The Strange New World of DIY Sufferfests

Madison Rose Ostergren: On the way down, I like got full primal. Like I just, ended up being like, ahh, ahh, ahh. Like I just couldn’t even control what was coming out of my mouth. I think it was more just like a release of like, this is painful and I am like in pain and I’m releasing this, like, this noise. It was kind of funny. 

Michael Roberts: That’s Madison Rose Ostergren, a professional big mountain skier from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, talking about her experience this past summer in a peculiar mountain sports event known, ironically, as the Picnic. It’s not an organized race. There are no sponsors, no aid stations, no medallions for finishers. It’s just something you do alone or with friends, and it involves biking into the mountains, a long swim in a very cold lake, and un-roped alpine climbing. 

Sounds nuts, right? It is. But the Picnic is not the only strange and creative sufferfest of its kind. In recent years, people all over have created outrageous multi-sport contests that are equal parts grueling and just plain silly. 

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, some of my Outside magazine colleagues participate in the unofficial Plaza to Peak race, where you bike from the middle of town to the base of Ski Santa Fe at 10,000 feet, then click into alpine touring skis and skid another couple thousand feet to the summit. Ouch.

Where I live in California, I have a friend who’s been trying for several years to get me to join him in an annual triathlon kind of thing he made up that includes biking for several hours into a national park, then hiking like five miles, then climbing a very big tree. I have yet to say yes.

So, what exactly is going on here? Why are so many peoople in so many places choosing to do really hard and maybe kinda dumb athletic things? For this week’s episode, producers Paddy O’Connell and Frederick Reimers decided to find out. 

Paddy O’Connell: So get this Rico, I actually came up with my own mountain race.

Frederick Reimers (Rico): How very Colorado of you, Paddy. 

Paddy: Well thank you. I’m always on brand, sir. But you’ll like this. It’s called the Roaring Fork Valley Big Dumb Fun. You ski Indy Pass above Aspen, bike Prince Creek in Carbondale, and then run up and down Red Hill. But–here’s the best part–in-between each sport you eat pancakes and charcuterie, and then end it all with a giant burrito. It’s all about outdoor fun but the real emphasis is on the fork. Which, come to think of it, I should probably should change the name to Get Fork’d in the Roaring Fork. 

Rico: Awesome name! And also a perfect setup for us to talk about the Picnic, which is one of the more extreme made-up events happening right now. 

Paddy: Of course. Because everything in Jackson is extreme. So, what do you have to do to complete a Picnic?

Rico: Well, a lot. People do it throughout the summer and the plan is always the same. You start by biking from the Jackson town square, 23 miles into Grand Teton National Park, then you swim 1.3 miles across Jenny lake, where the water is in the mid-40s, then you climb the 13,775 foot Grand Teton, usually without ropes because the route isn’t crazy technical, but it’s not easy. When you get to the top, you turn around and do it all in reverse.

Paddy: Jesus. That is outrageous. 

Rico: It is. And, in order to pull off the whole deal, you have to start super early.

Madison Rose: I drove over to town square and then I started exactly at 2 a. m. Like I was just like standing, it was dark. People were coming out of the bars. Still kind of drunk walking around. I was like, wow, this is crazy. I was like pretty intimidated and nervous. Like, can I do this?

Rico: Madison Rose told me about her experience in the Picnic a few weeks ago. By 8 A.M. she had done the bike and swim, and was closing in on the summit of the Grand Teton. She was climbing the Owen Spaulding route along with her friend Jimmi Ryan, who met her up there, and they were passing guided climbing parties.

Madison Rose: On the way up. I was just exhausted. I was like talking nonsense to Jim. Got to the top and I was like, yeah! It felt amazing. But then I was like, shit, there’s not time to really celebrate here. I got three minutes and then we’re like, all right, time to go back down. And that’s when, things get, yeah, even more tiring.

Paddy: Wait, why is she not letting herself celebrate at the summit and enjoy the view? I thought the Picnic and these others whacko events weren’t really races. 

Rico: They’re not races, and a lot of people don’t care how long it takes them. But some die-hards time it and post about it on social media. Again, Jackson is a really competitive place. Madison Rose was trying to set a new women’s speed record. During the climb, Jimmi kept reminding her of that. 

