Tom Evans was closing in on the running track at Placer High School in Auburn, California, and the last thing he wanted to do was sprint. For the last 99 miles, the British athlete had run over mountains, through rivers and along narrow tracks lined with poison oak and ivy. All the way, he was aware of the clock. And now time was running out.
As he entered the school's track, wearing a white vest with hand-cut holes to regulate his body temperature and the race number 12 pinned to his shorts, the rugged asphalt surface turned into a softer rubber, providing some respite to his nearly exhausted legs. There were only 300 metres more to endure.
Across the stadium he glimpsed the official race time: as the sun started to set, the red LED numbers on the finish gantry of the Western States 100 Mile Endurance Run reset to 14 hours and 59 minutes, exactly. Evans had just 60 seconds to travel two-thirds of the way around the track and make his goal of running 100 miles (161km) in under 15 hours. "Work hard for another 30 seconds; you've got another 30 seconds of hard running," Evans told himself as he increased his pace one last time.
As he rounded the last corner, the finish line within touching distance, he broke into a wide grin, raising his arms above his head and – as a captain in the British Army – saluted as he crossed the finish line. He had run the perfect race.
"That was the first point in the race where I relaxed," Evans recalls six months later at his training base in the Leicestershire town of Loughborough. Seconds after finishing, he ran back down the track, slapping the hands of everyone watching the end of his 161km journey, which had started at 5am that morning.
Most years, a time of 14:59:44 would be enough to win Western States – but this time it wasn’t: Evans came in third in the world’s oldest 100-mile trail race, the two men ahead of him both beating the course record. Evans still entered the record books as the fastest non-American to run the gruelling course, and for the fifth fastest time in the race’s history.
Remarkably, it was his first attempt at running 100 miles. Before June 29, 2019, the longest single run Evans had completed was 100km. Placing on the podium at Western States cemented him as one of the world’s top ultramarathoners and part of a growing subset of elite athletes who specialise in running unfathomable distances at incomprehensible speeds. Evans’ finish time means his average pace was 5:35 minutes per kilometre – for all 161km. Analysis of race results from across the UK shows the average pace for a 5km run is 6:47 minutes per kilometre.
Despite gruelling physical and psychological demands, ultrarunning is booming. Any run longer than a conventional 42.195km (26.2-mile) marathon can be considered an ultramarathon, but events are diverse, ranging from road and mountain races to multiple days of running through deserts. There has been a 1,000 per cent increase in the number of races taking place in the last decade and overall participation has skyrocketed. With this growth comes increased professionalisation. Ten years ago it wouldn't have been easy to find an elite ultrarunner with an agent; now it’s common.
"The globalisation of the sport is amazing," says Nadeem Khan, the US-based president of the International Association of Ultrarunners (IAU). The number of countries and athletes participating in the IAU’s world championship events hit record highs in 2019. Runners using the sports app Strava also logged more ultramarathons compared with 2018: UK users showed a 3.9 per cent increase, those in the US 8.8 per cent, and Japan 23.8 per cent.
Around the world, people want to run further and for longer. “Professional marathoners based around here are being asked ‘Would you ever run an ultramarathon?’” Evans says. “It's the next thing. Doing a marathon is now no longer enough to get kudos from your mates.”
Evans’s first official day as a full-time runner was the morning after Western States. Prior to this, the 28-year-old, who was born in London, served as a captain in the Welsh Guards. The race marked his transition from serving soldier to professional athlete.
He has brought a military discipline to his sport. Articulate and considered, Evans weighs up all options before coming to a decision. "Being a professional athlete, you are training to perform your best when you're feeling your best,” he says. “In the army, you are taught to perform your best when you are feeling your worst."
Evans has always been sporty, running in national school competitions as a teenager and later playing rugby. (When we meet in Loughborough University's Elite Athlete Centre, he is starstruck by the presence of Welsh international rugby player Jamie Roberts having lunch at the next table.) In 2015, a ten-month army posting in Kenya brought his focus back to running. He spent time training in the country of some the world’s greatest marathoners and rekindled his love for the sport.
In 2017, he was a relative unknown in the world of ultrarunning. Aside from competing in (and winning) smaller ultramarathons in the UK, he hadn't made a mark on the more competitive international races. The Marathon des Sables changed that. The six-day, multi-stage race based in the Sahara desert in southern Morocco is notorious for its conditions and difficulty. To finish, runners must complete a 251km course (an equivalent of five and a half regular marathons) over rocks and sand dunes, in temperatures that reach above 40 degrees Celsius. The longest day covers more than 80km; participants must carry food, clothing, medical supplies and a sleeping bag for the entire event.
