Over 100 Coloradans Embark on 24-Hour Race for Better Air Quality
“The point is to have a greater impact and a greater conversation about these issues that directly affect our health, and have an impact on the nature that we love to go out and run around in.”
By Catie Cheshire February 23, 2024
As the sunset fades this evening, endurance runners will begin their 24-hour, pierogi-fueled journey around Staunton State Park. Running Up for Air is a seven-state series in which runners elect to race for 3, 6, 12 or 24 hours to raise money and awareness for air-quality improvements.
The feds have labeled the Front Range of Colorado an ozone nonattainment area because it doesn’t meet national standards for the gas that forms when volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides interact with UV rays from the sun. High levels of ozone can lead to adverse health effects such as asthma, particularly in children and adults over 65.
“Air quality became abundantly clear to me when I first moved here because, of course, as a new person in Colorado, you’re immediately thrown into, ‘Oh, you have to hike all the fourteeners,’” says Matt Jones, a three-time race participant who moved to the state in 2021. “But trying to hike the fourteeners when the air-quality index is at incredibly bad rates, nobody wants to do that hike and not have a view.”
So Jones — who helps manage trails for the parks department in Colorado Springs, including the Manitou Incline — began to look deeper into air quality issues, and realized he wanted to find ways to work with his community toward solutions.
This race is one way to take action. Participants and organizers collect pledges for donations that will go to a local conservation nonprofit after the event is over, and then participants run a seven-mile loop as many times as they can over their designated racing time. Those in the 12- and 24-hour races have teams whose members divide the running time. Local nonprofit Suffer Better, which Peter Downing founded ten years ago to engage the endurance racing community in efforts to preserve the environment, puts on the race, now in its seventh year, at Staunton.
“My partner and I are both long-distance runners, and our whole thing was, you know, this is a really selfish sort of thing that we do, so we decided that Suffer Better was set up to become a way for endurance athletes to put some of that energy into doing good things,” Downing says.
When he heard about the original Running Up for Air race held in Salt Lake City in 2012, he asked if he could add a Colorado version. This year, the Staunton race will have over 120 participants.
“It’s a race, but it is, more than anything, this community gathering, and it’s just fun,” Downing says.
The Regional Air Quality Council, the air-quality planning agency for the Front Range, is one of the race sponsors in Colorado. Over the seven Running Up for Air events taking place across the country this winter, the total amount of donations is expected to reach $150,000. Colorado’s goal is to break $10,000 by the end of next week. Money raised from the race at Staunton will go to Conservation Colorado, a local nonprofit that works to protect Colorado’s natural resources and people.
Jones participates in the 24-hour event, explaining that it gives him an entire day in nature to reflect on what he can do to help preserve it. Electricity for the race hospitality tent is created entirely through rechargeable solar generators, carpooling is incentivized, and there are no single-use products involved.
Before Running Up for Air, Patagonia will host an educational event at its Boulder location; afterward, members are encouraged to participate in Conservation Colorado’s lobbying day at the Colorado Capitol.
“The point is to have a greater impact and a greater conversation about these issues that directly affect our health and have an impact on the nature that we love to go out and run around in,” Jones says.
Jones began trail running when he moved to Colorado from Florida; he says that in this event, he tries to keep his pace consistent and keep his mind clear, listening to music and podcasts or audiobooks. “There might be a slim minority of us who are actually running the full 24 hours,” he says. “By the end of it, it’s more of a trudging, jog, jog-walking speed. …Staunton State Park is a beautiful place in the middle of the night with the stars, and sometimes the moon will be out, and just the sound of your breath and the crunch of snow beneath your feet.”
At night, there is very little light pollution, so racers run under the stars, often battling frigid temperatures and snow. But in 2024, things look a little different.
“The course this year, there’s hardly any snow,” Downing says. “A lot of the course is icy as hell, so this year everybody has to wear spikes on their running shoes.”
After each lap, runners check in at the heated hospitality tent that Suffer Better sets up with snacks, including over 700 pierogi from Pierogis Factory, another race sponsor. Downing jokes that many of the runners come so they can eat bottomless pierogi for 24 hours.
Though everyone joins in for a bigger purpose, Running Up for Air is still a competition. The last two years, the crown for completing the most laps in 24 hours has gone to woman racers; last year’s winner completed eleven laps totaling close to 80 miles and almost 20,000 vertical feet of elevation.
“That’s the real deal,” Downing says. “That’s not messing around.”
And participants aren’t messing around about air quality, either. Jones hopes the running community will see this race as an example of the power and voice they could have to advocate as a group.
“Whether that’s on air quality, transportation or just the way we live our lives,” he says, “I would hope that not only at this event, but more people in the outdoor space could start to realize and start to have conversations about or think about those solutions.”