An epic first date
Almost 13 years later, I’m still trying to piece together exactly how it all happened.
It’s my favorite story to tell at parties — which is odd, as it’s a long and convoluted story with so many disparate plot points that it can’t sound true. I doubt many people keep listening the whole way through. I suppose I still can’t believe this story, which is why I keep retelling it — the story of my first date with Beat. It’s a story of uniquely offbeat individuals at different stages of their lives in different parts of the world, coming together for a most unlikely enterprise — the latter half of a 100-mile ultramarathon in northern Utah. Since it’s our 13th “anniversary” (before we married in 2020, I would celebrate the day we met — July 31, 2010 — as our anniversary), I thought I’d retell the story in print, which I haven’t yet tried.
It all began on a blistering July afternoon at a park in Columbia Falls, Montana. I had just moved to the state from Alaska one month earlier. In an effort to help his shy introverted bike friend (me) meet new people, my Canadian friend Keith set me up on a blind friend date with a woman who lived two hours north. Danni and I spent a wonderful weekend in Glacier National Park, where she urged me to volunteer the following weekend for a new race she was directing, The Swan Crest 100. I was intrigued. After several years of dedicated endurance cycling — all while watching my now ex-boyfriend move upward in the sport of ultrarunning — I was beginning to form my own interest in the sport. Volunteering for a hundred-miler would give me a front-row seat to what this kind of racing was really about.
Being part of The Swan Crest 100 was exhilarating and exhausting. Even though I didn’t show up until 12 hours after the race started, I spent a full 24 hours driving to each aid station with Danni, moving boxes with co-race director Brad, and checking in runners at the finish. I wrote about the experience in a blog post, “Diary of race volunteer:”
“5:06 p.m. Had a chance to chat with a lot of the runners. Several had just finished their first 100-mile attempt. Some had jumped right up from marathons or 50K runs. Their sense of accomplishment shines through their frazzled, stiff-legged demeanor, and it’s inspiring. They’ve all taken off their shoes, and I want to stay far away from those.
5:54 p.m. This cute Swiss runner, Beat Jegerlehner, just finished. He still looks strong and smiley, and he’s already using up valuable energy to goad me into running the Swan Crest 100 next year. And the strange thing is, I kinda want to. I've never run a foot race longer than eight miles. I consider with great interest and seriousness how long the buildup to 100 miles would really take.”
Shortly after I returned home to Missoula, I looked up the “cute Swiss runner” on Facebook. He had only opened his account one week prior, and the only photo he’d posted so far was a close-up of the horrific condition of his feet after Swan Crest.
“Gross. Why are runners so obsessed with their feet?” I wondered.
I learned Beat was a software engineer for Google and lived in the San Francisco Bay area. He accepted my friend request, and I made a comment about his gross feet. He replied he was running another 100-mile race that coming weekend — the Headlands 100 in San Francisco — just one week after finishing Swan Crest. Did I want to join him?
“Ha, you’re funny,” I wrote back. “I can’t even run five miles. Anyway, I’m already registered for a mountain bike stage race in Canada next week. It’s called TransRockies. Have you heard of it?”
Beat asked me questions about TransRockies and I asked him more questions about ultrarunning. I admitted it was my dream to finish the course of my first-ever bike race — the Susitna 100 in Alaska — on foot. He thought I should start right away. “You don’t need to train. You just go out and do it.”
Beat and I went about our lives through August and the first part of September, filling up our nights with long text conversations on Facebook and G-mail. He continued to prod me with dreams about running. I was, admittedly, also dreaming about hanging out with him. Beat’s summer races had all been buildup to a major undertaking in September, a 200-mile mountain race in Italy with more than 80,000 feet of climbing. It was called Tor des Geants — the tour of giants. It sounded impossible to me.
“And right after, I’m going to run the Bear 100,” he wrote. “You should run it with me.”
I didn’t believe him about the Bear 100. At all. It was a 100-mile race over the Bear River Mountains in northern Utah and Idaho. It started just one week later. “Hmmm, maybe,” I replied.
While Beat ran the Tor des Geants, I followed his progress on the race’s online spreadsheet, amazed that he was still going. That same week, my boss asked if I wanted to join a few of my co-workers at Interbike — a massive bicycle trade show in Las Vegas. They’d rented a van and planned to take a road trip down to Nevada starting Sunday morning. The group would host an information booth for our organization, Adventure Cycling, but they hoped that someone would talk to various companies about buying ads in our magazine, Adventure Cyclist. This kind of work — marketing and schmoozing — was not in my wheelhouse.
“Aw, I already made plans with my friends to hike Mount Borah,” I replied. As I explained our plans, my boss smiled. “We can pick you up in Idaho. It’s right on the way.”
