ORR- Orr native Jacob Skraba is living proof that a person can come to love and excel in a pursuit they once despised.
On Aug. 19, Skraba tested his endurance against the high elevations of the Colorado Rockies by running in the grueling Leadville 100 ultramarathon, widely considered one of the toughest races in the world. It’s one of the five contests that make up the Grand Slam of ultra running.
Skraba has always been athletic, participating in football at North Woods School, where he gradated in 2016, and holding down a spot on the University of Minnesota rowing team during his years there. And although he loved the outdoors, running was never something that held any appeal for him, at least not until he moved to Eugene, Ore., in the fall of 2020 to attend graduate school in architecture.
Studying in a town considered by many to be the mecca of track and field and distance running in the U.S., a city that claims legendary U.S. record holder and Olympian runner Steve Prefontaine among its favorite sons, Eugene is known as “The City where Everyone Runs,” and that soon included Skraba.
“I picked up running while I was out there,” Skraba said. “It’s hard to not run there. Atter being a self-professed ‘I hate running, I would never run’ person, I quickly fell in love with it.”
What sparked Skraba’s 180-degree turnaround was discovering trail running, which took him into the outdoors that he’d loved so much growing up in Orr.
“I think the access to the outdoors was something I just took for granted growing up, and that really reconnected me with being outdoors,” Skraba said.
Since then, Skraba has been racing competitively, and while it wasn’t his first ultra race, the Leadville 100 represents his toughest challenge to date. He described what motivates his desire for such a test.
“When people within ultra running talk about the experience, a phrase that you hear a lot is that it’s like living a lifetime in a day, just the ups and downs of how you go from feeling terrible, like you can’t take another step to hours later you’re on top of the world feeling invincible,” he said. “I wanted to experience that and push myself to do something I’ve never done, to see what I could actually do if I put my mind to it.”
The race is so popular that entry is determined by a lottery, and Skraba found out in January that he’d been accepted. Skraba, who now lives and works in the Breckenridge area, was running 90 to 100 miles a week at the time, and the race was extra motivation to endure the hours of winter training.
“In those winter months it can be hard to get out the door,” he said. “I don’t have a treadmill, so there were a lot of cold snowy mornings.”
As spring arrived, Skraba augmented his training by entering a number of shorter races, and he was able to shift his training to the trails he loves as the weather cleared. He was also able to test a few sections of the Leadville course.
He recruited a local coach in June, and one of the important changes the coach made to his routine was to work in recovery days, as Skraba has been running seven days a week up until then. Taking it easier on Sundays and taking off a day every week was beneficial.
“I think it was easier to have someone else tell me to take time off,” Skraba said.
With this being the 48th running of the Leadville 100, Skraba also had the chance to look at past race results and split times to guide some of his race planning.
And while ultra racing is focused on the individual runners, it’s also a team event, as runners assemble a crew of supporters, most often friends, to handle getting food, hydration, and other equipment to aid stations along the way. The Leadville 100 also allows runners to have pace runners with them starting at 62 miles into the race, and Skraba said he recruited two runners for that task through Facebook.
“Maybe that’s not the best way to go about it,” Skraba said. “I hadn’t met either of them prior to the race and actually connected with them maybe a week and a half beforehand.
A week ahead of the race, Leadville hosted a 10K run following a 100-mile bike race, and Skraba decided to use that as a tune up for the 100. He came in first out of 569 entered with a time of 37:16.
Going into race day, Skraba estimated that if everything went perfectly he could break the 20 hour mark. But perfection disappeared before he even got started when the temperature at the 4 a.m. start time was in the upper 40s, about 10 degrees warmer than normal, and it would skyrocket from there.
“I don’t know what the actual recorded temperature was, but I heard some people say that it was as hot as 90 degrees in the valley at the turnaround point. I’ve seen numbers in the 80s along the course, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it was that warm.”
About 16 miles into the race, runners encounter Sugar Loaf Pass, the first of five major climbs along the course. While the elevation goes from 10,200 feet to 12,600 feet, when one totals all of the uphill running involved in the up and down terrain it adds up to 15,744 feet of climbing.
The most daunting portion of the race is ironically named Hope Pass, and it’s where the hopes of many runners to finish the course are dashed. Starting at Twin Lakes, the trail rises 3,200 feet in only four miles, follow by an even steeper, though shorter descent to the halfway point, the ghost town of Winfield. The will of runners to turn around and go right back up a 25-percent grade they just came down is severely tested at that point, a point at which Skraba said many runners drop out. Across the entire 100-mile course, nearly 450 runners either dropped out or failed to finish in the maximum 30-hour time limit.
Skraba admitted to having doubts at times about completing the ultra.
“My first time going up Hope Pass my legs felt like crap,” he said. “I was like I don’t know, I might have bit off more than I could chew. It hurt. It sucked. I didn’t know if I was going to finish. But I felt great coming up over Hope the second time.”
But running through the oppressive heat, Skraba was again in a foul mood when he picked up his first pacer at the 62-mile mark.
“So, I’d been racing for 12 hours and under the heat, exposed a lot up to that point, it was just so hot. I was miserable. I was like why am I out here, what am I doing? My pacer was trying to tell me some funny stories and jokes, and I was just like no, I can’t handle anything, I just have to focus on one step at a time.”
As they hit the next aid station and encountered members of Skraba’s team, he asked them to text ahead for ice, because “I was burning up out there.”
But that stop yielded an unexpected and needed boost. A friend of his who was supporting another runner was there with a welcome four-legged companion.
“There are photos of me and my pacer running into the aid station and I just looked annoyed and grumpy,” Skraba said. “You can instantly tell when I saw the dog, Jack’s his name, when I saw Jack I had this giant grin on my face. I yelled out ‘Jack!’ That was honestly a turning point. It was so great. That was a huge boost.”
Skraba took off with his second pacer, and hadn’t yet given up on hitting the 20-hour mark, but his knees started giving him trouble, causing him to have to walk more frequently. Eventually, he accepted that 20-hours was a goal he could sacrifice.
“We hit the aid station with 12-and-a-half miles to go with just under two hours if we wanted to finish under 20, and I finally brought it up,” Skraba said. “I was like, we’re not hitting 20 let’s sit down, let’s take a minute. He helped me like take my shoes off and take some ibuprofen to hopefully help the knees a little bit. When we got moving it was so slow, but it was better. My pacer thought he saw some headlights behind us and that really got us moving again. We were able to run most of the rest of the race. It wasn’t fast, it wasn’t pretty. But the end was in sight.”
Another thing that was in sight was the possibility of improving his finishing position, according to his crew.
“They told me I was fourth in my age group, and we said lets see if we can find the guy that’s in third,” Skraba said. “We passed the guy at the one mile mark, and it ended up he wasn’t in my age group, my crew got it wrong. But I was really excited to make that pass with a mile left. I was the fourth person overall in my age group to finish.”
Skraba’s time for the 100-mile race was 20 hours, 54 minutes and 50 seconds, a bit less than four hours behind race winner J.P. Giblin of Boulder, Colo. Skraba navigated the course at a pace of 12:33 per mile.
But despite the late misdirection from his crew, he acknowledged their contributions to his performance.
“Anything I needed at the time they were there to help with,” he said. “I couldn’t have done it without them. I just can’t reiterate enough how important having a team was. At points when I was going through a rough spot and felt like I might want to quit, I wanted to continue doing it for them. I definitely thought about that a lot while I was out there. I guess I’m out there doing this for me, but I’m also out there doing it for them.”