A pint of milk and a bucketful of resilience: The ingredients needed to finish Hardrock 100
When Sarah Lavender Smith kissed the rock after completing Hardrock, she achieved a 10 year dream - this is the story of how she did it
Sarah Lavender Smith is struggling.
As a student of the Hardrock 100 and an experienced ultra runner, she had hoped to cover all the various bases that could metaphorically and actually trip her up at what is one of America if not the world’s most famous and toughest events.
But she hadn’t figured that her run would be ambushed by the aftereffects of a diet of overly acidic gels and chews.
Barely halfway through the 102.5 mile long run, Sarah is dry retching and throwing up gastric acid, her stomach performing cartwheels.
At at time when running was no longer fun, when her body was disobeying her mind, it would have been easy to quit.
What did Sarah do instead? Downed a pint of milk, embraced the pain and completed one of the hardest ultra marathons around.
This is the story of how Sarah took on this year’s Hardrock 100 and found the resilience to make her dreams reality.
Further reading:
Running the Hardrock 100 was the culmination of a long-held dream for Sarah Lavender Smith.
Read more about her reasons for wanting to take on the formidable event, and the life in ultra running that helped her prepare…
Heading for Hardrock: The 10-year making of a dream
There isn’t much Sarah Lavender Smith hasn’t done in the world of running.
Chasing the ghosts of her ancestors:
Doing hard things isn’t a new experience for Sarah. The Colorado resident has run more than 100 ultras and marathons, winning several at the 50k distance and clocking up many thousands of miles during more than 30 years in the sport.
In 2019, she won the Grand to Grand Ultra, widely celebrated as one of the toughest races in the world.
Although she’d originally been sceptical that she’d be able to take on one of the world’s toughest races, the pull of Hardrock had become increasingly tough to ignore.
Her home just outside Telluride in Colorado is very close to the route of the run, which snakes in a loop around the San Juan Mountain Range.
On top of that Hardrock is intrinsically linked to the area’s mining history, which reflect Sarah’s own ancestry.
It starts and finishes in Silverton, a gold rush camp that boomed in the late 1800s due to silver mining, and connects a number of former mining towns.
The name Hardrock even comes from hard rock mining, and the run pays homage to those who previously worked in the mines.
“One reason it was important to me is my family roots are here,” Sarah said.
“My grandfather and his brother, and my grandmother, had an incredible history of mountain climbing and exploring these mountains in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
“And my grandpa was a miner, at one of the mines along the route. I’ve studied a lot of the mining history in this region and of course my grandfather’s story.
“I’m fascinated by the history and I wanted to chase the ghosts of my ancestors and experience a little of what they did.
“In our era we have to manufacture adventure, whereas they just truly lived it.”
Sarah said she became a “student of the event” in the mid-2000s, eventually playing a part in it in 2011 when she paced a friend.
She told Running Tales: “Being a pacer is like being an apprentice in terms of learning about the route and how to handle the conditions and troubleshoot.
“It’s just absolutely incredible.”
The Hardrock 100 is recognised as one of the hardest ultra races around.
Combining 13 mountain passes, the numbers associated with the course tell their own story: 102.5 miles long, a cumulative vertical gain of 33,197 feet of climb, and an average elevation of about 11,000 feet.
“It’s run at an extremely high elevation,” Sarah said, “and much of the course is above timberline.
“You go over a lot of thirteeners and one 14,000 foot peak.
“Although I started pacing in 2011 and then volunteering, I didn’t have the courage to run a mountainous hundred miler as a qualifier until 2015.”
It was then Sarah started applying for the notoriously tricky Hardrock lottery, a multi-year process that became even more bottlenecked due to cancellations in 2018 and 2019.
It took 10 years from her first application for Sarah to crack the lottery code and set herself on a collision course with Hardrock destiny.
On July 11, 2025, she lined-up at the start of the run she’d dreamed of for a decade.
Extreme elevation, dry air, hard to eat, running at night… welcome to Hardrock:
Despite all her experience pacing and volunteer at the course, Sarah said nothing can prepare anyone for taking on the actual event.
“In spite of all the times I ran pieces of it as a pacer or in training, all the race reports I read, all the videos I watched, truly nothing prepared me for how hard it was to put it all together in one go,” she said.
“Why is it so hard? One is the 33,000ft of elevation gain in thin air, it’s just the amount of vertical and the terrain is so treacherous.
“There’s also the element of weather. Now, because we’ve been in drought, we have not for the past couple of years had the afternoon monsoon storms.
