A short Canyons 100K report

Subtitled: Why did no one want to talk to me?

Quick recap: UTMB now runs a World Series of ultrarunning with 43 races around the world. Three of those are designated as UTMB Majors (one in the U.S., one in Europe, one in Asia-Pac). The UTMB Finals are then the big races in Mont Blanc at the end of August — with the UTMB ~100mi, the CCC 100K, and the OCC 55K (and some other smaller races too).

To get into the “Finals” you have to earn “stones” (ie. lottery tickets). It’s a whole ecosystem now and ultra runners have a lot of feelings about this.

See the Q&A from our Book Club chat with the author of the UTMB history book:

Q&A: The story behind UTMB

“Hoka Canyons Endurance Runs by UTMB” (known as Canyons) is the N. American UTMB Major — and I raced the 100km at it this past weekend. I wanted to do it, because 1. it’s about two hours from my house, 2. I was curious about these extreme ultras and wanted to try one, 3. I wanted to get some stones/lottery tickets to enter the UTMB circus (and the Majors offer double the stones), and 4. from a work perspective, I wanted to see what everyone is freaking about re:the ultra community vibe/future/growth.

Here are my Canyons takeaways from the experience:

These big races are very well-run events.

I think that is to be expected, but from a sheer logistical perspective there was never a point (besides our pre-race shuttle driver getting kinda lost) where things weren’t up to par: courses were well-marked (and that’s no small feat), aid stations were heavily stocked, there was extra water and ice even at the remote spots, and the volunteers were some of the most well-informed and prepared I’ve seen at aid stations — none of that ‘high school kids who can’t figure out what’s going on’ you often get at triathlons or marathons. It pays off to get and keep the community involved.

That being said — and maybe this is my triathlon background coming through — it wasn’t as much of A SCENE as I had been led to believe it would be.

Given it’s one of three Majors in the world and everyone had been talking about how corporate trail running’s become, I was prepared to be overwhelmed by crowds and lines and scene-ness. But it’s still trail running. Even though the course was very crowded for the first hour or two (like whoa! — watch this video of the start), you’re still going to ultimately spend a lot of time in the woods by yourself. You’re still going to finish to a mostly empty finish line and eat a burrito and go home. And the nature of the fact that the 2,000 athletes were spread out across four races, finishing at different times, meant you actually never really saw everyone — you only ever saw a fraction of the people involved. I never even ran into probably the dozen people who I knew were there. This is distinctly different than the mega marathons or than looped triathlon courses where the experience is very concentrated in one spot and extras are part of the vibe.

Which brings us to: Why did no one want to talk to me.

How you feel about the vibe of a race this long, ultimately, is going to come down to the few dozen runners who are near you, who you interact with, etc. And given my ability and how I ran, I basically ended up going back and forth with a handful of American women and a lot of European dudes. Like all international men around me. (I’m guessing because it was a Major, UTMB is big in Europe, they wanted to take a Cali vacay.) And the Euro guys did *not* want to chat. They (mostly) were very serious and focused, even if they spoke English. They did not like my jokes.

So, by seven or eight hours in, I really wanted a run buddy. While people were nice enough and I exchanged pleasantries with a few of the women and one or two of the guys, the “run buddy” concept might be a very American thing. The one guy I eventually did an hour or so with was another American, who also thought it was weird how little people were chatting.

Having done quite a few races in Europe, I can say this made the whole thing feel very oddly European (which I don’t loooove). Since the vibe of your experience is defined a lot by the people around you, for me it made it as if we had imposed a Euro-style race onto a quintessentially California landscape.

Will UTMB figure out the US?

That’s kinda the big question here isn’t it. Catherine Poletti, who runs UTMB, was on hand at Canyons to see her Major in action and, I’d imagine, to get boots-on-the-ground in the U.S. It’s a very different market here and a very different style, and I think understanding how to communicate with us is going to be part of UTMB’s biggest challenge. I’m not sure they’ve nailed it yet, from a corporate level (as opposed to on the actual RDs and grassroots level).

To that end, one of the things I was thinking a lot about after the start — after they called up the top pros and all the men in the bathroom line by me were most impressed with the #1 woman: Katie Schide was the biggest star at Canyons, and then she had an insane race. (She won by 51 minutes or so, was 6th overall, and just watching the footage of her running after I had gone through that same terrain is mind-blowing.) So, use her better, market your female stars better. They appeal to that middle pack of men, too, because those men understand how intensely good she is. It’s not like they did a bad job on the ground; it’s just in how that gets translated then and messaged as it gets disseminated out into the ultra world.

• Some quick stats: There were 586 people in the 100K (445 finishers - of which about 27% were women). There were 291 people in the 100 miler and 186 finishers (it snowed and rained overnight on them, so.) And another 642 people in the 50K and 468 people in the 25K — of which nearly everyone finished.

Me, personally, in my first run longer than 50K: I finished in 15:45 — which was about 60-100 minutes slower than I was hoping, but not out of the range of expectations. An hour of that was because the first half was just slower going than anticipated for everyone, another 45-50 minutes of that was because I hemorrhaged time in the last 15 miles when there wasn’t much “running” happening.

The course is hillier than advertised, just fyi. [They say 10,600ft elev. gain on all the race info ahead of time, but then conflicting information started to list it at ~12,500ft and that’s what it played out as.] The terrain in the first half is also fairly technical and the net downhill is actually awful — by the time you get to the very runnable stretches in the second half your quads are toasted. And, given that muscular breakdown and time-on-feet was my main limiter, anything that added to leg trashing wasn’t great.

But, I regrouped, rallied, got it done. I didn’t have any real nutrition issues, kept Precision gels and salt tabs down (so shoutout to them), got super hot later and just wanted cold popsicles (which my crew managed to find!), probably should have prepped another bottle or two of Precision mix and left it in cooler (because I could have used it) but substituted on the fly with what was at the aid station. Sure, my gut jostling was not thrilled with running in the second half but I’m not sure it’s possble for that to not be an issue — and, anyway, I decided feeling slightly nauseous was just a state of mind and there wasn’t anything to do about it anyway.

People keep asking me if I’m hooked now (hah), and I’d say:

• I like trail running and it’s mostly what I do anyway

• I appreciate the random adventure aspect and the getting to explore shit

• The parts that were cool were the early morning as the sun came up in one of the valleys, running along and above the river, the sheer scope of the thing, and as the sun set coming up into Auburn — and running through all the burned out fire areas was interesting

• I don’t love having to factor in that amount of problem-solving and logistics (just not my thing)

• From a competitive standpoint, I probably prefer going hard for a few hours

• And, from a competitive standpoint, mainly I don’t think I could actually be good at this without 2x the amount I run right now (in order to build up the sheer muscular durability) and that sounds ugh

• If I get into UTMB, I’ll have to work a lot more on my hiking

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