Jeffrey Stern

As we enter the last month of 2021, there is no shortage of options to close out your own UltraRunning Calendar for the year. Taking the lead this week is the 2021 USATF 100-Mile Trail National Championships at the Brazos Bend 100 in Needles, Texas.

Running an ultramarathon after a Thanksgiving feast is either a really good or disastrously bad idea. Fortunately, with 36 hours to fully digest and potentially nap it off, you can test your own take on the racing after the meal at a plethora of post-holiday, caloric burning sessions around the country. 

Even as the temperatures start to dip heading into Thanksgiving week, the UltraRunning Calendar remains stacked from Georgia up to Maryland, across to Ohio, south to Texas, into Utah and over to the West Coast in Oregon and California. The 59th Annual JFK 50 Mile, America’s oldest ultramarathon, leads our weekend lineup this Saturday, November 20, starting in downtown Boonsboro, Maryland.

The highlight of the upcoming weekend has to be the notoriously swift Tunnel Hill 100 in Vienna, Illinois, on Saturday. The flat and fast course saw rising star Taggart VanEtten set the second-fastest time last year, just over 10 minutes behind Zach Bitter’s 2018 100-mile trail world record in 12:08:36. The two will face off head-to-head on Saturday in what is likely to be a quest not only for the win, but a new course record, potential world record and the first sub-12 hour 100-mile finish the course has seen.

Despite being the weekend after Halloween, there’s clearly never a dead weekend in ultrarunning. Even without a huge event taking place to kick off the month of November, nearly every corner of the country has something going on.

Leading the charge this Halloween weekend is the highly anticipated Javelina Jundred. The 100-mile distance has nearly 600 entrants and is a newly minted Western States Golden Ticket race. The 100K race boasts 300 entrants, helping to make this Aravaipa Racing event in Fountain Hills, Arizona, one of the largest event weekends of the entire year. What’s Up in Ultra in your community this weekend that we should know about?

The Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, nearly moved into the fourth night on Tuesday and had to be included in this week’s What’s Up in Ultra. Harvey Lewis outlasted the competition for a new world record in the last person standing world championship at 85 hours or 354.16 miles. Regardless, it’s a busy race weekend across the country as fall weather starts to roll in.

With 60 entrants from around the globe, the Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, on the property of Gary “Lazarus Lake” Cantrell, features a rematch of some of the top finishers over the last few years. Athletes from over 20 countries are expected on the start line of what’s quickly becoming one of the most popular ultrarunning disciplines around the world.

After nearly a 17-month hiatus, the notoriously competitive Lake Sonoma 50 returned to action this past weekend in Northern California’s renowned Sonoma County. In addition to the traditional 50-miler on Saturday, the race director and owner of Healdsburg Running Company, Skip Brand, recruited Keira Henninger to add a 100k race on Sunday.

After dedicating himself to an education in engineering and working nearly 80 hours a week as an information technology professional, Brandon Miller knew what it would take to achieve his dreams. In the energy infrastructure industry, he was operating on the ground in the harsh elements of northern Alberta, Canada. He originally thought his career was a dream come true but seemed on the brink of burnout way too early. Exhaustion, a decline in health and most importantly, unhappiness, had him soul-searching for change.

Looking back on the last few decades, Merrell has been synonymous with hardcore hikers, dominating the footwear sector of the outdoor industry with their innovation, style and durability. Afterall, they were founded when Rossignol ski company executives Clark Matis and John Schweizer teamed up with Randal Ivan Merrell of Utah, a craftsman of custom leather boots.

Before a race, we train our hearts out, study the course, prepare our mind, visualize success, taper marvelously, sleep more and eat all the right things. Yet for reasons beyond comprehension, sometimes the day just doesn’t go the way we envisioned. It’s a tough pill to swallow for any athlete, but you can find solace in the fact that it does happen to everyone at some point.

If you’ve been training for over a year without an opportunity to test yourself, what happens when race day rolls around? Minus a few changes, much of the race day routine remains the same and there’s plenty of reasons to start feeling amped about the big day ahead. Here’s how to maximize the fun and get the most out of your racing experience in 2021 and beyond.

Ask anyone at last month’s Canyons 100K which athlete was grinning ear-to-ear at aid stations and clearly having the absolute time of his life, and you’ll likely get one answer: Preston Cates. The 23-year-old finished in sixth place and was just 21 minutes off the podium in one of the most competitive ultras in the country—and this was just his third official ultra finish.

