The Dedicated Support Crews Behind the Brutal Badwater 135

Held in the high heat of the summer in the middle of Death Valley, Badwater 135 is billed as the toughest footrace on earth. Despite the focus in our culture on the limitless potential of individual athletes, the truth is that a race like Badwater shows the deep limitations that each human has if they are not supported by other humans.

As the race director, Chris Kostman, announced at the athlete briefing, “Seven times more people have summited Mount Everest than have completed this race.” The race begins at the lowest point in North America, the Badwater Basin, which sinks 282 feet below sea level, and where temperatures routinely top out above 120 degrees. (This year, with reported temperatures ranging from 116 to 118 degrees, was labeled a “cool year” by seasoned racers.) From there, the race summits two mountain passes before climbing to the top of Whitney Portal Road, where it finishes above 8,000 feet, right at the base of the hiking trail that climbs to the top of the continental United States’s highest peak. The race begins at nightfall. Runners emerge into morning light somewhere near the mile 42 checkpoint at the small waypoint of Stovepipe Wells, where, in 1926, the first hotel was built in Death Valley, just a few miles from a stovepipe that a thoughtful, considerate prospector shoved into a much-needed well so that travelers could find water that once was perpetually hidden under the valley’s sandy dunes. From there, racers begin a day of running that offers no shade and no respite from the sun. They suffer along a long and lonely road that warps with twirling mirages of heat, where even the wind feels less like a breeze and more like swallowing the inner workings of an oven that has been burning for centuries.

Because of this, Badwater is perhaps the most intensely and intimately crewed ultramarathon in the world. Runners can bring up to four crew members, who pile themselves into a support vehicle that drives along the course, pulling to the right of the road in any space that is wide enough to accommodate their car. The cars serve as the aid stations; there are no official aid stations other than what the crews provide. At the “Badwater University” website maintained by Kostman, one post details the specifications of the “ideal” crew vehicle: a Dodge Caravan—big enough to hold ice and gear, nimble enough to pull to the side of narrow desert and mountain roads. In each support car, runners can find refilled water bottles, new energy gels, anti-chafing lubricant, ice water spray-downs, and constant encouragement. After Stovepipe Wells, individual crew members can join as pacers, running directly behind racers while carrying whatever aid they can.

Extreme conditions exacerbate the already existing needs of ultramarathoners, thus making hydration, fueling, and cooling sacred. The risk of heat stroke is always possible in the next mile. The closest hospital is, at any time, essentially 100 miles away. “None of you,” Kostman told athletes the day before, “would finish this race unless you had a support crew.” I’d go one step further. If racers attempted to complete the course without a crew, it is not a stretch to say that they would die.

People do die in Death Valley. Just last year, a motorcyclist died while riding through temperatures pushing close to 130 degrees. He was surrounded by others, but was beyond help. One of his companions nearly died as well, and probably would have, if a “good Samaritan” hadn’t driven him nearly 20 miles to Furnace Creek before an ambulance drove him another 62 miles to a hospital. It was too hot for helicopters to fly that day. In many ways, it’s a miracle that man survived. He needed, some might say, a crew.

For what it’s worth, there is a small group of runners who have completed Badwater without a crew, often pushing a stroller loaded with over 200 pounds of aid. Marshall Ulrich did it first in 1999. Jeff Sauter did it later, though he suffered hypothermia as he ascended Mount Whitney. Two women, Lisa Bliss and Dusty Hardman, have also completed this feat. Others have tried and failed. Those who have succeeded have finished the course in a time ranging from 39 to 51 hours longer than the current race record. In other words, if you want to do it alone, it might take you another two days than a crewed attempt. You also, once again, might die.

Although ultramarathons are considered individual races, they are almost always dotted with aid stations and crew members. These exhibitions of aid are feats of endurance in and of themselves. At the Hardrock 100 Mile, an infamous ultramarathon in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains that climbs 33,000 feet in its entirety, one of the aid stations, Kroger’s Canteen, sits 13,000 feet above sea level, tucked into a notch in Virginius Pass. Staffing, manning, and maintaining the aid station requires volunteers to hike, often multiple times, up and down a 5,000-foot climb from Telluride, only to spend literal days living in a tiny nest of rock and breathing a bare minimum of oxygen.

