Dipsea: A Trail Race Where ‘You’re Either the Hunter or the Hunted’ – The New York Times

STINSON BEACH, Calif. — The toughest part of the Dipsea, said to be the country’s oldest trail-running race, might not be the first mile, which contains nearly 700 stairs rising through the forests above Mill Valley.

It is not the jiggly-legged drop into Muir Woods, or the steep rise up Dynamite, so named because your churning legs might feel ready to explode. And it is not even the next big hill, called Cardiac. (If your legs have not burst, maybe your heart will.)

It is not the treacherous plunge toward the ocean, the crooked depths and broken steps of Steep Ravine, even the poison oak that crowds the skinny trails and tickles the legs before blooming into a postrace rash. And it’s not the course’s maze of permissible shortcuts, like the one named Suicide, that give locals an advantage, as long as they stay upright and do not get lost.

No, unexpectedly, the toughest part of the 7.5-mile Dipsea, a topographically schizophrenic romp that was first run in 1905, could be mental. It is knowing that the slowest runners are given head starts and the fastest ones begin at the back. It is like unloading a zoo’s worth of animals in reverse order of mobility and releasing the cheetahs at the end.

The race is handicapped in an unusually calculated attempt to get the top runners in every age group to the finish line at the same time. The youngest children and the oldest adults are stacked at the front. The fittest, fastest men are at the back, released 25 minutes later. Everyone else starts in waves in between, distributed by a complex algorithm of gender and age. A different wave is released from the starting line every minute, each one (theoretically) moving faster than the one before it.

“It’s a very different dynamic,” said Alex Varner, a 32-year-old who, before this year’s race last Sunday, had the fastest Dipsea time seven times — but had never won, not quite able to sprint and maneuver past every one of the 600 to 700 competitors who started in front of him. “You’re either the hunter or the hunted.”

That is how the winners over the past decade include an 8-year-old girl (barely beating a 68-year-old woman) and a 72-year-old man.

And that is how I started Sunday’s race five minutes behind the defending champion, a 47-year-old woman named Chris Lundy.

Dipsea organizers placed me, comically, in the “invitational” section for accomplished runners, rather than the broader “runner” section behind it. Starting in the thick of the competitive pack would provide a better perspective of the race. At my age, 50, with a six-minute head start in front of the “scratch” runners — those in the last group, men ages 19 to 30 — most of the invitational section would start in front of me, including all the women.

I live not far from where the race takes place, and I jog the hills a few times a week, five or six miles at a time. Barry Spitz, author of “Dipsea: The Greatest Race” and the longtime finish-line announcer, asked me over coffee last month what other races I regularly run. Well, none, really, I said.

He silently and skeptically scanned me from head to toe and back again.

“I don’t mean to be negative, but you probably won’t pass anyone,” he said.

Seeking an outsider’s perspective, and a more optimistic one, I called Amby Burfoot, the longtime editor of Runner’s World and the 1968 Boston Marathon champion. The Dipsea was on his must-do list for decades, he said. He finally did last year, at age 70.

Burfoot thought, with his 21-minute head start, he might finish in the top 100. He finished 541st, with the 1,063rd-fastest time (1 hour 37 minutes 31 seconds).

“Never in my life have I been passed by so many people,” he said.

This month, he said, he was headed on vacation, not to the Dipsea.

“It’s a fabulous race,” Burfoot said, “but I don’t have an urge to do it again.”

In 1904, as Spitz tells it, more than 30 years before Marin County was connected to San Francisco by a bridge across the Golden Gate, someone had the idea of racing between the Mill Valley train depot and the Dipsea Inn, on the sand of what later became Stinson Beach.

There was no course, just wild terrain and a few scattered trails up and around the shoulders of 2,571-foot Mount Tamalpais. A man named Charles Boas apparently beat another named Alfons Coney and, deemed a success, the two-man event was renewed into an annual race beginning in 1905. It is considered the second-oldest major running race in the country, behind the Boston Marathon, which started in 1897.

Organizers made two monumental decisions at the outset. One was not setting a precise route; runners could create their own path, deciding if a shorter but steeper incline, for example, was better than a longer way around.

That notion persists, far more limited these days because of environmental concerns surrounding an otherwise established “consensus” course. But there are still places where even the top runners pass someone, only to see that person ahead of them again later in the race.

“Short cuts are kind of like the family jewels,” said Roy Rivers, a former winner. “If you have one, you don’t talk about it.”

The second, more notable decision was the use of head starts.

“Sometimes it’s the right thing to do to give other people a better chance to win,” said James Weil, an M.I.T.-educated engineer who has been the Dipsea’s handicapper for about 40 years.

Weil uses historical race data to conclude, for instance, that 60-year-old men should be placed in the same starting group as 12-year-old girls and women ages 45 to 48, all leaving the starting line 12 minutes before the scratch runners.

Theoretically, if you are the best among your age and gender, you could finish first.

“I want the winner to win by less than a minute,” Weil said. “I want the top 10 finishers to have started in different groups. And I want a representation of women in the top five. The fourth criteria, which is really difficult, I would like a scratch runner in the top 10. I don’t think I’ve done all four. I’ve done the first three.”