Madison Rose: At one point I was like, I don’t know if I’m gonna Make it for the fast time. Like I really, I’m quite tired. And he’s just like no Mads, you’re gonna get it. Like so, then he started telling people I was going for the fast time because he knows me He knows that I’m competitive. Right and he’s like, okay if Mads, if people know that Mads is doing this, she’s gonna go for it.

Rico: After she summited, Madison Rose began the descent. And as anyone who spends time in the moiuntains knows, going down can often be more dangerous than going up.

Madison Rose: I did fall on my face running down on the rocks, which is crazy. I was like, ow, and I was like, okay, get back up. Like, you know, there’s just these things that happen and you just got to deal with it on the fly. 

Rico: One of the biggest challeneges here were other climbers. Tons of people ascend the Grand Teton every summer and the Picnic route is on public trails. So as Madison Rose was racing down the trail to Jenny Lake, she was literally weaving between people coming up. 

Madison Rose: That is the most popular zone in the park. And I think there was probably like 200 plus people. I’m like, excuse me, excuse me. And I was like, so annoying. I felt bad. Cause I like, usually I’m trying to be so kind to people on the trail. And I was just like, please move.

Rico: At one point, she accidentally shoulder checked a guy 

Madison Rose: I was like on your left and he like moved to the left and I hit him with my shoulder and was like, oh my God, sorry. And they were like, ah, and I was like, okay, bye. 

Paddy: Oh, no! 

Rico: It was ok. The guy wasn’t hurt. But then, of course, she has to do this frigid swim a second time, which she said was the hardest part of the day for her. 

Madison Rose: My freestyle is comically bad 

Rico: How would you describe it? 

Madison Rose: Super inefficient is how I would describe it. Just like jumping around like a walrus. I don’t know. 

Rico: Because of her questionable swimming ability, she had a safety crew. On her first swim, which she did at 3:20 AM, her friend Christian paddleboarded beside her. When she got back to the lake, her friend Adele was there to do the paddelboard. At that point, Madison Rose had been redlining for more than nine hours.

Madison Rose: I had no energy left and was just kicking. And I really, like I said, I have such bad form that on the other side of the lake, one guy apparently pointed out and he’s like, hey, look at that. That fisherman on the boat, which was Adele on the paddleboard, he’s caught a huge fish. And that was me splashing in the water. That’s how bad at swimming I am. So that was just comical. And Adele had said, like, I got across the lake just out of pure grit. It’s this battle in your mind of like, can I keep going, or like, should I keep going, and can I do this? I just had these mantras that I had set up for when I would start to second guess, I would say, like, you’re so strong. You got this. 

Paddy: Am I right to assume that, given her mental and physical effort, she had to be eating like every five minutes?

Rico: That’s the thing, she was pushing so hard, she really didn’t feel like eating at all. 

Madison Rose: It’s hard to want to eat food. Like, your body just, I think just using up so much energy for other other things that it just you’re not hungry anymore. And so I I tried to just like put sugar every hour on the hour into my body whether it was like a fruit roll up or a applesauce that’s kind of helpful because it just like you can just, it’s children’s, you know, baby food, essentially.

Paddy: Fruit roll ups and applesauce, are you kidding me? What is this kindergarten? If that was me, I’d have two deep dish pizzas stuffed into my running vest. 

Rico: And you’d be right to do so, at least according to the guy who started this whole Picnic thing. Longtime Jackson local David Gonzales dreamt up the idea in 2011, and convinced six of his friends to do it with him the next year. Serious grubbing often was part of the fun. 

David Gonzales: I was first calling it the Grand Teton Triathlon and then I heard that the park service was miffed that there was a unsanctioned, unofficial race going on in our park, which it wasn’t, right?

There was no race. It was no, no reward, no reward, no entry fee, no nothing. And you know, the picnic just seemed like a good name for it since it involved lots of snacking along the way, right? These are energy intensive, exercise and you got to really do, you kind of do have to like stay fed throughout these things to like feel good throughout the whole process. It was kind of like a moving picnic. Well, that should probably be the name.

Rico: David is a climber, writer, and photographer. And he’s lived in Jackson for 25 years, he loves it here. But he also knows that Jackson is a place that takes itself a little too seriously. Picnic was his way of injecting a bit of humor into the community’s well known bravado, something he’s also done over the years in his social media posts about the Picnic.

