Bob Shebest: everyone has a plan until it falls apart

Bob Shebest came into Western States 2018 in the best shape he had been in. A high-mileage block timed properly, podiums elsewhere, no injuries — the sort of preparation that makes a runner quietly confident.

For sixty-two miles it worked exactly as designed. He was moving well, joking with people around him, hitting his splits. He came through Foresthill — the mile-62 crew point, and the moment when a Western States day either consolidates or unravels — expecting to consolidate.

What happened instead

It unravelled comprehensively. Vomiting that went on for hours, not the brief kind that clears and lets you eat again. Then sleeping on the side of the trail, more than once. Then the long argument with himself about whether to stop, which he had repeatedly and lost every time.

He finished. It took a very long time, and the finish-line photographs from that day are not the kind anyone frames.

The useful kind of race report

Most post-race interviews are with people who had a good day. They are pleasant and largely uninformative, because success in a hundred-miler is mostly the absence of the specific problems that ruin one. This is the other kind, recorded close enough to the race that nothing had been smoothed over.

The material worth having is in the detail:

• what the vomiting actually did to the calorie plan, and why the standard fixes stopped working
• the decision-making, or the near absence of it, once he was sleeping trailside
• what his crew did and did not do, and how a crew reads the difference between a runner who should stop and a runner who merely wants to
• what he would change, which is less than you would expect

A note on grit

The sport talks about toughness constantly and rarely defines it. This episode is close to a definition: not the ability to push through one bad hour, but the willingness to keep restarting a day that has already been over for eight of them.

An earlier conversation with Shebest, from 2015, is here.