A SOUND TO REMEMBER

“Do you ever still hear them?”

I knew exactly what he meant. Yes, all I needed to do was close my eyes. For the past 25 years, they’d been a reminder that Joe Braninburg, in the midst of his own finest athletic moment, saw me as the ultrarunner I was yet to become.

, I was writing for the local newspaper in my hometown of Reno, and I’d met Joe a couple of years earlier. He had been a road runner like I was, but by 1990, he ran his first ultra and was hooked. When he turned 50 in 1994, Joe had already finished the Western States 100-miler four times and I was intrigued by him. He looked like a character out of a western with deeply creased skin from years of working construction in the sun. His penetrating eyes could wither you with their High Plains Drifter intensity. Yet, there was a comforting wisdom about Joe as well. When I called him one night during the spring of 1995 to ask him