Endurance Artist

Rickey Gates has been running his whole life, but as a storyteller he still knows the value of stopping to reflect.

By Jadzia Engle

"The beautiful thing about running is that it’s absolutely the simplest sport out there, so much so that it’s oftentimes not considered a sport at all,” says Rickey Gates, ultra runner, photographer, mountain runner, world traveler, author, running trip host extraordinaire, and Salomon-sponsored athlete. It’s not so simple to fit Gates into just one box, partly because he’s spent his whole life butting heads with societal expectations and a set trajectory for his life. The one thing that seems to stick: he has chosen to run towards adventure and self-discovery. For Gates, running offers so many dynamic facets to explore, and he has spent his life chasing them down.

Born and raised in Aspen, Colorado, Gates explored a relationship between self and the external environment, immersing himself in beautiful scenery at a young age. The affluent community that surrounded him, something his family did not partake in, granted him a perspective that he’s grateful to have: money isn’t the have all be all to happiness. This allowed him to confidently forge his own path in life, following the ideal that “the less you have, the happier you are.”

At 14, Gates began running when he joined the cross country team as a freshman in high school, where he found a real sense of community. While he didn’t immediately show competitive potential, he cherished the experience. Later attending Lewis & Clark University in Portland, Oregon for a year, Gates continued with the sport before making the financial decision to return to Colorado and attend a school with in-state tuition, but not before taking two years off.

During his break, Gates got his first big taste of travel, spending nearly half of that first year in South America, living very minimally and dealing with the many challenges of travel as they arose. When Gates resumed his postsecondary education in 2003 at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), an itch to travel persisted. Gates decided to study abroad in Chile, this time making the decision to immerse himself in the culture before he even arrived by taking two extra months to ride his motorcycle, rather than leisurely strolling on and off a plane. “Dealing with the challenges of travel at such a young age illuminated that anything is really possible,” says Gates. “Such a huge part of that infinite possibility is simply continuing on, day after day and mile after mile.”

This mentality pushed Gates to test his perceived limits. For the three years that he attended CU Boulder, he attempted to make the competitive cross country team at the Division I school to no avail. Yet, he continued to run, refusing to give up something that he loved. And his persistence paid off.

Gates discovered his love for mountain racing in 2005, and met success, creating a new world of opportunities. He competed on the US Mountain Running Team from 2006 to 2011. In 2008, Gates signed on to be an athlete for Salomon, an athletic equipment and run specialty company based out of France. “I’ve been fortunate enough throughout my years to travel to nearly 40 different countries and all seven continents,” Gates reflects, going so far as to race in the glacial conditions of Antarctica in 2010.

His travels, combined with the raw and authentic experience that running evokes, granted Gates an inherent connection to those he encountered along his journey. “It’s quite a bit different going to Italy with a Lonely Planet guide and ticking off the things that a book suggests you should see, and then a different thing to go line up at a starting line and be on that line with a bunch of Italians, and seeing how they race, and then after the race sharing some beers,” says Gates. “It breaks down a lot of barriers that normal travel can’t really do.”

Gates’ last long stretch of competition in the sport introduced him to the world of ultra running. He made his biggest splash in his very first appearance in 2011 in a 125K Canadian Death Race. Down the road, to stay relevant within the world of running, Gates began incorporating a more artistic perspective into his athletic career.

For Gates, the realms of writing, photography, and running began to intertwine with one another in 2009, when he wrote a Trail Runner magazine article entitled “On a Shoestring,” which highlights three months of his travels in Europe, living off of nothing more than the clothes off of his back and the money he won from races.

Over the years, Gates became more in tune as a storyteller and he began to notice more about his surroundings, including others’ actions as well as his own. Gates says that “when you’re having an experience knowing that you want to retell the experience, [it] makes you pay attention to it differently, and I would say even closer. It makes you pay attention to people’s words and what you like about someone or what you dislike about them. And it allows you to really reassess and see what it is about someone or something that has a positive or negative effect on you.”

This perspective is very similar to one gained by athletes, runners in particular, that is the result of consistently pushing the body to its limit. By doing so, they can gain both internal and external benefits that reveal minor changes in routine and how it affects the body and mind. It is only natural that Gates integrated storytelling and running in order to captivate others with astute observations of the world.

In 2015, Gates collaborated with Salomon on several short films. Each project captured an essence of running outside the realm of competition, a philosophy Gates describes as “running beyond the bib.”