David: Picnic certainly started, as kind of a little bit of a joke almost, you know, because this community is so intense. But when I first wrote about doing it, I definitely wrote about it in a jokey, self deprecating way because it is ridiculous and it is contrived. But it is also a test that, you know, people in communities like this are always looking for something bigger and harder to do. 

Rico: Over the last decade, hundreds of people have completed the Grand Teton Picnic. They’ve also taken the bike-swim-climb challenge to other peaks in the Teton Range, including on Mount Buck, where the contest is called the Bucknick, and Mount Moran, for what’s known as the Moronic. Other folks have created picnics on Idaho’s highest peak, Mount Borah, and called it the Spudnick, and in Colorado, Michigan, Montana, and California. In 2020, Gonzales himself pioneered the Hoodnick on Oregon’s Mount Hood. That’s my favorite, because to do it he actually swims across the Columbia River in the middle of the night, dodging massive grain barges.

David: I start swimming. And then this light on top of a barge that’s like coming towards me, that I hadn’t seen, swivels over and like shines directly at me. And he had seen me. Before I saw him. So they yelled at me like, are you okay? And I was like, yes, I’m fine. I’m doing this on purpose.

Paddy: That sounds insane. But why does David think so many people have taken up the picnic? What’s the allure?

Rico: To him, it’s pretty simple. Doing hard and unusual things is appealing to a lot of outdoor people. And the weirder the event, the more appealing it probably is to folks who aren’t elite athletes. 

David: People really respond to hearing things that other people have done that sound really whack, you know, people just love that. 

Rico: Right. 

David: Cause it just like, It just jumpstarts their own imagination. And they’re thinking about like whether or not they could do it, you know? people in this town don’t think of me as a great athlete, so when I was like doing this thing, it was probably even more intriguing that I wasn’t a professional athlete. And I was just like, you know, just a dude. And, I’ve wanted to just challenge myself and see what I could do. And then other people want to see if they can do them, too

Rico: According to David, a Picnic has to involve a bike ride that takes at least an hour each way, a swim of around a mile, and a climb where a fall could have serious consequences. 

Paddy: Why those things? Why is all that important?

Rico: The main point is that you have to be out of your comfort zone. 

David: In my mind, it’s like the whole, the picnic has to be human powered, And it has to scare you, and ideally it scares you in various ways. To have to undergo all those cruxes, by yourself and deal with them. It’s really illuminating, about how you work and how you deal, how you think. 

Paddy: So is this what happened to Madison Rose? I mean, she’s a super fit pro mountain athlete. But did she find herself scared and having to rethink her approach?

Rico: Yeah, you know, she went through everything that David describes, and then some.

Madison Rose: It felt like I was really pushing myself extremely to like an uncomfortable place and then was, like went for more and did more.

Paddy: We’ll be right back.

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Paddy: So Rico, this summer, when pro-skier Madison Rose Ostergren tried to set the new women’s speed record for Jackson Hole’s unofficial triathalon, The Picnic, did she ever think, ‘Wow, this was an awful idea. What the hell am I doing here?’

Rico: Oh, for sure. 

Madison Rose: It was just hard, way harder than I thought. You swim two miles, you bike 50 miles, you do the grand. When you do it all together, it’s just, it accumulates so heavy. You just gotta like, be, you can’t think of what’s next. You gotta just be like in the moment. Like I can get through this. 

Rico: She told me that she tried to focus on each individual challenge, rather than the whole enchilada. And it mostly worked. She was on a record-setting pace all the way through the point when she came out of Jenny Lake after her second swim, ten hours after she’d started the whole thing. 

Paddy: Ten hours? That sounds both really fast and also like a crazy long time to be flying through the mountains. 

Rico: Yeah, And she still had the final 23-mile bike ride back to town. Her friend Stephen was set up to ride alongside her on his bike. And that is when things went sideways. 

Madison Rose: There’s a pretty gnarly headwind. God damn it. I don’t want to deal with this. And we’re like, are we going to get it under, like I didn’t know if I was going to get it under the 12 hours. So we’re cruising along, cruising along. And, we get to like four miles. To the finish and I just lose focus, I guess. I hit his back tire, it goes boom, boom, hits twice. And then I just like fully high side and do like a full tour de France, like double front flip over my bike. My bike like is still attached to one of my feet and I just like hit the deck going like 25 miles an hour. 

