Extreme sports are almost becoming common place. They are still too arduous for any everyday athlete, but new athletes trek around the world to do amazing things and spawn new sports seemingly every week.

The original extreme sports of summiting Everest or swimming the Channel, which risked plenty enough lives, have been succeeded by skiing across Antarctica and skydiving off statues.

Exploring an exotic locale also adds spice to these new challenges and augments the basic athletic task – if something like running a 100-mile race can be called “basic”. One extreme sport, mountain marathoning, has evolved from ultra marathoning, which in turn evolved from distance running and mountain climbing.

The historic Inca Trail in southern Peru is as remote as destinations can be, and no roads exist in this steep part of the Andes Mountains where peaks reach 20,000 ft. But the trail has carried many types of pilgrims over the years. Modern hikers now flock to the stone path, which as far back as 550 years carried religious pilgrims to the Machu Picchu temples, the religious capital of the Inca.

So, Devy Reinstein of Santa Monica conjured the idea of racing these steps to the sky a decade ago. In June, 43 runners from around the world met him there for the 10th annual Inca Trail Marathon. This was no ordinary marathon. The starting altitude was 8,400 ft. with an elevation gain of 5,400 feet — almost one mile — during the first eight miles of the race. The trail is not smooth either. The pathways are hard stone packed in dirt, becoming 2-foot tall stairs at times.

The race course included four summits in the first 32 kilometers, and the runners were following the footsteps of the historic “chasqui” messengers of the Andes. In the past, these Incan runners plied the stone paths and delivered spoken messages between the villages. They were a mix between Phidippides, the messenger who died after running to Athens and delivering news of victory over the Persians at Marathon, and the American west’s Pony Express.

The modern marathon runners came from far away countries like New Zealand, China, Switzerland and the United States. The runners were not Olympic-caliber athletes, but many were highly talented and sought competitive times. Half the group had run an Antarctica Marathon, and a quarter of them had run at the Great Wall of China. Despite the diversity of nations, no competitors were residents of the host nation Peru, a poor nation with episodes of civil and political strife in its past and little history of international competitive distance running.

However, two Los Angeles-area runners provided ample Andean heritage. Reinstein is a native of Peru with half Austrian heritage, and Dorian Quispe, who has a Peruvian father and Argentinian mother, lives in Pasadena. Reinstein is a veteran at age 50, having run all 10 of his marathons and finishing this year’s race in 6:45 on two hours of sleep.

Quispe came for the personal challenge. His racing history was limited to only two Los Angeles Marathons. But a combination of Quispe’s Andean heritage and a shoe advertisement sent by his brother that asked, ‘Are you tough enough for the Machu Picchu marathon?’ sent him on his way.

The trail itself is the most popular hiking destination in South America. (Torres del Paine in Chile is next.) Those hikers take a leisurely four days and camp along the way. The winner of June’s race was in much more of a rush and finished in 5:45, and the final runners completed it in 10:30. Along the way, runners had views of genuine antiquity like the ruins of Llactapata and Runkuraqay, replacing L.A.’s venerated monuments like the Coliseum and cathedral that are less than a century and decade old respectively.

Quispe completed the 28-mile race in about nine hours (8:55) of running time. A couple of miles were unexpectedly added onto the end with police refused to let runners enter the Sun Gate entrance to Aguas Calientes, the final town of the course and site of the finish line. Quispe lost another hour helping a fatigued runner summit the second peak at 3,900 meters (11,700 feet) altitude.

Extreme temperature changes and easy dehydration were problems in the high altitude – but water or aid stations every five miles helped. One runner quit with altitude sickness, something Andeans tolerate with home remedies of chewing on coca leaves and drinking coca tea.

Runners faced decreasing oxygen and ice-cold temperatures during the initial 12.5-mile climb. Quispe couldn’t look at the summit without losing hope, and he had to focus on each individual stair, struggling one step upward at a time. But, his father was waiting at the finish line, and family pride on two continents was at stake. Plus, no mini-bus was available to pick up the stragglers, mainly because there were no roads that high in the mountains.

“I couldn’t quit, there was nowhere to go,” Quispe said. “I had to cross the line and look composed. You just don’t want to kill yourself. You want to finish and stay alive.”

On the backstretch, which featured 33 kilometers of downhill, Quispe’s hill training in Big Bear came in handy. He raced the Inca Trail in “survival mode” at full speed on the long downhill stretches with their sharp corners, similar to his workouts in Big Bear. A twisted ankle could lead to a tumble down a stone cliff, but his legs were too tired stop.

“If you trip, you’re wiping out huge, you might break something,” said Quispe, a former football player at St. Francis High in Arcadia. “It takes so much energy to steer yourself. It’s not like the feeling of a real marathon. Your mind is constantly on. It’s not like you can zone out on boring pavement.”

Holding a parachute event in which wealthy First World tourists come and go is not the goal of the trip, nor very practical as athletes. Quispe trained in Big Bear during the months prior to acclimate to running at high altitudes. The athletes also arrived three days early for practice runs in the mountains and to learn about the culture. The group visited the famous Temple of the Sun in Machu Picchu and architectural sites around Cuzco. They even learned about local cuisine – guinea pigs.

Quispe’s heritage made the trip worthwhile in unexpected ways. During one practice run, he struck up a conversation in his passable Spanish with a porter who was also named Quispe. The porters for hikers are often poorly paid contract workers and trek every week along the same race course — except they also lug huge loads of campers’ equipment and food on their backs. The marathon runners understood that and added tips and gifts from their home countries.

On another practice run, Quispe spent 45 minutes chatting with a woman and her papoose after offering to help carry her heavy bag of corn. The Peruvians’ concerns are similar to those in Los Angeles — political corruption and poor funding of education — but on a much more dire scale.

Many Peruvians are like Quispe’s relatives there who have never hiked the trail, similar to Arizonans who skip the Grand Canyon or New Yorkers who never visit the Statue of Liberty. When Quispe told his relatives about completing the race, they said first, That’s great, and then, That’s insane.

By Jay Ross
Aug. 16, 2005
Copyright 2005 all rights reserved