Running Situation:
- Location: Bogota, Colombia
- Time: 03:45 am
- Altitude: 2625 m / 8612 ft
- Distance: 9 miles / 14.5 km
- Altitude Gain: 1500 ft / 457 m
- Altitude Loss: 1500 ft / 457 m
- Frequency: 16 times over 45 days
3:45 am: The alarm goes off. Shitty time for an alarm to go off. But me, I love the shitty.
I never sleep well the night before. It’s pitch black. Coffee. Stretch. Prepare mentally. Gear on, out the door.
Mission: Become the Local Legend on the toughest hill in Bogota.
What is a Local Legend? It’s a term from the fitness tracking application that is an “achievement is awarded to the athlete who completes a given segment the most over a rolling 90-day period regardless of pace or speed.”
In order to become the hardest man in Bogota, I had to run the toughest hill in Bogota at least 16 times.
4:45 am: I head out the door. The streets of Bogota are quiet. Too quiet. A handful of people heading to work… or on their way home from the night shift. But in general, it’s just me at least for the first mile.
4.5 miles (7.2 km) are straight uphill—6.9% grade. There is no warmup. There’s nowhere to warm up. You just start running uphill.
The first half-mile (0.8 km) is not too bad. I go slowly. It’s all residential. Just me. The watchful eye of security guards as the 6’1” (185 cm), 185 lb (84 kg) man runs by them. It’s well-lit. I’m in no rush. I know what’s coming.
I make my way up the side streets to the highway. My half-mile (0.8km) “warmup.”
“Highway” would be an overstatement. A gross overstatement.
KM 0.
That’s when it begins for real. The sign is a clear indication. From that point, my mission is to complete the next 4 miles (6.5 km).
Seems simple.
Conceptually, it is. You just have to run up a 6.9% average grade for 4 miles and then run back down.
You start at an altitude of 8600 feet (2621 m). And end at over 10,000 feet (3048 m).
The night air is cold and biting. It takes incredible force to hurl yourself up a mountain that steep for that long. Your body oscillates between too cold and sweating.
The “highway.”
It’s a two-lane winding road. One lane goes up towards La Calera, a Colombian town of about 28,000 people, and the other down towards Bogota, a city of 8 million.
There is no sidewalk.
There is a sliver of space between the edge of the road and the mountain. My feet are confined to a narrow strip of asphalt just outside of the white line. That margin is about 18 inches (45 cm) of space. Any further to my right, I am enveloped by the wall of the mountain. To the left, the road.
The cars. The trucks.
Cars and trucks roar by with alarming speed, so close you can feel the rush of air as they pass. They whizz by within inches every time.
I could touch them.
If they make one wrong move, take a curve too wide, or lose focus, I am dead. The margin for error is inches. They aren’t looking for me, but I am looking for them.
Motorcycles present a different danger. In Colombia, criminals use motorcycles. Two men on a motorcycle could mean danger. At 4 a.m., there would be no witnesses.
And so I run. For the next 45 minutes, my heart rate will be in the 150-160 range, and my breath will be at its maximum.
I listen to no music. It’s just me. My thoughts. My heavy breath. My burning legs. Focus. Focus until I can make it all the way up.
You see a lot of interesting things that early in the morning.
One morning I saw a bird catch a worm.
Yes. I literally saw the early bird catch the worm. What lesson there is in that I am not sure.
One morning I saw a zombie.
I mean, he was living (I think). We were in the middle of one of the most isolated stretches of road. There are few lights. No buildings. Just darkness. Me and the zombie. A creature in a hood in the middle of nowhere hobbling up the hill. As I saw him, the only thought going through my head was if I would have to kill it. He did not try to attack me, so we both went on our way.
One morning I saw a chicken cross the road.
Yes. A fucking chicken crossed the road. Why?
One morning, about halfway up the hill, I saw what appeared to be a prostitute. It was a little past 5 am on a Saturday. She looked no older than 19.
One day I heard shooting.
That’s not a sound you want to hear when you’re running. Especially when you’re 7 miles (11.3 km) into a run on a two-lane highway. Worse yet, the shooting was close – within a hundred yards (91 meters) of me. There was no cover.
That’s what I get for choosing to run during the afternoon instead of the morning.
One shot turned into two, which turned into dozens of shots.
My only saving grace was that I knew they weren’t shooting at me. A bullet fired at you sounds different. And something about it was just… not aggressive, as if people were shooting at each other. It sounded off. That and I had the high ground – they were down the hill. Nonetheless, I was unarmed and had nowhere to go.
So I kept running. A bit faster, of course.
A quarter-mile later, the source of the shooting became apparent. There was a little yellow sign that said in Spanish, “Military Base – Do Not Enter.”