Evans says he entered the Marathon des Sables for a bet – friends who finished in the top 300 challenged him to do better. After 19 hours and 49 minutes, he finished third and became the highest British finisher since the event started in 1986. He has since clocked up an impressive roster of results: first place in the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc's (UTMB) 101km CCC event; first at the multi-day 235km Coastal Challenge Costa Rica; and third place in the Trail World Championships. Two weeks ago he won the Tarawera 100km, in New Zealand, setting a new course record in the process. He has also represented England at the Granollers Half Marathon, in Spain. Sponsorship deals from adidas Terrex, Garmin and Red Bull now pay his wages.
His team is made up of a coach, nutritionist, physiotherapist and agent. "I leave no stone unturned," he says. Each week, Evans spends up to 30 hours training, covering 160-190km at peak volume. He is coached by Sussex-based Allison Benton, who describes the schedule as high-volume marathon training.
Evans’ running training is designed to increase three physiological measures: VO2 max, the amount of oxygen the body can process; running economy, how efficiently he moves; and the lactate turn point, where muscles begin to accumulate too much lactic acid, which stops them working efficiently. Once a week, he will run at a fast pace that’s designed to improve his lactate turn point, and will also do tempo sessions that simulate the pace he is aiming to run in the next race. “This is not typical of what most ultrarunners do,” Benton, who runs the AB Training Group, says. He also completes comparatively easy runs designed to build-up weekly mileage and aid recovery. Aside from running, he lifts weights, cross-trains (swimming or cycling), works with a biomechanist to improve his form, and does intensive mobility work.
"Ultrarunning is problem solving," he says. "Problem solving on your feet, when you're tired." When running extreme distances, everything can be a problem: not taking in enough calories, failing to keep properly hydrated, needing the toilet, running at an incorrect pace, taking a wrong turn, or an unexpectedly steep hill can all end any runner’s race – especially if you’re aiming to win.
Evans took special steps ahead of Western States. The event is one of the world’s most revered ultramarathons and fills its 369 spots with the sport's top performers plus an army of recreational runners. Participants begin in near freezing temperatures in Squaw Valley, California, before traveling over the Sierra Nevada to Sacramento, California. They can encounter bears and snakes. The course requires 5,514 metres of climbing (almost two-thirds the height of Everest) and punishes runners’ quadriceps with a devilish 7,001 metres of descent.
Before the race, Evans moved to Ethiopia for a two-month training camp. The country's high altitude, dirt tracks and hilly terrain are similar to what can be found on the US course and provide near-perfect conditions for long-distance runners to hone their bodies.
Although rarely the domain of ultrarunners, east Africa is the home of the world’s best marathoners, and Evans joined a group for some of his workouts. He was the slowest. A combination of the group’s speed, high altitude (which means less oxygen), and unfamiliar conditions saw him drop out of one of his first group runs halfway through. But at the peak of his training he completed a run no marathoner would attempt: eight hours through the Ethiopian countryside. His running watch recommended two weeks of rest at its conclusion. He took three days.
Ethiopia proved perfect training for one of the hardest parts of ultramarathon running: mental strength. Evans spent a lot of his time training alone. While he ran, people threw stones at him, he was hit by a car and someone pulled a knife on him (he ran faster at this point). “When it rains, you've got to run on the treadmill,” he says of the torrential weather. “And then there are power cuts, so you can’t run on the treadmill.”
As soon as he won a place at Western States, he started to obsess over the route. "In running and in daily life, there are controllable factors and there are uncontrollable factors,” he says. “Being able to know the course in an ultramarathon is a controllable factor.” He watched YouTube videos, installed course maps on his running watch, and read blog posts reviewing the race. The wallpaper of his laptop became an image of the route.
Evans never pictures a run where everything goes right and he crosses the line first (that's too easy), but instead imagines every scenario where things could go wrong, then creates a plan for what to do. During the complex, rocky sections of Western States, for instance, he chose to wear a running vest with deep pockets that could hold his water bottles, while flatter parts saw him use handheld bottles.
His preparation paid off with eight kilometres of the Western States remaining. It was here that Evans realised his sub-15-hour target was "possible, not probable". Before the race began, he had programmed the course into his GPS running watch in four 40km chunks, to make the entire endeavour not seem so daunting. The finish predictor for the final section said his arrival time at the Placer High School track would be 5am – just minutes outside of target.
