that staying silent also heightened his other senses, enhanced his listening skills, reduced his stress level through the relative quiet, and improved his sleep. The longest and arguably the most difficult challenge was the Grand Slam, which tested the limits of his physical endurance and personal resolve. His total time was 109 hours, 47 minutes, and 11 seconds. That’s more than four and a half days of running, day and night.
PATH TO THE TRAILS On the shelves and walls of Phil’s office, awards and souvenirs from his decades of trail racing adventures intermingle with photographs of his wife, Robin, and their four children and mementoes from some of the entrepreneurs and emerging companies in which he and his firm have invested. Out the windows stretch the green expanses of the Presidio, a park-like campus of offices and open spaces within the city limits of San Francisco overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Phil logs his weekday miles in the Presidio or on one of the trails in the Marin Headlands, Muir Woods, or Mount Tamalpais State Park, all along his commute home to Mill Valley, located about 10 miles north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate. He runs for an hour six days a week, and on Saturday or Sunday, he sets off on trails near home for a weekly four-hour run, accompanied by a friend or a good audio book on his iPhone. He has followed this training regimen for years, along with core strength work, stretching, and regular injury-preventing massages. Phil started running when he was a freshman at Loomis, a day student from Coventry, Connecticut. Freshmen were not allowed to play varsity soccer, and one of Phil’s best friends, Pat Hayden ’86, ran cross country, so Phil joined the team. Sally Zimmer, now Sally Knight, was the head coach then, as she is today. “It was a great team,” he says. “I had the most fun in my running career in the practices at Loomis. Great personalities,” including John Eustis ’84, Kermit Adams ’85, and others, he recalls. The team was good, too, he says, opening his training journal from 1985, when he was a senior and captain of the cross country team. In the back, he consults a handwritten log of his races. The cross country team placed fourth in the cross country New England Championship 30
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Meet that year, and he finished seventh overall. “Not too bad,” he says with a shrug. After graduating from Loomis, Phil continued to run cross country and track at Hamilton College. He won the New England Small College Athletic Conference individual championship in cross country his senior year and set several track records, one of which, the indoor 5,000 meters (14:18), stood for many years after he graduated. One of his teammates at Hamilton was Andrew Bartlett, who went on to coach cross country at Loomis alongside Sally, and still does. After graduating from Hamilton in 1990, Phil ran for Nike’s West Coast team in Los Angeles for a few years before moving to San Francisco. While many lifelong and novice runners test their competitive mettle in road races and challenge themselves to complete marathons, Phil skipped over road racing and the marathon distance almost entirely (although he did run the Maine Coast Marathon when he was in high school with Sally and some teammates). “When I moved to San Francisco in ’93 all my friends were doing ultras, so I tried the American River 50-Miler,” Phil says. He was hooked.
PHIL SANDERSON ’86 HOME: Mill Valley, California WORK: Managing Director, IDG Ventures, a San Francisco-based independent boutique venture capital firm. Phil’s particular focus is on video game, music, and software startups. FAMILY: Phil’s wife, Robin Shank Sanderson, is a nurse practitioner and a former medical researcher. They have four children, Bryce, 11; Sage, 13; Pierce, 15; and Logan, 16. EDUCATION: Loomis Chaffee 1986, Hamilton College 1990, Harvard Business School 1997
Ultramarathons are defined as races longer than 26.2 miles and are primarily contested on trails. Since that first 50-miler in 1993, Phil has completed 47 ultras, ranging in length from 50 kilometers (31 miles) to 100 miles. He hadn’t considered taking on the challenge of the Grand Slam, however, until a couple of years ago. “I feel my tolerance for Big Hairy Audacious Goals has gone up over time,” he says, and in 2014 he was running race times similar to those he’d achieved when he was in his 20s. He averaged 7:10-per-mile pace for a 50K trail race in early 2014, and later that year he placed 12th overall in the American River 50-Miler. So he decided to challenge himself to the Grand Slam of Ultrarunning. He tore a hamstring in the summer of 2014, and to give the injury time to heal, he had to take more than a year off from running. In late 2015, with his hamstring finally improving, he applied for a sponsor entry for the 2016 Western States 100, the first race in the Grand Slam. Entries to Western States are limited to 369, the number allowed to pass through the Granite Chief Wilderness section of the course, and are distributed primarily by lottery each December for the race the following June. “Automatic”
Phil fords the American River at mile 78 of the Western States Endurance Run. His wife, Robin, who was his pacer during that portion of the race, can be seen just behind him.