Wes Ritner
The first time I ran any real distance without the urging of a junior-high track coach or a West Point upperclassman was when I decided in 1989 to start running from my dorm at West Point to the edge of the academy and back. I did it because I wanted to be more fit than any of the soldiers in the tank platoon I hoped to be leading in less than a year, but it wasn’t long before running grew into a true passion for me. I have run regularly ever since that day in 1989, and I don’t plan on stopping until someone puts me in a casket.
Back in 1990, after graduating from West Point, I spent seven years as an Army lieutenant and captain in various tank units before transitioning out of the military and into leadership roles within the fields of manufacturing and distribution. Throughout my career I’ve lived in every major region of the US, but I reside now at 9200 feet of elevation in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. And here I shall stay.
For 11 years after leaving the Army in 1997, I religiously followed a 6-days per week, 4-miles per day running schedule, with the occasional seventh day thrown in for good measure. I never raced. I ran solely because I loved running. Races seemed entirely unnecessary for me to experience the pure sense of peace and fulfillment I derived from the activity. That still holds true today, although late in my running journey I also came to discover the excitement of racing.
In 2006, twenty-three years after my last official race at a junior high track meet, a coworker talked me into doing a 5k in Pueblo, Colorado. It was a small race with only a few hundred runners. Nonetheless, much to my surprise, I won. While it was fun to win, it didn’t inspire me to abruptly switch my focus to racing. Over the course of the next six years, I participated in a couple more races in the 5k to 10k range, and ran several marathons. I enjoyed the marathons, but never to the extent that I wanted to design a specific training plan to improve my performance. Instead, I just kept running like I always had: six days a week, although I added a few long runs here and there each month since I’d recently found myself energized and challenged by the longer efforts.
Then it happened. In late 2012, my body was feeling run down. I’d be at mile 3 of a run and my body felt like I was at mile 12. On top of that, my knees were bothering me. Nothing seemed to help. I changed the lengths of my runs. I changed the frequency. I changed the intensity of effort. Nothing helped. Finally, I decided the only thing I hadn’t tried was running even more.
I knew the best way to get myself to consistently add distance to my weekly regimen would be to sign up for something big and crazy, like the Leadville 100-mile trail race I’d read about in Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run. I went to an orthopedic doctor in Columbia, South Carolina, where I was living at the time, to verify there weren’t any serious issues with my knees. As soon as he gave me the “all clear,” I jumped online and signed up for Leadville.
I bumped up my weekly mileage. I added hill repeats into my running repertoire. Then, in August of 2013, I was standing at the start line of the Leadville 100 wondering if I could actually do this. I didn’t know the best way to run a 100-miler, I didn’t care how I fared against the other participants, and I knew I was going to fumble my way through hydration and nutrition. But I was committed to finishing and to giving the best effort I could. The result was not pretty, but by the time I crossed the finish line, I’d fallen in love with mountainous, ultra-distance races.
From there, my weekly training miles and vertical ascent increased every year as I discovered just how much I enjoyed my time training on the trails and in the mountains. Exploring new areas, the discipline of long miles, the challenge of steep ascents, the beauty of the forests and mountains…all of these were components of the journey I was living and loving. Races became the icing on the cake of this journey.
Shortly after that first Leadville 100 in 2013, I tried a couple other ultramarathon distances, and I even decided I didn’t want to put the marathon distance in my rearview mirror without having ever run the Boston Marathon. So I signed up for a Boston qualifying race and then ran Boston as my final marathon hurrah. The Boston Marathon was in 2015, the same year I ran Bigfoot 200 as my first 200-miler. And I haven’t looked back.
I’m still on my journey, and I hope and believe there are many more adventures to come. As of now, I’ve completed seventeen 200+ mile races and ten 100-mile races. I’ve also DNF’d another two 200-milers, for a total of nineteen 200-mile starts. I’ve put the stories of twelve of those 200-mile races on this website, and I’ve written notes for some of the other stories that I’ll post in the future. I love writing as much as I love running, so I’m considering these race narratives to be practice for a book I’d like to write someday when I’m ready.
See you on the trails!