But Evans knew what was coming. He knew there was one downhill and one uphill to go, and that the remaining section up to the track would take 35 minutes at an easy pace. By the time he reached the asphalt roads of Auburn, the chances of hitting his goal had increased: "I'd done this last bit a lot," he says. While he was anxious about the time, there were no surprises around the corner. "I knew I was going to be knackered. I wanted to be able to completely switch off and just run the course."
Not all professional ultrarunners have the same approach. This is part of the sport's beauty: what works for one athlete won't necessarily have the same results for another. In 2017, American Courtney Dauwalter quit her teaching job after six years to pursue ultrarunning full-time. "I just wanted to know what would happen if I went all in," she says. "I didn't want to get 50 years down the line and be sitting here wondering what could have been, or what I could have done if I had really invested myself in it."
During the same year, she won the first Moab 240. The race is 386km (240 miles) long and consists of a huge loop in Utah that sees runners climb and descend cumulative heights equal to the world's tallest mountain. Dauwalter won in 57 hours and 55 minutes, beating the man in second place by over ten hours and 32km.
In ultramarathons, particularly those over extreme distances, men’s general strength and power advantages over women can be diminished. Stamina and mental endurance can play a larger part, allowing the top-performing women to compete on a more equal footing. Gender diversity is, however, still a problem in ultramarathons. Start lines are often overwhelmingly male, and the percentage of women competing, while rising, is often low.
Unlike Evans, Dauwalter doesn't have a strict training plan. She runs between 160km and 190km per week on the trails near her Colorado home, based on how her body feels. "It's easygoing in that I'm not attached to numbers and data," she says.
Runners have more data available than at any point in the history of sport. GPS watches and apps such as Strava let any runner track their distance and pace. Heart rate monitors assess the body's effort, gait analysis tracks the number of steps per minute, and precision measurements can even work out how much the torso moves vertically with each step. It's easy to get subsumed in the data. "Over the years, I've developed a pretty good internal computer," Dauwalter says. "I'm pretty good at gauging effort and pace just based off of how I'm feeling."
Ultramarathons that push the boundaries of what's humanly possible are Dauwalter's big interest, although she has run – and won – big name races such as Western States and UTMB. A key race she's targeting in 2020 is Big's Backyard Ultra, where she previously finished second. The race is organised by Gary Cantrell, known in running circles as Lazarus Lake, who founded the Barkley Marathons ultramarathon, popularised by the Netflix documentary The Race That Eats Its Young. In many years nobody finishes: only 15 people have completed the course since it started in 1986.
But Big's Backyard Ultra is another form of torture. There is no finish distance, time, or set end to the race. Instead, runners get one hour to complete a 6.7km loop. How fast they run it is up to them, but one hour after the loop starts, the next one begins. If runners finish a loop in 28 minutes, they get 32 minutes to take on extra food, nap or just sit down. Then they run again. The race continues until only one person is left running. It may be one of the most brutal forms of running that exists anywhere.
In 2018, Dauwalter covered 449km in 54 hours and 37 minutes of running (total race time: 67 hours). But she wants to go further. To do this, she believes she may need to look at techniques to help her quickly nap in the seven to ten minutes she plans to leave for recovery each lap. "The last-person-standing format is a total head game," she says. "I want to get 300 miles [483km], but I think 400 miles [644km] is doable, which would be four days of running four miles every hour. I think you've mentally got to be set on five days of running."
Shortly after 9am on October 27, 2019, Dauwalter walked over to Camille Herron, who was part-sat, part-slumped in a canvas camping chair in the middle of a French running track. The two new world champions embraced and talked about how they hurt.
For the previous 24 hours, the runners, both in blue Team USA vests, had been looping the same repetitive 1,500m course as part of the IAU World Championships. At the end of the mind-numbing process, both the American women's and men's teams took the overall titles. Individually, Herron ran 270.116km to set a new women's world distance record for 24 hours – averaging an astonishing 5:19 per km pace.
Herron regularly takes on races that can involve running around the same eight lanes of a 400m track for hours at a time. As well as the women's 24-hour record, she holds records for 100 miles (12:42:40) and 12 hours (149.130km), and has set nine American records from 50 miles to 200km.