“Whereas, typically, you can get biblical storms with electricity and hail pelting down, we’ve actually had the opposite problem.
“This past year, and the prior year, has been so dry and blazing hot.”
As if those challenges weren’t enough, Sarah was facing the prospect of going into a second night for the first time.
At Hardrock, even the very fastest runners take around 24 hours, with the women’s record approaching 26, meaning most runners take far longer.
The average time is around 40 hours and the cut-off is 48.
Sarah said: “If you do the math, the average mile pace is over 23 minutes. So, it’s like a brisk hike.
“You think, how can people be so slow? It’s so pedestrian. And actually the nickname is Hard Walk, because so much of it is unrunnable. You are hiking.
“It means you have to cultivate patience. A lot of top runners from different geographic regions just can’t handle it being so slow.
“There are parts where you’re scrambling up scree and it’s so slippery. I say it’s like cat litter on a slide. It’s that hard to get up and down.
“Then you have to go past the second sunset. From all the 100-milers that I’ve done, the slowest I had been was 35 hours which was the afternoon of day two.
“So, it was really tough. I only had two 10 minute naps and had to keep going into the second night, sleep deprived and exhausted.”
Sarah said another reason time starts to add up at Hardrock is down to how long it takes at aid stations to change clothes and regulate body temperature.
Running 100-milers across night and day is almost like an entirely different sport to the 10k or half-marathon road races many runners live for.
At events like Hardrock, aid stations are like small villages rather than somewhere to grab a quick Isotonic drink. What happens in those moments can change someone’s day for good or bad.
“You end up taking more time at aid stations to change clothes because thermoregulation and managing your body temperature is tricky and strategic,” Sarah said.
“It’s really, really hard to breathe in the high altitude with dry air. It’s hard to eat, to chew and swallow.
“When you’re on the trail, you’re mostly ingesting liquid or gel calories, which are easy to swallow. So, when you do get to an aid station, it’s important to spend some extra time and eat some solid food.”
Tragedy on the Hardrock course:
Sarah may have spent years studying Hardrock, but ultra running is all too often able to throw unexpected spanners in the works of the best laid plans.
The first of these came in the form of a regional wildfire which had blown dense smoke over Silverton on the morning of the event.
“When I finally got going I just felt so grateful because there had been a question over whether the run would be cancelled, which would have been devastating,” Sarah said.
The event committee eventually offered anyone who might be susceptible to the smoke, for example if they had asthma, the chance to defer their entry - an option no-one took up.
Sarah added: “When your drop bags are packed and you’re ready to go, you’re going.
“And thankfully, after the first climb, the winds shifted and by the second mountaintop, we had blue skies.
“I have a friend who ran Hardrock a couple years ago, and I had asked her for advice because she’s a faster runner than I am but it had taken her 45 hours.
“She told me her mantra had been ‘no hurry, no worry’ and that really stuck with me.”
Following her friend’s advice, Sarah eased her way into the run, clocking up the first few miles “like a tourist, just sightseeing”.
But, at the mile 30 aid station, she was hit by news that rocked her and the event as a whole: Hardrock had suffered its first fatality.
Elaine Stypula, a 60-year-old runner from Michigan, had collapsed about three hours into the run, near Gold Lake on the Little Giant Trail.
She had been pronounced dead later in the morning, despite efforts to revive her.
When Sarah heard the news, “everything changed in my mind and my spirit”.
“I didn’t know Elaine so I couldn’t really picture her but I could imagine the runners and sweepers and photographers who had to deal with it, and search and rescue.
“My heart really went out to the run director (Dale Garland) and the sadness and stress I knew he’d be feeling.
“It was extremely sobering. I left the aid station imagining the awful thing that must have happened.”
Sarah was so caught up thinking about the incident, she missed an important turn on the course - adding an extra mile to her Hardrock endeavour.
“I was feeling very depressed at that stage,” she said, “but thankfully I was able to turn it around.
“When I got to the next aid station, a friend was volunteering there and they put everything into perspective.
“I thought, ‘oh my gosh, I am so lucky to be out here, I’m so lucky I’m alive. Who cares about whether this takes me 40 or 42 or 46 hours. I’m alive and I’m doing it’.”
Steadily regaining her previous composure, Sarah made it to the 14,000 foot Handies Peak - one of the most famed parts of the course - at sunset.
“I was doing the math in my head and realising I was behind what were my ideal splits and I just had to let them go,” she said.