I made a long trip up to the still-thawing-out Pacific Northwest for the 19th Annual Peterson Ridge Rumble, previously advertised as a 40-miler, but really known to only be 60k. Either way, it’s a fast and runnable course with two big climbs and tons of flowy single track southwest of Sisters, Oregon, in the Deschutes National Forest.

After nabbing the 1,200-mile FKT on the Ice Age Trail last summer, Coree Woltering has already completed four ultras in just the first two months of the year. Most recently, he finished the Black Canyon Ultras “double” he dubbed “the Black Canyon 100,” running the 100k race on Saturday and coming back bright and early the next morning to compete the 60k course.

New York-based filmmaker and ultrarunner Austin Meyer’s love for storytelling originated in the fourth grade after he got in trouble at school. Since then, Meyer, who released his film about the Western States Endurance Run, “Golden Hour,” just last year, has loved to tell stories. Whether they are about inspiring individuals or global crises, his knack both behind the lens and beyond is apparent.

When you win a high school cross-country race on campus, and your English teacher is the head track and field coach, not only are you guaranteed a spot on the track team, but there is little chance you’ll be able weasel your way out of it.

Despite lower participant numbers, it was a race for the record books. The winner of the race, Hayden Hawks, set a new course record in 5:18:40, nearly four minutes faster than Jim Walmsley’s time from 2016. And for the first time since 2017, when Emile Harrison Torrence ran the fourth fastest time ever in 6:27:43, a woman cracked the top ten as Camille Herron ran the eighth fastest time ever in 6:31:14.

Like a duck takes to water, or perhaps more appropriate for the Austin, Texas-based runner and photographer, like a cowboy takes to wearing boots, Jobie Williams’ side gig as a photographer was happenstance.

Dan Barger was registered for Western States this year and looking for a way to still get out and experience the course after it was canceled. It seemed that 2020 was the perfect year to try and run a double Western States. The consensus among the tight-knit Auburn, California, endurance community was that it had not been done, and thus, the “Western States 200” was born.

“It seemed like it became a self-fulfilling prophecy that I was always going to get second,” Tyler Green laments. “I shouldn’t put myself in this pecking order. To come to that realization that I should just go for the win, not necessarily that I am going to win, but I should go for it and just see what happens, is pretty cool.”

Adam Kimble crossed the finish line in Tahoe City with a new supported FKT on the Tahoe Rim Trail. Says Kimble, “I love the supported effort from the standpoint of that it’s really fun to get your core group of people together, your team in life, and go after something together.”

For Latoya Snell, there’s something about the smaller ultra community. She’s drawn to the enthusiasm shown for new runners toeing the line and feels right at home on the trails. It’s why she encourages others to invest in themselves by getting out the door each day from her home in Brooklyn, NY. Leading by example, it’s a risk that Latoya continues to take and one where she finds that the hardest things can become the best teaching moments.

Originally Candice Burt had planned to spend the week before her next race, the Badwater 135, adapting to the heat in the Badwater Basin, but with Badwater’s official cancellation, she instead spent a week at altitude in Lake Tahoe for her new goal: the 171-mile Tahoe Rim Trail unsupported fastest known time.

During the long summer days, the sun rises before 5 a.m. in Minneapolis, Minnesota, home to the hardworking mother of four, founder of Native Women Running and ultrarunner, Verna Volker. She heads out the door for her daily morning ritual: a run towards the rising sun.

We caught up with Kevin Youngblood last week in the midst of what he considers to be the most pivotal moment of his life. “I’m in a truck on the Ice Age Trail at 2:30 a.m. answering questions to be featured in UltraRunning Magazine,” just as he was one day away from finishing a three-plus-week trip following Coree Woltering as he set a new FKT on the trail in 21 days, 13 hours and 35 minutes.

Mount Shasta Trail Runs, to be held on June 20, appears to be the first sanctioned race of any kind to take place in California since the Pioneer Spirit 50 Miler went off on March 14, just five days prior to Governor Gavin Newsom’s statewide stay-at-home order to help combat the spread of the coronavirus.

The independence and freedom that running had given me since seventh grade was stripped away. I knew that getting back on my feet and leaning into running—rather than away from it—was a step forward in my recovery.

It’s not often that you find a dehydrated and perhaps, still hallucinating ultrarunner who just spent a full day running 100 miles rushing off to clean up in order to get back to the finish line and cheer on other racers. Arguably even less frequently, do you find the outright winner of a 100-miler hustling to get his camera to snap shots of runners coming through the final chute of glory as the “golden hour” of the race approaches.