Meet the Mammoths; Gabe Joyes!

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Meet the Mammoths — Gabe Joyes: 200-Mile Curious, Properly Intimidated

Today's guest has raced almost everything this sport has to offer. Gabe Joyes has been top 10 at Hardrock, runner-up at HURT 100 this past January, and finished the Dragon's Back Race, the 240-mile stage race across Wales. He's a coach at Uphill Athlete and a race director himself. What he's never done is a continuous, single-push 200 — until this October.

Gabe joins us to explain why he's been "200-mile curious" for years but properly intimidated, and why the Mammoth course was the one that finally got him to sign up. He also has a compelling theory about what these races actually are: not eating competitions, but problem-solving competitions, where the plan holds for some unknown number of hours and everything after that is jazz.

We also get into something few runners have had to reckon with. A few years ago Gabe fell on his trekking pole while running downhill fast, nearly bled to death on the trail, and was helicoptered to a hospital. He talks openly about how long it took to move past that, why he still uses poles, and the one rule he's never broken since: he does not run downhill with them out. Ever.

Plus: sleep strategy after a 47-hour unsupported Wind River High Route push that went sideways past hour 40, a refreshingly honest answer about having six shoes still in contention a month out, and the single best homework excuse of the series — Gabe outsourced his Mammoth 200 video game playthrough to his 11- and 14-year-old kids, who ran five or six attempts, posted times between 88 and 96 hours, and logged exactly one DNF.

In this episode:

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.