At bedtime last week, legendary American distance runner Melody Fairchild regaled her 7-year-old son Dakota with tales of the he plans to run this year.

One of the biggest road races in the world for the past several decades, the race sends 40,000 runners through the streets of Boulder, Colorado, on a point-to-point race that ends at the University of Colorado (CU) football stadium, full of cheering spectators and fellow runners.

“I told him it’s an amazing feeling to run into that stadium,” Fairchild says. “When you hit the field, the whole crowd is cheering for everybody. You feel like they’re cheering for you. He had this huge smile on his face.”

And if 50,000 people cheering isn’t enough, there’s also the famous slip-n-slide, numerous bands playing on the course, runners and spectators wearing outrageous costumes, and the military jet flyover by the Colorado Air National Guard you can feel in your bones. Named America’s All-Time Best 10K, it’s likely to be one of the biggest parties you’ll ever attend.

Fairchild recounted for Dakota her experience as the U.S. captain for the Bolder Boulder’s first International Team Challenge professional race in 1998.

“I remember looking out the window and seeing the stadium full. I was so nervous, I thought I was gonna vomit all over the floor,” she says. “When I walked out and they introduced me as the local hometown girl, the whole crowd roared.”

Fairchild ran her first Bolder Boulder at age eight. She went on to win the citizens’ race three times (1989, 1990, 1991) when she was a record-setting high schooler, became an All-American and NCAA champion at the University of Oregon, and then qualified for the U.S. Olympic Trials in the 10,000-meter run and marathon as a professional runner. But the Bolder Boulder has always held a special place in her heart, which is why she has continued to run it through the years and why she’s so eager to introduce Dakota to it.

How it Got Started

The idea for the Bolder Boulder germinated in the mind of a father watching his five children participate in all-day track meets. It was the summer of 1978 at the upswing of the original American running boom, and runner and local businessman Steve Bosley had grown frustrated with the disorganized events and parents berating their children for not running fast enough.

Bosley, then 37, reached out to his friend, Boulder resident and international running icon Frank Shorter, a two-time Olympic medalist in the marathon, for help designing a race that would serve their community and promote the sport of running. The race would not only become a Colorado icon, it set a gold standard for road races around the world and helped elevate women’s running in unprecedented ways.

RELATED: The Man Who Brought Running to Boulder

During the spring of 1979, Cliff Bosley, the current race director, went door to door with his Boy Scout troop, passing out posters to encourage neighbors to run his dad’s inaugural race. The poster announced a 4,000-participant cap and enticed Boulderites to “Run with Frank Shorter and Ric Rojas!” for a mere $6.50 entry fee. (Rojas was another local elite athlete who would go on to win the inaugural race in 1979. His daughter, Nell Rojas, a current professional runner, won the women’s citizen’s race 40 years later in 2019.)

Bosley recalls giving a man in his front yard a poster who threw it back in his face in disbelief. “‘Yeah right, 4,000!’ the man scoffed. “I was just a 12-year-old kid. You believe everything your parents tell you. I thought, ‘Dad says it could happen—why won’t it?!’”

The inaugural race saw 2,700 registrations. The next year, it doubled in size and live entertainment was added to the celebration. Participation continued to soar in the ensuing years and decades, eventually reaching 50,421 in 2010. With an average of 45,000 finishers over the past 10 years, it’s now the seventh-largest road race in the nation and the largest Memorial Day celebration in the U.S.

Pioneering Prize Money

From its inception, the Bolder Boulder 10K offered equal prize money for the female and male winners. In 1984, it created a separate elite race from the citizens’ race. There was also a deliberate split in the women’s and men’s elite race so that both races could be showcased equally and covered live on the local TV broadcast. Today, it offers one of the largest non-marathon prize purses in the U.S., but this did not come without a lot of work.

Initially road races were precluded from paying prize money to athletes because it changed their amateur athlete status, preventing them from competing in the Olympics. In the early 1980s, Steve Bosley, then the president of the Bank of Boulder, worked with two local attorneys, Frank Shorter, and TAC (The Athletics Congress which was then the name of the national governing body for the sport; now it’s known as USATF), to create a mechanism using trust accounts for athletes to earn prize money. It was then paid into athletes’ individual trust accounts so they could draw living and training expenses. At the time these accounts were called TACTRUST Accounts, and the Bank of Boulder was the steward of 95 percent of all of these accounts on behalf of both American and international athletes from around the world.

Promoting Women’s Running

One of the most circulated photos of the Bolder Boulder 10K is that of Shorter, the 1972 Olympic marathon champion, winning the 1981 race— the first time the race finished in the University of Colorado’s Folsom Stadium. But that same year, Ellen Hart, then 23, won the women’s race—although she says there was no finish line tape for the female winner.

“It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen,” she recalls. “Since I was a little girl, I had wanted to go to the Olympics. I thought, Oh my god. This is like the Olympics! I traveled to races all over the world and the BB was my favorite race.”

Hart would move to Boulder in 1982, and then win the race again in 1983 before the four-year reign of Portugal Olympian Rosa Mota. In many ways, Hart says, her success in the Bolder Boulder launched her career as a professional athlete.

