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This past June, the top two women and men at the sixth annual Broken Arrow Skyrace 52k in Olympic Valley, California, qualified for the 80k US Trail team competing at the inaugural World Mountain and Trail Running Championships.
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Marathon Des Sables (MDS) never shows mercy. I have taken that race for granted a few times and suffered the consequences. There’s always something new to learn. Some of the new things I tried went unexpectedly sideways this year. But hey, it’s all good: I survived and finished. Here is my humble take on a few items.
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Climbing up Little Cottonwood Canyon Road out of Cottonwood Heights via Salt Lake City to Snowbird Resort, the Wasatch Mountains dominate the skyline. If you’ve spent any time exploring them on foot, you know just how unforgiving they can be. That’s just why Karl “Speedgoat” Meltzer decided to organize the Speedgoat 50k 15 years ago.
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“She’s making history!” Devon Yanko’s pacer Ellie shouted as Yanko made her way through her last 12.5-mile lap at this year’s Umstead 100 Mile Endurance Race. Yanko came flying into the finish, clocking in at 14:23:13. With this, the 39-year-old seasoned elite became the first woman to win outright in this event’s 27-year history.
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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.
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The Grandmaster Ultras would be business as usual as far as most ultra events are concerned except, and apologies to younger runners here, you are required to have lived at least half a century in order to participate. Grandmaster, in other words, is where the older generation gets to feel young again and pursue their ultra dreams without all those pesky young runners gumming up the works.