Trio of mountain lionesses prepare for SB6K trek

Rebekah Trittipoe of Bedford, Jenny Anderson of Lynchburg and Anne Lundblad of North Carolina are about to embark on the adventure of their lives, an ultimate test of their physical endurance and mental toughness.

Starting Wednesday morning, the pride of mountain lionesses — they have nicknamed themselves Momma Cat, Bohima-Lion and Dixie Cat, respectively — will be trekking on the wild side of western North Carolina. They will attempt to become the first trio of women to complete South Beyond 6000 (SB6K), a 300-plus-mile journey ascending 40 mountain peaks of at least 6,000 feet, in seven days.

Anderson, 35, a cross country coach and Spanish teacher at Virginia Episcopal School, is relatively new to the sport, but is an up-and-coming runner.

“She’s very, very good,” Trittipoe said.

“It’s a passion of mine,” Anderson added. “I’m hoping this will be the first of my many adventures.”

Lundblad, 42, is a national ultramarathon champion who has represented the United States in the World 100K championships six times, placing as high as second in the world.

Trittipoe, a 52-year-old veteran ultra runner, says her claim to fame is that she ran with Lundblad in her first ultra in the mid-1990s, when they tied for first among women.

Trittipoe, who ran the length of the Alleghany Trail in 2007 after completing a 160-mile Jungle Marathon through the Brazilian Amazon in 2003, sent out an e-mail to a select group of friends that read, “I want to do a girls adventure, who wants in?”

“(Anderson) said ‘Yes,’ Anne said ‘Yes,’ so here we are,” Trittipoe said.

“When we first came up with this thing, we wanted it to be a girl thing,” she added. “And the beauty of a group is that you actually stay as a group. I told these guys, it’s almost a joke that we can only go as fast as the slowest person, and I’m the slowest person, without a doubt.”

“But you never know,” Anderson added. “On any given day if there’s an injury, then one of us will be the slowest.”

They will have a common purpose, running to support Project Athena, an organization that helps women who are dealing with a debilitating illness, disease or injury while trying to fulfill a dream to do something athletic.

“We didn’t want to do it just because we felt like doing it,” Trittipoe said. “Anne actually has a friend of her’s who was an excellent Adventure Racer, very young in her 30s or 40s, and she had a stroke. So she’s still in the process of learning how to walk again and talk again.”

Anderson, who considers herself “a very positive person,” knows this week’s trek will test her inner resolve and pain threshold.

“The pain is going to be inevitable,” she said. “Rebekah knows that pain. I don’t know that pain yet. And I know it’s going to be something unimaginable. For me, I’m not so nervous about the pain, but how my mind is going to handle it. The mental strength it’s going to take to accomplish this I think is going to be so enormous.”

Only a few individuals are known to have run the check-shaped point-to-point SB6K course, which straddles the border of Tennessee before finishing near Asheville, N.C., in a continuous stretch. One of those is Ted “Cave Dog” Kaiser, who set the speed record of four days, 23 hours, 28 minutes in June of 2003.

Running together, Anderson, Trittipoe and Lundblad must average 42 miles per day through thickly forested terrain. They will spend close to 15 hours per day on the run with an average elevation gain and loss of approximately 15,000 feet.

“Actually, that’s something we want to establish,” Trittipoe said of a net elevation change chart. “We’ve got altimeter watches and we’ll be keeping track of that every day because no one has recorded that yet.”

Making the journey more difficult is the fact that many of the mountains are unmarked and do not have trails, and they must chart their course between the peaks in the Smoky and Appalachian mountain ranges, some of which are as many as 80 miles apart.

“The hard part is not really the miles, it’s the navigation,” Anderson said. “We’ll have to bushwack and some of that’s going to take an hour a mile. We have to be very patient with ourselves and give ourselves leeway for the bushwhacking.”

The three women will use three different methods of navigation, with one using a GPS, one the National Geographic maps of the area to see the big picture.

“Hopefully, three heads will be better than one,” Trittipoe said. “At the beginning, there was so much navigation that was involved. It wasn’t like just getting on the AT (Appalachian Trail) and following the white blazes.”

Trittipoe made up a set of 40 index cards with detailed information about each mountain peak, including its name and elevation on the front and a topographical map with directions on how to get to the next one on the back.

“Rather than carrying millions and millions of maps, we just consolidated it,” said Trittipoe, who took a navigation course to have some background on maps and compasses. “Anne and Jenny did the GPS route and really learned the ins and outs of putting in way points and all those kind of things, based on the UTMs (a grid-based method of specifying locations on the earth’s surface) because we were told the GPS doesn’t always work down there, and that is true.”

