Until Sunday.
On the day Bourgeois vowed would mark her last competitive race up and down the foreboding slope overlooking her hometown, she discovered saying goodbye came with a gut-check.
And in seizing her seventh straight championship, the woman who so often had dispatched the field with the mountain version of a knockout blow finally found out she could counter-punch, too.
Trailing Olympic nordic skier Holly Brooks by nearly two minutes halfway through the race, Bourgeois, the race's preeminent downhiller, stormed down the perilous pitch that averages 38 degrees, caught Brooks about 200 meters from the finish on Fourth Avenue, crossed the line and collapsed in exhaustion and elation.
In the last stages of her pursuit, Bourgeois said, fortitude buoyed her as much as fitness.
"I started to see the gap close and my legs went numb,'' said Bourgeois, 34. "So I ran with my heart.''
In her six previous Mount Marathon victories, Bourgeois won by an average of 3 minutes, 48 seconds. In that span, the closest anyone came to her -- and that's a generous description -- was 1:45.
Sunday, though, Bourgeois clocked 51:48, four seconds off her personal best, to top Brooks by 10 seconds. That marked the closest finish in Alaska's most celebrated footrace since Bourgeois' coach, three-time champion Sam Young, tied eight-time champion Bill Spencer in 1986.
Bourgeois' come-from-behind win in the 83rd edition of the Fourth of July race that lures thousands of spectators to the shores of Resurrection Bay left her just one shy of tying Nina Kemppel's record of eight straight wins.
As Bourgeois watched Brooks descend a snowfield near mountain's peak, with more than a minute of climbing left until she circled the rock that marks the turnaround, she knew she had no margin for error.
"That could have broke me right there,'' she said. "I just dug down. I knew I'd never had a race where I had really had to dig, so when I rounded the rock I started digging.''
By the time she reached the 90-degree right-hand turn off Jefferson Street and onto Fourth Avenue, perhaps 400 meters from the finish, Bourgeois figured she trailed Brooks by 10-15 meters. The duo was greeted by a cheering, clapping, howling crowd four- and five-deep -- "a tunnel of noise,'' Brooks called it.
Bourgeois gathered the new-found speed born of training intervals on the track under Young's tutelage and passed Brooks, who did not have the energy to answer.
"This was the most painful thing,'' Brooks, 28, said of the last quarter-mile. "She came flying by me. I couldn't move.''
Both women collapsed just after crossing the finish line. Bourgeois fell onto her back, spittle trailing down her jaw. Brooks propped on her knees and forearms, and gulped deep breaths.
For Bourgeois, Sunday's race marked the end of her Mount Marathon racing. She has a burgeoning business, Nature's Nectars, where she makes coffee, tea and smoothies. She has two children and says she's ready to move on after devoting a decade of her life to the race. There was no Favre-like wiggle room in her declaration.
"I was foaming at the mouth, and I wanted to go out in style,'' Bourgeois said. "This is it. I'm done -- 100 percent. It's time.''
All the training and all the expectations placed upon her by herself and others is wearying.
"It's a burden," she said. "It wears, and it's a heavy load, and I'm ready to take that backpack off.''
The duel between Bourgeois and Brooks capped a remarkably fast race on a day when conditions -- overcast with a breeze but no rain --were ideal.
Bourgeois sniffed her personal record (PR), and the contenders behind her cranked out PRs.
Brooks' 51:58 proved a PR by 3:31. Third-place finisher Kikkan Randall clocked 53:29 for a PR by 2:35. Laura Brosius with a fourth-place finish in 55:18. Fifth-place finisher Rachel Dow of Seward racked a 58:14, a PR by 3:00. Sixth-place Danielle Pratt (58:30) clobbered her PR by 5:16. And seventh-place Gail Taylor debuted in 59:32.
Bourgeois, Brooks and Randall began the ascent together. Twelve minutes into the race, Brooks broke from a power-hiking mode into running, and gapped her rivals.
"She starts running like a friggin' freight train,'' Bourgeois said. "I saw that power and said, 'Wow.' "
Brooks, who led much of last year's race until heat exhaustion and dehydration forced a trip to the emergency room before finishing, said she needed to move on the uphill because Bourgeois is such a downhill demon.
"I'm not trained on the downhill, so I pretty much have to get any every second I can,'' Brooks said.
Randall, a three-time Olympian and four-time Mount Marathon runner-up, marveled at both Brooks' uphill surge and Bourgeois' downhill dominance.
"It just goes to show you it's a two-part race," Randall said.
And on this day, the top three women slugged it out. Bourgeois walked away delighted and content. Brooks reached her goals after last year's meltdown -- she ran safely, had fun and bagged a strong result. And Randall clocked a PR for second straight year, despite being in the midst of a hard-core training block for her ski career.
Brooks also finished second to Bourgeois in 2008.
"I would have liked to win,'' Brooks said, smiling. "But almost. Next year.''
By then, Bourgeois said, she'll be enjoying the Fourth of July, watching the race instead of competing, and hanging out with her kids, Zen and Coral.
"I'm going to drink beer, walk around with my kids and hoot and holler,'' she said.
Find Doyle Woody's blog at adn.com/hockeyblog or call him at 257-4335.
Important warning about e-mails purporting to be from the adn.com staff.