Three generations of women face one of the oldest and most difficult races in America.

by Mary Cornelius

illustration by Grace Molteni

The race up Pikes Peak is treacherous.

After a paved first mile and a half through town, runners turn left up a trail into the woods. It’s rocky and barely wide enough for three to go abreast. It’s dark. The trail leaves the woods only when the woods stop at the tree line, at an elevation of 12,000 feet where the air is too thin for anything but weeds to grow. At this point, there are three miles left in the race, which grow progressively rockier as the summit nears. The tan, stair-like boulders that lead to the finish line are called the Golden Steps.

August 14 and 15, 2015 will mark the 60th running of the Pikes Peak Ascent and the Pikes Peak Marathon, which are races run on this mountain in Manitou Springs, Colorado.

I’m not racing this year, but next year, I will.

I’ll graduate from Augsburg College in Minneapolis in May 2016, and in August 2016, I’ll face my goal: I’m going to cross the Golden Steps. I’m going to become a third-generation Peak Buster.  

The Peak Busters are a self-proclaimed group of women who’ve completed either the ascent or the marathon. The ascent is just over a half-marathon distance, 13.32 miles, spanning from Manitou’s main street to the mountain’s summit. The marathon, which is the traditional distance of 26.2 miles, runs up the mountain, makes a hairpin turn at the peak, and finishes with a descent down the same gravel trail.

Pikes Peak is the third oldest marathon in the United States (after Boston and Yonkers) but is the first to have a female finisher. According to the race’s website,

In 1959, 29 year-old Arlene Pieper finished the Pikes Peak Marathon becoming the 1st official female finisher of a US marathon. This was 7 years before Roberta Gibb snuck into Boston in 1966 and 8 years before Kathrine Switzer ran Boston as K.V. Switzer in 1967.

 

Even more interesting, however, is that Pieper didn’t run the ascent portion of her race alone—her  10-year-old daughter made the journey from base to peak with her, and to this day, is the youngest woman to complete the ascent.

After Pieper, another woman didn’t attempt the course until 1971, the year before Title IX passed and opened the gateway for women to compete in high school and collegiate athletics.

My grandma, Mae Knudson Horns, completed the Ascent for the first time in 1996. When I ask my mom about it now, just laughs. “Your grandma just liked stuff like that,” she says. “She was an adventurous woman. If there was a challenge, she would try to meet it.”

She didn’t start running until she was 40, after she watched a women’s marathon in Minneapolis with a friend in 1978. She ran her first at Grandma’s Marathon in 1979. Between then and her diagnosis with Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2001, she completed more than 40 marathons. She also did triathlons. She biked across Iowa more than once as a part of RAGBRAI. She attempted the Western States 100 Miler (the oldest 100 mile trail race on record, which stretches from Squaw Valley, California to Auburn, California) twice. The first year, she dropped out at 50 miles after breaking her big toe at mile 30. The second year, she was forced to stop just nine miles from the finish.

“The actual words of her phone message to me were, ‘Jan, made it to 91. Blew a quad,’” my mom remembers.

For my grandma to run 13.32 miles up Pikes Peak was nothing out of the ordinary. It was her later diagnosis with Lou Gehrig’s disease that caught us off guard. It is not unusual for active people to be diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, but it was easy for us to assume that someone was who was this tenacious had to be somehow immune.

Named after the famous Yankee star who also had the disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is particularly tragic for athletes. It severs the neural connections between the muscles and the brain, meaning that as it progresses, its victims slowly lose the ability to move their legs, then their arms, then the small muscles in their faces and throats that allow them to speak and swallow. There is no cure, no way to make the progression stop, only ways to make it slow.

While this happens, the mind remains wholly functional. 

Many ALS patients become depressed, overcome by both the intensity and the inevitability of their disease. My grandma was different, though. Resilient. When she could no longer lift her hand to her mouth to feed herself, her friend’s husband built her a pulley contraption that hooked into the back of her wheelchair. It had a hanging loop she could slide her arm into that would assist her in feeding herself. She called it “Shirley I. Canhelpyou.” She skied every winter in what she called “the bucket,” a chair-shaped sled mounted on a single ski that she maneuvered with the help of an able-bodied guide, who was tethered to her from behind. She drank wine out of a 16-ounce thermal coffee mug with a two-foot-long straw.

