The Highest Point

print email

Richard Bolt remembers the cowbells. He heard them in Switzerland, racing the dawn to the top of a 6,000-foot ridge where he and a friend hoped to watch the sunrise. He was in the country as a coach for the U.S. Mountain Running Team, competing that week in the World Mountain Running Championships. But for the moment, he and his friend were lost in their own world.
Photo Credit: Sean Fouts

“The Alps are gorgeous places to run,” Bolt says. “The country is so old and the trails have been there for hundreds of years. You can imagine Hannibal and his elephants passing through.”

Just as in the famous children’s story Heidi, there are small farmsteads in the high meadows where farmers bring cattle and sheep for summer pasture. There, the cowbells carrying on the wind can be the only sounds you hear other than your own breathing, footsteps, and the wind itself. “It’s a unique European alpine experience,” Bolt says.

Then he and his friend reached the top, where they found an enormous cross, several stories tall. “The sun was breaking through; we could see mountains along the French and Italian borders.”
It was, in a word, sublime. “Those are the reasons I love mountain running,” he says. “To be able to experience that kind of thing, away from other people… and to hear cowbells.”

Bolt moved to the Northwest only two years ago, but he’s already established himself as a major player on the Portland road and track scene. In the weeks prior to our interview, near his office in Portland’s Pearl District, he’d clocked 15:46.5 in a 5,000-meter track race, and 15:39 in a hilly 5K road race.

But those are of secondary appeal to him. “My primary sport is mountain running,” he says.
I’ve barely heard of it, but Bolt assures me it’s a full-fledged sport that’s been holding its own world championships for the better part of three decades. This year’s event, which Bolt will be attending in mid-September, will again be in Switzerland.

“You have the same sense of accomplishment you get from road racing,” he says, “but there’s this whole other component of getting to the top. And every mountain is different. Some races are on paved roads; some on dirt. Some are wooded. Others are above the tree line.”

He got into the sport in 1995, when he was recruited by Dave Dunham, “the father of mountain running.” At the time, Bolt had begun doing races on the roads that climb to many of New England’s summits. “There’s probably 10 or 12 in all,” he says. “Mt. Washington is the most famous.”

It’s also famously tough. At 6,288 feet in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, Mt. Washington is the highest point in the northern Appalachians – notorious for some of the world’s worst weather. The race to its top climbs nearly 5,000 feet in 7.6 miles. Bolt’s best time is 1:06:00, and he’s been as high as fourth in the overall standings.

Growing up in Rochester, New York, he wasn’t initially interested in running. Instead, he dreamed of being the next Larry Bird.

“I was tall,” (he’s six feet) “so I thought I should go out for basketball,” he says. “But a friend said I was an endurance athlete. On a whim I joined the ski team.”

That proved a good move, and when he was looking for colleges he limited the search to those that fielded Division I cross-country ski teams. He settled on St. Lawrence University, in Canton, New York – not far from the Winter Olympics training facilities of Lake Placid. He wound up a two-time winner of the Eastern Collegiate cross-country ski championship and third in the NCAA championship his senior year. He also went to the World University Games, an Olympic-style competition for college athletes.

“That was my first experience in international competition,” he says. “It really got me motivated to try to make the Olympic team.”

He also had to make a choice. For most of his college years, Bolt had been in Army ROTC, contemplating a career in the National Guard, which would have allowed him to continue training and racing. But the Army wanted him for active duty. “So I had to make a decision whether to pursue a full-time career in the Army or pursue those Olympic dreams.”

The Olympics won. By that time, he’d already gone to the 1992 Trials, and the Olympics were being restructured to put the Winter and Summer Games in different years. That made him part of a lucky cadre of athletes who got three shots at the team in six years: ‘92, ‘94, and ‘98.

He has no regrets about either being in ROTC or dropping out. “I learned a lot about being organized and disciplined that helped me in my work life and athletic career,” he says. He’s now director of operations for a software company that works with seven of the top 10 grocery retailers.

Wherever Bolt goes, he (often with Dunham) tries to run to the top of the highest point in the vicinity. At its best, it’s like running among the cowbells in Switzerland. But there was also the time he and Dunham tried something similar in Hawaii. They were on Oahu, where the highest point, Ka’ala, is only 4,040 feet. But it was hot, humid, muddy, and drizzling. Not to mention cloaked in tropical vegetation.

