Courtesy Photo | Mauricio Puerto, facilities team lead at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Port Hueneme...... read more read more
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Four days and 210 miles into a 220-mile trail race, Mauricio Puerto felt relatively good, his body and his running shoes still holding up, as he scrambled through the damp darkness up Mammoth Mountain toward the summit — the final climb before descending to the finish line.
Draped in a trash bag to ward off the elements, his headlamp barely illuminating the snow-covered path ahead through thick fog, the Navy veteran and facilities team lead at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Port Hueneme Division (NSWC PHD) was close to completing the inaugural Mammoth 200 ultramarathon in California’s eastern Sierra Nevada in late September.
If Puerto finished the race, it would be the longest in his two decades of running ultramarathons — races beyond traditional 26.2-mile marathons — as a side pursuit during his activity-duty and civilian careers with the Navy.
But then the foggy night sky in front of him flashed and roared — an ill-timed lightning storm — forcing him to retreat and seek shelter.
As he huddled in the restroom of a remote food shack on the backside of Mammoth with fellow runners, dabbing his soggy feet with paper towels, Puerto heard rain pouring, then hail pelting, outside the structure.
“The storm was getting worse,” he said, recalling the experience. “At that point I thought, ‘I’m done.’”
If he did not finish the race, known in the running world as a DNF, it wouldn’t be the first time in his long list of ultramarathon endeavors. He wanted to complete the Mammoth trek, but as he pondered the tempest, he reasoned, “It’s not worth getting killed for a finish and a belt buckle.”
So he sat and waited, too hyped up and caffeinated to sleep, even as the hours dragged on into the early morning.
Finishing was always his goal, Puerto said, but he had learned to savor “the journey” of long-distance running ever since he caught the bug for it as a Seabee stationed on Sardinia, when he and his comrades set out to run across the Italian island.
Outdoor adventures
Puerto grew up in the small community of Belchertown, Massachusetts, as a self-described “outdoorsy” kid, spending much of his free time cycling and cross-country skiing around the wooded landscape. His love for running bloomed later, after he enlisted in the Navy in 1992.
As a utilitiesman for U.S. Naval Construction Battalions, known as Seabees, Puerto worked on facility systems like plumbing, water treatment, boilers, and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC).
“It’s a well-rounded rate,” Puerto said.
His first duty station as a Seabee became his favorite — Sardinia, which he described as “a beautiful, mountainous Mediterranean island” — and he returned there for a second tour later in his active-duty service. The rugged isle is about 170 miles long from north to south.
Puerto ran as part of his Navy physical training. He eventually advanced to marathons and tried to qualify for the prestigious Boston Marathon in his home state, but the qualifying time eluded him. Back then, men in the 18-to-34 age range had to run a 26.2-mile race in 3 hours, 10 minutes to be eligible for Boston.
“I was never fast,” Puerto said.
His perception of his long-distance prowess shifted when he and a few fellow Seabees decided to run across Sardinia in 2006, during his second tour there, to raise money for their annual ball. They tackled the 173-mile route in a relay, and sometimes Puerto volunteered for back-to-back legs. He surprised himself by running two marathon distances in a row — more than 50 miles.
“It just felt natural to me,” he said. “I think that was when it clicked for me that long distance — more than a marathon — is where my niche is.”
Embracing the HURT
Puerto’s naval career took him to other duty stations in the Mediterranean region, including Naples and Sicily in Italy and Souda Bay in Greece. He also served tours at Naval Base Ventura County (NBVC) in Port Hueneme, California, home of the Pacific Seabees.
While stationed on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, he took another crack at qualifying for Boston by running the Honolulu Marathon in December 2006. He stayed on his targeted pace for much of the race, but then he experienced the crushing phenomenon runners call “hitting the wall” — essentially running out of steam. He stuck it out and crossed the finish line, but he was about 15 minutes over the qualifying time — another disappointment on his quest to compete in Boston.
“I’m tired of this,” he said, remembering how he felt about that quest at the time.
