The basic principles for fueling endurance sports can be credited to a rural doctor in California who, over 32 years, meticulously documented the vital statistics of the participants in the Western States Endurance Run.
Robert H. Lind, the longtime medical director of the prestigious 100-mile race from Squaw Valley to Auburn, California, is being remembered for turning the event into a laboratory to study the effects of ultrarunning on the human body. He died on March 2 at his home in Roseville, California. He was 81.
Lind, who lived with prostate cancer for 15 years, began his research on ultrarunning in 1974, when family friend Gordy Ainsleigh became the first to traverse the 100-mile course on foot. Lind is credited with helping generations of runners find the blueprint to repeating the feat—one that he thought at the time was so monumental no one would ever be able to duplicate.
“I said, ‘Man, you’ve seen a miracle of the 20th century. You will never see this again,’” Lind said in 2014, recalling Ainsleigh’s effort in the event, which was originally a race for horses. “Getting in and out of all of those canyons was a miracle. I didn’t think it would happen.”
In the years he served as the event’s medical director from 1974–2006, Lind and his volunteer associates measured runners’ weight, drew blood, and collected urine samples. They also monitored blood pressure, heart rate and the saline content, white blood cell count, among other measurements, for those who wanted them.
His son, Paul Lind, who has competed at Western States, said his dad had an honest desire to learn about the human body, but that wasn’t his sole purpose.
“More importantly, he had more of a humanitarian attitude in understanding what these people were going through, what it was doing to the human body,” Paul Lind said.
The doctor kept handwritten notes—recorded in impeccable penmanship—on each runner in his study through various checkpoints along the course. He then assembled his findings into binders that stayed tucked away in the office of his home until the day he died.
The early findings—the results of which runners take as established fact now—showed the critical need to manage fluids and body weight over the course of 24–30 hours of movement. That led to a deeper understanding of sodium’s role in the body during prolonged exertion, and eventually a stronger understanding of refueling with calories before and during events. He later studied the role anti-inflammatories consumed during and after races had on the body. He hated them, his son said, out of concern for the potential damage they did to kidneys.
After each event, he called each participant and sent handwritten notecards with the medical results. Many credit Lind’s advice and tests for helping them finish the grueling course, which pushes runners through 18,000 feet of climbing in temperatures that often exceed 100 degrees.
“We didn’t have anybody die over his whole tenure, which is pretty amazing considering how dangerous the course is, still to this day,” Craig Thornley, the race director of the Western States 100, said.
Lind embodied the ethos of the country doctor, his black physician’s bag beside him, knowing when to eschew measurements and tests and charts and numbers to tell him about a runner’s physical condition. He would lock eyes with a wayward and delirious participant, speaking calmly, firmly and in measured tones, even if the situation appeared dire. His ultimate test, in his own words, was to determine whether “the soul had separated from the body.”
His methods were not without some disagreement. Lind was fixated on monitoring the runners’ weight. Losing too much could mean dehydration was setting in, and gaining weight between checkpoints was an indication of hyponatremia, a condition in which the sodium content in the blood is too low.
In his later years, he expressed concern that the growth of the sport was ushering in a crop of runners who weren’t as tuned to their bodies or familiar with how their systems could react over long distances, Paul Lind said.
More recently, the race has has moved away from monitoring percent body weight loss, because its medical staff doesn’t believe it’s always an accurate measurement of runners’ overall health.
The race is moving back toward a more subjective indictor, Thornley said—one that Lind himself would have endorsed: Look them in the eyes.
“We’re going back to what he knew was important — and the best sign of a runner’s condition,” Thornley said. “You can read it in his eyes, and not just look at what’s on the scale.”