Like Evans, Herron works to an extended marathon training programme. She runs 160-190km per week. During the two months before the world record, she ran more than 1,600km in training. While setting the 24-hour world record, Herron finished sixth out of a total 352 runners. "There's nothing easy in running multiple loops for 24-hours," she says. She believes that after distances of 161km, the races become more mental than physical. Herron says: "I could be puking and having diarrhoea and it's ok for me because I think I can work through it." It's partly this mental strength that makes ultrarunning different to other forms of running.
"Ultrarunning is this unique sport where the further we go, the closer the gap is on beating the men," Herron says. The data backs this up: analysis of the state of ultrarunning from RunRepeat says female runners are faster than male runners over longer distances. The further the distance, the shorter the pace gap between genders. In marathons men overall are 11.1 per cent faster, but when a race is extended to 161km the difference shrinks to 0.25 per cent. Herron says: "It seems like the further I go the more the likelihood of me beating the men."
Ultra long-distance endurance running has its roots in human evolutionary history – our earliest ancestors used to run to hunt and survive. As a sport, walking races during the late 1800s – often two people would compete over 80.5km – eventually gave way to competitive running. South Africa’s Comrades Marathon, an 89km road race, started in 1921 and is now the world’s largest ultramarathon with 25,000 runners.
“Ultrarunning has been around for ever, but people don't recognise especially what it is,” says the IAU's Nadeem Khan. “It's a little bit off from mainstream athletics, where track and field or the marathon takes the centre stage.” As a result of this, the majority of ultra athletes are amateurs with day jobs.
The last half-decade has seen a surge in the number of ultramarathons around the world, including trail events and mountain running courses (although these can sometimes be shorter than a marathon). Steve Diederich, who runs the website RunUltra and organises UK entries for the Marathon Des Sables, estimates there are up to 3,000 ultramarathons around the world. RunRepeat's analysis says participation in ultramarathons has increased 1,676 per cent over the last 20 years. In 2018, there were 611,098 participants in ultramarthons (made up of 329,584 unique individuals) – the growth has been rapid. In contrast, marathon participation has flatlined with 1.1 million people completing one in 2018. "About 90 per cent of [ultra] races are trail runs," Diederich says. He says that he is seeing the most growth in Asia and Russia, which have historically had a low number of events.
The sport’s showpiece is arguably the series of UTMB races. Across multiple events during a week-long festival, 10,000 participants tackle rocky tracks through the Alps and cross borders in France, Italy and Switzerland before finishing in the storybook town of Chamonix. Races range from 40km to 300km and attract the sports' top competitors. UTMB completely takes over Chamonix for a week, with thousands of spectators lining the streets.
To earn a place at any of the UTMB races, runners are required to complete qualifying races, earning points based on difficulty, and enter a randomly drawn lottery. Places at the world’s top ultramarathons, which can cost thousands of pounds, are so coveted that lotteries are common. Western States’ race director Craig Thornley received a record number of applications for the 2020 edition of the race: 6,666, for just 369 spaces. “Conducting the lottery is more difficult and challenging than putting on the race," he says.
Look at pictures of almost any of the world's largest ultra races and one difference from regular marathons held in London, New York, Boston and Tokyo is apparent. The vast majority of competitors, particularly among the professionals at the front, are white. Few runners from Kenya or Ethiopia – countries that have dominated men's and women's marathons for decades – run in ultramarathons.
While running can be seen as a way to escape poverty in east African countries, with the world’s biggest marathons offering huge prize pots, few ultramarathons give cash prizes. South Africa's Comrades offers some of the biggest prize money: male and female winners get around £27,000 each (with similar bonuses for breaking course records). In the US, the winners in Colorado's Run Rabbit Run get about £9,500 each. These are outliers: UTMB only started offering prize money for the first time in 2019. The winners received just €2,000 (£1,700) each, and its race organisers have previously said they are against “professionalisation of the sport with money, as this would increase the risk of doping”.
Adharanand Finn, a journalist and author of The Rise of the Ultra Runners, has tried to help runners from Africa participate in ultra events by raising money for their travel. He says there is a reluctance from some runners to participate in races where the main prize is prestige. "When they come to ultrarunning, they're like, 'Where's the prize money?'" Finn says. "What I would like to see is the races inviting runners, particularly from places where they're not being sponsored. I can't see how races can get away with collecting all this money off the masses and not sharing it with the athletes themselves."
This may be set to change as the sport grows, bringing with it new business opportunities. On May 4, 2019, French sports brand Hoka One One held an ultrarunning event called Project Carbon X in Folsom, California. The aim was to set new 50-mile and 100km world records in one race – but the attempt also coincided with the launch of Hoka’s Carbon X racing shoe. Every athlete was wearing a pair.
