Dave Mackey’s left leg never had a chance.

While he was scrambling down from a local peak on May 23, 2015, a loose rock sent him crashing 50 feet down a wall of scree before landing on his left leg and smashing the tibia into eight pieces. That was just the first strike against it.

The second was that the 300-pound rock that had snapped his tibia like kindling also tore his skin open as it landed. A friend at the scene described it as “bones sticking out everywhere.” Muscle and bone were open to the elements, leading to a ceaseless string of infections and brutal antibiotics. Surgery after surgery, the leg wouldn’t, couldn’t, heal.

The third strike was Dave Mackey.

Rocks are tough. But Dave Mackey is tougher.

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Greg Mionske
Mackey, wearing his walking prosthetic in his Leadville, Colorado home.

Just after dawn on August 18, 2018, 48-year-old Dave Mackey emerges from a trail in the San Isabel National Forest. He runs up a wide, dirt road at roughly 10,500 feet in Leadville, Colorado, a slight hitch in his stride.

It’s Mackey’s third race in eight days. He finished a 100-mile mountain bike a week ago and ran a trail 10K the next day. Earlier in July, he paired a 50-mile mountain bike race on Saturday with a 50-mile ultra on Sunday. And he started the summer running a trail marathon with more than 6,300 feet of elevation gain. Now, he’s tackling the Leadville Trail 100-Mile Run, and he’s about 20 miles in.

This barrage of events is the Leadman and Leadwoman Race Series. All six races start and finish in rugged, thin-aired Leadville, Colorado (elevation 10,152 feet). Only about 100 endurance athletes attempt the challenge each year and fewer than half finish. Mackey’s done it before, back in 2014. He came in second. This year is very different.

“Just 80 more to go,” he quips as passes the aid station.

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Greg Mionske
Mackey leaves downtown Leadville, roughly a half mile into the Leadville Trail 100 Run.

Dave Mackey is the kind of fast that never leaves. Even during his 15 months of post-fall recovery, he wasn’t not fast, he was just on a break.

In one way, he’s faster now. He finished 2018’s Leadville Trail 100 MTB almost 18 minutes quicker than when he raced it in 2014, four years younger and on two good legs.

But on foot, descents cost him time. It’s where he used to excel, his edge in races. As competitors picked their way down ankle-breaking trails, Mackey danced over them with the skill and speed of an ibex. Now down to one nimble foot, he steps more cautiously; but to be clear, it’s not slow.

Even a slower Dave Mackey is fast, because finishing a 100-mile ultra to cap off a series of events all above 9,000 feet requires, more than anything, that you keep moving forward. That’s never stopped being his greatest strength.

Almost two years after his amputation, you can’t say he’s moved on—part of his leg will always be missing—but he has absolutely moved forward. See him off the trails and it’s difficult to tell it even happened, at least when pants cover the prosthetic.

In his eyes there’s no hint of pain, suffering, or scarring. His stance is comfortable and relaxed. And he talks about his accident with the logic of an actuary. If he’d had his accident in his 20s, he’d be devastated. His 70s or 80s would be better, he adds, but 40s isn’t bad. Is he joking? Yes and no.

His experience as a physician assistant provides context. From his job, Dave Mackey knows bad. Losing a leg is a challenge, he says, but not bad, especially below the knee. A stroke, he says, is bad. A freak accident, like becoming a quadriplegic, is bad. He has a challenge.

The accident freed Mackey from the requirements of fighting to be the fastest at every event. No longer gunning for wins and records, Mackey doesn’t do speed workouts anymore. That’s fine by him—he never liked them anyway. Now he revels in what he considers garbage miles. Running for running’s sake, he says, smiling. But he is still fast.

Dave Mackey’s hindsight about that May day is crystal clear. He could have noticed that the recent spring rains had softened the mountain scree. He could have seen that other rocks had moved. And he could have used two hands, instead of one, to steady himself.

Mackey had left his home in Boulder, Colorado, on a damp morning to run to the summit of South Boulder Peak, follow a ridgeline to the top of Bear Peak, and then tag the Green Mountain summit. The route, he estimates, “is probably a 15- or 17-mile loop. I don’t track any of that stuff.”

As he began his descent of Bear Peak, Mackey stepped on a giant rock—one he says he’d stepped on hundreds of times before. The rock moved, and the ground shifted, caving in beneath him. He clawed at stones and brush to stop the fall, but nothing held. He tumbled 50 feet down the steep, rocky slope. When he finally came to a stop, he was on his back, and the 300-pound rock was pinning that left leg to the ground.

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Greg Mionske
Mackey passes near the Leadville Trail 100 Run Twin Lakes aid station.

Later, Mackey will say that the rock landing on his leg was lucky: It could have crushed his head or chest. He’s earnest, but after a pause, his dry humor adds, “Or it could have missed me entirely.”

Paul Gross, a friend, 53, was out for his own trail run when he heard Mackey yelling. “I saw Dave, on his back, with his head on the edge of a drop-off,” says Gross. “And then I saw the massive rock.”

