Ultrarunning Gets Younger – and Faster

"I've never operated well under coaches," he says. "It's not like I have a problem with authority figures, but I always wanted to run the way I want to run. I was always injured or overtrained."

A similar pattern developed during his college years. He'd train hard in the summer, piling up the mileage, then have difficulty adjusting to the speed drills at school and post unremarkable numbers on cross-country races. The kind of interval training common in college track programs — running 400 meters or a mile, resting a couple minutes, then doing the same thing — didn't sit well with him. "He's actually a lot better at short distances than he makes out to be," says Boggs. "He just doesn't think his body can handle the training."

Krupicka made some lasting friendships among CC's cross-country stars; his girlfriend, Jocelyn Jenks, and Boggs, who still joins him on evening runs, are both seniors on the team this year. But he didn't blend in easily with the school's athletic community at large, what with his dim views about excessive partying and strong opinions about training and his chronic injuries. "He can be real abrasive and gruff," says Boggs. "I've certainly gotten pissed off at him and said he was stupid for running as much as he did. But what he does is hard; it takes a lot of self-control."

Frustration over his erratic cross-country performance didn't stop Krupicka from putting his college studies to good use, honing his notions about sustainability, environmental ethics and his own possible role in the world. He read avidly and widely. "The stuff that influences my running is the stuff that influenced my life," he says. "Reading Ed Abbey influenced my running more than Arthur Lydiard."

By his fifth, final year, he was making plans to try some ultra events as soon as he was out of school. In some ways, it was a postponed dream; as a kid running around Niobrara, he'd often wondered what it would be like to run for seventeen hours straight. He started pushing up his training mileage until it reached 200 miles a week. Shortly after graduation, he cruised to his first marathon and 50K wins. But he still didn't know if he was ready for the Leadville 100. "Everyone was just assuming I was going to do it, but I wasn't sure," he says.

John O'Neill, manager of the Colorado Running Company — the shoe store just off campus where Krupicka now works — remembers egging him on that summer during Wednesday-night group runs. "I just told him, 'Dude, you're running 200 miles a week,'" recalls O'Neill. "'You need to go up there and kick some ass.'"

After some hesitation, Krupicka did just that. Somewhere around mile eighty, an ultrarunner was born. Winning the race after coming so close to collapse on Sugarloaf Pass gave him a fleeting sense of invincibility, he says now.

"It kind of messed me up, actually," he says. "I got mono shortly after Leadville and didn't know I had it. I ran a marathon in Colorado Springs two weeks later and PR'd [set a personal record], but I felt terrible for months after that."

Not surprisingly, Krupicka couldn't run a lick the day after his first Leadville 100. The second time, in 2007, he kept a comfortable pace throughout, not pushing it, and still finished three-quarters of an hour sooner. "It was kind of a submaximal effort," he says. "I was ahead by three hours. When you're just jogging along, it's not going to feel so bad."

It was the easiest 100-miler he'd ever done. His body was much stronger and faster, his training much better. The next day he ran five miles, just to keep things in tune.

Krupicka agrees to a photo shoot on a ridgeline near the top of Mount Buckhorn, a brief interruption during his morning training run. The photographer and his assistant drive up North Cheyenne Canyon to the end of the paved road and park. They hike up a mile of dirt road, then half a mile of steep switchbacks. By the time they reach the rendezvous point, they are sucking down water and feeling the 8,000-foot elevation.