Meet the Mammoths; Bailey Gripshover!
About this episode
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Meet the Mammoths — Bailey Gripshover: The ICU, the PCT, and the Potato Lifestyle
Today's guest spends her working life in a cardiothoracic ICU in Seattle, with patients having the worst days of their lives. When she's not there, she's choosing to suffer on trails — a contrast she says keeps everything in perspective when a race doesn't go the way she hoped.
Bailey Gripshover finished top 10 in her 200-mile debut at Cocodona 250 this past May, and held the lead in the inaugural MBA at Mingus for a while after sinking a shot she fully expected to miss. This October she's back for a second crack at the distance at Mammoth.
We talk about what it's like running these races with a medical background: knowing when to pull the plug on an Arizona Trail FKT attempt because of a swollen Achilles, and also completely botching her own electrolytes at Javelina despite managing electrolyte imbalances at work every single day. She also makes a strong case for being the best-prepared person in the field on sleep — 12-to-14-hour ICU shifts, flip-flopping between days and nights, operating at a high level while exhausted because there isn't another option.
Plus: how hiking the PCT in 2019 introduced her to the idea that people race these distances at all, why the Eastern Sierra is family terrain (her grandpa did the JMT, and she summited Whitney with her mom and sister for her mom's 60th), and her Mammoth 200 video game result — currently second on our leaderboard at 68 hours, after a first attempt where she DNF'd because her feet disintegrated on the pumice. She is now, genuinely, reconsidering gaiters.
In this episode:
- Perspective from the ICU, and why it's "just running"
- When medical knowledge helps, and when it doesn't
- Shift work as accidental sleep-deprivation training
- Four hours of sleep and almost no hallucinations at Cocodona
- A virtual DNF by foot destruction, and a potential gaiter conversion
- Making a basket at Mingus and riding the high
- Her prediction: this will have the best aid station food in ultrarunning
- Peter's preferred potato orientation
Mammoth 200 kicks off Friday, October 2nd in Mammoth Lakes, California. Catch live coverage on the Mountain Outpost YouTube channel, and follow @Mammoth200 for updates and tracking throughout the race.