She went on to place 11th at the inaugural women’s U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in 1984, set an American record in the 30K, and won 18 world championship titles in triathlon and duathlon racing. “In terms of women’s sports, the Bolder Boulder was certainly more forward-thinking than any other race I ever attended,” Hart says.

The race organization was also ahead of its time when it began the Women’s High Altitude Training Camp, something it did not offer for men, in 1989. The 100-day program was designed to bring five talented post-collegiate female runners to Boulder to train prior to racing Bolder Boulder. Runners were placed in volunteer host families, provided an elite coordinator and a trail guide, and given access to a local gym and the university’s track to train.

New Jersey runner Inge Schuurmans McClory was a member of the 1990 team.

“I really didn’t feel worthy of national attention, but I applied for the program not even thinking I was going to get in,” she says. She was not only accepted, but she fell in love with Boulder and stayed.

“I went to graduate school here. I met my husband here. I coached cross country and track at CU. It sort of was the launching pad for the rest of my life, and I owe it to the Bolder Boulder and that high-altitude training camp,” says McClory, now a physician’s assistant who has trained cardiac patients—the Brave Hearts—for the Bolder Boulder since 2000.

Since 1996, there have consistently been more women (average 53-54 percent) than men completing the race. Cliff Bosley attributes this to his mom creating a walking division in 1984 so that her father, diagnosed with prostate cancer, could participate.

“We kind of look at it as a placeholder,” says Bosley, “You come in as a walker and now you’re on the continuum. Let’s help you become a jogger. Let’s help you become a racer.” This exemplifies the Bolder Boulder’s rallying cry, “Oh Yes You Can!” that it established in 1979.

Building Community Through Running

The Bolder Boulder has always been defined by its strong community involvement, which includes an eager network of volunteers, aid stations staffed by local running groups, and the thousands of spectators who line the streets and fill the stadium. Historically, the race donates more than $100,000 to local nonprofits and community groups that volunteer. Even during the pandemic, the race still found a way to contribute.

“Knowing we could not stage the Bolder Boulder in-person, we created a virtual event called the VirtuALL 10K and offered it at no cost,” Bosley says. Thousands of T-shirts, designed for the 2020 race that went unused, were donated to shelters.

Another Bolder Boulder program that supports the community is the BB Racers Club. Created in 1996, the program prepares children for the race, so their experience is a positive one. Initially started as a middle school program, this club now includes elementary schools. Children who are signed up are given a special training program, coach, and starting wave. Fairchild’s Boulder Mountain Warriors club, of which her son Dakota is a participant, is training a large number of BB Racers this year.

Bosley is prepared for up to 45,000 participants at this year’s race on May 29. And just as they did 44 years ago, race organizers will serve participants a sack lunch and send them a postcard in the mail with their finishing place, pace, time, and ranking in their age group.

“I can still remember checking the mailbox every single day until it came,” says Fairchild. “It makes me emotional just thinking about how much attention to detail they’ve always given hundreds of thousands of people. They care so much. It’s not an accident that they are the best 10K in the world.”

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Legendary climber Jeff Lowe, who at the age of 67, took more risks than most. At 7 years old, he climbed the Grand Teton. At 27, he soloed Telluride’s 400-foot Bridal Veil Falls. Perhaps his most famous and dangerous ascent was his 1991 solo climb of the north face of the Eiger.

In June, a friend who was close with Lowe told me that Lowe was in his final days and had stories he wanted to share. I was eager to meet him. I’m a rather conservative endurance runner, not a daring climber. But I am fascinated by a mind like Lowe’s that takes a body to places many wouldn’t dare go.

For the past two decades an unknown neurodegenerative disorder, whose symptoms resemble ALS, had stolen away most of his physical capabilities, including his speech. He was physically bound to a wheelchair; sometimes he needed supplemental oxygen. A tracheostomy tube expelled mucus from his lungs. Lowe would occasionally wake up and momentarily forget he was trapped in a stationary body that was quickly breaking down. His mind, however, was still whip sharp.

On my way to meet Lowe in Boulder, Colorado, that summer afternoon, I accidentally texted him a message intended for someone else.

“Oops!! Wrong person! On my way,” I attempted to explain my mistake.

“I’m not always wrong,” he wrote back. “Sometimes I’m even the right person at the right time.”

Jeff met me outside his nursing home. He was sitting in his motorized chair and smiling out at me from under his Indiana Jones-esque hat. As I asked questions, he slowly pecked out his answers one letter at a time on an I-Pad with his stylus pen. Occasionally he paused to summon what little strength he had left to cough out the mucus that had accumulated in his lungs. At one point he motioned to me to make sure his trache was draining into the bag on his chest.

We live in an age where more unskilled climbers appear to be taking impatient risks all for the sake of a social media boost. Lowe’s view of risk hadn’t changed, he said. “I have always felt that no climb is worth losing the tip of a little toe. A parallel thought is that if I had died during a climb, it would put an asterisk on all my climbs. Being willing to risk it all for any given climb will inevitably end at some point in disaster.”

