It was curiosity that brought Rickey Gates to both Canada and the South Pole.
It was his jaw-dropping endurance that allowed the Woody Creek man to win foot races in both places in conditions beyond brutal.
Taking a break from scrubbing dishes at a research station, Gates won a marathon around the outpost amid temperatures of 20 below zero. Then last Saturday, the Aspen High graduate shattered the course record in the 80-mile Canadian Death Race by nearly 33 minutes. Not a bad effort for Gates’ first ultra marathon.
First the story of the South Pole.
“It had been in my brain for awhile to check out Antarctica,” he said.
Doing so can either cost a fortune, or one can make a little money by scouring plates for scientists. To see a land he described as “flatter than Kansas” and “colder than the dickens,” he chose the latter.
The key to the frozen sojourn? “Lots and lots of layers and don’t stop running.”
Gates, 30, was a standout runner at Aspen High, but often finished second to Jon Severy, who went on to All-American status running at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Now a member of the Salomon shoe company’s international running team, and a veteran of mountain races in Italy, Switzerland and on Pikes Peak, Gates said the 24-hour Canadian Death Race piqued his interest.
Having done three marathons, “I decided to run three at once,” he said.
The race is held in central Alberta, several hours north of Banff in the Canadian Rockies. The terrain includes 4-wheel-drive trails, bogs, streams and simply scrambling up and down three peaks with thousands of feet of verticality.
“Going into the race I was just really curious,” he said. “I had nothing to base it off of. Usually I’m done eight hours before this race finishes, so I was curious about how my body would react.”
Gates said six hours in, he relied on mantras to continue — “Keep going, keep going,” for instance — as his brain deteriorated to what he described as an infantile or animalistic level. He had an advantage, however, having talked with the previous Death Race record holder, Hal Koerner, of Ashland, Ore.