Hoka's race signals a wider trend of sports brands ploughing money into non-traditional running. "Most running shops now will have as many trail shoes as they do road shoes," RunUltra's Diederich says. Pro runners can be seen on Instagram and Twitter building up their following by exploiting the rolling hills and snowy peaks they run through. The more followers a runner has, the more likely they're going to be sponsored by a big company.
Recent years have also seen the emergence of more professional ultrarunning race series. The Ultra Trail World Tour includes some of the world's most popular races over 100km and lets any runner claim points for finishing to create unofficial world rankings. The Golden Trail Series, which consists of mountain running over shorter than ultra distances, is sponsored by Salomon. The brand puts thousands into slickly produced YouTube videos recapping each race's highlights – everything from mountain falls to runners getting lost.
American runner Jim Walmsley – who set the new 50-mile world record at Hoka’s event (4:50:07; averaging 3:35 per km) and is the course record holder for the Western States 100 – says the sport is set to increase in popularity in the future, as events begin to live-stream races and make it easier for fans to engage. "I think the sport has been behind in that aspect, but I think it's inevitable that broadcasting will catch up and I think it will be more fun to follow the longer events," he says. More remote cameras, the ability to quickly upload video to the web and increasingly smart drones that can follow runners will change how the sport is beamed to consumers.
It all feeds into the professionalisation of the top end of the sport. "There's more opportunity to run as a professional, or semi-professional balancing your money from another income," Walmsley says. "There's a lot of pro ultrarunners that didn't exist 15 years ago." Walmsley adds that there is little transparency around how much top runners earn from the sport.
"I see trail running where the Ironman triathlon was five years ago," Evans adds. "It is on the verge of really kicking off."
Ironman has in fact purchased two ultrarunning events. In May 2018, it bought Ultra-Trail Australia, a multi-race event with distances up to 100km. In January 2019, it brought New Zealand’s largest trail event, the 2,000-person Tarawera Ultra Marathon, which has runs from 20km to 161km. Unlike ultrarunning's grass roots origins, the Ironman series – a 3.86km swim, 180.25km bicycle ride and 42.20km run – is a business that wants to make money. The brand name is owned by the World Triathlon Corporation, which itself was purchased by Chinese conglomerate Wanda for $650 million (£500m) in 2015. Separately, Europe's UTMB has also franchised its brand and now runs events in Argentina, Oman and China.
Ultrarunning’s watershed moment may take place in 2021. For the first time, the official governing bodies of ultra, mountain and trail running are working together with World Athletics (formerly the International Association of Athletics Federations) to produce a combined world championships, giving ultrarunning disciplines official World Athletics branding. Ultramarathoners will get more prominence on a world stage, opening the door to greater recognition and funding for the sport.
Since turning professional, Tom Evans’ life has changed. He is now able to focus solely on running. As well as ultrarunning, at the start of December 2019, he briefly diverted his attention from ultrarunning, as he qualified for the Great Britain men’s cross-country team in the European Championships.
Cross-country races see runners, who mostly have track-running backgrounds, competing over boggy hills and fields at distances of around 10km. The six-person GB squad won the gold medal in the men’s team event. “I get a lot of recognition in the UK for doing ‘normal athletics’, the recognised distances where people like quantifiable things,” he says. But ultra distances are what drive him. Evans has mapped out his long-term plans for the next five years and knows which races he wants to run and what goals he has for them. In his sights are the British and world-best times for the 100km distance.
He also dreams of becoming an Olympian. At the moment, this would most likely be at the traditional marathon distance (if he can sufficiently improve his speed), as ultrarunning isn’t an Olympic sport. But he, along with many others in the ultrarunning community, hopes that an ultramarathon will one day grace sport’s most high-profile event.
“Whatever ultra event ends up in the Olympics, whether it is a road, trail or track event, it would be a victory for all runners, elite and non-elite, that have participated in ultras,” says Khan. He believes greater World Athletics involvement will increase the chances of that happening. Evans agrees. "I think it will become an Olympic sport," he says. “Probably not Paris 2024, but after that. And for me, that's really exciting. I definitely want to go to the Olympics."
Updated February 27, 2020 09:02BST: The number of unique participants in ultramarathons has been added to this article and the route of Western States clarified
Matt Burgess is WIRED's deputy digital editor. He tweets from @mattburgess1
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
