Ben Gibbard Completes Prestigious 100-Mile Ultramarathon

“Ultramarathon.” Have you ever encountered that word before? I never had. I hate it. I hate looking at it. I hate thinking about what it means. A plain, non-ultra marathon is already horrifying enough. The idea of running 26 miles in a single day is the stuff of nightmares, but it’s something people do voluntarily. One of those people is Death Cab For Cutie leader Ben Gibbard, a distance-running devotee who is evidently much more psychotic than I realized. An ultramarathon is any footrace longer than 26 miles, and Ben Gibbard has run a bunch of those. This past weekend, Gibbard successfully completed the Western States 100, a 100.2-mile race through the trails of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. How fucked up is that? That’s terrible.

Running World, a magazine that once profiled Ben Gibbard, reports that he reached the finish line of the Western States 100 on Sunday morning, after getting started at 5 a.m. the previous day. It was his fifth 100-mile race. He’d been trying to compete in the Western States 100 for nearly a decade, and he finally got his chance when he moved up on the waiting list. Gibbard did not have an easy time in this race. The changes in elevation are extreme, and its peak is 7,000 feet above sea level. After a steep descent, runners must ascend through something called the “Devil’s Thumb,” and Gibbard was having trouble when he reached the aid station at its peak. Gibbard tells Running World, “I think I was having heat stroke or something. By the time I got to the top of the canyon at Devil’s Thumb, I couldn’t see. I was really nauseous. I was seeing double and had to lay down. I was shivering even though they were putting blankets on me. I was in bad shape.”

Volunteers gave Gibbard soup broth, and he improved enough to take off running again. He ran through the night and crossed the American River, where the water was 55 degrees, after 1 a.m. He finally reached the end of the course at 8:15 a.m. Sunday. He wore shoes from the Portland company Speedland, and he’s got his own Speedland shoes coming out in August. He tells Running World that he got through the roughest parts of the run by listening to Teenage Fanclub. He says. “I can’t believe I made it, and that was a very rough patch. I have been doing all this for a while now, and the physiological effect is that it makes you feel unsafe. If it wasn’t for the volunteers at the aid station, I never would have made it. Everyone was so kind and did everything for me when I needed it.”

Can you believe this fucking guy? I cannot believe this fucking guy. The typical blogger thing to do would be to try to come up with Death Cab song-title puns — the Running World story has one — but I am frankly too uncomfortable to attempt anything like that. Why would he do that to himself? I will never understand. Read the Running World story on Gibbard’s experience here, and check out our We’ve Got A File On You interview with Gibbard here.