Peter Ripmaster of Asheville has just won the longest, hardest ultra-marathon in the world, the 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail Invitational across Alaska.
ASHEVILLE — Of all the agonies Pete Ripmaster endured in a 1,000-mile footrace across the Alaskan wilds, the one he can’t shake is the memory of waking up in a sleeping bag next to the Yukon River, smothered under a foot of snow, with wolves howling dangerously close along the ridges above his bivvy.
“People said, ‘that’s so awesome, you heard wolves!’ Well, it’s not. It’s really scary. When you wake up and you can’t undo the sleeping bag zipper because it’s frozen and you’re dug in like a coffin, you have claustrophobia and you have diarrhea, and hear all these wolves howling, it’s madness,” Ripmaster said on Wednesday, safely back home in his bed in Fairview.
But the madness was deliberate. On his third try, Ripmaster, 41, a husband and father of two little girls, not only completed the 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail Invitational footrace, he won the running category, finishing Saturday in 26 days, 13 hours and 44 minutes, averaging 38 miles a day.
The race follows the historic Iditarod Trail from Knik Lake, Alaska, over the Alaska Range to Nome, a week before the Iditarod Sled Dog Race. It is billed as the longest and most arduous winter ultra-marathon in the world.
Ripmaster started off Feb. 25 at Knik Lake, near Anchorage, with 21 other racers, including seven on foot, the others on fat-tire bikes and cross country skis.
The invitation-only race tests the limits of human mental and physical endurance and sanity as competitors pull their own food, water and gear on a sled strapped to their bodies, much like the Siberian huskies in the dog sled race, climb from sea level to over 10,000 feet, cross frozen rivers and desolate expanses of wilderness, brave sub-zero temperatures, 30 mph winds, frostbite, sleep deprivation, exhaustion and loneliness.
And all for a patch, a T-shirt and a handmade ceramic coffee mug.
Joar Leifseth Ulsom, of Norway, who won the sled dog race in 9 days, 12 hours, received $68,000 and a new truck, Ripmaster said.
“I didn’t do this to win a bunch of stuff, but it’s pretty humbling to see what the sled dog racers win,” he said.
At one point in the race, Ripmaster crossed paths with a man on a snow machine when the wind was whipping sideways, covering the trail, and making it nearly impossible to keep moving forward. He was averaging about one mile every 75 minutes.
But it was without any sense of pride, Ripmaster said. Just a dogged determination climb his Everest.
“This was personal. This was all about business,” he said.
Ripmaster said the Iditarod had been a dream since childhood. He wanted to be a sled dog musher, and moved to Alaska in the early 2000s to run dogs. He said he found managing the dogs to be too overwhelming, however, and moved to Asheville with his wife, Kristen in 2006. He worked as a teacher and ran the Black Mountain Running Co. shop for several years, and started running.
He ran his first, self-devised marathon in 2008 on the Blue Ridge Parkway, got the running bug, and couldn't shake it. In 2013, he completed a years-long goal of running a marathon in every one of the 50 states, including Alaska, raising more than $60,000 for cancer research.
He lost his mother to breast cancer when he was young and his father to prostate cancer.
He graduated to ultra-marathons – distances longer than a 26.2-mile marathon - including the 40-mile Mount Mitchell Challenge, the Umstead 100 in Raleigh, and the Iditarod Trail Invitational, which consists of 130-, 350-, and 1,000-mile distances.
In 2014, Ripmaster took on the 350-mile Iditarod to raise money for the Asheville-based Hope Chest for Women, which offers financial and other assistance to women in Western North Carolina with breast and gynecologic cancers.
With little ability at channeling a sled dog, he pulled a 90-pound sled, and came in last.
In 2015, he learned from his mistakes, pared his sled down to 45 pounds, and placed third in the 350-miler.
In 2016, he thought it would be a good idea to take on the 1,000-mile race. Four days in, he fell into the freezing, fast-moving Tatina River and nearly died.
“It was about as close to death as you can get. I was in water over my head. I tried to get to the surface, and when I did, the ice would break and I was back in the middle of the river,” Ripmaster said.
He stopped the race short at 500 miles, but after raising some $16,000 for the Hope Chest, he attempted the race again last year. This time, the weather was worse than brutal, dipping to 60 below zero, and racers losing fingers and toes to frostbite. Ripmaster called it a day at McGrath, 350 miles in.
“This year I was all in. I had to dig deep and find ways to keep going. I worked really hard training on trail, I’ve been mindful in meditation, not trying to do the math and not thinking about how far come and far I have to go, but just to be in the moment, just thinking about my goal for each day,” he said.
He lived on “junk,” like runner’s gels and Snickers bars, only occasionally able to set up his stove and heat water for a hot freeze-dried backpacker meal. Distances between shelters and checkpoints were about 100 miles. They were sometimes large enough to rent a room and buy a meal, but more often were small cabins overflowing with snowmobilers who were following the sled dog race, took all the beds, and left the runners to sleep on the floor.
Listening to books on tape like “Into the Wild” and “Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage,” along with "good old country" like Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, Ripmaster witnessed the Northern Lights, came upon fresh wolf prints in the snow, avoided eye contact with a massive moose, and tried not to think about his family back home.
Then there were the “thousands” of demoralizing mountains, Ripmaster said.
“You come down a hill, and look up and there’s another hill. So many times I would lean over my poles, put my head down and cry. Mentally it’s so hard to keep going and going. You just want to lay down and have someone pick you up and take you home,” he said.
He also has a natural born fire in the belly for competition. When he saw Tim Hewitt - a 10-time Nome finisher – drop out, it lit the flame for Ripmaster.
The second and only other runner to finish was Beat Jegerlehner, in 27 days, 1 hour and 47 minutes.
The overall winner was Jay Petervary, on bike, in 16 days, 23 hours, 45 minutes.
Ripmaster arrived back home to a hero’s welcome Tuesday night at the Asheville Regional Airport, having lost 30 pounds and most of his toenails, and feeling not-so hero-like. He hasn’t been able to keep food down for the last few days. Wednesday morning he got heavy doses of anti-nausea medicine and IVs to rehydrate.
Kristen said she is thankful to have her husband home after a month of parenting on her own, but she was never worried he wouldn’t come back.
“I’m so proud and so beyond excited for him. It’s been a part of his genetic makeup since he was little. I wasn’t worried because I knew he was learning from each mistake he made in the past. He proved that he’s not going to put himself into a life or death situation last year when he stopped when it was 60 below,” said Kristen Ripmaster, who sometimes runs with her husband and will compete in the Boston Marathon in April.
Peter Ripmaster said he will not be returning to the Iditarod next year, or maybe ever. He did no fundraising this year because he wanted to be laser focused on his own inner goals.
He has no big running plans right now, but he said there will be more adventures in his life. He hopes to use the experience, and to show off his coffee mug, as a public speaker and motivator. His phone has been ringing all day Wednesday from national media.
“I can’t tell you how many times I thought, ‘this is not humanely possible. I might not be able to finish this in time,’” he said.
Follow Peter Ripmaster at www.peteripmaster.com.