That evening, while researching other races, he set his sights on a far longer endeavor: the Hawaiian Ultra Running Team’s Trail 100-Mile Endurance Run, tellingly known as the HURT100. The race was only about a month away, leaving him little time to ramp up his training or learn the tricks of the trade in ultrarunning.
“I had no clue what I was getting myself into,” Puerto said.
He didn’t know how to pace himself for that kind of distance. He didn’t know about the chafing it causes and how to mitigate it. He didn’t know about taking salt supplements to compensate for all the sweating. He didn’t know how many calories he would have to consume to power him through 100 miles.
Instead, Puerto said he learned on the fly during the HURT100, asking other runners for advice as he hustled through the Hawaiian rainforest and up and down countless steep hills. When he felt sleepy, someone handed him caffeine pills.
Nearly 90 miles in, a race director approached and told Puerto that one of his family members was in the hospital. Stunned, he dropped out of the race and hurried down the hill toward his car. He borrowed someone’s cell phone, called the hospital and connected with his family member. Puerto was relieved to hear that everything was OK; the situation was stable. Then his thoughts wandered back to the HURT100.
“I said, ‘Do you mind if I finish this race?’” Puerto said, recalling the conversation.
With his family member’s blessing, he returned to the course and pushed himself through the last dozen or so miles to the finish line. Thirty-three hours and 48 minutes from the time he started, Puerto had conquered his first official ultramarathon — although it had nearly conquered him.
“I was destroyed, but I was hooked,” he said.
Projects and pasta sauce
After retiring from active-duty service in 2011, Puerto went to work as a civilian for Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command (NAVFAC) onboard NBVC. He served as NAVFAC’s facilities liaison for NSWC PHD.
In 2023, a position opened in the infrastructure division at NSWC PHD, and Puerto joined the command as a facilities team lead. In that role, he manages projects for dozens of facilities — anything from renovating restrooms to replacing roofs to installing HVAC systems or generators.
Puerto said he appreciates the wealth of engineering expertise at NSWC PHD that he can tap into to help keep projects on track.
“We have a lot of good people who specialize in certain areas, which helps us get answers quicker than trying to go externally,” he said.
For his part, Puerto provides the command with invaluable experience in managing facilities projects from his time with the Seabees and NAVFAC, according to Carter Divine, deputy manager of NSWC PHD’s infrastructure division.
“He’s still bringing fresh knowledge on how to effectively work through the processes and get the most bang for our buck,” Divine said.
Puerto is also known for bringing his homemade marinara sauce and “huge pots of spaghetti” — fitting fuel for a long-distance runner — to infrastructure division potlucks, Divine added.
“If I had to give you a three-word summary of Mauricio, it would probably be marinara, running and projects,” Divine said.
Side hustle
Alongside his civilian career with the Navy, Puerto ramped up his long-distance pursuits. He said he’s drawn to both the camaraderie of ultrarunning — “People you’re with will bend over backward to help you out” — and, by contrast, the times of isolation out on the trails — “trying to push yourself without any help.”
Puerto has returned to Oahu every year since 2007 for the HURT100. He has run the original course of California’s Badwater ultramarathon — 146 miles from below sea level in Death Valley to the 14,505-foot summit of Mount Whitney. His longest race before the Mammoth was the Bigfoot 200, a 211-mile trek near Mount St. Helens in Washington state.
By his count, he has completed 178 ultramarathons, many of which were not organized races — like his frequent jaunts over Southern California’s Santa Monica Mountains along the 67-mile Backbone Trail. Last year, he ran there and back on that route, for a total of 134 miles.
Ultramarathons often stretch into multiple days, but there’s always a time limit for the organized races. If a runner doesn’t make it to one of the checkpoints on the course before the cutoff time, he or she is out of the race — a DNF. Puerto has had his share of those setbacks.
For example, in his 19 attempts at the HURT100, he has finished nine times and not finished 10. Sometimes, his DNFs were due to an injury or medical malady that stopped him in his tracks. Others he attributes to matters of the mind — becoming overwhelmed by the daunting distance ahead, for instance, rather than focusing on just the section immediately in front of him.
“Mental is the No. 1 thing in giving up on a race,” Puerto said.
At the HURT100 in January this year, he wound up with another DNF.