Other races, such as the Western States Endurance Run, offer both aid stations and crews. Racers can bring a team of people to support them at aid stations, pace them through the course, and more. Those crews pile into cars and drive mountainous backroads from aid station to aid station, prepping food and ice, before getting it to their runner, packing up, and driving further down the course. When two of my friends, Matt Collins and Nick Synan, and I ran (for fun) across the state of New York years ago, Matt’s brother, Joe, crewed us. He drove a few miles down the road each day in a minivan stocked with turkey sandwiches, cans of Coke, and jars of pickles. He’d look at maps and iron out the route. He offered nothing but support and positivity. Without him, we might still be wandering in a state forest somewhere outside of Binghamton.

Thinking of crewing someone as they run through Death Valley is like thinking of crewing someone as they run through a 146,000,000,920-square-foot pizza oven. It is a strange place. I noticed, upon arrival, that everything is named after the devil. Devil’s Cornfield. Devil’s Golf Course. If the devil lived in a miner’s cabin, I am sure it would be alongside Furnace Creek, which is where the devil bathes. There are ghost towns, like Cerro Gordo, hidden high in the hills, at the tail end of roads that snake their way through canyons where vultures no longer fly, the bones of long-dead miners already picked clean. And there are the remnants of small industries built around sulfate and borax, the latter of which is used to kill insects. I saw, once, a lone dragonfly float above the road. But only once. And yet, there is still life.

A small town of Darwin, five miles up from Owens Lake, has a town population sign that reads “50…Or So.” There, I met a woman named Ursula, who drives down to watch the race each year. In town, there are over a dozen sculptures in plain view, scattered into different people’s yards. Some are porcelain bone-white, gesturing at the soft sensuality of bodies. Others: a remarkable, polished darkness. Cubes of what must be granite, shined so bright and so smooth I could have cleaned my teeth with them as my mirror. Above, a sun burned the ends of my hair. Sometimes in the Valley, you realize that you are the only proof of life. Nothing is a ghost town if you are standing in it. However, for two days in July, this long and lonely road through the desert is filled with people.

This year, I embedded with Frederick’s crew, joining Boyd, Myers, and Sisson as they supported Frederick in her quest to finish her third straight Badwater. I wanted to learn the story of not just Frederick’s run, but also the behind-the-scenes adventures of care that made her run possible. I arrived in Badwater Basin an hour before Frederick’s 9 P.M. start time. Temperatures still hovered above 100 degrees. I walked out onto the salt flats and turned around. Racers gathered at the bottom of a steep, thousand-foot cliff that looms over the country’s lowest point. The setting sun illuminated the top of the rock. It shone candle-like beneath a rising moon. I felt like kindling in a great, big fire.

Myers, Boyd, and Sisson made final preparations to the support vehicle, a white Ford Expedition that housed four large coolers in its trunk: one filled with Tailwind drink mix, one filled with water, one filled with ice, and one filled with assorted food—Uncrustables, watermelon slices, oranges, and more. There were baggies of lubricant, lip balm, pain relievers, and nearly 100 energy gels (Frederick prefers Science in Sport’s isotonic gels). What else? Ice bandanas. Ice hats. An array of Mount to Coast’s shoes and sun hoodies and singlets for wardrobe changes. A neon light shaped in the letter “K,” so that Frederick could see the vehicle from a distance at night, and know that aid was coming soon. And, finally, a rock about the size of a cantaloupe that Boyd was overjoyed to find a couple of miles into the race—something to rest the neon light upon when we stopped.

Both Boyd and Sisson know Frederick from her hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Boyd has run more than a few races alongside Frederick. Not long before Badwater, he was bested by Frederick at the Laurel Highlands Ultra as Frederick ran to a second-place finish and the race’s second-fastest time ever, losing only to Deanna Done, who ran 12 hours and 51 minutes to Frederick’s 13 hours and 12 minutes. Both times were under the previous course record.

Boyd and Sisson are counterbalances to each other. Boyd is hard-wired, a ball of frenetic energy, always saying he will sleep but never actually does. The day before Badwater, he summited Mount Whitney: 20 miles out and back with 6,000 feet of climbing. He has a knack for the off-kilter thought that rises, in some inexplicable way, to the level of poetry. I kept note of them on a separate page. I called them Andy-ism’s.