“I was thinking, ‘to finish is to win it’. And so my process oriented goals were not to hurt myself.
“I’m so proud that I didn’t trip and fall. Another big one was making sure I was super smart about my hydration and electrolytes and my fuelling.
“Fuelling went off the rails later (in the run), but I did stay hydrated and my fingers didn’t get puffy.
“It was a challenge in that dry hot air. So much of success at this kind of hundred miler is about what I call systems management.
“It’s not about how fast you are, it’s about your endurance and being smart to maintain your hydration, fuelling and thermoregulation.”
‘The thing you think will be a problem usually turns out to be something else’:
Running in the dark was another challenge, with Sarah admitting her night vision “isn’t that great”.
A double light system of a headlamp and another light on her waist helped, but depth perception continued to be a problem.
But those challenges all paled into insignificance when she started feeling sick.
“It came from the weirdest mistake, something I never anticipated,” she said.
”All of the trail snacks I carried were basically the simple sugar stuff, so hydration mix, chews and gels. Those are what I can get down while moving.
“I had very few solid foods because it’s hard to chew and swallow in the dry, thin air. Those chews and gels worked great - until they didn’t.”
It turned out the flavours Sarah had chosen were almost exclusively fruit-based. Their tangy, citrus nature meant her mouth and tongue started breaking out in sores.
Soon after, she began throwing up gastric acid.
“Once I started throwing up, my mouth and my tongue were killing me,” Sarah said. “It made food so unpalatable and I didn’t to want to eat anything.
“I got to the halfway-point aid station and my friend made me some instant mashed potatoes, and I had a chocolatey recovery shake that could go down.
“But the minute I tried to have gels or the tangy chews that I was really relying on for calories, it just backfired.
“It was horrible. I was either puking or I was dry heaving. And so, my stomach really started to hurt because it was cramping and felt like it was turning inside out.”
Fortunately, an answer was at hand in the form of a pint of cold milk: “My body knew it wanted to coat my stomach and neutralise the acid.
“I just chugged it like I was in a milk commercial.”
Although it didn’t completely solve her sickness issue, the milk gave her some much-needed respite.
“I had prepared for so many problems,” she said. “My sprained ankle, my sore knees, my bad lungs.
“I was ready to troubleshoot all that. And yet my body behaved really well. It was my stupid tongue and my burning throat and my acidic stomach instead.
“It’s an old saying in ultras. The thing you think will be a problem usually turns out not to be because it’s something else.
“And that was totally what happened to me.”
Sarah said despite her stomach issues, and the fuelling knock-on effect they had, she didn’t consider dropping out of Hardrock.
She told Running Tales that because she wasn’t chasing cut-off times, she had been able to simply keep moving forward.
“When you have these top level goals, you just do whatever it takes to finish.
“I always had enough of a time cushion, which was reassuring. I was just worried I’d pass out and lose consciousness, maybe hit my head, and then I wouldn’t have been able to finish.
“That was the scary part. I could never relax and say, ‘oh, I’ve only got 10 more miles. I’ve got this in the bag’. I was always thinking that anything could happen.”
As she started to move through the night for the second time, Sarah’s worries about collapsing due to a lack of energy were combined with the onset of “crazy hallucinations”.
It was then she drew upon her previous experience of pacing in the event and her knowledge of what it takes to finish Hardrock.
“It is definitely an event that rewards experience,” she said. “I’ve accompanied Hardrock runners in previous years when they have struggled in the final stretch.
“I kept remembering my experience in 2017, when I was pacing someone who is a really good runner.
“One thing after another went wrong during his Hardrock, and it was really challenging weather. The altitude just did him in.
“By the time I started running with him, he was chasing cut-offs. He was on the verge of falling apart and was so extremely slow.
“This was a speedy guy going at a snail’s pace. At one point, at mile 80, I was talking to him and wondering why he wasn’t talking to me.
“I look around and he had fallen asleep with his chin down toward his chest, and his arms propped on trekking poles. He looked like a scarecrow, just standing there.
“I had witnessed that - but I knew he had finished. It was so useful knowing he had done that.
“So, I was able to tell myself, ‘I can get through this’.
“The worse you are struggling, the more pride you should feel in finishing. It’s not that you should feel discouraged by struggling. It’s more, ‘okay, this is bonus points for extra effort, it’s going to feel that much better to get through it’.”
“Don’t puke on Dale!”:
Sarah’s battle with Hardrock came to an end after 46 hours, although the finish line didn’t provide quite as momentous an occasion as she’d hoped.