And she took her children and grandchildren on extravagant trips. One of the trips she took us on was back to Manitou Springs, a 16-hour drive from our home in Minnetonka, Minnesota. It was 2003, and my mother, Janis Kristin Klecker, a national champion and Olympic-qualifying marathoner, was running the Ascent for the first time.

During her professional running career (which ended, for the most part, when I was born in 1993), she was not much of a trail runner, focusing instead on the roads and on the track where she could chase national- and world-record times.

This summer, though, she spent her days caring for my grandma and training, sometimes for hours on end, up and down the hills of a ski area in the next town over. She was both following in her mother’s footsteps and blazing her own trail.

I was 10 when I first watched my mom reach the peak. I still remember the way she raised her hands at the end in triumph. They weren’t the pumped fists of other finishers but open palms tipped toward the sun, a silent prayer before officials escorted her off the course to the recovery tent, where she was given a warm blanket and a canister of oxygen.

While my mom ran up the mountain, my dad loaded our burgundy Ford Excursion with my grandparents, my five siblings, and me. We couldn’t fit my grandma’s wheelchair in the trunk, so we hoisted her into the front passenger seat, settled my youngest brother on her lap, and hoped there would be a ride available for her somewhere at the summit.

The road that winds up Pikes Peak is only marginally less terrifying than the trail, a dusty red lip without a guardrail, weaving skyward. It felt like riding a roller coaster that only went up. The whole time, my father cheered: “Just think! Your mom is running this! Your grandma ran this! Just think!”

We, of course, didn’t understand the gravity of it all then. Once we arrived, we waited impatiently in a vinyl booth at the back of the gift shop café, the only building on the summit. As soon as my mom found us, we were at her knees, hugging and whining. Instead of congratulating her on the age group medal around her neck, we asked her for money to buy fudge from the candy counter. We pulled on her sweaty arms and tired legs, pestering her for bites of the banana and free granola bar she’d received from the aid station.

She began to cut it carefully into six equal pieces, one for each of us, but my grandma, our matriarch, enthroned on that borrowed collapsible wheelchair, told my mom to stop and rest. She would buy the fudge. This would be her gift. She would treat us all. 

My grandma died on a late spring day in 2005 while my mother cradled her and sang. My grandma taught me what it looks like to die gracefully. My mother taught me what it looks like to grieve gracefully. They have both lived lives of incredible tenacity, strength, and courage—and when I graduate, it is my goal to do the same.

I’ve been a runner since my freshman year of high school, when my brother finally convinced me that I could run for fun if I wanted to—not to prove anything to anyone. Coming from a family of runners was intimidating before I started, but once I did, the sport became my own. Instead of feeling as if I had to live up to a legacy, I was adding to and expanding it in a way that only I could.

I now compete at the collegiate level for Augsburg. I’m a track and field captain and race mainly middle-distance events like the 1500m, the 800m and the 4x400m relay. My mom hardly ever misses a meet and is only a phone call away when I have questions about how to calm competition nerves or how to stretch my ever-too-tight calves. When I’m ready to face Pikes Peak next year, I know she’ll be there to coach me through the months of preparation: if she’d not running up the ski hill with me, she’ll be at the top timing my repeats. When I finally finish the race, she’ll be the first one I hug at the top.

In 2006, my mom made the trek a second time. Instead of meeting my grandma at the top, though, she carried her with her, scattering my grandmother’s ashes along the trail as she went up. 

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Mary Cornelius is a college student, runner, and poet currently living in Minnetonka, MN. She loves cold press coffee and fresh flowers from Trader Joe’s. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @_marymae. 

Grace Molteni is a Midwest born and raised designer, illustrator, and self-proclaimed bibliophile, currently calling Chicago home. For more musings, work, or just to say hey check her out on Instagram or at her personal website.