ALABASTER — Instead of making the rounds at The Endless Mile this year, endurance veteran David Mickelsen is taking on a different role.
Mickelsen is recovering from hip replacement surgery. A year after setting the 72-hour record with 200.406 miles, he’s helping crew a friend this weekend. The Endless Mile begins today at Veterans Park on its certified 1-mile course.
Mickelsen lives in Decatur and has more than five dozen endurance events to his credit. These include 6-hour and 50K events to multi-day events like Six Days in the Dome. At Endless Mile, runners and walkers can participate for 6, 12, 24 and 72 hours. Marathon and 50K distances were added this year. If you finish the 50K in 5 hours 59 minutes, your standings are included in the 6-hour group. If you finish in 7:00:01, you are in the 12-hour group.
The loop course at Veteran’s Park in Alabaster is USATF-certified to 1.00203 mile. Mickelsen’s 200-mile achievement actually was 200.406, meaning the .00203 added more than four tenths of a mile to his 200 loops. Bonus fun! The lighted, paved path is mostly flat. It’s not like you’re scaling Monte Sano or Oak Mountain or Wade Mountain.
The goal? Complete as many loops as you can in the allotted time. Every six hours, runners reverse directions for the next six hours. Endless Mile events are chip-timed and distance is displayed with each lap. Solo runners or teams are allowed, and solo runners achieving 100 miles receive an uber-cool buckle.
The 72-hour runners start Thursday morning. The 48-hour starts Friday morning, along with any 6/12/24-hour runners. The 50K and marathon runners may start either day. Sound cool? Put it on your calendar for next year.
Mickelsen’s Might
Mickelsen set a record last year with his 200-plus mile effort, but he wasn’t the overall winner. He was second.
At age 67, Mickelsen was runner-up to a 71-year-old woman from Pensacola, Letha Cruthirds. She finished the 72-hour toodle with 206.866 miles. Mickelsen hit his 200, and she added six more loops. The youngest in the Top 15 finishers was 43 years old, and the oldest was … 86.
Final miles are impressive in these kind of events. A glance at the ages reveals the secret.
“Letha was a silent assassin. I don’t know how much she slept, but not very much,” Mickelsen said. “She’s from Florida so heat was not a factor for her like with most people. She walks really fast and doesn’t slow down. Even when I was pressing at the end to hit a goal, I’d be run-walking and didnt leave much space between us. She never wavered.”
Mickelsen was a decathlete and football player at Concordia in Minnesota, graduating in 1980. He didn’t get into ultrarunning until about 15 years ago, when he was 52 or 53 years old. His best 100-mile and 24-hour efforts were in 2019, but shortly therafter he started having knee pain. In 2020, he had double knee surgery for meniscus tears and arthritis. Since then, he’s been diagnosed and treated for a 90-percent blocked artery, A-Fib, prostate cancer and hypothyroidism. While training for the Blue Heron 100s two years ago, low oxygen levels required a checkup and … he got a pacemaker. It took several months to get it synced correctly.
“I feel tremendously humbled and blessed that the doctors figured out what was going on, could put in a pacemaker and I’ve been able to do what I’m doing,” he said. “Going into the (2024) race I had maybe 30 days of training. but long distance running kind of allows you to put things in the bank. I have lot of miles in my belt, but I’m always under on mileage-per-week. I’d like to train more than 30 miles a week but sometimes less is more. For younger people in their 30s 40s and 50s maybe, more mileage is probably appropate to be elite.
“But I think as we get older it’s more about quality and mental preparation. Endless Mile is my goal race each year. If you know anything about state records in Alabama, Endless Mile is where you gotta do it. Ther aren’t many 48- to 72 hour opportunties in Alabama. David and Marye Jo (Tosch) put on the best events around. They’re really good people. So, as hard as that course can be because its open in the middle of the afternoon — it’s crazy hot, and that surface isn’t nice (for the heat) — it is the place you have to go for the (age group record) opportunities.”
Mind Over Matter
Multi-day endurance events require myriad things for success, from appropriate gear for weather conditions to nutrition, crew assistance and a plan for sleeping. Or not sleeping. The crew should know of any medical issues. Your body is the power furnace but the feet are doing the Lord’s work, with 58 muscles and 52 bones in both dogs keeping you moving forward.
In short, everything matters.
“It takes an older mind to know what’s coming,” Mickelsen said. “When I was younger, there was no way on God’s green earth I’d do more than 10 miles. But as you get older and slower, you have more opportunites to put mind over matter. I have all these miles in the bank and for me it’s literally mind over matter.”
His 2003 Endless Mile was “a semi-failure, because I didn’t do what I wanted to do.” But it was a learning lesson. It was 87 degrees during the day and cooler at night, so he walked-jogged-ran in the darkness. Since then, he’s learned about taking care of his feet, about taping and chafing and blisters and toenails. Mickelsen read Dr. John VonHof’s book, Fixing Your Feet, “which I recommend for anyone who does these events because it helped me greatly.”
All of that culminated in 2024 with his goal to hit 200 miles, at age 67 with a litany of medical issues but the determination to not quit.
“I started crying when I finished,” Mickelsen said. “I’m not an emotional person, but that got me. In 2023 David (Tosch) gave me my 100-mile buckle and I said I had four of them … he asked when I was going to get my 200-mile buckle. I told him next year, and that was the goal for 2024. I’m a stubborn Norweigian farmboy from Minnesota. I can endure a lot of pain because the key is to not acknowledge the pain and keep moving.
“This wasn’t me winning, though … this was my Savior winning. I can’t describe last four hours. I prayed to get my goal done. Not to win, but to get done. People ask me why I run 100 miles and I don’t know. it’s something that makes me tick. It’s not about bragging or proving a point. It’s just me, and something I like to do.”
Mickelsen won’t be on the track this weekend but he doesn’t mind. He’ll be around like-minded people enjoying their goals, whether it’s a specific age record or a multi-day goal of 100 or more miles. Veterans and newbies will mingle, meet, compete and have a good time.
“I’ve met a lot of good people at ultramarathon events,” he said. “If you’ve run 5Ks, 10Ks, half-marathons and marathons, often there are lot of folks who try to … not intimidate, but they know they’re going to win. It’s not like that with the ultramarathon group. Everyone wants everyone to do well. It’s amazing how everyone wants to support each other.
“Letha and I started talking in the last 10 miles last year. Think of that. We’ve been running for three days and it’s 3 o’clock in the morning of Day 3 of 72 hours, and I’m having a hard time running and she’s walking. But we’re talking and moving. I get finished and I’m darn near crying, emotional, and never met each other before, but she comes over and hugs my neck. That’s one reason i like to do this.”
