Cobus and Caitie van den Berg seem like your average Midway couple.  Walk into their Berg Design Architects office in Park City, and they’re quietly and calmly working away, crafting the future homes of the town.  That piece of mind and modern, nature-inspired home design draws, in part, from the couple’s outside-work hobby: ultrarunning.  A hobby, Caitie joked, that their clients and friends may think they’re crazy for, ultrarunning entails running races from as little as 31 miles to as long as 200. The couple does a race or two each month to maintain their fitness, including next week’s Tahoe 200 trail race in Lake Tahoe, California. Another passion of the van den Bergs is animals, and so, they thought, why not turn the Tahoe 200 into a fundraiser for Nuzzles Co Rescue and Adoption in Park City, where they’ve adopted from in the past. As of midday Friday, they’ve helped raise $15,896 for the shelter with the goal of raising $20,000 by the end of the race on June 16. Caitie believes many of the donors are clients of Berg Design who think to themselves, “If they’re running this crazy race, the least I can do is donate to a good, local cause.” “Growing up in South Africa, my dad was a long-distance runner,” Cobus said about getting into ultrarunning. “My dad used to take me on these long runs as a youngster. I think that’s where my love for running started.” Cobus, who’s lived and worked in the U.S. since the late 1990s, met Caitie when briefly returning to South Africa. When first getting to know each other, the van den Bergs would run half-marathons and marathons together, eventually working their way toward longer distance trail races. They have lived in Midway since 2017.  “I discovered running later in my life,” Caitie said about her journey toward ultrarunning. “It feeds and nurtures your soul, and that’s why I keep doing it. When I need a stress release, I go into the mountains.” Cobus too finds peace and serenity in the outdoors. A trip from San Francisco, where he was living at the time, up to Tahoe, led to him living there and falling in love with mountain living.  “I think nature is a very powerful energy,” Cobus said. “As an architect, I draw all my inspiration from nature. … I think nature is the most perfect work of art that you’ll ever encounter, and to be able to put yourself in that environment and smell it, feel it and experience it is very special.”  The van den Bergs see ultrarunning as a way to get in touch with nature and disconnect from the otherwise busy world. They estimate that they’ve trained on about every trail in the Wasatch Back. The van den Bergs have run races so far in the U.S., Europe and Africa. They’ve raced the Tahoe 200 several times, also fundraising for Nuzzles Co in 2022, then raising $7,000. They love the trees, boulders and lake in Tahoe, all of which keep them coming back. The couple often finish the race in about 80 hours, which includes the about seven hours of sleep they’re able to get upon the pinestraws surrounding the trail during race weekend.  “It’s three or four days, and you go through so many phases of feeling amazing and feeling lousy,” Cobus said. “You cannot avoid that. … There’s been times where both of us have thought, ‘Oh, this is it, I can’t eat anymore, I feel nauseous, I just want to sleep. I’m going to stop the race like now.’ And if you just sit down, get some food into your body and maybe sleep for 10 minutes, you wake up and you’re running, feeling like you’ve never felt before.” While Cobus is 58 years old and Caitie 57, they don’t see their ultrarunning stopping anytime soon. They are eying another big race in the fall in the south of France, and Caitie will be running the New York Marathon again in November. The van den Bergs’ big reward for completing the Tahoe 200 will be a nice dinner together and just a couple of days off training.  “We are so privileged to have such an incredible natural environment around us: The textures, smells and freedom,” Cobus said. “I see it as a treat. You’re pampering yourself to be out there. … Go out there, and at some point just stop, observe and listen because it’s something that we’ve stopped doing.” The fundraiser can be found on Caitie’s GoFundMe page, with two $1,000-plus donations raising the total to nearly $16,000 as of Friday morning. The couple will head out to Tahoe early next week, with the race beginning the morning of June 12. The post Midway ultra runners prepare for Tahoe 200 trail race appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less