She said: “I had told my crew the best case scenario would be around 40 hours and to prepare for me to take around 44 hours.
“I took two hours longer than that, which hurt my ego a little bit - and yet I was still proud.
“I felt this enormous relief. With about half mile to go, my husband and a friend met my pacer and me to run us in.
“I’d like to say it was amazing, the best moment in my life. But it was actually anti-climactic.
“I was super stressed out because I had been dry heaving and making these terrible awful noises. I had no control over it.
“I would try to jog and to get running, and I’d have to bend over and make these noises. Approaching the finish, where I could finally see the lights up ahead, I got stressed out because they had a live stream and I knew it was going to be televised.
“I didn’t want anyone to see me like that. As I went round the final corner, I was making myself run but my only thought was, ‘don’t puke on Dale, don’t puke on Dale’.
“I knew I wanted to finish and kiss the rock, and then Dale (Garland, the run director) would give me a hug but I didn’t want to get sick on him.
“I didn’t want the live stream to capture the horrible noises.”
Although she did manage to avoid being sick over the man most synonymous with her dream run, Sarah’s illness forced her to leave the finish area quickly and head to her motel to recover.
“I rushed the finish because I was in such distress,” she said. “We made it to the hotel and I just collapsed.
“But a few hours later on the Sunday morning, they had the big, breakfast celebration with awards and stuff.
“That’s when I felt all the warm, fuzzy feelings of accomplishment. That’s when I celebrated.
“So, I did get the moment of accomplishment.”
Despite all the hardship and sickness Sarah encountered on the Hardrock course, she does not hesitate when asked if the event met her expectations.
“It definitely lived up to the hype,” she said. “It was as special and exciting as everyone makes it out to be.”
One and done… or not?:
There’s always one question that gets asked after a runner completes a major event.
Whether that’s their first 5k or the Moab 240, someone is bound to ask if they’ll do the race again.
And if that’s true, it’s also guaranteed that the runner involved will say no - and then change their mind.
It’s a process that Sarah went through, starting before Hardrock 2025 had even finished.
“My pacer and I had a conversation during the last few miles,” Sarah said. “She’s an older runner who I really, really respect, and she made a deliberate decision a few years ago to retire from 100 milers.
“I was thinking, ‘if I don’t do any more hundreds, this is the best one to end on - why not go out with a bang at the biggest and best’.
“That was actually a big motivator for me to finish. In the final painful miles, my new mantra was ‘one and done’.
“This is it. I never have to do this again.”
After she had finished, Sarah even told her husband, Morgan, that she was finished with the 100-mile distance.
“He’s an attorney and said he was going to drop a contract for me to sign,” she said.
“He was laughing, because he didn’t believe me. But I felt so certain.”
For the next 34 hours, Sarah remained sure Hardrock had been her last 100-mile race.
“And then the mind starts going,” she added. “I started to think about how I’d had the trouble of the citric acid and how if I could have avoided that, I would have done so much better.
“And then the real thing that got me curious is that Hardrock reverses direction each year.
“My mind started thinking about the difficult climb at mile 84 that I’d crawled up, and what it would be like to plunge down it at mile 16 in the other direction.”
What she calls her “curiosity” has now persuaded her to enter the Hardrock lottery again. She’s also applied for Western States 100, a race she completed in 2016.
Sarah is happy to admit her about-face is a “cliché” but then so is running in general.
From facilitating the fulfilment of dreams, to overcome hardship and taking on races we said we’d never touch again, running is one great big, puke-inducing, goal conquering struggle.
Runners, particularly those like Sarah Lavender Smith who take on events like Hardrock 100, wouldn’t have it any other way.
Growing community on Substack - Mountain Running & Living:
Sarah’s running ups and downs are chronicled in her popular Mountain Running & Living Substack newsletter.
With more than 4,000 subscribers, the blog features far more than simply a list of running achievements or race reports, with Sarah chronicling her life in Talluride, giving training advice, and writing openly of her concerns as a runner on the wrong side of 50.
“Substack has challenged me to be consistent with a weekly newsletter and to really build community through it,” Sarah said.
“I feel I’m trying to give a voice to midlife runners and to anyone who’s interested in leading a more rural and outdoorsy life.
“And, also, I write about being an empty nester. My two children are now in their mid-twenties. So, I have adult children and that’s a big life change - a new chapter in my life that I write about.”
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Craig, thank you so much for this excellent writeup! You really captured my experience and got the details right.