Quest for WS

     The crowd at placer high school was abuzz on December 7th, 2019. The auditorium was filled with hundreds of semi-locals, many of whom hoped their name would be on one of 269 tickets pulled from a drum containing more than 25,000. For most people, odds were stiff, but for some, being selected to run the Western States 100 was a near certainty. When the first of nine 8-year applicants was called, the crowd exploded with excitement. Anytime someone in the audience was called, the crowd lit up, but we all had empathy for the 8-year applicants. To be an 8-year applicant, runners have to run a hard 100k or 100 miler to qualify, enter the lottery, be rejected from the lottery, and then repeat the process for seven more years. For first-year applicants, odds are horrendous (this year about 1.2%), but every year runners enter and aren’t selected, their odds double. If at any point, however, they fail to run a qualifier on some calendar year, or forget to enter the lott...

     The Sean O’Brien 100k is really freaking tough. There’s 13,000 feet of elevation gain, and you only have 16 hours to complete it—that’s no joke. But the thing is, ultra marathon runners are tough people. They know what they’re getting themselves into, and most of Sean O’Brien’s competitors have run longer and harder races before. Due to a variety of unseen factors, however, the race is a DNF machine, sending dozens of experienced ultrarunners back to the start/finish area without a finisher’s medal to take home. It’s not the course or the time cutoff that makes this race so challenging, however, but the unusual ease of quitting that doesn’t exist at the majority of ultra marathons. It possesses a remarkable ability to get in your head, and every year dozens of runners allow it to do just that.        For starters, the race dangles the finish line and your accompanying car (and hence food, shower, hotel) in front of your face at a variety of...