History:

If you’ve never heard of Western States before, congrats! You probably don’t run ultramarathons, didn’t grow up in Northern California, or you just don’t pay an excessive amount of attention to more “niche” running events. If you HAVE heard of Western States, and especially if you’ve spent the past few years running qualifiers and amassing lottery tickets to try to get into the race, I’m sorry in advance.

Now, a lot of this section will be coming almost entirely from wser.org, so if you have further questions I’d recommend checking out their in-depth history pages and not asking me, because I am a dummy. 

The Western States 100 mile Endurance Run has its roots in horseback riding. Back in 1955, Wendell T. Robie and a few pals rode a portion of the Western States Trail from the post office in Tahoe City to Auburn, proving that horses could still cover 100 miles in one day. Robie went on to found the Western States Trail Foundation and organized the annual Western States Trail Ride, also known as the Tevis Cup “100 Miles – One Day” Ride. For those unaware, the Western States Trail is a nationally dedicated recreational trail that stretches from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Sacramento, California. 

In 1974, Gordy Ainsleigh joined the horses of the Tevis Cup. His horse had gone lame and he didn’t have time to find another, so he decided to try it on foot instead. Twenty-three hours and forty-two minutes later Gordy arrived in Auburn, proving that a runner could indeed run the entire trail within the 24-hour time limit of the Tevis Cup – 100 miles in one day.

In 1977, 14 men participated in the 1st official Western States Endurance Run, which was held in conjunction with the Tevis Cup Ride. Runners were monitored by a doctor at the three veterinary stops set up for the horses, and although the race organization transported the entrants gear, runners were responsible for producing all of their own supplies, except water. Three runners finished the course: Andy Gonzales, age 22, in the record-breaking time of 22:57, and Peter Mattei and Ralph Paffenbarger, ages 53 and 54, who tied in 28:36 (and the 30-hour award was born!).

In the fall of 1977, the Board of Directors for the Western States Endurance Run was formed as part of the Western States Trail Foundation. The Run organization later became its own entity and is now known as the Western States Endurance Run Foundation. The following years, the race grew dramatically and in 1981 a lottery system was established due to the increasing number of entries and the need to limit the number of entrants due to new conditions required for use of the newly created Granite Chief Wilderness Area.

Famous Finishers:

In 1989, Ann Trason was the women’s winner and became the first woman to finish in the top ten on the 100.2-mile course. She also won the race in 1990, 1991, 1992 (finishing third overall), 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 (after winning Comrades 12 days before!), 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003. That’s fourteen wins, for those counting along.

For some more recent history, you may remember the hype surrounding Jim Walmsley over the past few years. In 2016, he made waves by making it clear going into the race that he was chasing Timothy Olson’s course record (even though Western States would be his first hundred miler). After leading the race and staying ahead of course record pace for 92 miles, he made a wrong turn and went off course for two miles before realizing his mistake. After getting back on course, he jogged it in for the last 8 miles to finish in 20th place. Fast forward to 2017, where he once again takes a crack at the course record but drops at mile 70 with GI problems. Finally, in 2018, Walmsley takes a third shot at the course record and runs 14:30, smashing the old record of 14:46. Courtney Dauwalter was the women’s winner (and my personal girlcrush) in 17:27, the second fastest women’s time in history. In 2019, Walmsley and his training partner Jared Hazen went 1-2, both coming in under Jim’s 2018 record, finishing in 14:09 and 14:26 respectively. Clare Gallagher won the women’s race in 17:23, bumping Courtney down to 3rd all time and even setting a Strava CR at mile 98.

The Course:

So, at its most basic level, Western States is a net downhill 100 mile run from Olympic Valley to the track at Placer High in Auburn. It starts at 5 am on Saturday of the last full weekend in June. There is a 30 hour cutoff to be an official race finisher (so you must finish by 10:59:59 am on Sunday). Overall, the race has 18,090 ft of elevation gain and 22,970 ft of elevation loss. So, a net downhill, but not an easy one. The highest part of the course is Emigrant Pass, at around mile 4.5. 