Combining a difficult hike and a last-minute trip to Vegas proved challenging. After an exhilerating climb and an unexpected success on Mount Borah, my friends and I spent the night with Bill’s friends (and their full-blooded timber wolf) in Idaho Falls. I texted my boss with the address, then sent most of my hiking gear home with Bill and Norm. This allowed me to take only one duffel with my one nice suit and a few dresses that seemed proper for schmoozing. I had a single bike outfit and grubby shoes because I was told there would be a bike demo. I also had a pair of yoga pants and a polyester T-shirt in case I carved out an opportunity to work out at the hotel gym. I did not have this opportunity. Interbike was almost 24-7 work — breakfasts, meetings, wandering the trade show, dinners, and late-night drinks with potential advertisers. I was young and so far outside my comfort zone and the work almost broke me. I hardly slept during the week. The anxiety was overwhelming.
Meanwhile, Beat had wrapped up the Tor des Geants and made his way home to California. TDG was the hardest thing he’d ever done, he told me. He slept five hours in six days. By the end, he was so exhausted that he was hallucinating continuously. He talked to people who did not exist. He saw Chinese farmers working in the rice fields. He believed he was his own father. After finishing the race, he sat in his hotel room with his stuff spread all around him, too overwhelmed to even pack his suitcase. He’d only gotten home on Monday. It was Thursday evening. He asked if he could call me.
Sitting in the hall outside the Vegas hotel room I shared with my co-worker — who was already asleep — I heard Beat’s voice on the other end of my cheap flip phone. All of our communication since the day we met had been by text. It was odd to hear his accented voice. The voice sounded startlingly small, frail even. “I’m here (in Logan, Utah) for the Bear 100. Are you still coming out?”
Um, what?
All that time, I hadn’t believed him — that he would finish something like the Tor des Geants, travel from Italy to California to Utah, and start a 100-mile race just five days later. But he had committed. He was there. I wondered if part of the reason he was there was because I’d been wishy-washily musing about running with him.
“I’m in Vegas,” I admitted. “Let me see what I can do.”
I hung up and dialed my boss, who was still at some late-night schmoozing party that I’d gotten out of by saying that I felt ill, which wasn’t entirely untrue. My boss knew I’d been struggling with the work that week. He had suggested I take Friday off, so I asked him if that was still okay. I didn’t tell him I was going to try to make an early escape out of state. But he agreed, so I opened my laptop and scrolled through airline schedules. Almost nothing was available. United had a few seats to Salt Lake, but the fares were over $1,000. I couldn’t afford it. And what would I do once I got to Salt Lake? My parents lived there, but they were out of town. Rent a car? I couldn’t afford any of it.
It was a nice pipe dream for the few minutes it lasted. Truthfully, I wasn’t too disappointed. I was looking forward to catching up on sleep and erasing the grueling Vegas endeavor from my memory. I opened up Facebook to send a message to Beat, who I felt sheepish about calling back with bad news. This was back in the days when it was still common to start each Facebook post with your own name and then talk about yourself in the third person. Serendipitously, the first post in my feed was from a friend in Los Angeles:
“Evan is annoyed that he has to get up in three hours to drive to Salt Lake.”
I commented: “You’re driving to Salt Lake tomorrow? Is there any way you can pick me up in Las Vegas?”
Amazingly, this Facebook friend with whom I had only a passing acquaintance in real life agreed to meet me at my hotel. Evan emphasized that he was trying to make an appointment which is why he was leaving L.A. so early, and I better be outside at 4:30 a.m. sharp. Evan showed up at 5, which was 6 a.m. in Utah — the starting time of the Bear 100. It occurred to me that I was still in Las Vegas and Beat was eight hours away, starting a race that I was apparently supposed to run with him. Evan and I drove north with his pit bull in the back seat and all four windows rolled down as the sun rose over the desert. I closed my eyes and let the toxins of Vegas evaporate into the clean air.
Evan wasn’t kidding about being on a tight schedule. By the time we crossed into Salt Lake County, he only had time to drop me off at an Interstate exit — literally on the offramp — before speeding back onto the highway. Of course, I was still grateful for the serendipitous carpool opportunity but bemused when I had to throw my big duffel over my back and trudge two miles uphill to my parents’ house.
