Josh Wheeler and Nick Selbo will be back Saturday morning on Signal Mountain for the StumpJump50k, the 31-mile trail race where last year they became acquainted on the way to finishing first and second.
Last month they ran together to third place in the top division of the Gore-Tex TransRockies Run – a six-day, 113-mile set of endurance races ranging from 14 to 25 miles, the shorter ones with steep ascents, descents or both. The Aug. 22-27 event included more than 12,500 feet of elevation gains, and Wheeler and Selbo had a total time of 17 hours, 28 minutes, 37 seconds.
Wheeler and Selbo represented the Rock/Creek racing team in the journey between the Colorado towns of Buena Vista and Beaver Creek. Teammate Jaclyn Greenhill and Roxanne Zobava finished third in the women’s open division in 21:59:12.
A 33-year-old emergency room nurse, Greenhill now lives in Boulder, Colo., where she went to college, but she was a Signal Mountain resident as the women’s winner of the 2008 StumpJump and the female runner-up a year ago. Zobava, 34, is in the process of moving to Chattanooga from Atlanta. She’s a hairdresser in both cities, locally at Hair-A-Go-Go.
Wheeler, 22, goes back and forth regularly as well. While finishing work on his degree at Appalachian State in Boone, N.C., the 2006 McCallie School graduate takes classes Tuesday through Thursday and then drives to Durham, N.C., and works Friday through Monday in molecular genetics at Duke University.
He isn’t working this weekend, though, and he looks forward to sharing the trail with Selbo again.
“He should’ve won last year,” said Wheeler, who finished the Cumberland Trail course in 4:15:00, compared to Selbo’s 4:21:53. “I did not give Nick the respect he deserved as a runner, and I let him run on ahead. He got as much as an 8-minute lead at one point.
“Nick’s the strongest one in the field,” Wheeler added about the 31-year-old local Mandarin Chinese teacher. “He’s a phenomenal runner. With his patience and his poise, he simply understands how to pace himself.”
Those strengths helped them both in the TransRockies Run, Wheeler said this week.
“Certain terrain played to my strengths more than his, and others played to his. You really feed off your partner and push each other,” he said. “It’s a unique event. I had never done a race of that magnitude or with the partner aspect.”
Wheeler, intrigued by the TransRockies after hearing Matt Sims tell of his and fellow local runner Sheridan Ames’ experience in the race last year, explained that no runner is allowed to go past an aid station without his partner or to finish a stage more than two minutes ahead of the other.
“It’s a whole different thing,” Greenhill said. “You can’t run as fast as you want at times, and you can’t run as slow as you want. You can’t just think about yourself.”
She and Zobava met in June 2008 on Signal Mountain, when Zobava won the 20-mile stage race that ended a three-day trail event including Lookout and Raccoon mountains. Greenhill was the Sunday runner-up and the overall winner.
“I love ultra running, and she has done a lot of 50ks and some 50-milers,” said Zobava, who’s also running the 2010 StumpJump. “Her sister lives in Atlanta and they had done the Rockies a couple of years ago, so when she asked me if I wanted to run it with her, I said yeah.”
Greenhill ran track and cross country in high school in Atlanta and began long-distance running while living on a wildlife refuge in Montana. While she likes nothing more than a long run with her dog, she enjoyed the TransRockies partnership as “an amazing experience.”
“It is the most perfect runner vacation you can imagine,” Zobava said. “You run in this amazing scenery, and you are around people who are a lot like you. You get wonderful food, and I got a massage every day. There’s no work to it. It’s all pleasure.”
Registration is closed for both the 50k and the 11-mile options of the StumpJump, which starts at 8 a.m. Saturday at Signal Mountain Middle/High School.
Contact Ron Bush at rbush@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6291.