Because of the varied terrain you traverse over the course of the race, the weather conditions can vary as well. Temperatures can range from 20 degrees F at the start (especially during a snow year) to 110+ degrees F in the canyons. During a deep snow year, there is an alternate snow route that drops down into French Meadows drainage and avoids Lyon Ridge and Red Star Ridge, getting back onto the normal race course around Duncan Canyon.

There are 20 aid stations along the course (not counting the start and finish), with the first located at mile 10.3 and the last located at mile 98.9. If you’re familiar with the race at all, you’ve probably heard of at least a few of them (“the race doesn’t start till Foresthill” is a popular phrase, for one). They’re very useful to know when referring to different parts of the course. They are, in order: Lyon Ridge (10.3 mi), Red Star Ridge (15.8 mi), Duncan Canyon (24.2 mi), Robinson Flat (30.3 mi),  Miller’s Defeat (34.4 mi), Dusty Corners (38 mi), Last Chance (43.3 mi), Devil’s Thumb (47.8 mi), El Dorado Creek (52.9 mi), Michigan Bluff (55.7 mi), Foresthill (62 mi), Dardanelles/Cal-1 (65.7 mi), Peachstone/Cal-2 (70.7 mi), Ford’s Bar/Cal-3 (73 mi), Rucky Chucky (78 mi), Green Gate (79.8 mi), Auburn Lake Trails (85.2 mi), Quarry Rd (90.7 mi), Pointed Rocks (94.3 mi), Robie Point (98.9 mi).

There are about 4 distinct sections of the course, depending on who you ask: Olympic Valley-Robinson Flat (mile 0-30), Robinson Flat-Foresthill (mile 30-62), Foresthill-Rucky Chucky (mile 62-78), and Rucky Chucky-Finish (mile 78-100).

The first section is in the high country up on the Escarpment. It tends to not be too hot, although the bit after Duncan Canyon can get a little toasty. It’s early in the race (obviously), so you don’t want to get too caught up and push super hard up the first big climb. After Robinson Flat, you start to get more singletrack for a bit until you start to hit the canyons. The climb up Devil’s Thumb is in this section, and it’s brutal. A friend of mine is going to be volunteering there during the race, so I’m looking forward to that morale boost after dying on the 36 switchbacks to get up the climb.One more canyon later, and you start to climb up again towards Michigan Bluff, which serves as a brief respite from the brutal canyon heat. After Michigan Bluff, there’s one more canyon until Foresthill. Foresthill is where the race “starts” according to many. After you leave, you hit a 16 mile “downhill” (with some uphill sections) that can kill your quads and your spirit. Once you survive and hit the river, you’re onto the last section of the course. Depending on the water level in the river, you’ll either ford it yourself or catch a ride on a raft. The last 20 miles post-river are some of the most runnable miles of the entire course, which of course will do you no good if you managed to trash your quads on the previous downhill. Eventually, you’ll hit the road and start to see the lights of the Placer High track in the distance and sprint (or shuffle) the final 250m on the track to reach the finish line. I plan to collapse immediately after.

Entry:

Now, you may be thinking to yourself: “Wow! This race sounds cool! I’m going to go sign up for next year!” (or, maybe you’re sane and you think it sounds brutal). Due to the limited number of starters allowed, Western States has a lottery for entry. In order to enter the lottery, you need to earn a ticket by finishing a qualifying race. There are approximately 175 qualifying races across the globe, ranging in distance from 100 km to 135 miles. After you run your first qualifier, you can put 1 ticket into the lottery. After you inevitably don’t get picked and run another qualifier the year after, your tickets double. Rinse, repeat, and you wind up with “8 year losers” who have been trying to get into the race for 8 years straight unsuccessfully and who have 128 tickets in the lottery. There are a few other ways to get in, like racing your way in by doing well at a Golden Ticket race or getting a sponsor spot (if you know the right people, I guess), but most of us plebs get in via the lottery (eventually). 

