Fueled by a rush order of bacon and mushroom pizza, flatlander Josh Sanders ran, climbed and power-hiked 10 fourteeners in 23 hours and 33 minutes last week, breaking the record for 14,000-foot summits in a day.
What does a pizza have to do with a fourteener record? In this case, a lot.
On the way to the his first trailhead and in search of carbs, Sanders called in a pizza order. The only problem was the Dillon Domino’s closes its doors and takes delivery-only orders after 10 p.m. Sanders explained his mission and that he needed to be at the Grays Peak trailhead by midnight on June 29, so the shop made exception — and possibly its shortest “delivery” ever: to its own parking lot.
The drive-by grab-and-go gave Sanders the carbo-loading he needed on the drive to the trailhead that sits six miles east of the Loveland ski area. He gave the folks at the Domino’s in Dillon a $10 tip on a $15 pizza for their supporting role in the achievement.
Aided by the light of a nearly full moon and a full belly, the Michigan resident started up the trail to Grays and neighboring Torreys Peak at the moment Thursday gave way to Friday. He would finish his record quest 27 minutes before the subsequent midnight by finishing a descent from Mount Belford near Buena Vista. Along the way, he covered 45 miles on foot with cumulative elevation gains of 18,000 feet.
Sanders, who lives in Kalamazoo, made a family vacation out of the trip with his wife and their two boys, one 2 years old, the other 7 months.
“Which, by the way, might a bigger accomplishment than climbing 10 fourteeners in a day,” Sanders, 36, joked, “getting a toddler and an infant, 18 hours, halfway across the country.”
Sanders lives 700 feet above sea level, and he knows the math: Michigan is hardly an ideal place to train for high-altitude mountaineering escapades because there is 40 percent less oxygen at 14,000 feet. Michigan does have something Colorado doesn’t, though.
“As much as I love Colorado and wish I could move here, the only thing I love more than that is watching my dad play with my kids,” said Sanders, a marketing vice president for a company that makes automobile trailers. “I escape to Colorado as often as I can, but I’m a flatlander for a while.”
To break the record, Sanders climbed four clusters of peaks: Grays and Torreys; Evans and Bierstadt, Lincoln, Democrat and Bross; Missouri, Oxford and Belford. In 2016, Boulder’s Bill Wright topped 10 14,000-foot summits in a day, but he counted Mount Cameron, a ridge point at 14,238 feet between Lincoln and Bross. Most fourteener folks don’t count Cameron as a separate peak because it doesn’t meet the criteria of a minimum 300-foot drop between it and neighboring fourteeners.
Sanders came to fourteener ultrarunning in an unusual way. While living in North Carolina in 2014, a friend took him on a hike to the summit of Mount Mitchell, the tallest peak in the state at 6,684 feet. It also happens to be the highest peak east of the Mississippi, and the experience reawakened a love for the outdoors that was instilled in him while growing up in southern Wisconsin.
Soon he heard about the sport of highpointing, which is trekking to the highest point in every state, and that triggered his natural competitiveness. In 2015, he broke the record for highpointing all the states in the contiguous 48 with one of his sisters, finishing in 19 days, seven hours, 37 minutes.
That led him into ultrarunning on mountain peaks. Last year, he attempted 10 Colorado fourteeners in one day but made it only halfway to his goal.
“It’s not really a failure unless you give up and never try it again,” Sanders said. “I think the most important thing that happened to contribute to the success of this record was that failed attempt.”
With crew support from his father and a sister in last week’s odyssey, Sanders had the fourth summit (Bierstadt) in the bag by 8 a.m. and knocked off Lincoln-Democrat-Bross between 12:10 and 2 p.m. He was back in the van by 3 p.m., headed to the Missouri-Oxford-Belford trio, and at 7:11 p.m. he reached the summit of Missouri ahead of schedule.
The moment of truth would come between Missouri (peak number eight) and Oxford (number nine). It was around 9:15 p.m., darkness was falling and he was beginning to struggle physically. Now he had less than three hours to knock off two more summits and descend to accomplish his goal. In the thin moonlight he saw what he thought was the summit of Oxford, only to learn it was a false summit when he got there.
“My perception was, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ I knew I was going to be cutting it close, and for a moment I just sat down on the trail and (thought), ‘What do I do?’ All day I was confident, all day I was ahead of schedule. It seemed impossibly far away. That was the darkest time.”
He thought about how he wanted to set the record to inspire his sons. As a result they inspired him, and he pressed on.
“What got me up out of the dirt was family that I just didn’t want to let down,” Sanders said. “My sons, I want to teach them that when things are incredibly hard, don’t give up. I want my sons to be the kind of men that see things through, that don’t quit when it gets really hard. I got up and went as hard as I could, went down into the saddle and then up Belford for number 10.”
When his boys are old enough to understand, he hopes to have more stories to tell them. There are speed records in the Smoky Mountains and the Grand Canyon he wants to break.
“I want to try and do extra things with my life,” Sanders said. “You can’t do that if you’re not willing to take chances. I think it’s incredibly important not just in sports but also in business, also in life, to take chances and understand that what some people may view as failure really isn’t. I think this mountain climbing record is a perfect example of that.”
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