After that defeat, life got in the way. Caught up with selling his house and moving into a new place, he didn’t run for several months. When the dust settled, he looked for another race to motivate him back into action.
“I need to find something that’s going to put my gut in gear right away,” he said he recalled telling himself.
He found that something via a video announcement on social media: the launch of the Mammoth 200.
Lofty endeavor
Puerto trained for about two months for the Mammoth 200, averaging 60 to 80 miles per week, with his longest runs 20 miles at most.
He and his wife, Laura, also drove out to the Sierra Nevada on weekends to hike mountains over 14,000 feet tall, like Whitney and Langley, to acclimate to high altitude. And they traveled to Mammoth ahead of the race to run parts of the course.
Divine said that Puerto applies the same kind of methodical planning to ultramarathons that he does to facilities projects at NSWC PHD, and in both cases that approach is critical to success.
“If you don’t take the time to prepare, you’re going to fall flat on your face,” Divine said.
The Sept. 26-20 race was the first-ever Mammoth 200, starting and ending in the town of Mammoth Lakes at an elevation of 8,050 feet.
As designed, the race would send runners up the 11,053-foot Mammoth Mountain twice — bookending the 215-mile course. In between those two climbs, they would traverse backcountry trails around pristine lakes, through pine forests, past fields of lava rock amid towering volcanic domes, and over alpine passes.
Organizers projected that the total elevation gain and loss would be 31,000 feet — more than the vertical distance from sea level to the top of the world’s tallest mountain, Everest.
Puerto started slow but steady — his typical conservative approach at the beginning of ultramarathons. When he reached the top of Mammoth Mountain on the first ascent, he was around eighth from last out of about 140 runners who started the race.
He wore a backpack-like running vest to carry some 15 pounds of essentials such as food, fluids, extra layers of clothes, a GPS transponder with an SOS button for emergencies, and a battery pack to charge his phone.
Aid stations along the route offered an eclectic mix of salty snacks — pickle with your trail mix? — as well as bananas, energy gels, water and other drinks. Certain stations also served heartier fare like pizza and breakfast burritos, and they provided cots for sleeping.
Puerto found sleep elusive. He grew tired running through the night — sometimes drifting side to side — but when he lay down at a sleep station or on a trailside bed of pine needles, he mostly stayed awake, shivering in the cold.
“You hear your heartbeat through your ears — it’s so loud — and you’re so caffeinated,” he said. “Even though I was physically exhausted, my mind was still racing.”
Gradually, Puerto picked up his pace and gained more cushion from the cutoff times at the checkpoints — three hours ahead, then four, then six, then seven. His goal was to stay 10 hours in front of the cutoff times.
On the second day, the temperature rose. He felt the sun blasting him as he slogged up the exposed ridge of a volcanic caldera, climbing nearly 3,000 feet over about 8 miles, his shoes slipping on the soft pumice. Soon he had downed his three bottles of water. He could refill them at the next aid station.
At the top of this second-highest pass on the course, close to 10,000 feet, he could see much of the rugged terrain ahead — another 140 miles to go.
Not a dream
After two full days with no sleep, Puerto was pressing ahead through the night when he witnessed a dreamlike sight: a herd of wild mustangs, standing silently near the trail in the darkness, watching him pass by.
“It was surreal … like I had crossed into another world entirely,” he said.
As the sun rose the next morning, he found himself in a sweeping green meadow awash in golden light. He said his fatigue fell away, and “everything just felt perfect” in the moment.
But the feeling was fleeting — soon the zipper of his running vest blew out, scattering his food, clothes and gear onto the ground. He stood gaping down at the mess, trying to stay calm. This was a real problem, but solving problems is part of ultrarunning, he reminded himself.
So he picked up his belongings, pulled out a few spare safety pins and clipped the broken zipper shut as best he could — a bit of “trail-side engineering,” as he put it. Then he soldiered on.
One of the many striking sights he saw along the course was a dramatic change in landscape as he descended from Crater Mountain toward Mono Lake.
“You go from high meadows and forest into lava fields within a few miles — traveling through so many different ecological areas,” he said. “It’s weird and amazing in the same way.”