In 2020, there were 6,664 applicants to the lottery and 27,872 tickets amongst them. If you had 1 ticket in the lottery, you had approximately a 1.3% chance of getting in the race. If you listened to my episode of the 1609 podcast (plug), you can hear me joke about how I’m totally going to get into Western, which was funny in the moment because I was so obviously not going to get in.

The lottery is done in the auditorium of Placer High in Auburn, CA and streamed on facebook. Imagine my surprise when my single ticket got pulled as I was standing in the middle of my favorite running store surrounded by many people who had many more tickets than me (and much more experience at running ultras). As you might imagine, with only one finished hundred miler under my belt, I felt severely unprepared to make my way from Squaw to Auburn in June.

What My Plan Was:

After recovering from the shock of getting in, I started to freak out. I hired a coach (Stephanie Howe, a fantastic ultrarunner who has a history with Western and knows the race very well). I hadn’t even begun training in earnest for Western when the pandemic started to creep into public consciousness. At first, I ignored my gut feeling and continued to train with the goal of Western States in mind. I did some long-ish mountain runs in March (16mi/13mi and 10mi/18mi back to back longs) and mid-week tempo workouts. The plan was to start with tempo workouts for a few weeks, then move to steady-state, then really hone in on race specific workouts. For race specificity for a race like Western, I was going to work in some post-workout sauna sessions and really focus on matching the course profile as well as I could during my long runs. I was also planning to run the Quad Rock 50 miler as a tune up (Addie Bracy did that last year, and it worked out pretty well for her!). I was going to peak at around 70-80 miles per week and try to get in plenty of vert. I had peaked at 70 mpw for Javelina, and I wanted to try to have an even better training cycle for Western.

What I Changed:

On March 27th, I got the email that Western States had been cancelled, and all entrants would be allowed to rollover their entry to the 2021 race. I was hella bummed, but I decided to try to keep training anyways and just try to get fit and build a huge base for 2021. I kept doing long runs, with a back to back 20/10 mile weekend in early April. By the beginning of May, despite my best efforts, I started to have a rough time keeping up with my planned training. Even though I really liked her, I stopped working with my coach because I was not mentally in a great place with running and it was just making me more stressed.

By May, I was running terribly. I did a 5k time trial and ran my slowest 5k in over three years. I felt like I could barely muster the energy to run a mile without stopping to walk. I wasn’t sick, but I was mentally not well. I left Colorado and went home to Pennsylvania for a month and a half. I also broke up with my boyfriend of 2.5 years. After coming home and getting down to sea level for the first time in two years, I started to feel better and run normally again. From mid-May to now, I’ve just been kinda running aimlessly. No long runs over ~15 miles, trying to get in one workout (or at the very least strides) every week, aiming for about 40-50 mpw volume. 

Current Plans:

I am technically signed up for CIM in December, but realistically that’s not happening (because I don’t want to train for a marathon right now). I’m eyeing up a potential fixed time event in October, but I’m wary about the travel required. I think what’s most likely is that I’ll just continue running 40-50 mpw with occasional workouts and no “ultra long” long runs until February-ish. I’d like to build my volume up a bit in February/March before fully diving into Western States training. I was very lucky that they just decided to let all the entrants roll over into 2021, and I didn’t have to go back in the lottery and keep trying. I’m trying to look at this as a bit of a blessing in disguise. I’ve only been running since 2016, and only doing ultras since 2017. I still feel like a baby in this sport, and I want to give Western States everything I’m capable of. An extra year to train and stay consistent and build lifetime miles should be pretty beneficial considering how little experience I have compared to everyone else on that start line. I also might be able to do the Memorial Day Training Camp in 2021 (if there are spots), so fingers crossed!

Ideally, in a perfect world, I’d love to go sub 24 (have y’all seen that buckle??? SO beautiful). I’m not at all confident in my ability to do that, but it’s always going to be in the back of my mind. Honestly, I just want to finish before the cutoff. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to hire a coach again or not. I really liked the idea of having someone to tell me what to do, especially someone who knows the race much better than I do, but I’ve found I don’t actually like the reality of being told what to do. I might just ask a lot of people a lot of questions, and just kinda wing it from there. It’s what I do best.