By Pam Boyd GYPSUM — For 107 hours — from Oct. 12-16 — Lucas Rivera of Gypsum ran his way through the desert and across the mountains around Moab, Utah, to achieve a personal goal and aid a personal cause.
Think of it as commitment in motion.
Rivera, the health and wellness supervisor for Mountain Recreation — formerly the Western Eagle County Metropolitan Recreation District — is an ultra marathoner and a supporter of the local suicide prevention group Speak Up Reach Out. He combined those two passions in his most recent effort — the Moab 200. Actually, that’s a bit of a misnomer because the race actually covered 243 miles.
“It was supposed to be 238 miles, but they got hit with a huge snowstorm so they had to revise part of the course and it actually made it longer,” Rivera said.
But then, what’s 5 more miles when you’ve already spent more than four days trekking through a landscape that included both baking heat and frigid cold? It takes a special kind of person to take on that challenge, and Rivera is plainly that kind of guy.
“It’s about seeing how far you can push your body. It’s about having your limit but pushing past that limit,” Rivera said. “There’s something about tackling an adventure this big.”
In search of a challenge
As a young athlete who played both high school and college football, Rivera hated distance running. But he always liked taking on a physical challenge. He came to work for Mountain Recreation after college and in 2011, he learned about the local Tough Mudder race.
“I started training for that and I thought, ‘How am I ever going to run 10 miles?'” Rivera said in a 2017 interview. “I had never been a fan of running. It just wasn’t my thing.”
But that race was the athletic equivalent of a gateway drug to Rivera. From there he went on to run progressively tougher races, including the World’s Toughest Mudder in New Jersey and the Leadville 100. The Leadville race taught him some valuable lessons. He didn’t finish the first time he attempted the race in 2013, which led him to adopt a year-long training regime. He successfully ran the Leadville 100 in 2014 and again in 2015 and 2016. He found himself engulfed in the fraternity that exists among ultra marathoners and he learned about an incredible Triple Crown series of 200-mile events — the Bigfoot 200 in Washington State, the Tahoe 200 and the Moab 200. Last year, Rivera completed the Bigfoot 200 and he set his sights at the Moab 200 in 2018.
But as he was training for the event, Rivera decided that he wanted to take on an additional challenge. His goal became two-fold — to complete the Moab 200 and to raise money for a cause that is close to his heart.
Suicide prevention
As a member of the Mountain Recreation staff, last year Rivera attended a suicide assistance training presented by Speak Up Reach Out. It was a powerful experience.
“People want to help, but …read more
Via:: Vail Daily