One day I fell.
I haven’t fallen running in years. In fact, it’s been more than a decade. I remember exactly where I was in NYC when it happened. I still have the scars on my left arm near my elbow.
I was five minutes from the end of my run. That morning, I met someone, a fellow runner named Max. More on him later. He is a better runner than I am, training for a 100-mile race in the French Alps. But we were running at the same time and decided to run together back down the hill.
The details aren’t necessary, but I made a misstep and fell off the curb. Not just that, but into the road in front of a bus. Thankfully, the bus had just picked up a passenger and was moving slowly. I waved to the driver, thanking him for not killing me, and finished my run.
Of course, my left ankle swelled, and I was covered in blood on my right hand and right leg.
The next day, still swollen, I ran again.
I fell. Again.
I almost don’t even understand how. Again, I was toward the end of my run, and I tripped on something in the road. Nice work, Shawn.
I landed… on the same already bloody leg… again.
Again, I popped up and finished my run.
As I write this, my wounds have healed, but my right leg is… well, pretty gross.
It’s easy to make friends on that run.
- Bryan: A few minutes into my run one morning, a guy around my size ran up behind me. He asked if he could run together. I said yes. An hour and a half of running up and down a hill with someone, you get to know them well.
- Max: The Englishman. More interesting, he’s a humanitarian who has lived in many of the world’s worst countries during wartime. Years in Afghanistan, for example. All while raising two kids with his wife. He technically is the local legend – he runs the hill almost every day and sometimes goes up and down multiple times in a run. There’s always someone out there working harder than you.
- Naruto: He’s my favorite. To make sense of what I am about to tell you, look up “Naruto running.” Well, this is a young guy. No modern running gear. He runs up and down the hill like Naruto but with an exaggerated straight-arm swing. I don’t understand how he runs. But I have seen him more than anyone. We always say hello.
- The Old Man: On KM 1 of my run, I saw an old man up ahead of me. He had no gear other than a headband with a flashing red light on it. Nothing else. No water. Just a shirt, shorts, and shoes. It was apparent I was going to blow by him as he was going glacially slow. When I ran by him, I said good morning and kept going. This guy was easily in his 70s… or older. The point is, no spring chicken. “Beware of an old man in a profession where men usually die young,” comes to mind.
The run is 6.5 kilometers long. Around kilometer 5, he flew by me. Not like we ran at the same pace up the hill for a bit and he pulled away. No. He burned me.
To this day, I don’t believe it.
But it got worse. I saw him up ahead at the top of the hill where the run stopped (for me), and I turned around to go back down the hill. He kept going.
Anyone who runs that hill gets my respect.
According to my tracking application, Strava, less than 20 people run it in a given day. There are hundreds of cyclists. 25 times more people bike up the hill rather than run it. Or less than 4 percent of the athletes run; the rest are on two wheels.
All of us runners on this hill have a screw loose.
In fact, I didn’t even know it was possible to run up that hill.
The only times I had done it were on a bicycle. And on a bike, your lungs feel like a 5-alarm blaze for the 30-40 minutes it takes to get up.
One weekend, as I was on my way down, I saw a runner going up as I was near the bottom. I thought that person must be going like a mile before coming back down.
I was wrong.
Sometimes you just don’t know what’s possible. In fact, what seemed impossible just a couple of months ago became an average Tuesday morning. Funny how life works sometimes.
Recertification
For the handful that knows me well, I find comfort in the depths of the dark hours of the night, every muscle of my body in pain. The more it hurts, the more I start to feel well… something.
All I can think about is how much it sucks. And how I am tougher than the pain. Everything after that run feels easy in comparison.
Every year since 2011, I undergo a personal “recertification” process.
It’s something just for me. I don’t tell anyone when or where I am doing it. I just do it. It means putting something that seems insurmountable on my calendar and doing it. Some years, it’s a 12 or 24-hour event. Other times it’s moving to a new country. Whatever it is, it has to make me… and any normal person think, “Why would you ever do that?”
Some years I recertify more than once. But I always have to recertify.
This hill became my recertification process. In the span of 45 days, I wanted to become the toughest man in Bogota. At least, that’s what I tell myself.
Hours. Days. Alone with my thoughts. No electronics or distractions. In my head. Exactly where I wanted to be.
I did it.
I remember when I knew I had completed it.
Unfortunately, it’s the same feeling I’ve had 100% of the time I’ve completed a goal:
“OK, cool. What’s next?”
Stay tuned.
“You might be stronger than me. You might be faster than me. The only thing I can promise you is: I will outlast you. I will not quit.” – Me, 2015