“It’s 98 degrees,” he said, looking at the car’s thermometer. “That means it’s still chilly.”

“We’re in the right church,” he said once while we waited in the darkness for Frederick, “but the wrong pew.”

Sisson is calmer, organizing Boyd’s energy into specificity. In the crew car, Sisson kept a binder of spreadsheeted pages, with a table for each pit stop where Sisson recorded the air temperature, Frederick’s arrival time, Frederick’s departure time, and the amount of fluid and gels she’d consumed in between the past stop and the current one. There was a space within each table to record any of Frederick’s requests or any of our own noticings. By the end of the race, Frederick had consumed over 50 gels, 500 ounces of fluid, a couple of caffeine pills, four Tylenols, and a handful of French fries. Sisson had taken note, too, of her mood and her body’s needs. At one point, Sisson—concerned and doting—went to the bathroom with Frederick so she could assess the color of her urine. Her care knew no bounds.

And then there was Liz Myers, who helped crew another runner at Badwater last year, and crewed Frederick at the 2024 Keys 100—a hot, exposed ultramarathon that runs the length of the Florida Keys. A latecomer to the ultra scene who only started running seriously a few years ago, she now hosts a podcast, Tribe of Runners, and has transitioned from a student of the game to a teacher of it. She and Boyd have a similar sparky spunk—unafraid to toss out a new idea and speak their mind. Together, the crew has five years of Badwater experience. All in their thirties and each over a decade older than Frederick, they seem like a motley, sleep-deprived, half-crazed family of an uncle and two aunts, cheering on a niece with big dreams. By the end of the race, I had peed into more than a few desert shrubs next to Boyd, had watched Myers emerge from behind a tree after having filled a Biffy Bag, and had turned my back to Sisson so that she could change—head to toe and everything in between—into a completely different outfit. This is just to say: they were a welcoming family.

The race started at seemingly just the moment that the sky turned an unimaginable shade of darkness: blue-black and deep. The runners became headlamps and neon vests, little dots of light bouncing along the horizon line. At the start of the race, Frederick maintained a steady, relaxed pace, with Boyd ecstatic about her quiet confidence. On Frederick’s arm, written in Sharpie, was the phrase Strong mind, strong finish.

The crewing began the moment the race did, with Boyd driving a few miles ahead and pulling to the side of the road along with other support vehicles. We searched for Frederick’s lamp-lit arrival under a night sky freckled with stars. This announced the cadence of the day. Frederick kept running through our early aid stations, slowing just enough to grab a new handheld bottle while we spritzed her down with cold water. Even at 10 P.M., it was still 103 degrees. As she ran away, the crew discussed. Sisson wrote down notes in her spreadsheets. She measured the water level of each bottle Frederick returned. She did this calmly. And then she calmly let us know something: Frederick wasn’t drinking enough—only 6 to 8 ounces of each 16-ounce bottle. And so, Boyd’s work began.

“I’ll talk to her,” he said. “I won’t be too hard on her. She knows what she needs to do. She just needs a reminder.”

A mile later, under a wide, big moon, Boyd leaned out the window.

“We need you to drink,” he said. And she did.

In the car in between our mobile aid stations, we discussed strategy and tried to build the foundations of a strong relationship that would last over 30 near-sleepless hours in a 100-square-foot car. We talked about what we do when we’re tired or stressed. Boyd, naturally insane, gets a bit more insane. And Myers, naturally energetic, quiets down. I, too, get quiet. To be honest, I get a little sad. We talked about the importance of being forces of calm in the ever-changing world of Frederick’s individual journey. We joked. When Myers suggested a swap from water to Tailwind early in the race, Boyd responded, “You’ve got it, man.” Myers immediately shot back. “You’ve got it, woman,” she said. We all—in the pitch dark of early morning—laughed. Sometime around 2 A.M., one of us sprayed another racer with cold water. They spread their arms, overjoyed. Looking up and down the lone road through Death Valley, I saw nothing but stars above and the blinking hazard lights of cars miles ahead and miles behind. There were constellations decorating the night sky and constellations decorating the desert. It wasn’t the runners I saw; it was the crews.

