THE ‘ULTRAS’ : Runners of 100-Mile Races Find a Heaven in San Gabriel Mountains

At altitudes ranging from 5,000 to 7,000 feet, they run--sometimes as far as 50 miles a day--in the San Gabriel Mountains, just north of Pasadena. They say it is heaven even when it hurts like hell.

They are the “ultras,” runners who will forgo sleep and food to train for ultra-marathons, 100-mile ordeals across mountain trails and valleys depths.

Their ranks in Southern California have grown from a few to nearly 500 runners, say those involved in the sport. On weekends, 30 to 40 runners a day can be seen along the two- to four-foot-wide trails on the sides of Mt. Wilson, said Terry Ellis, district ranger of the Arroyo Seco Forest Service.

Ellis, a runner himself, said the area is especially popular among the mountain-marathoners because the terrain is similar to that of the Western States Endurance Run between Squaw Valley and the Sierra foothills, a 100-mile challenge in July for which many of the runners train.

The uphill running is physically grueling, and the runners agree that they share an obsession that overcomes the pain and the risks of their avocation.

The degree of the risk was made harshly clear when one of the regular runners on these slopes fell 1,600 feet to his death last week.

Park officials said Herman Kuhn, 49, ran close to 50 miles every day. Each run took as much as 11 hours. Because of his love for running, friends said, Kuhn worked part-time as a house painter only when he needed money.

Ellis said he had warned Kuhn not to take an icy north side trail near Mt. Wilson Observatory on Saturday, Jan. 12, when winds were blowing up to 90 m.p.h.

His body was found Tuesday night at the bottom of a rocky cliff by search-and-rescue teams after a friend noticed that his car had been parked in the same spot since Saturday.

Sought a Challenge Nancy Tinker, 33, of Monrovia, who ran twice a week with Kuhn, said that they were constantly looking for tougher trails and Kuhn probably saw the steep, icy incline as a challenge he could not pass up.

“After running for a long time, you don’t realize some of the dangers,” Tinker said. “If you are determined to go, you go.”

Tinker and another runner, Ted Hill, said that while none of the runners are in it for masochistic motives, there is an obsessive quality to their determination to run despite the pain.

“The biggest hurdle is internal,” said Ted Hill, 46, of Temple City. “Eighty percent of the work is mental. I work through the pain. You have to keep moving forward because there is nowhere else to go.”

Runs by Flashlight Hill, who is training for the Western States run, said he runs close to 100 miles a week, which is typical of those working toward the July race.

“Running is a very, very big part of my life, and I schedule things around it,” said Hill, a pharmacist who added that he is reluctant to think about being promoted for fear it will cut into his running time.

Tinker also admitted she is outright “addicted.”

“I will get up to run at 4:30 a.m. if I can’t fit it in later, and I will sometimes run at night and carry a flashlight to see the trail,” she said.

Ranger Ellis warned that a running partner is essential for survival.

“He (Kuhn) was planning on running 10 to 11 hours, and an awful lot can happen to you in that time,” Ellis said.

Robert Lind, a physician for the Western States run, said in a recent Times interview that runners experience nausea, vomiting, headaches, dizziness, irritability, lassitude, weakness, pounding pulse, hallucinations, paranoia--all symptoms of dehydration, hypothermia, hypoglycemia and renal failure.

“The most serious risk you take,” Lind said, “is death.”

In addition to bodily malfunctions during a long stint, runners say that they encounter hunters in the fall and rattlesnakes in the summer. There are also loose ground and falling rocks to contend with, they said.

Ran Into Religious Cult Bill Johnson, owner of a store in Arcadia that sells running equipment, said he and his buddies even ran into a religious ceremony one time in which people in robes were chanting “sacrifice.”

“I was the slower runner of the group, but I was blazing a path from that,” Johnson recalled.

Despite the pains and the risk of death, most of the runners said that the beauty of the mountains and the “clannish” friends keep them doing it.

“You hurt and everything,” Johnson said, “and you give up sleep and food, but the time goes very fast and the experience is totally beautiful.”