy jog, and I kept waiting for another competitive female to pass me and be like, ‘This is getting old. Let’s start running.’ Nobody ever did and if they’re not going to set the pace, I’m not going to do it and burn myself up. If they want to sit me behind they can, but I’m going to go really slow.

At Mile 60, you’ve been holding back all day, so that’s when you can really start to let go. From there we just rolled forward. That’s where the gap started to grow.

That’s where you picked up Avery as your pacer, right?

It was probably 10 p.m. and he ran with me to the end.

So, he ran 40 miles with you?

42, yeah.

Is that a lot for a pacer?

It just depends on your runner. Fortunately Avery is doing a 200-mile race in September so he needed it for his training.

Good lord.

Yeah, it was just a good training running for him. (laughs)

You’re hammering through this really important race. What it’s like running with your significant other?

Avery and I love running together. Not every single time, because we do need our me time. When I pick him up it’s this new energy source that I can draw from when mine is getting depleted. It’s nice to have that extra brain, who can count your calories and remind you when to eat so you don’t have to think. He’s really my race manager, which is nice.

People talk about getting to a dark moment in a 100-mile race. Did you have that and where was it?

For sure. Roughly 20 miles out from the finish was when the dark place started to creep in. I like to pride myself on not letting that dark place grab hold and stay around. I started to fall apart physically at Mile 80. With about 10 miles to go you have this massive, massive climb. It’s like a thousand feet of gain per mile for two and half miles. That was my darkest, darkest point.

Honestly, I grew weak mentally and I indulged in that more than I should have. So Avery was my counselor.

That’s tougher mentally or physically?

It’s crazy what the brain can do to you physically. Just by negative thoughts, you feel it more. If you’re in a more positive mindset I feel like you can have a broken leg and drag it up the mountain. It’s something that needs to be trained and practiced just as much as physically.

How do you train for that?

It’s different for everybody. Some people, if you believe in visualization, you spend five minutes every night and think only positive thoughts.

Another tool that I like to do with my runners (Stanley is a RRCA certified coach), if you can get on the course in training and think, ‘How will I feel at this point and what will the issues be that arise?’ So when it happens in a race, you’ve already been there and you know how you’re going to deal with it.

It takes out the fear of the unknown. Maybe the pain will keep getting worse. But if you know the pain is at the max level and it’s never going to get worse, when you’re at Mile 90 and you can’t feel any more pain, you just deal with that and just enjoy it. It’s a weird concept.

It’s so masochistic.

Just truly enjoy every minute, no matter how brutal it is.

So, what happened at the end?

We got to Mile 95 and there was a mountain behind us so you could see these runners coming down. Somebody told us we had an hour and a half lead, we’re still like, is that a female? Is that possible? So we start pushing faster.

We get within a mile of the finish and Avery with panic in his voice is like, ‘Start running. Start sprinting right now.’

At Mile 99, there’s only so fast you can sprint. He thought he recognized two girls. One was a pacer and the other was Michael Wardian, who’s an insanely fast marathoner. It was a nice little panic attack at the end.

So that wasn’t a tactic, that was actual fear?

How much would that have sucked for 99.5 miles and let it go that last half mile. That would have been devastating.