Thinking of crewing someone as they run through Death Valley is like thinking of crewing someone as they run through a 146,000,000,920-square-foot pizza oven. It is a strange place. I noticed, upon arrival, that everything is named after the devil. Devil’s Cornfield. Devil’s Golf Course. If the devil lived in a miner’s cabin, I am sure it would be alongside Furnace Creek, which is where the devil bathes. There are ghost towns, like Cerro Gordo, hidden high in the hills, at the tail end of roads that snake their way through canyons where vultures no longer fly, the bones of long-dead miners already picked clean. And there are the remnants of small industries built around sulfate and borax, the latter of which is used to kill insects. I saw, once, a lone dragonfly float above the road. But only once. And yet, there is still life.
A small town of Darwin, five miles up from Owens Lake, has a town population sign that reads “50…Or So.” There, I met a woman named Ursula, who drives down to watch the race each year. In town, there are over a dozen sculptures in plain view, scattered into different people’s yards. Some are porcelain bone-white, gesturing at the soft sensuality of bodies. Others: a remarkable, polished darkness. Cubes of what must be granite, shined so bright and so smooth I could have cleaned my teeth with them as my mirror. Above, a sun burned the ends of my hair. Sometimes in the Valley, you realize that you are the only proof of life. Nothing is a ghost town if you are standing in it. However, for two days in July, this long and lonely road through the desert is filled with people.
This year, I embedded with Frederick’s crew, joining Boyd, Myers, and Sisson as they supported Frederick in her quest to finish her third straight Badwater. I wanted to learn the story of not just Frederick’s run, but also the behind-the-scenes adventures of care that made her run possible. I arrived in Badwater Basin an hour before Frederick’s 9 P.M. start time. Temperatures still hovered above 100 degrees. I walked out onto the salt flats and turned around. Racers gathered at the bottom of a steep, thousand-foot cliff that looms over the country’s lowest point. The setting sun illuminated the top of the rock. It shone candle-like beneath a rising moon. I felt like kindling in a great, big fire.
Myers, Boyd, and Sisson made final preparations to the support vehicle, a white Ford Expedition that housed four large coolers in its trunk: one filled with Tailwind drink mix, one filled with water, one filled with ice, and one filled with assorted food—Uncrustables, watermelon slices, oranges, and more. There were baggies of lubricant, lip balm, pain relievers, and nearly 100 energy gels (Frederick prefers Science in Sport’s isotonic gels). What else? Ice bandanas. Ice hats. An array of Mount to Coast’s shoes and sun hoodies and singlets for wardrobe changes. A neon light shaped in the letter “K,” so that Frederick could see the vehicle from a distance at night, and know that aid was coming soon. And, finally, a rock about the size of a cantaloupe that Boyd was overjoyed to find a couple of miles into the race—something to rest the neon light upon when we stopped.
Both Boyd and Sisson know Frederick from her hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Boyd has run more than a few races alongside Frederick. Not long before Badwater, he was bested by Frederick at the Laurel Highlands Ultra as Frederick ran to a second-place finish and the race’s second-fastest time ever, losing only to Deanna Done, who ran 12 hours and 51 minutes to Frederick’s 13 hours and 12 minutes. Both times were under the previous course record.
Boyd and Sisson are counterbalances to each other. Boyd is hard-wired, a ball of frenetic energy, always saying he will sleep but never actually does. The day before Badwater, he summited Mount Whitney: 20 miles out and back with 6,000 feet of climbing. He has a knack for the off-kilter thought that rises, in some inexplicable way, to the level of poetry. I kept note of them on a separate page. I called them Andy-ism’s.
“It’s 98 degrees,” he said, looking at the car’s thermometer. “That means it’s still chilly.”
“We’re in the right church,” he said once while we waited in the darkness for Frederick, “but the wrong pew.”
Sisson is calmer, organizing Boyd’s energy into specificity. In the crew car, Sisson kept a binder of spreadsheeted pages, with a table for each pit stop where Sisson recorded the air temperature, Frederick’s arrival time, Frederick’s departure time, and the amount of fluid and gels she’d consumed in between the past stop and the current one. There was a space within each table to record any of Frederick’s requests or any of our own noticings. By the end of the race, Frederick had consumed over 50 gels, 500 ounces of fluid, a couple of caffeine pills, four Tylenols, and a handful of French fries. Sisson had taken note, too, of her mood and her body’s needs. At one point, Sisson—concerned and doting—went to the bathroom with Frederick so she could assess the color of her urine. Her care knew no bounds.
And then there was Liz Myers, who helped crew another runner at Badwater last year, and crewed Frederick at the 2024 Keys 100—a hot, exposed ultramarathon that runs the length of the Florida Keys. A latecomer to the ultra scene who only started running seriously a few years ago, she now hosts a podcast, Tribe of Runners, and has transitioned from a student of the game to a teacher of it. She and Boyd have a similar sparky spunk—unafraid to toss out a new idea and speak their mind. Together, the crew has five years of Badwater experience. All in their thirties and each over a decade older than Frederick, they seem like a motley, sleep-deprived, half-crazed family of an uncle and two aunts, cheering on a niece with big dreams. By the end of the race, I had peed into more than a few desert shrubs next to Boyd, had watched Myers emerge from behind a tree after having filled a Biffy Bag, and had turned my back to Sisson so that she could change—head to toe and everything in between—into a completely different outfit. This is just to say: they were a welcoming family.