So painful. I like, slam my shoulder, I’m bleeding all over the place. I’m like, I’m fine.  We like, fix up the handlebars really quickly and, torque the bike so that it goes back to, like, straight. And he’s like, are you sure you’re good to go? And I’m like, yeah, yeah, I’m, I’m good to go. Let’s finish this thing strong. 

Paddy: How the hell do you push through a crash like that when you’ve been racing for nearly half a day?

Rico: I was wondering the same thing. So I asked someone who has focused their entire life on pursuing the edge of what is humanly possible in the mountains. 

Jason Hardrath: When I got into this whole FKT world, I just started looking all adventure sport and I’m like, what styles of things? Are people doing and finding a lot of meaning in and what manners of testing oneself are out there.

Rico: That’s Jason Hardrath, an elementary school PE teacher from Klamath Falls, Oregon. He is best known as the first person to set 100 FKTs, or Fastest Known Times, a term that covers self-organized contests in the outdoors. One of Jason’s FKTs was ascending every one of Washington State’s highest 100 peaks in just 50 days.

Jason: Then I came across David Gonzales and the Grand Teton Picnic, and I was like, this is something. There’s something about that that just like spoke to me. I’m like, yeah, that’s, that’s a way to spend a day. 

Paddy: Wait, hold on, Jason set 100 FKTs? 

Rico: Yeah, when he’s not running upsettingly long distances, he’s thinking about his next sufferfest. Jason has also established two picnics of his own, one on Mount Shasta and the other in Yosemite.

Paddy: Let me guess, it’s absurdly difficult. 

Rico: Yes it is. It involves cycling 43 miles from Yosemite Valley up to Tenaya Lake, a 1.1 mile swim across that, and then completing the Tuolumne Triple Crown, which is a technical ascent of three peaks from Tuolumne Meadows—Tenaya Peak, Mathes Crest, and Cathedral Peak. Then you have to do the swim and bike again to the finish. 

Jason: The triple crown is already like a tick list rock climber objective to try to pull off in a day. Tenaya Lake is a lake that lake swimmers come up to like bucket list swim. And then just add on a bike ride that starts at the foot of El Cap and finishes back at the foot of El Cap when you’re done and suddenly you have a tremendous, 100 mile day when you add it all together. It’s just a grand tour of Yosemite.

Rico: Of all the FKTs he’s established, Jason says his Yosemite Picnic is probably the most rewarding. Because of the grandeur of the setting, and because of the difficulty. 

But similar to Madison Rose’s experience in the Tetons, his second swim and bike ride were, uh, really tough. 

Jason: Get in the water and immediately just start having like cramping issues in my shoulders, just massive cramps in my legs. 

There’s a couple of times I had to just like dunk underwater for like 20 seconds and like pinch a cramp out of my calf or pinch a cramp out of my quad or hamstring. Massive leg cramp after massive leg, leg cramp. It got a little bit scary, out there in the cold water, But like, you know, just kept talking myself through it. I have this old mantra. It’s like, yeah, but am I still moving forward?

Yeah, you’re swimming really slow, dude, but you are still swimming forward. So no reason to quit. Doesn’t matter how it feels like you will finish. Just keep, deal with a cramp, swim as long as you can, deal with a cramp, swim as long as you can. And eventually pull out the other side, all wobbly and like somewhat like disoriented and kind of wobble my way to the bike. 

Rico: Keep in mind here that he’s wobbling his way to his bike, then has to ride 43 miles, during which he’ll gain 2000 feet of elevation. 

Jason: Once you get on the bike the final time, it’s like the trick there is like, do I have any competitive juice left in me or am I just on damage control at that point. Knowing how to pace yourself with the whole vision in mind and knowing it means being ready for these like different skills and what might go wrong in those different skill sets. 

Rico: Ultimately, Jason did get his pacing right, saving just enough energy to ride to the finish.

Jason: finally being able to tuck, and just rip going the speed of traffic all the way down into the Valley and just finishing there on the bridge in front of El Cap and just being like, Oh man, that was incredible.