After calling 911, Gross used a branch as a lever to lift the rock off Mackey’s shattered leg. Mackey saw bone everywhere and exposed muscle. But the sight was reassuring. A medical professional, he noted a lack of pooling blood. That told him he was going to live.

Lucid despite the fall and the pain, Mackey told Gross to hold the leg in traction. That required pulling the leg down from below the fracture to realign the bones and relax the muscles. “I could feel the bones grinding,” he says. “Dave was screaming in pain.”

More runners and rescuers, including 24 volunteer members of the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, arrived at the scene. They administered IV painkillers and ketamine before Gross straightened Mackey’s leg. The team placed the leg in an extremity splint, and then put Mackey in a full-body vacuum splint, secured to a steel litter.

A precarious evacuation ensued with anchored ropes, belays, and careful hands carrying Mackey’s stretcher away from the dropoff and down the steep, rocky slopes to the trailhead. Mackey calls this part surreal. Packaged in the litter and covered with a heat blanket and sleeping bag, he remembers watching the sky and trees pass above.

“I’d call it a calming experience,” he says. “Compared to prior hours, it was pretty soothing.”

Four hours after his fall, Mackey reached the trailhead, with his wife Ellen waiting for him. “I was so surprised he was talking,” she says. “You could see the exposed muscle and bone…the way he was so calm was odd to me.”

Mackey was rushed to the Boulder Community Hospital, where he was stabilized and sent on to a specialty hospital in Denver, where he underwent his first of 14 surgeries.

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Greg Mionske
Mackey's wife and son guide him through the outbound Twin Lakes aid station near mile 38.

Despite excelling at a sport that requires hours of silent, solo training, Dave Mackey is not a self-obsessed athlete. Before the accident, Mackey would wake up at 4 a.m. to train on the bike or on foot to be back in time to walk the kids to school.

And when asked about his desire to return to running, Mackey clarifies that “running isn’t everything,” but admits it is in his Top 5. Also in his Top 5 are his daughter Ava, 10, son Connor, 8, wife Ellen, 48, and his career.

Dave Mackey once competed in a six-day, 300K snowshoe race through –35°F weather. The prize was a winner-take-all one-carat diamond worth about $11,000. He describes his motivation to win as not to test himself or prove himself fastest, but to justify his time away from his family. He understands he owes them for this absence. When he returned, the prize was added to Ellen’s wedding bands.

One of Dave Mackey’s biggest finish-line smiles ever recorded came on Father’s Day weekend, 2018. As he approached the end of the first Leadman event, the trail marathon, Ava and Connor emerged from the crowd to pace him home. Mackey is usually smiling in race pictures. But it’s a hybrid grin-grimace, like he’s laughing at himself in acknowledgment of the absurdity of what he’s doing. With Ava and Connor, his face relaxes and his eyes brighten. He’s really smiling.

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He’s not one to focus on himself, says Ellen. Though he is the definition of a winner, a textbook champion, “he’s always rooted for the underdog.”

He gravitates toward jobs that help other people, she says. When he first moved to Colorado 26 years ago, Mackey worked at the Breckenridge Outdoor Education Center, teaching adaptive athletes to ski. He’s also led wilderness courses for Outward Bound, worked as a rock-climbing guide, and taught science and social studies at a high school in an underserved Denver neighborhood.

Mackey consistently downplays his race achievements when interviewed. For every course record, he says, there was a DNF (likely an overstatement). Of course, his DNFs are not from a failing of will or strength. It’s a failing stomach, he says. Mackey always raced hard, but occasionally his stomach would shut down, close up, leaving liquid to slosh and nutrients to sit unabsorbed

Since he won’t crow over them, know that his course records have included the Quad Dipsea, Waldo 100K, Headlands 50K, Bandera 100K, and a fastest-known-time for the Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim, crossing the Grand Canyon and back in just under seven hours. He has also, by the way, won U.S. trail-running championships at 50K and 50 miles.

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Greg Mionske
Mackey, one day before the start of the Leadville Trail 100 Run.

Without meaning to, Dave Mackey downplays his amputation, calling it “a hassle.” Following up for emphasis, he elevates it to “a real pain in the ass.”

His initial surgery didn’t take, due to infection, so doctors removed pieces of bone and attached an external fixator, an unwieldy medical contraption that surrounded his entire lower leg, with screws extending from inside his leg bones to the framework of the device. He wore the cumbersome “ex-fix” for the next three months, walking with crutches and a heavy limp, and often in pain.

“Wearing it was like an iron lung for the leg,” he says. “Not pleasant to walk around in.”

More surgeries, with multiple bone, muscle, and skin grafts, followed.

“He wasn’t himself all that time,” says Ellen. “It was hard on all of us.”

Hard is relative.

“Moments were hard,” Mackey counters. “It was definitely a funk during that first summer. In the fall, the scar tissue in my leg was painful.” He quickly adds, “It wasn’t constant pain, on my back in agony. But it was frustrating, for sure.”