This is what Gates went searching for when he departed from Folly Beach, South Carolina on March 1, 2017, running all the way to San Francisco, California over the course of five months. Shortly after the 2016 election, with the United States under new political leadership, Gates set out to run through many counties deemed politically “red.” His path traced a similar course of many historical westward journeys that traversed American soil, including that of Lewis and Clark, as well as the Trail of Tears. In his book, Cross Country: A 3,700-mile Run To Explore Unseen America, Gates explains, “to cross a place on foot is to observe and participate in a vast and complex web of infrastructure. It is to experience the history of that place in a very real and personal way. It is to have a better understanding of what that place is.”

Gates didn’t know quite what to expect as he ran through the South, but he learned a great deal about the goodness of all people. Gates says, “[when] people see this skinny guy with a beard, wearing practically nothing at all and carrying very little, their first inclination in talking to me (or somebody like me) isn’t what my political beliefs are, or whether I believe in the Second Amendment, or any of these things. They want to know about my trip, and about me. And the same goes in reverse, I want to learn about them.”

Simple interactions between strangers illuminated the influence external factors play in people’s everyday lives. “We’re led to believe by media, by family, by so many different things… that there are really big differences from one society to another, or from one state to another, or from one political belief to another,” says Gates. “We’re very much products of our environments.” Gates’ trip, aside from providing him hundreds of miles of solitude at a time and plenty of time to reflect on his own personal morals or beliefs, taught him a lot about people and how to overcome the factors that sway us from the real and raw truth. “I learned… that it’s extremely important for us to step outside of our comfort zone,” says Gates, “and get to know people without the assistance of… news or any of these things and talk to people one on one and really try our best to think on our own.”

During his TransAmericana journey, Gates largely refused financial aid available to him from sponsors, insisting he use his own money, around $5,000 he saved up prior to setting off. With no other external assistance, save for the periodic aid to film small portions of his trek or an arranged care-package (of not much more than a new pair of running shoes) sent by friends or family members to post offices throughout the trip, Gates spent most of his time in solitude. To endure on a shoestring budget is not something new to Gates, but as he completed thousands of miles of exploration he wanted to make the trip financially attainable so those who are inspired to partake on a similar adventure are not discouraged from the possibility.

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Over a year after arriving in California, when he submerged himself in the Pacific Ocean after successfully crossing the country, Gates grappled with a way to continue to grow as a runner and a person. Once again he decided on downsizing significantly but undertaking a feat no less astounding. From continental to just one city, Gates wanted to further explore his own backyard and get to know the people within it by running every single street in San Francisco. The reason? “It’s as simple as empathy,” says Gates.

He wanted to look others in the eye, people that may normally be passed by without a second glance or too wrapped up in their own routine to make a simple connection with a stranger. From November to mid- December of 2018, Gates traversed 1,300 miles of streets stopping along the way to chat with those he encountered. The project itself made quite the ripple in a community of runners who heard of this undertaking. “Outwardly, the

Every Single Street project has been [my] most rewarding [project], on a community level,” says Gates. “I had done that project hoping that other people would take it on, and I really had no idea that it would take off as it has.”

#EverySingleStreet can now be found plastered along many social media posts of runners getting to know their own neighborhoods or whole cities, and it is something Gates has since attempted in four other cities, one of which being his new home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Gates has now settled down with his wife, Liz, but has yet to give up travel or running expeditions. He hosts two running trips, Hut Run Hut and Bus Run Bus, where others join him for a laid out running excursion. The Hut Run Hut trip begins in Aspen and ends at Red Cliff Mountain just over one week later, with participants sleeping in huts along the way, an experience that retraces the stomping grounds of Gates’ younger life. Bus Run Bus takes advantage of a vehicle with sleeping quarters, allowing participants to easily change locations while exploring new trails in western America.

“It’s really important to me to share that experience with other people,” says Gates. “I know that [for] a lot of people it’s simply not in the cards for them to take five months off and have an experience like that.”

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Gates has been refining his own niche in the sport of running for the past 25 years, each day finding joy in its dynamic ability to simplify life into one action. His mantra: run “fun not fast,” and encourage others to participate with him.

Running has not provided all the answers to life’s questions by any means, but it has strengthened Gates’ sense of self and brings him closer to those around him. He considers his biggest accomplishment of all his “consistency and dedication to the sport,” in which he always strives to grow, pushes his perceived limits, and explores something deeper and more personal in his life, while simultaneously sharing that experience. Gates encourages others to find their own driving force, and run with it.