My parents were vacationing in Germany and had no clue about my week’s exploits, from Mount Borah to Vegas to abandoning my caravan of co-workers to this insane plan to … pace? … an unknown distance of an ultramarathon with a man I’d only met for a few minutes two months ago. I broke into their house by climbing the fence and fishing the spare key out of my dad’s toolbox. I then rifled through the coat closet for anything resembling running gear that I could find — Dad’s wind jacket and flashlight, Mom’s knit beanie and cotton gloves, a pair of bedazzled sunglasses left behind by my youngest sister, and to my delight, a thermal top that I’d forgotten at some point. With the yoga pants and a lightweight backpack I’d received as swag from Interbike, I was all kitted up. (As you can see from the photo, Beat let me borrow his spare headlamp so I didn’t have to bring a large, unwieldy flashlight.) My shoes were some grubby pair of off-brand hikers that I used for mountain biking and did not spend much money on, as shoes had never been important to me before. This was because I was not a runner. Really, not even a little bit.
I had gone out for a few “practice” runs in Missoula with Beat’s encouragement. One was six miles along the Rattlesnake and one was eight miles up Mount Sentinel and back. On that long run, I kicked a rock into my ankle and limped home three of the eight miles. Then I nursed my “injury” and didn’t run for the next two weeks leading up to Mount Borah. So yes, I wasn’t even a little bit of a runner.
I rifled through my parents’ drawers until I found the spare key to Dad’s 1994 Toyota pickup truck. With my cobbled-together running gear and a bag of cookies and bagels that I purchased at a Draper bagel shop for running fuel, I drove the two hours north to Logan. Even with the serendipitously early start in Vegas and running around as fast as I could in Salt Lake, I still arrived at Tony Grove — mile 52 of the Bear 100 — just before sunset. I hadn’t talked to Beat since the previous evening and had no idea when he’d arrive at the aid station or if he’d already passed through. I stepped out of the truck wearing jeans and a cotton T-shirt, and there he was — a cute European guy in skin-tight shorts, standing next to the aid station tent, looking right at me.
As I walked toward Beat, he regarded me with a weary yet piercing gaze. I couldn’t quite read his expression. I hadn’t seen him since we met two months earlier. He was taller than I thought. His eyes were dark and his hair was disheveled. And he seemed older than I remembered. Although anyone would look years older after a race like the Tor des Geants and half of a hundred-miler in the span of less than two weeks. His expression turned stern.
“Well,” he said tersely. “Are you running?”
“Um, um,” I stammered. I gaped at him and his piercing eyes, and then averted my own eyes to catch the gaze of a man who was standing next to him, and who I later learned was his friend from California, Harry.
“You know he’s here just for you,” Harry said in an equally stern German accent.
“Just give me five minutes,” I mumbled, then hurried off to the truck to change.
By the time we took off, the sun had sunk to its lowest angle over Tony Grove. Long shadows stretched across an aquamarine lake rimmed with spruce groves and granite cliffs. The beauty was breathtaking, but I could only look for a second before turning my attention to my feet, which were shuffling awkwardly over a dusty ribbon of singletrack that descended into a dark valley. Beat was running fast and I was incredulous that he could run at all.
“How are you feeling?” I asked him.
“Oh, you know,” he replied, as though I did know.
He told me he felt exhausted at the start but that he was getting into his groove. He was starting to break away from his friends — Harry and another Californian, Steve — who were usually faster than him and currently much more rested than him. He said his feet were shredded but he was holding it together. Finally, I asked the question that was gnawing at my stomach, which was flipping somersaults thanks to the large turkey bagel sandwich I wolfed down on my way to Logan.
“So how long do you want me to run with you?”
He didn’t even pause. “To the finish.”
“The finish? 50 miles?”
“Sure,” he replied matter-of-factly. “Why not?”
This whole time, I’d been thinking about following him to one aid station, maybe two — eight or twelve miles. I wasn’t here to actually pace him. I was here to learn ultrarunning from him. I was here because I wanted to spend time with him. I was here because Beat described his participation in ultramarathons by writing, “In these five years I have probably lived more intensely than in all the years before together (except for my work/education.) In some way, I don’t remember who I was before that, nor does it seem relevant now.” I took those words to heart. I wanted to live intensely, too.
So … why not 50 miles?
After eight miles, we arrived at my first aid station, where I gorged on watermelon and then felt sick to my stomach for the next eight miles. We crossed long meadows where the night sky seemed to explode overhead — the opaque curtain of the Milky Way draped across stars upon stars. We climbed mountain passes beneath aspen trees, their dry autumn leaves rustling in the breeze. We expanded the brief conversations we’d started in text, talking about my endurance biking endeavors and Beat’s early years in the United States. He regaled me with simple explanations of the theoretical physics he studied and the process of writing software. I held onto every word, believing I understood (I didn’t. But I love hearing about the things people are passionate about.) He started to feel sleepy and asked me to tell him a funny story, so I told him the story about nearly pooping my shorts during the Tour Divide because the freehub was slipping and I couldn’t risk pausing the pedals for even a moment. This segued into another story about a bloody crash I’d had a few weeks earlier, which is when Beat changed his mind and said he didn’t want to hear my bike stories anymore.
