MARK MACY
When renowned endurance racer Mark Macy got his diagnosis, he was told he had two years to live. That was four years ago
‘IT NEVER ALWAYS GETS WORSE’ is part of Travis Macy’s answer to my perfectly reasonable question: ‘How and why would a person run 100 miles, all in a row?’ Hundred-mile races are just one of the many superhuman things he and his father, the equally legendary endurance athlete Mark Macy, 68, have both done multiple times over multiple decades. How – why – does a person take on a race where a 20-hour finish is an aspirational result? I have run marathons before, I have felt the pain and the elation and the thing where a stranger hands you an orange slice and you put it in your mouth. I have pushed myself past my limits. At least I thought I had. But I have never crossed a marathon finish line and thought to myself, let ’s do this roughly three more times right now. How do you mentally get yourself to 30 miles, to 50, to 100? How do you keep going, long after any sensible person would tell you to stop?
‘ You have to remember that it might actually get bet ter,’ Travis, 39, explains. ‘ You tend to think, I feel this bad after 20, I’m going to feel twice as bad after 40, but how do you know? Maybe you won’t .’ It ’s a testament to his general charisma level that I find myself believing him. ‘If you keep eating and drinking, if you surround yourself with positive energ y, you might hit a point where you feel bet ter.’ Travis smiles. ‘Things turn around, that’s what happens in any long-distance event.’
I’m with the Macys – Travis and Mark and their wives, Amy and Pam – on a family hike. I’m with them because I want to talk about how a person becomes an ultrarunner, but I’m also here because I want to know how this family is weathering the latest complicat ion in their collective long-distance event. In 2018, Mark Macy was diag nosed with ea rly-onset A lzheimer’s disease, an incurable and terminal illness.
‘ You have ups and downs out there,’ Travis says. ‘But the lows don’t always just get lower. You can still find some good.’
Mark nods at his son, and then at me. ‘It’s not that hard,’ Mark says. And we keep moving.
WE’RE IN THE US TOWN OF SALIDA, COLORADO, ABOUT THREE HOURS south-west of Denver. Travis and Amy moved here a few years ago; they wanted their kids, Wyatt and Lila, to be able to walk home from school and play unattended in playgrounds. Salida is a town full of outdoor types. The main street is one Gold Rush-era facade after another, now home to yoga studios and art galleries. It ’s devoid of national chains, and there appears to be roughly one microbrewery for every eight residents. I’ve ta