“You couldn’t see the top of the mountain,” he remembers, “and it was really steep.” In places the trail was so difficult there were ropes to pull yourself up the muddy slopes.

Finally, the two runners reached a knife-edged ridge whose slopes fell into cloud-shrouded valleys on each side. The wind was howling and the summit still lost in more clouds, an indefinite distance ahead.

Dunham may be the father of mountain running, but he has “a bit of an issue” with heights, Bolt says. In other words, he was on his hands and knees, worried about being blown off the ridge. “I was trying to be sympathetic,” Bolt recalls, “but also laughing my ass off.”

Ultimately, sympathy and common sense carried the day. “We knew it would get tougher the higher we got, so we ended up turning around.”

From 1992 to 1998, Bolt’s primary focus was skiing. He was good, but never quite made the team.

“I was one of the top 15 to 20 guys for a good four or five years,” he says. “I got to travel internationally and made several trips to Sweden to ski, train, and race against some of the best international skiers.”

Not quite good enough to make the team, he had to find his own way to do all of this – another thing he thinks really helped him later in life. “I gained a lot of skills being self-directed and organized, managing my own training, trips, and equipment,” he says.

The shift to mountain running seems logical in retrospect. “Cross-country skiing has a lot of climbing,” he says. “They try to put about 1,000 feet into every 10K.” Mountain running seeks three times that. “So it’s even steeper.”

When he started mountain running, U.S. runners had to pay their own way. “If you could afford to go, and you were pretty good, you submitted a resume to the guy who picked the team,” he says. Now, the team is sponsored by shoemaker Teva so there’s a good deal more competition. Bolt’s role is as coach and administrator: part of a four-person group that works with the team under the auspices of USA Track & Field’s Mountain Ultra Trail-Running Council.

Bolt did make the team himself in 1991 and 2002, competing in Malaysia and Austria. In between, he missed out due to a bout with Lyme disease, which he probably acquired visiting relatives in Massachusetts. He never saw the tick that bit him, nor the bulls-eye rash that for some is a telltale of the disease. Rather, it hit him as swelling in his knee, which for months he and his orthopedist wrote off as overtraining. Then he had a blood test and wound up in a clinic in Boston, with the very doctor who’d first discovered the illness decades earlier.

Unfortunately, the fame of his doctor didn’t speed his recovery. When oral antibiotics didn’t work, he spent a month injecting himself with an intravenous antibiotic. He lost so much training that it was 14 months between races. But today he can laugh about it. “I have great pictures of me sitting there in drug-addict pose,” he says.

During his recuperation, he took up another new sport: snowshoe racing. “I had trouble running on pavement, but snow is softer,” he says. His first year, he finished third in the national championships, making the U.S. national team. Since then, he’s often gone to the U.S. championships.

Most people associate snowshoeing with the heavy, wicker shoes used by fur trappers for wading through deep powder. But times have changed. “These are not your grandfather’s snowshoes,” Bolt says. “They are much lighter, much more maneuverable, easier to put on.”

In fact, equipment manufactures now make special running and racing snowshoes. The first time I tried these, I was amazed to discover that it really is possible to run on them. Then Bolt came flying by with a cheery wave – coming back downhill well before I’d reached the top – and I realized there is running . . . and then there’s running.

Of course, he isn’t satisfied with the manufacturer’s latest and greatest. He removes the binding and fastens a pair of lightweight running shoes directly to the snowshoe, saving additional ounces.

“That’s what the top racers are doing,” he says.

These days, Bolt is supported by both snowshoe manufacturer Atlas and trail shoe manufacturer Salomon.

He likes the opportunity to provide feedback to the manufacturer and talk to other runners. “One thing I’ve noticed is that the trail-running brands don’t have as much market penetration here as in Colorado or New England,” he says. “A lot of people run trails, but do it in road shoes. I think there’s a lot of really good trail-specific shoes people don’t seem to be aware of.”

And ironically, while skiing is what first brought him to the Northwest (his last Nationals were at Mt. Bachelor) he no longer does much of it. Now, the trails of Portland’s Forest Park issue the same out-the-door call as New England’s winter snows did for him.

In the winter, he notes, “nobody’s there. Forest Park is where I spend my time.” And, he adds, “Who cares about rain? At least you don’t have to shovel it.”

Comments & Feedback

Leave a Comment

Name: Email:  do not notifynotify Title: Comment: Code: Please input the code from the image above (case sensitive). Click image to generate new code.

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."