Mono Lake itself is a spectacle — a vast body of mineral-rich water saltier than the ocean and adorned with calcium-carbonate spires called tufa towers. It also has a Navy connection: In the 1950s and early ’60s, the service operated a weapons testing and research facility on the south shore of the lake, according to a historical plaque at the site now known as Navy Beach.
Near the town of Lee Vining, at mile 140, Puerto saw a sight for sore eyes: Laura. She brought a replacement running vest, which he had texted her about, as well as moral support.
“Just the presence of someone you love and care for is always a lift up when you’re in situations like this, doing hard things,” he said.
About 30 miles farther along the course, Puerto nabbed his first real sleep at the June Mountain aid station — a 30-minute nap on a cot. He woke up feeling “almost like a new person,” he said. Then he devoured two breakfast burritos before hitting the trail on his reinvigorated legs.
Storm brewing
After four days of mostly clear skies, the weather had shifted when Puerto left the last aid station, at mile 202, around midnight. He ventured out into a thick fog, struggling to spot the flags marking the course.
“It’s an eerie feeling,” he said, recalling the moment. “I can’t really see where the trail’s at in the dark.”
Nor could he see what loomed ahead, although he knew it was coming — the second and final ascent of Mammoth Mountain, a couple thousand more feet of climbing before descending to the finish. He pulled out his phone and used a trail navigation app to stay on track.
Then rain started falling. He donned his waterproof jacket and pants, plus a trash bag for extra protection. Then it started pouring.
He first took refuge in a ski lift shack, sharing a couch with a couple other runners. Then lightning flashed and thunder crashed. They texted the race director, who told them to hold tight.
They waited about two-and-a-half hours before there was a break in the storm — lightning hadn’t struck within a 5-mile radius in the past 30 minutes. The race director gave them the go-ahead.
Outside, about an inch of snow had fallen. Puerto plodded onward, peering into the darkness for the tracks of two runners who had taken off ahead of him.
“I’m following white footprints up these trails,” while also checking the app on his phone, he said, “to make sure I’m not just blindly following someone else.”
He inadvertently sloshed into an icy puddle, soaking his shoes. His gloves were also growing damp.
When Puerto was about halfway up to the summit, the lightning storm came roaring back. That’s when he retreated down the mountain to the food shack restroom, where he sheltered with other runners for several hours as the storm raged. Puerto found a heater in a janitor’s closet, allowing them to dry their wet clothes and gear.
Around 5 a.m., news came from the race director: His team would reroute the course around the mountain instead of over it, avoiding the dangerous conditions at the higher elevation.
Two hours later, Puerto and a pack of fellow competitors followed the race director as he marked the new course through about 3 inches of snow.
As Puerto made his way into Mammoth Lakes and approached the end of the race, he again saw Laura. She grabbed his hand and ran with him across the finish line, both smiling.
Puerto placed 55th out of 92 finishers, male and female. His time, which included the hours of waiting out the storm, was 99 hours, 5 minutes, 53 seconds — about 11 hours ahead of the final cutoff time.
While the planned course was 215 miles, Puerto ended up logging just over 220, according to his Garmin GPS watch. Having to backtrack on Mammoth Mountain and then take the longer detour around it accounted for the extra distance, he said.
Puerto estimated that he slept only about an hour and 20 minutes throughout his more than four days on the course. Despite that shortage of shut-eye, he said, “I felt pretty darn good at the end.”
Up next on Puerto’s ultrarunning radar is a return to the HURT100 in January. After his DNF earlier this year, he’s hoping to notch his 10th finish in what will be his 20th attempt at the 100-miler on Oahu.
“I obviously have a huge hook on that race because it was my first ultra,” he said.
Back in the office at NSWC PHD a few days after finishing the Mammoth 200, Puerto said running such massive distances helps him put things in perspective, at work and in life in general.
“It makes problems much smaller,” he said.
| Date Taken: | 11.14.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 11.14.2025 16:25 |
| Story ID: | 551116 |
| Location: | PORT HUENEME, CALIFORNIA, US |
| Web Views: | 313 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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