Handicapping, and the headache of starting at the rear, is one reason most world-class runners do not bother with the Dipsea. Besides, there is no prize money. A scratch runner has not won the race since 1966.

“There’s no incentive for them,” Spitz said. “There’s no money. It’s dangerous. It’s in June, in peak racing season. They have bigger fish to fry.”

Typical contenders are locals who know the course intimately. They are often strong Dipsea veterans in their 40s, 50s and 60s — those who turn a year older and gain another minute of a head start, but whose actual running time does not increase a minute.

As Spitz said during Sunday’s award ceremony, if you want to win, or at least get one of the treasured black shirts given to the top 35 finishers, “get faster and get older.”

The actor Robin Williams ran it a couple of times. (“Besides the hills, the stairs and the downhill, it wasn’t bad,” he said after finishing a respectable 232nd in 1984.) So did a young Robert S. Mueller III, long before his pursuits included the current president. Elmo Shropshire, known for singing “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” has run it 17 times. Now 81, and still running competitively, he stopped doing the Dipsea a few years ago.

“When you’re 75, you max out the head start minutes you get,” Shropshire said last week. “I was falling back in the pack, and it felt like it was getting a little dangerous.”

The local flavor makes the Dipsea feel like a throwback in an era of gimmicky races. The starting area in Mill Valley on every second Sunday in June has the mellow air of a farmer’s market, not a major sporting event. The race has no costumes, no man-made obstacles, no music. Sponsor names are not strewn about the course or the back of T-shirts. (“We like the shirt to look like a race shirt, not a billboard,” said Edda Stickle, the race director.) There is no encampment of sponsor tents and giveaways at the beach-side finish.

The Dipsea is routinely approached by big-name sponsors, including one recently, offering lots of money and outfits for the army of volunteers.

“It’d be the so-and-so Dipsea Race,” Stickle said, dismissively. “We said thank you, but this will be nothing but the Dipsea race.”

I never saw Varner go past. But less than a mile into the race, climbing staircases so long that the top cannot be seen from the bottom, I was aware that dozens were passing me. They were getting younger by the minute.

Beyond the race’s midpoint, heading downhill, the field thinned. I was alone when I ducked under a fallen tree to take a well-used shortcut called “the swoop,” a thin, tangled thread of a trail dropping fast through thorny thickets and trees. Relieved to hear no footsteps behind me, I tripped over a hidden root and fell into a bush, bruising only my ego.

I later passed the feet of person on a stretcher sticking out of the bushes, surrounded by three paramedics who smiled and told me everything was fine. I learned later that a teenage girl somewhere else collapsed and was helicoptered to a hospital. (She was released later in the day.)

The week before the race, I interviewed 80-year-old Russ Kiernan, a three-time winner who had won 30 black shirts in 49 career starts. On Sunday, he got dizzy at Cardiac and was taken away by stretcher. (He, too, was home that night.)

More people caught me. It is the downhill dashes where the top runners make up the most time, bounding down steps and rocks and daringly passing the competition on narrow and tight corners like short-track speedskaters.

There is a lot of touching, hands on sweaty backs and shoulders, to keep in control. (The late Jack Kirk, who finished the Dipsea 67 times in a row, the last when he was 95, took to wearing a shirt that read “Do Not Touch Me” on the back.) Only occasionally does the convivial civility turn to trail rage. One man shoved another at the finish line, sending him tumbling into the timing equipment.

I was not there yet. Darting down a meandering trail overgrown with bushes, I heard footsteps behind me. “On your left!” a voice shouted over my shoulder. It was followed by an “oops!” and a “sorry!” as the man bounced past me on the right and disappeared into the bramble.

Nobody gobbled up more runners than Varner, who began with a one-minute head start on the scratch runners. He ran at Davidson College and finished 26th at the 2013 Boston Marathon. He lives in Marin County, does a few trail races a year, and seems pleasantly unbothered by his inability to win the Dipsea.

By the last mile, he had only one more person to catch: Lundy, a local veterinarian and an accomplished national trail runner. In 2017, she had an 11-minute head start on Varner and beat him to the finish by 20 seconds. This time, she had a 10-minute head start.

She, too, had passed hundreds by the time she topped out at Cardiac, where the Pacific Ocean comes into view. When she slid past 60-year-old Diana Fitzpatrick, a former champion, on the spiraling steps into Steep Ravine, about six miles in, she figured she must be in the lead.

“But I knew Alex was closing in,” she said later.

Varner ran out of time and space again. Despite one of his fastest times ever, 48:51, and the race’s overall fastest time for the eighth time, he finished in second, again, this time 15 seconds behind Lundy.

“I was closer than I was last year, but she’s such a strong runner,” Varner said. “I ran what I hoped to run. No complaints.”

Nine of the top 11 came from different start groups. Winners of the 35 black shirts included three teenagers and seven runners in their 60s. Their median age was 53. The top scratch runner finished 30th.

“I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I might have to wait 10, 20 years before I win,” Varner said. “It’s the way the race is designed. They did it because they want to give everybody a shot, and if you look at the results, it works out remarkably well. It’s hard to argue with.”

I finished 580th. By my calculations, analyzing the final results, I was passed by 247 people.

The good news is that I passed 39. And in another two years, if I get the urge to do the Dipsea again, I will gain another minute of a head start.