By morning, though, the race took on a new shape. There was the brief newness that light provided, followed by the long, drawn-out agony that followed. Around 7 A.M., the race became desolate and isolating. Runners were spread out along the 135-mile course, and I could no longer see the lights of other crew cars ahead and behind. The temperature rose, it seemed, by the minute. And so, too, did the delirium. Around the 54th mile, the crew car felt trapped in a hazy lull. We were a literal half day into the race, tired, lethargic, still trying to troubleshoot. Frederick’s fingers and feet had swelled up throughout the morning. We debated strategies. At the next aid station, she was given a bottle of Pedialyte. She was told to drink. She did as she was told.

I set out to pace Frederick at mile 54, 18 miles before Panamint Springs, as she climbed up to Towne Pass, which sits at 5,000 feet. Before I went off, Boyd strapped an old-school gym interval trainer to my waist, which he set to beep at 100 seconds and then again at 20 seconds. “We need to keep her reined in,” Boyd told me. We’d powerhike for 100 seconds, and jog for 20. This is how Frederick climbed: steady, relentless, metronomic. When she summited the pass, the beeper came off, and Sisson paced a flying Frederick who seemed to careen downhill.

The valley after Towne Pass feels like the Death Valley. From the summit of the pass, you can see the long road stretching out ahead, the waystop of Panamint Springs looming strange and surreal like some ancient town in the distance. In this oven-like chamber between two ridgelines, the heat swells. I could feel it in my mouth. I put my hand on the car’s window, and it simmered. At one aid stop, Sisson noticed Frederick’s legs were chewed up and red with pending heat rash, and she asked Frederick to stand still. Sisson got down on her knees and slathered Frederick’s legs in diaper rash cream. Right there. On the side of the road. By the end of the race, Frederick’s legs were so covered in the zinc-filled, pasty, and white rash cream that I imagine she could’ve been inches away from the sun and not been burned at all. As Frederick ran down that lone valley road, other runners dry-heaved in the distance. They were like twigs cracking under an invisible weight.

At Panamint Springs, I ordered cheeseburgers for the whole crew. It was the last opportunity, they said, for “real food.” The cheeseburgers disappeared the moment I brought them into the car. “I should save half of this,” Myers said. There was a brief pause. Myers, normally chatty, was not talking. I looked at her. She was devouring her whole cheeseburger. Spectators were staked out at the Panamint Springs General Store, in a crowd of neon-vested race volunteers with Wi-Fi hotspots, cold beers, and water, trying to transcribe and update the race in real time for the niche world of ultrarunning. Racers and crew members wandered between them like dazed and tired fans at a musical festival. I watched as a man covered head to toe in white nylon tried to order French fries from the bar, a vagabond astronaut hurtled back into this world. People gravitated to and hovered around Frederick, the 40th runner to reach the checkpoint, as if she were some wayward pilgrim from a distant land, bringing news for all to hear. I met Starshine, a member of the Badwater staff who told me, “Kaylee is like my niece.” Ursula was there, too, having driven from Darwin, 50 miles away. They just wanted to see her, to make sure she was OK.

Leaving the mile 72 marker at Panamint Springs with temperatures well above 100 degrees, runners ascend a multi-thousand-foot climb to a vista that looks out over canyons that dip into one another, layered with color. Everything is sunburnt and hissing in the hot wind. The road twists into switchbacks, and it narrows so much that there are fewer places to see your crew. You are alone longer and exposed. The air thins, and the beauty of the world is at once stunning and insufferable. Frederick began to hurt. She started to overheat. Sisson, forever attentive, packed her hat with ice. She stuffed more ice into her bra. We tried to turn her into an unplugged refrigerator that still kept its contents cool, refilling her body with ice every few miles.

Frederick reached a low point at mile 83. She was nauseous; she had no desire for food. She was loopy and starting to enter a hallucinatory stretch, where she would later attest to seeing a shelf of coffee mugs laid out perfectly alongside the road, a butterfly walking backward, painting the highway’s yellow lines with its wings.

“I just feel sad,” she said. “I can’t stop at the car anymore; otherwise, I’ll get too sad.”

A crew exists to meet needs and to anticipate them. For roughly a marathon, I watched this happen in real time. We improvised. We grew more mobile. We had ice bandannas ready upon arrival; one for her neck, one for her bra. As Frederick ran past the crew car, she dropped her melted bandannas on the ground, along with her water bottle, and whoever was pacing her picked up her new bandannas and bottle and ran them over to her. We were approaching 24 hours of being awake, and yet, I watched Boyd, Myers, and Sisson recommit to good humor and care. When Boyd was pacing a still-beleaguered Frederick, it was Myers who leaned out the window.

