News and Notes

This week’s What’s Up In Ultra is our 50th consecutive column that highlights events on our  UltraRunning Calendar each week. We’re always looking to improve and would love to hear any feedback you have about the weekly column, so drop a comment below. Standouts on our calendar for the first official week of fall include a mountain 100-miler in the Wasatch Mountains, a point-to-point 50k in the Cascade mountains and a classic 50-miler in the Green Mountain State.

It’s finally starting to feel like fall in many places around the country and on our UltraRunning Calendar, with a welcome relief from late summer heat and some much-needed precipitation to help big wildfires out West. Leading our calendar is a Colorado ultra with the biggest ultrarunning prize purse in the world, a qualifying race for next year’s Barkley Marathons and the state of Georgia’s longest-standing 100-miler.

We’re closing in on the official end of summer on our UltraRunning Calendar but still have some heavy hitters to wet your ultrarunning appetite. Whether you prefer a high-altitude 100-miler in Colorado, a historic Southern California 50k, a Canadian technical 50-miler or a fun, low-key race, we’ve got you covered.

Memorial Day arrives on our UltraRunning Calendar as the unofficial first weekend of summer, even though the big kick-off is still three weeks away. Whether you’re celebrating your kids’ break from school with an ultra camping weekend or keeping it close to home, we’ve got you covered with the top events around North America during this three-day weekend. 

Aleksandr Sorokin is destroying ultra records. Already the first human to go sub-11 hours for 100 miles and the holder of the 12-hour and 24-hour world records, the 40-year-old Lithuanian now also possesses the 100k world record. Sorokin ran 6:05:40 for the 100k, besting the previous record of 6:09:14 set by Japan’s Nao Kazami in June 2018. For those of you playing at home, that’s a 5:53-per-mile average.

We’ve hit a bit of a mini-milestone this first week of May with the 30th consecutive “What’s Up in Ultra.” It coincides nicely with our UltraRunning Calendar which includes 42 different races across the US this weekend.