“I train like a devil,” Brendan Trimboli wrote in his blog. “Life is short ... I haven’t realized my potential yet.”
Trimboli, 27, a web developer and Durango Running Club race director, certainly has potential energy. He has an accomplished list of endurance events, with more than 30 ultra marathons – distances beyond the traditional 26 miles – under his belt since 2011, and several 100-mile events, including the Wasatch Front 100 in Utah, Wyoming’s Bighorn 100 and his 2013 fourth-place American finish in the internationally renowned Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, a rugged 103-mile traverse of the Alps of France, Italy and Switzerland.
So when he got word he had made it into the 2015 Hardrock 100 mile Endurance Run in Silverton after three years of missing the cut, he was elated.
Trimboli, a native of Woodland Park, is a true alpine athlete. Where the air gets thin and the oxygen sparse, Trimboli soars. He said his heart belongs to the mountains.
“For me, it’s just the mountain aesthetic appeal,” he said recently. “I absolutely cherish the San Juan Mountains.”
But he’s diverse. He runs at least one city marathon a year, stacking up solid times in the Eugene, Salida and Los Angeles marathons.
He said he got his running gene from his mother, who he called a tough pioneer. Lillian Trimboli, once a biologist with the National Park Service, a high school running coach and one of ultra runnings earliest female participants, was diagnosed with ocular melanoma, a rare cancer of the eye, when she was 27. She continued to run for years after the diagnosis, but Trimboli lost his mother to the disease when she was 47.
“It was right when I was in the middle of high school,” he said. “It was a tough time to go through that kind of loss. You’re 16 years old and still figuring a lot of things out. It was a pretty heavy subject to deal with at that point.”
Later, in Seattle, at the University of Washington, Trimboli worked four jobs to earn his degree in electrical engineering.
“I went off to school and started trying different things, trying to find myself,” he said. “For some reason, the group that offered me the support I needed was the running community.”
He began following distance runners, often not knowing how long the outings would last. He did know that his mother found something in running, so he just kept going.
“I felt lost and (running) kind of made me feel good about myself, to kind of honor her in that way,” he said. “It provided me some grounding.”
Perhaps it offered her grounding, too. She completed the Leadville Trail 100-mile race (twice), won the Abingdon Marathon in England just nine months after Brendan was born, and ran the Pikes Peak Marathon in 1989, all following the removal of her right eye.
As Trimboli continued to find solace in long-distance endurance running, he wanted his runs to have meaning. For the 2014 New York City marathon, he had a plan.
“It seemed a little selfish to just pay $250 and go run this race,” he said. He thought of his mother – her perseverance – and partnered with his uncle, his father’s brother who is blind in one eye from a childhood accident.
“That inspired me to pick up my own torch and chase my own physiological limits,” he said.
Raising almost $3,000 for the Ocular Melanoma Foundation, Trimboli would run the entire New York City Marathon with a patch over his right eye. “It spurred quite a response,” he said. “I just want to find my limitations. It provides me some solidarity with the amount of pain and discomfort my mom went through in three years of intense treatment.”
He said he found her dedication to running an amazing mystery.
“I’ll never have an answer for it,” he said.
But it did change his life. Now he’ll bring it all to the Hard Rock, and for that he can hardly wait. Nearly 70,000 feet up and down, 20 summits and passes over 12,000 feet – seven of those over 13,000 feet and one 14,048 foot summit (Handies Peak).
“I think I have a really solid hundred-mile race in me,” he said. “Just the thought of doing that historic event, and an hour up the road, in some of the most amazing mountains and wilderness our country has to offer.”
Trimboli said that, in addition to events around the region, like California’s Miwok 100, The San Juan Solstice 50-mile run in Lake City, the Silverton Alpine 50K and the Canyon Lands Half Marathon, he’s been ski mountaineering to condition his legs for the endless approaches in the Hardrock.
“I knew it’d be a good early season base, and for the events I’ve done so far, I’ve picked steeper, more technical races to focus on,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of high-intensity long intervals over the last three months, and now it’s just all about seeing how many days I can get up to Silverton to spend time at elevation, running up and down terrain like the (Hardrock) offers.”
He said that when running head-first into the introspective abyss of a 24 hour-plus race, it’s not the physical challenge but the psychological one that’s most crucial.
“I’m not the fastest guy out there, and I’m not the strongest, but one thing I’ve always felt I had a knack for is the mental fortitude,” he said.
He used to set a timer on his wristwatch to bring him back to reality every hour after running in a sort of trance, calling it a time warp.
“The mind has some pretty funny ways of dulling the senses,” he said. “It allows me to push through some pretty serious discomfort.”
But that’s what he’s looking for – realizing his potential. He said ultra running has shown him another world.
“For a lot of people it’s their therapy,” he said. “It satisfies their obsessive or addictive tendencies. It’s become a huge part of my life. Even though I’ve done a handful of (100-mile races), I don’t think I’ve really nailed one yet.”
bmathis@durangoherald.com
