A few days after Tucsonan Pam Reed won the 125-mile Death Valley Badwater Marathon in temperatures of 130 degrees, she flew to New York to be David Letterman’s guest on “The Late Show.”
“What did you win?” Letterman asked.
“A belt buckle,” said Reed.
Letterman laughed and said, “Good lord, sign me up.”
Seventeen years later — still running, still winning, still defying age and endurance — Reed last week crossed the finish line at the Grandmaster Ultras 100 Miler near Mesquite, Nevada. It was the 100th time she has completed a 100-mile race.
Yes, 100 miles. Yes, 100 times. People really do that. Pam Reed became the 17th person in history — male, female, superman and superwoman — to do so.
Her prize? Another belt buckle — but this time race organizers also presented her with a cake with a big “100” on it.
“When I found out I was so close to 100, I was fired up to get there,” says Reed, who has been the director of the Tucson Marathon for 28 years. “So I ran 10 100-mile races in 2020.”
This is unimaginable stuff, right? Reed turns 60 this month. Slow down? If anything, she has accelerated her pace. Her 2021 calendar is full of challenges that make the Grandmaster Ultras race come off as a pregame layup line.
She’s going to run in a 250-mile race across Arizona, which isn’t much more than the 240-mile race she completed near Moab, Utah, a year ago. She has plans to run a full schedule of marathons and ironman triathlons.
And get this: early next month, near her summer home in Jackson, Wyoming, she will run in The Drift. It’s like running the winter version of the 125-mile Death Valley Badwater Marathon, only harder. It’s so crazy difficult that only 16 other people entered The Drift in 2020.
Why? It was 7 degrees below zero when the race started. You must pull a 25-pound sled. It requires a 25-mile climb to 9,500 feet. And then there was the blizzard and 70 mph winds.
“It took me 42 hours,” she says. “I got lost. People on snowmobiles would come out looking for you, pointing you in the right direction.”
How did Pam Reed do? She won the race.
“I’m looking forward to doing it again,” she says. “It’s a real challenge and it’s close to our house in Wyoming so I’m going back.”
This is not much of a surprise to those who have followed Reed’s running career since she moved to Tucson from Michigan in the 1980s. When she was inducted into the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame in 2017, she said that she is of Finnish ancestry and that the Fins have a word — “sisu” — that means “guts.”
Sisu?
This is sisu: One Sunday evening in the spring of 2005, I watched a “60 Minutes” feature on Reed’s career. The next day I drove to Picacho Peak to watch her complete a world record-breaking 301-mile run on a frontage road next to Interstate 10. She had begun that race on a Friday morning and completed mile 301 on a Monday afternoon.
When she crossed the finish line she neither collapsed, excused herself to take a nap or called for the paramedics. She sat in a chair and answered questions from reporters while eating a stick of cotton candy.
And you thought linebackers were tough.
When Reed turns 60 this month, she will qualify for induction into the American Ultrarunning Hall of Fame, which is run by former Tucsonan Davy Crockett, who himself has run 105 100-mile ultramarathons.
“Pam is well-known in the sport and yes, she is ranked among the best American women ultrarunners,” says Crockett, who now lives in Utah and is a noted historian of American ultradistance running. “Her three outright Badwater victories were particularly impressive along with American records for 24 hours and for six days at a time.
“Her 300-mile run on the frontage road between Marana and Pichaco Peak created a stir in the sport. Her book — ‘The Extra Mile: One Woman’s Personal Journey to Ultrarunning Greatness’ — is well-respected.”
Reed is long past the “creating a stir” period. The mother of three, a high school tennis player and UA grad, married to former Tucson triathlete and CPA Jim Reed, never was looking for fame or fortune or anything like that. About the most she has ever been paid for winning a race was the $1,000 she pocketed for winning the Mule Mountain Marathon between Sierra Vista and Bisbee.
But she has won a lot of belt buckles, and sees no reason to stop now.
“I’ve just got so much I want to do,” she says. “I want to break some age-group records for 60-over. I had originally planned a run across America but now I don’t know. Never say never, right?”
