Benefield: Boyes Hot Springs woman completes 200-mile run around Lake Tahoe

It started with the zoo animals.

“Then it became like King Kong and pterodactyls,” Suzanna Bon said. “Then it became like extraterrestrials. I had to say ‘OK, stop looking around.’?”

Bon, pushed to an extreme few people know or understand, was seeing things.

“People say it’s 10 percent physical and 90 percent mental to finish a race like this and I couldn’t agree more,” she said.

“A race like this” is the Tahoe 200 - a 200-mile run around Lake Tahoe in one go. Dusty single track on the Tahoe Rim Trail, massive boulders, felled trees and 40,000 feet of elevation gains all in one race. That’s like climbing to the top of the Empire State Building 32 times.

Oh and one other thing. It’s actually 205.5 miles.

For the winner, Jim Trout of East Grand Rapids, Mich, that meant almost 61 hours of running. For Bon, 51, the first woman to cross the finish line, it meant nearly 68 hours of running and exactly 40 minutes of sleep. Total.

“I thought about really trying to schedule in sleep breaks,” she said. “I talked to people about that. The final decision was, I’m just going to run for as long as I can until I’m totally exhausted and them I’m going to lie down for 20 minutes.”

Bon said she didn’t hit her “totally exhausted” point until 45 hours into the race.

That’s just shy of two days to you and me. Which prompts me to ask what I think is a reasonable question.

Why?

She says the answer is complicated.

“Running has always been a good friend to me,” Bon, who is a mother to three and lives in Boyes Hot Springs, said.

I like running, too. But after, say, 50 minutes I usually stop, take my shoes off and find something else to do.

Not Bon.

Bon goes on runs so long she has to stop at her car midway through not to rest but to replenish calories. A regular training route traverses not one mountainous park but two: Sugarloaf Ridge State Park to Hood Mountain Regional Park.

She trains for hours.

After one such run, she didn’t return. But that part wasn’t planned.

“One time, six years ago, she went on a run. She didn’t come home,” Bon’s husband, Sam, said. “I spent the night on the phone.”

He had a helicopter all lined up in the morning when his phone rang. Bon and two training partners had gotten lost and spent the night on the trail. In the morning they found someone with a working phone.

But Sam Bon, who helps crew Suzanna’s races, said that while the rest of us may not grasp what drives a person to run for nearly three days straight, he prefers to feel awe.

“We should all be so lucky that we should find something that moves us like running does her,” he said. “I think it’s a special calling.”

“Whether it’s brain chemistry or what, it feeds my soul,” Suzanna Bon said.

Bon not only asks herself what is possible, she runs until she finds the answer.

Can I? What will happen if I try, she asks.

More and more runners are asking the same sorts of questions.

The sport of ultra running - generally anything more than 31 miles - has grown more than 17 percent since 2007, according to Ultrarunning magazine.

“The really nutty thing is that those races sell out,” Sam Bon said. “In my experience, they tend to be pretty bright people, pretty impressive folks.”

Suzanna Bon had a number of marathons under her belt when someone suggested that she take on a 50-kilometer run.

“It was within about 10 months of my first 50, I was running my first 100 miler,” she said. That was 12 years ago.

Bon has since raced the world over. Usually wearing a headlamp.

Whether Bon could complete 200 miles was largely unknown until she toed the line in Tahoe on Sept.?11. The longest race she had completed before that was 147 miles in a 24-hour race. And that was a different beast altogether because it didn’t include nearly the climbing that Tahoe demanded, nor the rugged terrain.

From approximately mile 60 on, Bon had “pacers,” members of her crew who kept company, kept rhythm and kept watch. Carrie Peterson-Kirby of Santa Rosa, Jamie Frink of Folsom, Todd Bertolone of Santa Rosa and Heather Perry of Redwood City all ran stages with Bon, sometimes in silence and other times dealing with some of the obstacles that arise when one has been running for 21/2 days.

Like when she started seeing zoo animals and angels on the trail.

Or when, much to her later horror, she became “a leaner,” listing distinctly to starboard in the waning hours of the race.

“She looked good for really all but the last 15 miles of the race,” Sam Bon said.

“Things are just kind of getting wonky,” she said.

But she didn’t start throwing up until mile 195.

And still, every photo I can find of Bon out on the trail, she’s smiling.

“Running,” she said. “It’s always been a good friend to me.”

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield.