THE MAMMOTH AND THE MILESTONE

Last Tuesday, at 3:23 p.m., Mammoth Lakes local Sofia Carolina Flores finished the mammoth, a 208 mile trail race. An enormous accomplishment by any standard.

Flores is not your typical ultra-marathon runner. She’s not a professional athlete. She didn’t run in college. This was her first 200+ mile race. Flores is challenging the norms of the sport, breaking the runner stereotypes and pushing her body to achieve remarkable feats.

“I’m an average person,” Flores said in an interview with the Sheet on Wednesday. “I don’t chase podiums, I can’t train that way. My body is different. I’m on the heavier side, but I can still go out there and do challenging things.”

Flores and her family moved to Mammoth Lakes from Mexico when she was four years old. Her parents followed other relatives who had moved to the area, searching for better opportunities for their eight children.

Initially, her parents worked as housekeepers, but when Flores was in middle school, her mother and father each started businesses of their own. Her dad spearheaded Flores Carpet Cleaning, now run by her brother-in-law, and her mom founded a community daycare. They are both retired now, and have since moved back to Mexico.

“She took care of a lot of kids in the community,” Flores said of her mother.

Flores grew up in the Mammoth Lakes school system. Her first experiences with running were on the MHS cross-country team.

“They didn’t really have any girls running in the team, but my best friend convinced me and our other friends to join,” she paused and laughed. “Yeah, we didn’t consider ourselves runners. We just wanted to hang out.”

The sport didn’t matter much to Flores back then. She didn’t pursue it in college at the University of San Diego, where she earned a degree in Child and Family Development. She wouldn’t run again until after college, when a coworker proposed they sign up for a trail marathon together. The race was in nine months. Flores figured she was up for the challenge.

“It was just such a different mindset than what I was exposed to with road running,” she said. “It opened the world to what running could be for me.”

The race would change Flores’s life. She loved it. She loved that she could talk to the other runners while racing. She loved hearing about the trail community. She wanted to be a part of it. 

After the marathon, Flores learned about ultra running. “I was like, ‘Oh, that would be cool to do.’ I didn’t realize there were other distances.”

Then Flores did her first 50k.

“When I [finished], someone was like, ‘Well, some people say an ultra is more like 50 [miles],’” she said. “It starts itching your brain like, ‘Oh, there’s another distance. Let me see if I could train for it and go up to a challenge.’”

Flores was. She did a 50 miler. Then she did a 100 miler.

“When you get to one distance, it gives you the confidence to think about a longer distance,” she said. “I never thought I would be able to run the 100 miler. And then I did.”

After running through the night for 100 straight miles, Flores wanted to attack the next challenge: the mammoth.

It wasn’t an easy race for her. In July, Flores rolled her ankle, and didn’t run for eight weeks. She worried the injury would hold her back from competing in the fall.

“Instead, I decided I could still hike. I did a lot of hiking. That’s what really saved me for this,” she remarked. 

During the race, at around mile 25, Flores started to have nerve pain on the soles of her feet. At that point in the run, her body still felt good and her muscles were fresh, but it hurt every time she stepped. The faster she ran, the more pain she was in.

“I had to find a balance between pace and pain,” Flores remembered.

Sometimes, she struck this balance. But other times, the pain was so great that it translated from physical to mental, leading to “negative self-talk.”

“The negative self-talk was the worst part, because that’s what made me feel like I needed to drop out,” she said.

At mile 75, Flores had an epiphany. “I realized that my intention for the trail was to allow myself to lean into my community and allow myself to be taken care of,” she said. “It is something that I normally don’t do because I’m so strong headed and independent.”

This realization would be important later in the race. Flores recalled her time at the Obsidian Dome station, when she was “mentally hitting a huge wall.” She cried and told her crew she wasn’t going back out there.

But her crew –– her partner Ian Snyder, two of her sisters, her cousin, and a collection of friends –– refused to let Flores give up. Her cousin spoon fed her mashed potatoes; her partner dutifully tended to her feet. She was off again.

When Flores finally got to the finish line, she was so overwhelmed by the outpouring of love from the people in the Village that she buried her head in her sister’s shoulder and started to cry.

“I think I was so emotional yesterday because it’s not just my journey […] It’s the journey of my crew, because they experienced so much to support me.”

It was the journey of the community members who came up to her at the finish line and told her they were tracking her the whole time. They were so excited to see someone local running the race. It was a journey for the volunteers who ran up to her and asked, “are you Sofia?”

“That inspired me,” Flores said. The perpetual cycle of community stoke.

Flores doesn’t have any upcoming races. She wants to give herself a break. But she does have a vision for the future of trail running, one whose seeds have already been planted. She wants to see more representation in the sport. More marginalized people, more low-income people, more people of color.

“It’s about the stories we’re told,” she said. “You can enter a sport as who you are.”

It’s why telling her story matters.