There isn’t much that can break David Roche, as his exploits over the past year or so have shown – but he admits that Western States did just that.
Roche, from Colorado, had high expectations going into the prestigious race after performing heroics last year, bouncing back from a near-death experience when he was hit by a car with his record-breaking run at the Leadville 100 last June.
He followed that with victory in the Javelina Jundred to win his Western States ‘Golden Ticket’ but it all went wrong on one of the toughest courses in the world, where Roche was brought back down to earth with a bump and did not finish.
“Anxieties and panics”
He vomited several times and suffered blurred vision – but claims the bigger issues were in what he calls the “irrational fears” which ultimately got the better of him.
In an emotional, soul-searching YouTube video he named ‘Breakable’ – a play on the famed ‘Unbreakable’ film around the 2010 edition of Western States – Roche said: “I was a patient in a coma, essentially. A coma of weird, irrational fears and anxieties and panics.”
Taking us step by step through the race and what went wrong, the film is an emotional rollercoaster, and shows the human side of running. It’s embedded below and well worth a watch.
Roche revealed he had an early “Woah” moment when eventual winner Caleb Olson passed him early on in the race when they were both in the lead pack “looking so confident and strong.”
But he still felt good about his chances and decided to hang off the back of the lead group and run his own race, arriving at Robinson Flat on mile 30 in sixth place, 20 seconds off the lead.
By mile 34, he’d passed the great Kilian Jornet into fifth and says he “got emotional” because he felt it was all “coming together perfectly.”
But that ended up being “the highest point of the day” because about a mile later he started to vomit.
“I know most of the top ten probably vomited at some point,” he said. “But the way I diagnosed it was not good. I dropped back on sodium – and I think that was correct. The mistake I made was then dialling back gels.
“I didn’t think about how much that might cause issues later. In the heat of the moment it felt like the right thing to do.”
“Everything went to cr*p”
Roche was still third at the halfway point going into the climb up Michigan Bluff. But in his own words that’s where “everything went to cr*p.”
First, Jornet passed him “looking like a God”. Then, Jeff Mogavero passed him too. Worse, Roche started to experience blurred vision, which he says “became difficult to deal with by the top”.
Roche said: “Mixed with that, I started to be concerned about my health. I think the blurred vision set off a cascade of weird thoughts related to the dangers of this race.
“I’ve coached this race in the past when athletes have had health issues. I’ve heard of athletes being in hospital after this race, on dialysis.
“Traumatic accidents”
“The vision thing was just normal fatigue. It wasn’t a big deal. But I started to realise I had 45 miles to go, in the heat of the day. Will I be there for my kids if I cross the finish line? Wtf. What a weird thing to think.
“But I learned afterwards that it’s not a weird thing to think. Especially for people who have had traumatic accidents. I just never processed it in time, which is so sad.
“I ended up in seventh place. Still in a great spot. But I lost the mental ability to pound my quad into the ground. I was thinking too much. The origin point for it was taking fewer gels and that leading to the body feeling normal fatigue.
“I could have worked through it, but that wavering led to my brain not being my own when I most needed it. In that moment all I wanted to do was be there for my kids growing up. I was mentally gone.”
“Hyperventilating”
Roche says he knew as soon as he saw the next steep downhill that he couldn’t do, and “started hyperventilating.”
“I was still eighth at this point,” Roche says. “But after ten minutes or so of standing there, and nobody even passing me, I was a patient in a coma, essentially. A coma of weird, irrational fears and anxieties and panics.”
By the end of the video, Roche admits he felt like he had let people down. But it was the people closest to him, including wife Megan and their two kids Ollie and Leo, that he was thinking about when he realised he couldn’t go on.
“Maybe it needed to happen,” he says. “Maybe if I’d finished seventh or eighth I would have realised that the athlete in me is doing great – but not that the human being needs something else.
“A breakthrough for me”
“I worked so hard on my body but I didn’t work hard enough on my brain. This race always feels like you’re dying. I let a lot of people down, and I let myself down most of all.
“But I know this experience was a breakthrough for me. I will be a better Dad, athlete and coach because of it.
“The whole goal of setting a big goal and chasing that dream was to learn what happens over the edge. I thought it was going to be physical learning.
“I didn’t think it was going to be emotional, spiritual, mental learning. But running gives you what you need, when you need it. That’s why it’s magical.”
