Mining Their Own Business

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“We got all these guys who have been mining their whole lives—this is some tall, rough timber—and now all of a sudden they’re out of a job,” Chlouber said. “They’re just sitting here in town, of course filling up the bars. Now we got alcohol abuse, drug abuse, child abuse, spousal abuse. All this sort of follows this displaced aggression—old man comes home, beats up the old lady. Old lady beats up the kids. Kids kick the dog. Dog bites the postman.

“So we had to have a way to bring money into the community. We knew we had to save our community, keep from being a ghost town.”

But how could they avoid Winfield’s destiny? The thing that Leadville did best—and the thing that they liked best—was mining, which had betrayed them again. Leadville couldn’t wait for the price of molybdenum to go back up and mining to return to Climax, but there were people like Chlouber who weren’t about to leave. From his matter-of-fact drawl to his untamed, frizzy grey locks, Chlouber belongs in Leadville. But for him to stay, and for the town to survive, something had to be done about the economy.

And Chlouber thought that a 100-mile run might just work.

“I was for him 100 percent, but I just didn’t think that anybody would be crazy enough to run 100 miles up here,” Miller said.

As Chlouber remembers it, Miller told him, “You’re crazy as hell, but I’ll still help ya.”

***

Sure enough, there were about 50 people who dared sign up for that first race in 1983. The sinister Leadville Trail 100 course only allowed 10 runners to finish, but the important thing for Leadville’s bleak economy was that people came.

Unlike the ice palace, the Trail 100 would see a second year. In 1984, the race doubled in size, as 100 people signed up for a day’s worth of torture. But it was that third year, 1985, when the Leadville Trail 100 declared that it would never become another ice palace.

The television show Wide World of Sports did a feature on the Leadville Trail 100, or as Chlouber puts it, a feature on “these idiots trying to run 100 miles.”

“Then it exploded,” Chlouber continued. “That television show set it off, and it’s grown, grown, grown ever since.” From 1986 on, Chlouber says they had more entrants than they wanted.

But unbeknownst to Chlouber and the race’s co-founder, Merilee O’Neal, the Trail 100 was still in its infancy. It would take off again in 1994 when the Leadville Trail 100 Bike Race was added. Chlouber is the first to admit that he did NOT want to introduce bikes into the fold. The running race was going fine, and Chlouber was convinced that bringing in a bunch of cyclists would throw off the decade-old dynamic of the race.

“I said, ‘No, no and hell no’ to biking.”

But Chlouber eventually relented, giving birth to what is now one of the most sought-after biking events in North America. Even Floyd Landis, the 2006 Tour de France champion, has done the Leadville Trial 100. (He finished second in the 2007 race.)

“It wasn’t any foresight or intellect on my part,” Chlouber said. “It was just I was focused on our community. The mountain bike thing, though, you talk about a bozo with blind luck, that’s me.”