“So we really have to rely on Rebekah’s navigation skills,” Anderson added. “The icing on the cake is Anne has seen 75 percent of the peaks. She’s visited the trails and using what she’s seen, I think we’re going to be golden.”

The team will have a two-vehicle support crew that will feature Anderson’s husband Cory, Trittipoe’s son Seth, Lundblad’s husband Mark as well as Josh Yeoman, an experienced ultra-marathoner who supported Liberty University’s David Horton along much of his record-setting Pacific Crest Trail run in the summer of 2005, and Robin Packer.

Like Kaiser, who had his Dog Pound, all of the pride’s crew have nicknames, too.

For instance, Cory Anderson will go by “Lion Tamer,” Seth Trittipoe is “Kodak Cat” because he will be the team’s photographer and Yeoman is the “Cat Keeper.”

Logistically, the obstacles could be a bearish for the pride to meet up with their crew for replenishments and gear along the route. The trio will be camping every night and toting only small backpacks with water, snacks and emergency supplies.

“The first day, access is very limited so all of our crew will have to (hike) in 11 miles to bring our sleeping bags and a change of clothes and some food,” Trittipoe said.

Running through the thick vegetation up and down the unmarked mountainsides could rival what she encountered on the Allegheny Trail and in Brazil.

When they last went on training and scouting run in the area in the first weekend in May, meeting Lundblad along the way, the underbrush was not very dense. By now, it will be nearly fully grown.

“Back in May, we did about 60 miles of it and we were on our bellies like a bunch of army dudes trying to crawl through this stuff,” Trittipoe said.

“It looked like we’d gone through a war zone,” Anderson added.

They’ll be going through “blackberry bushes, briars, getting torn up,” Trittipoe said. “And all the balsam (trees), when they fall over (or) when the branches fall off, they form these tiny little impaling things. It’s awful.

“Like barbed wire,” Anderson added. “You’ve got to climb over it and under it. It’s nothing like you see in these (Blue Ridge) Mountains. It’s like a whole other country.”

The trio also must tackle steep, rocky inclines and descents.

“It’s very technical,” Anderson said.

“Anne went and scouted one area last weekend,” Trittipoe added. “It was a rainy, miserable day and she said there were so many rocks and it was so slippery and slimy and horrible, that she fell at least a dozen times, and Anne’s pretty sure-footed. She said even if it was dry, it will be very slow-going.”

They just plan to take it step by step and enjoy themselves, and survive the journey.

“The deal is we have to go into it thinking, one step at a time, one day at a time … you know, one peak at a time,” Trittipoe said. “Because you really can’t get your arms around that many miles in that short of a period.”

When they reach each summit, they will photograph themselves with the corresponding index card.

“That way, the camera will time-stamp when we were there, and it will sort of prove that we were there,” Trittipoe said. “When we finish one mountain, we’ll take that card, we’ll put it in our backpack, and it’s gone. We move on. Come hell or high water, we’ve got to get to this point today, we’ve got to get to this point tomorrow. So however long that takes, that’s what we’re committed to do.”

Some, she said, think they should be committed to an asylum for wanting to try such a physically demanding and mentally taxing journey into the wilderness.

To those, Anderson replies, “We’re doing what we love to do.”

Trittipoe says the trio will pull together like a rope with three strands and push each other through the tough times.

“It’s not like it’s going to be rosy every second of every day, but I think we can get beyond that and accomplish something as a group,” she said.

Friction could develop between the team members, who have different personalities, run at different speeds and have experienced different types and severities of injuries.

“The three of us, that can definitely be a strength, but it could also present some challenges,” Trittipoe said. “There are those who think this is impossible, to do this as a group because everybody’s going to have a tough spot at a different time, more than likely. I know for me, in the long stuff that I’ve done, you’ve got times where you think you’re going to die, and then sometimes you rally around that. But how are they going to react to get me through that? How am I going to react if Jenny has a hard time or Anne has a hard time?”

She said on previous solo quests, if she was having a bad time, she could just cry by herself in the woods and work it out.

“Well, I’ll still cry in the woods, but I’ll have two people to cry with me — or just whip my butt and tell me to shape up because, I mean, that might be appropriate at a certain time,” Trittipoe said. “Hard love.”

“You have the added issue of having to be diplomatic, compassionate and empathetic, and not laugh when we’re not supposed to laugh,” Anderson added.

The three runners hope the experience won’t make or break their friendships. They’re looking at it as a challenge that will bring them closer together.

“We want to be friends at the end, too, not just at the beginning,” Trittipoe said.

“And we definitely will be,” Anderson said.

“I’m not sure that men could do it because they’re very competitive, but the way that we’re approaching it, I think it’s very doable,” Trittipoe added.