“Look at that gorgeous princess,” she said to Frederick.

“Thank you,” Boyd said, waving a hand, giggling, a slight man of mischief running through the desert.

I could’ve sworn, in that moment, that I saw Frederick smile.

That small switch of mood, a gentle nudge towards joy, is part of the work of a crew. I remember how, the day after the race, I walked into Jake’s Saloon, Lone Pine’s lone bar—the kind of place with swinging doors, a trough to piss in, and a bartender who went to the local high school and has never left town. I pulled up to a table of crew members and pacers for other runners. Smelly, tired, smiling crackerjack smiles and drinking Coors Light, they were swapping stories of life out there. They reminded me of teachers at the school’s end-of-year happy hour. When I asked them about how they made it through, one person—Frank Bigham, who crewed 11th-place finisher David Bone—mentioned something similar to that marathon of miles I’d experienced with my crew. Bingham said the crew adopted a “pit stop crewing” mentality in the later stages of the race, trying to minimize any time spent standing or sitting still. Bingham said they kept repeating one phrase over and over again: “Stop is the enemy.”

Frederick only stopped once in the time between miles 75 and the finish—at mile 104, along a straight road that seemed to never end. Myers set a five-minute timer, and Frederick put her cream-covered legs up on the car’s dashboard and drank a Mountain Dew. In the meantime, the crew was hard at work—lacing up new shoes, grabbing a fresh singlet, refilling bottles. When Frederick stood up, it was for the last time. She wouldn’t sit until the finish.

As we turned into Lone Pine to begin the half-marathon ascent of Mount Whitney, I got the sense that Frederick had been distilled into a person whose focus was so singular that she only needed someone to show her direction. That someone was Boyd. Frederick asked him to pace the miles into the base of the climb, and it was then that Boyd told her, finally, that she was on pace to break the age-group record. This was the final arrow in his quiver. Use it too early, and Frederick might blow herself up. Use it too late, and Frederick might run out of time. Standing outside the crew car a couple of miles up the Whitney Portal Road, we saw Frederick minutes before we had predicted. It looked like she was sprinting. Boyd threw me the belt that held the pacing bib.

“Keep up with her,” he said.

Of the nearly 20 miles I ran with Frederick that day, those two miles up Mount Whitney were the fastest. Only two people in the entire race ran Mount Whitney Portal Road faster than Frederick; they finished second and third overall, and they are both men. Frederick passed nearly 15 people from mile 90 onward, and she seemed to carry us up the mountain, swapping through the four of us as we changed her bottles and chugged our own coffees under a Milky Way of stars that kept getting closer and closer. Boyd took her the final stretch, and her crew joined for the last few meters, crossing the finish line together, the female 20 to 29 age group record broken by over half an hour. Frederick ran 31 hours and 54 minutes, still a ways off the 21-hour, 44-minute performance of Ashley Paulson, but faster than any woman under the age of 30 has ever run Badwater.

“Are you proud? Are you proud?” Frederick kept saying.

“Of course. Of course,” Boyd kept saying.

At the finish line, the morning moon was disappearing, and the top of the Eastern Sierras began to glow with the burnt orange of morning. There were only a few people, I thought, closer to the sun or moon in the country than any of us were. I thought about how, 32 hours earlier, I had walked out into Badwater Basin on the salt flats, far enough away from the start line that I felt as close to alone as I could. There, nearly 300 feet below sea level, standing on a dried lakebed of thick, desert-like salt, I had the distinct sensation that no one else in the country was as far away from the moon as I was. In such a landscape, I felt more on the moon than on Earth. It was lonely. We are a lonely species despite our togetherness. But there is something about running through one of the loneliest stretches of land on Earth that reminds me of how much we need each other.

It’s funny. A day after the race, a friend asked me: “Do you know who Michael Collins is?”

I didn’t. Turns out, he was the one flying the Apollo 11 command module around the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface down below. He sat there, somewhere out in space, waiting for them. Without him, they wouldn’t have made it home alive.

What It Takes to Crew the Hardest Race on Earth