Paddy: Ok, so, Rico, I do some hard things outside ; I know you do, too. But what Madison Rose and David and Jason are up to is on a totally different level. It honestly sounds horrible. So did Jason explain why he’s drawn to suffering this way? 

Rico: Yeah, putting yourself through a meat grinder of a day like this is not all that appealing to me. But the feeling Jason says he had when it was all over sure as hell is. 

Jason: I think anybody that’s tested themselves at just one discipline can understand the gratification that comes when you can cleanly execute your chosen skill, your chosen craft really well. And I think the thing that just sort of gets amplified is when you duplicate the skill sets and you stack them on top of each other, the stacking of all the things you have to carry mentally and physically. just makes the reward at the end so much more just rich. 

Choosing these deeply challenging and testing physical endeavors. It just creates this magical experience moving through so much nature. So you’re like, wait, all this happened today? Did I really see all that and touch all that and move through all of that just today? It’s this beyond ordinary experience and these, beyond ordinary memories that come out of it. 

Rico: This is exactly how Madison Rose described her finish. After her over the handlebars crash, she was bloodied and exhausted, but still pedaling hard back to town. She rolled back under Jackson’s famous elk antler arches in Town Square 11 hours and 43 minutes after starting, setting a new women’s record. 

Madison: And finally, we roll right in underneath the antlers. And all I can think about is, like, what just happened, the bike crash, my friends, and I’m not even recognizing that there’s like hundreds of people at Town Square, like, taking photos under the antlers.

I’m bleeding from the crash. I look like a crazy person. And I’m just like, like kind of sobbing for a second, but mostly just like happy to be done. And I feel this huge amount of accomplishment for doing it 

But, I also felt this huge sense of gratefulness and appreciation for my friends that are so talented and skilled in their own ways, but they just show up. They just showed up for me and they knew that this was something that I cared about and that that’s my love language and they really, they showed up for me, and they love me, and that feels really special to have that. Nothing else really mattered in the world in that moment.

Paddy: Well, jeez, that’s enough of a reason to do a Picnic right there.

Rico: Yeah it is. 

Paddy: But Rico, I have to play a little devil’s advocate here. If Jackson’s Picnic started as a sendup of the Tetons’ notoriously ego-driven mountain athlete culture, and now folks are trying to set time records, aren’t Picnics just dowsing hubris gasoline onto that fire? 

Rico: That’s a fair point, and even David Gonzales has questioned whether some publicized picnics were, as he termed them ‘ego-gasms.’ But for him, any of that is outweighed by the stoke people feel when they do them.

David: It kind of started as a joke to sort of make fun of like how intense Jackson Hole athletes are. And here I am like 11 years later, pretty obsessed because I want to think of cooler, bigger things to do and see if I can do them. 

Most people don’t realize what kind of athletes they really are, unless they try really hard. And the cool thing about a Picnic is that it is an excuse to try really hard and seeing what you can do. It makes me nervous and it makes me question myself and those doubts are really the point. 

You have these self doubts going into these things, but those self doubts and like conquering those doubts, right? By preparation and persistence is really the reward, can I do this thing? I don’t know if I can do this thing.

And then like, figuring it out, and doing the training and putting yourself in that position. And then at that time having the will and the drive and the power and the mental fortitude to do it, to put it all together. It is like, that’s why I’m still doing them.

Paddy: So Rico, are you going to do the Picnic next summer?

Rico: Mmmmm, probably not. The Picnic is too technical of a climb for me. But I do have an idea for a different big, brutal multi-sport day outside. It’s gonna be hard, but it’ll mostly be super fun. 

Paddy: Well, I guess that’s the whole point, right?

Rico: Exactly.

Michael: If you want to see what it’s like to complete the Picnic, check out our episode about it on the first season of Beat Monday, a video series from Outside Watch available to Outside+ subscribers. Go to watch.outsideonline.com or get Outside Watch app from the Apple App Store or Google Play.

This episode was produced by Paddy O’Connell and Frederick Reimers, who we all call Rico. It was edited by me, Michael Roberts. Music by Robbie Carver.

The Outside Podcast is made possible by Outside+ subscribers. Learn more about all the benefits of a subscription and subscribe now at OutsideOnline.com/pod plus