Friend and fellow racer Bob Africa, 46, saw Mackey’s frustration. “This guy who was always strong and durable, happy-go-lucky and goofy, is just hurting,” he says. “There was a sadness. You could feel that he just wanted to get back to a sense of normalcy.”

More than a year after the fall, Mackey’s leg still wouldn’t heal, hampered by incessant infection. He couldn’t run, ski, climb, or even walk his kids to school without limping in pain. The only future he saw for his leg was more hurt.

Around 4:00 p.m. Dave Mackey reaches Winfield Aid Station, halfway turnaround of the Leadville Trail 100. He doesn’t want to leave.

He’s blown, he tells Africa, his pacer. His quads, his hip flexors, they’re gone. He’s done, not going to finish.

Africa knows Dave Mackey, and he knows he’s not done. So Africa begins a magic act, passing him ibuprofen, rubbing his legs, feeding him, getting him rehydrated.

Body sated, Africa moves on to Mackey’s mind. “Just walk out of the aid station so everyone
can cheer for you,” he tells Mackey, “and when we get around the corner, you can call it.”

Mackey agrees and starts walking. There’s a massive climb ahead, but uphills are easier, putting less pressure on his residual limb. Mackey is building momentum at the Mile 55.5 Hope Pass Summit (elevation 12,600 feet) aid station, and they stop only long enough for Africa to refill their water.

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At Mile 60, he’s rolling and there’s a cheering section staked out. Ellen, Ava, Connor, and friends clap, hoot, and holler for Mackey. Right there, 10 miles after begging to quit, Mackey felt like he’d won the whole thing.

The descents still hurt. His stump rubs with every step down the steep, rutted, loose-dirt roads. But over the climbs back to downtown Leadville, Mackey’s revival continues. At Mile 69 he’s passed 107 runners since Winfield, and by Mile 87, another 41.

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Greg Mionske
Mackey takes in mid-race nutrition near mile 70.

Fifteen months after the accident, he didn’t have a left leg, he had an anchor. Whenever he tried to do something, he was met with pain holding him back, dragging him down. Bone and muscle grafts couldn’t take, under the attack of infection. Scar tissue brought more hurt. Even the rod holding his tibia together failed.

In September of 2016, after consulting surgical specialists and amputees, Mackey decided to have his left leg amputated below the knee. It wasn’t about running, he says. “I wanted to be as functional as possible and not in pain, for my family.”

Ellen says, “As soon as he made the decision, I could see the relief on his face.”

Here, Mackey agrees, saying it was a weight off his shoulders.

WATCH: Dave Mackey returns to Bear Peak, the site of his accident.

preview for Newswire: Ultrarunner Dave Mackey Returns to Site of Accident

The night before surgery was Halloween. With his spirits and humor returning, Mackey had a going-away party for his leg. He dressed as an old man with a cane, and had friends sign his skin.

After the surgery, it took Dave Mackey a year to relearn how to run. When asked about this challenge, he emphasizes figuring out where his stump would blister, taping it just like he learned to tape his feet for ultras. He likens adapting from his 46-year-old lower left leg to a carbon prosthetic to swapping out your old running shoes for a new pair with a different heel drop. With practice, he says, muscles get used to it. He lost a quad muscle above the amputation, too, but his remaining muscles did adapt.

“I’d be a little more wobbly without it,” he jokes.

The prosthetic is built for running, a triangular carbon blade with an outsole glued to the bottom. To go for a run, he tapes up and then pulls a mesh sock over the rounded point below the knee. Over that, he slides a neoprene sleeve with the
attachment socket. His cycling and walking prosthetics attach here, too. When he stands, the blade compresses under his weight. This is his leg now.

At 4:55:14 a.m., on August 19, Dave Mackey becomes the last runner to finish under 25 hours for the 2018 Leadville Trail 100. That earns him the big finishers’ belt buckle.

He smiles. He hugs Ellen. When the emcee asks for a few words about the race, he gives just that, grinning but deadpan: “It was brutal.”

Hours later Mackey says, “Well, I got my qualifier to Western States.” He’s joking, but also not. He will sign up for the 100-miler.

And days later, in interviews, Dave Mackey doesn’t downplay Leadman, calling his finish his “hugest achievement.” But he quickly adds he hopes there’s something greater in store.

Asked why Leadman didn’t produce a teary finish-line moment, he runs the emotional math and replies, “Death is something to cry over. Leadman is not, for me.”

He finished 12th in the Leadman series, far better than he expected, but he doesn’t act impressed with himself. He says his 2nd-place Leadman in 2014 was more painful. His perception of pain, he tries to explain, is more abstract.

Anyway, he says, he’s a get it done and move on guy.

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Greg Mionske
Mackey, shortly after finishing the Leadville Trail 100 Run.
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Greg Mionske
Mackey kisses his wife at the Leadville Trail 100 Run finish.
Headshot of Lisa Jhung
Lisa Jhung
Lisa Jhung writes about all things adventure and is the author of Running That Doesn't Suck: How To Love Running (Even If You Think You Hate It) and Trailhead: The Dirt on All Things Trail Running.