“I mean any fool can hurl themselves at a climb that is beyond their abilities to safely negotiate. You may get away with such an approach nine times, but the tenth time you don’t come back. That includes what climbers call objective risks such as avalanches and rock fall. Many climbers use the term ‘objective hazard; to denote something they aren’t to be held accountable for. I held myself accountable for the mistakes I made over the years.”

Toward the end of our hour-long meeting, he began relaying the story of his last big Himalayan climb, in 1993. But it was time for me to go; I had plans. “I’ll email the rest to you later,” Jeff typed. “I’ll be back,” I reassured him. He never did email me. I didn’t get the chance to go back. It was his final interview with a journalist.

Like many people with diseases similar to ALS, Jeff was afraid of drowning in his own fluid, a term described by doctors as having air hunger. An ironic fear, perhaps, for an alpinist who spent his life climbing towards thinner air.

Seven weeks after our interview, death came for the alpinist and Lowe passed away. He was at a new care facility in Fort Collins with his cousin George Lowe, daughter Sonja, climbing friend Michael Weis, and close friend and former caregiver Chris Wolfman. They were all outside, at a spot they affectionately called “basecamp.”

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Downhill mountain bike world champion thrives on ritual, from what she eats for breakfast to which shoe she puts on first. “It’s all part of a chain of events,” she says. “Sometimes I stand there with my shoe in my hand, and I wonder if I could risk putting my right shoe on first. But the left always wins.” Those rituals, fringy as they may seem, help Atherton in the world at blistering speeds. Atherton currently has 33 World Cup wins to her name. If she makes it to 41, she will become the most successful athlete, male or female, in mountain bike history. At last year’s World Cup Championships in Mont Sainte-Anne, Atherton clocked a speed of 45 mph—faster than all but three of the 78 male riders.

While rituals have played a prominent role for hunters, military officers, and religious members for centuries, their prevalence among athletes has been explored only more recently. New research doesn’t just draw a connection between rituals and positive performance outcomes; it also explains why it is that athletes who follow rituals— “steps occurring in a fixed episode sequence” and occurring with “a high level of rigidity and formality”—are more successful. In short, rituals keep anxiety and nerves at bay by giving athletes a reliable set of actions to fall back on, and it diminishes the power negativity has on your brain after a mistake or misstep. The form that these rituals take, however, varies widely among elites, each with their own eccentricities and quirks.

Some involve words or other forms of communication rather than individual action. For more than a hundred years, Hawaiian surfers have started their competitions with a chant circle, known locally as a “pule.” Before every race, multiple Ironman champion says the same prayer. The last person world champion steeplechaser talks to before every race is her husband (now coach), either via text or in person. It’s been that way since she was in college. Atherton skips the words and goes for a special handshake with her team manager instead. “We have to do it until it’s perfect. I look him in the eyes and look for that confidence and belief in me. If he knows it, I feel it.” And while it’s not a chant per se, the last song Atherton always listens to during her warmup is is Britney Spears’ “Circus.”

What an athlete does with a space can also be considered ritualistic. For mountain bike cross-country champion and Stanford student tidying up her hotel room the night before a race increases her confidence. For ultra-endurance rower it’s about creating a familiar environment in unfamiliar territory. Often when he travels to a new place—like another university for a regatta during his collegiate career or the Arctic shelf as part of the record-breaking team—Facchino brings a bottle full of water from his home port. “We pour the bottle into the body of water where we are competing to signify that even though we are away from our home, we are still rowing on our water.”

Many athletes have made clothing an essential part of their rituals. Before every race, ultrarunner puts on a new pair of knee-high compression socks. “The socks feel so cozy that I automatically feel quicker,” he says. “It’s especially helpful when you’re staring down the barrel of a 100-mile race.” In addition to the new compression socks, Bowman also likes to wear brightly colored (orange is his preference) tight-fitting clothing when he has a hard workout. “It helps me feel speedier when I’m wearing tighter clothing—like a ninja. And when you feel fast, it bleeds over into the actual reality of the workout. You are faster,” he says. Bowman’s speedwork wardrobe rituals seem to be paying off. This summer at the UTMB, Bowman finished seventh with a time that would have won the race 13 out of the past 15 years. To encourage himself to go legitimately easy on recovery days, he wears baggy earth-toned clothing.

Perhaps the most storied object of ritual fixation is food. While peanut butter and banana on toast may not seem like a consecrated meal, Coburn eats this 30 minutes before every race, no questions asked, and has since high school. Atherton goes for the sugar rush, popping a few Haribo gummy bears and swigging down some apple juice while she warms up on the turbo trainer before a race. 

In June, Atherton’s historic came to an end when she at a race practice. When a streak is broken, how does an athlete so steeped in ritual return to winning when winning is part of the ritual? “So much pressure has built. Maybe it’s my own fault for having won so much. The first couple wins you have are better than anything you can get. That’s why you keep racing—to try to recapture the feeling of that first win.”

Until then, though, you start with what you know—putting on your left shoe first, wearing neon orange for speed days, organizing your hotel room the night before a race, or whatever your thing is. Keep doing that and, as these athletes demonstrate, you might just be better for it.

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