The miles passed as though we were running in a dream. I barely felt my legs. Temperatures began to plummet, and I realized I’d left Dad’s jacket in the truck. It didn’t matter. I’d stay warm because I was running, because I was exhilarated, because the night sky opened itself to us and us alone, and not even these enormous mountains could hold us back.
Near mile 77 of the race — my mile 25 — Beat paused at a high point on the course. Together we looked at the sky. He reached into his pack and pulled out a small gray rock with crystal flecks of white that sparkled in the moonlight.
“I found this in Italy and I brought it for you,” he told me.
I cupped the rock in my hands. How did he know? How did he know that I was the little girl who loved rocks, who crawled on my hands and knees looking for “fossils” and who kept a cherished rock collection in my dresser drawer? “And you brought it all this way?” I asked.
“I can carry it to the end if you want,” he said.
“No,” I replied. “I want to carry it.”
There was another pause, and then he asked, “Do you want to go out?”
I knew exactly what he meant, but I am nothing if not awkward. After squirming for a moment, I asked, “Um, aren’t we already out?”
“No,” he laughed. “I mean, do you want to start dating?”
More awkwardness on my part. “I mean, the Montana-California thing is complicated.”
“We’ll figure it out,” he replied assuredly.
Later, Beat told me that he wanted to kiss me at that moment, but after 77 miles of mud and heat, he felt too wretched. I wasn’t exactly a spring daisy myself. But imagine that was our first kiss. It wouldn’t be long anyway — just a few more hours, a few more miles, a few more layers of wretchedness.
As sunrise approached, the spell began to break. The temperature dipped below freezing. Sheets of ice clung to the streams we had to cross in wet shoes. Beat was mostly walking by this point, but I still had to jog to keep up with his 4 mph pace. By the mile 90 aid station (my mile 38), I was in agony. My feet felt like I had danced on hot coals, slapped the soles a thousand times with a wooden paddle, then stuck a needle in every pore for good measure. I asked the aid station captain if I could hitch a ride to the finish from there, but he told me I’d likely have to wait five or more hours. I did not have the gear to stay warm if I stopped moving for even five minutes. So I kept going.
As I limped painfully, I begged Beat to continue without me. “Go run your race,” I urged. He joked about running so fast that he broke his pacer, but refused to leave me. We reached the top of another climb and faced a 4,000-foot descent to the finish. I was in such pain that I had to walk backward while descending. We finally came to a fork where Beat thought I could shortcut the course on a paved road. So we parted ways and I continued limping in agony along a busy highway. Beat finished his race in 29 hours and 29 minutes — still faster than his friends Steve and Harry, who didn’t have 200-mile Alpine race fatigue or a hobbled pacer, he’d brag later. When I finally limped into the finish, I found Beat sprawled out barefoot on the grass with his gross shoes and socks beside him. I gleefully removed my shoes as well but left my socks in place. I was terrified to see what sort of monstrosity my feet had become.
Beat congratulated me for finishing my first ultramarathon. I hadn’t thought of it like that before, but according to the Garmin Vista HCX that I carried in case Beat ditched me and I became horribly lost, my first ultramarathon came in at 52 miles in 17 hours, 15 minutes. My total elevation gain was probably around 11,000 feet.
I couldn’t comprehend those numbers. More than that, I couldn’t comprehend how it all came together so perfectly — the unlikely blessing of an understanding boss, Evan’s perfectly-timed drive, just happening to arrive at Tony Grove at the same time as Beat, my inadequate shoes and even more inadequate feet holding it together for as long as they did … all to arrive there in that moment, curled up in the grass in the warm September sunshine beside brilliant physicist/ultrarunner.
I wrote in my blog:
It was still before noon and the shuttle bus wasn't set to leave the finish line until 7 p.m. There was nothing for us to do but wait, so we settled into a shady spot on the grass, where the lake glistened, gold and green leaves rustled in the wind, and wisps of clouds streamed through the bright blue sky. The pain in my feet faded into the background, my mind settled into a pleasant fog, and the only thing I understood was that I was in Fish Haven, Idaho, and I could scarcely comprehend how I got there. But I lived every mile of it, intensely.
I’m so glad it all worked out. Happy anniversary, Love. ❤️
aww so sweet ❤️
Hey Jill, this is the most romantic tale I've heard. And the most meaningful progress for the two of you to this zenith moment of the trail. Congratulations to you, and to Beat!