Father of 200-Mile Ultramarathoning: John Lacroix

This is Chasing the Cut-Off with Troy Eid, conversations with professional people, age 40 and older, who balance busy careers with excellence in endurance athletics and extreme sports. And Denver, Colorado, here's Troy Eid. Welcome to Chasing the Cut-Off, I'm Troy Eid, and with me today is John LaCroix, who is the founder, the owner, and the race director for the Human Potential Running Series. Welcome, John. Thanks for having me, Troy. It's great to be here. So we've been friends for a while, and you're someone who has had an incredible impact in the sport. I'm so excited that you'd actually take the time and come to downtown Denver and take a break and be able to actually do these things. You're able to take an activity that was very unstructured, ultra-marathoning, from the early days, from the mid-2000s, and actually you've helped to guide its development. It's taken a lot of different forms, and so I know we're going to talk about your journey, but also the journey of ultra-marathoning and how you see it unfolding in terms of a sport, in terms of an activity that's really grown in popularity and has changed a lot, too. I think what we look to and think of as ultra-marathoning has made me change, so welcome. Appreciate you being here. Thank you. I think you give me a little too much credit in the introduction, but I'm humbled. I appreciate it very much. Thank you. Let's talk about your journey. You came from New Hampshire. Is that right? You grew up in New Hampshire? New Hampshire, born and raised, lived there all my life until I moved to Colorado. You helped to create the very first 200-mile ultra-marathoning. I think maybe the first in the country. It was the first in the world. Wow. So you talk about that. That was in New Hampshire, right? It was in Vermont, actually. Or it's talking about that. It's a same place. There are small states back there. Yeah. I had an opportunity. I ran a Vermont 50-mileer with a guy named Joe DeSena many moons ago. And Joe is one of the original co-founders of the Spartan races. And when we ran together, he was telling me all about this idea he had to build a trail running ultra-marathon and mountain bike endurance series on his property. He'd Joe owned a lot of land. And he asked me to be his race director. And I knew nothing about race directing. I was just a runner like him. But long story short, he found a race director and I had the opportunity to be a race director apprentice for a guy named Andy Weinberg, who basically ran the series for Joe. And I learned a lot through Andy. And Andy put on my first 100-mile, which was in Pekin, Illinois called the McNaughton Park Trail Runs. He called Potawatomi and he had a 150-mile race associated with that event. And at the time in our sport, this is 2007. 100 miles was considered unfathomable, but the idea of 150 miles. And so as we got to working together, I decided I wanted to take a stab at this race directing thing. And if runners could go 150 miles, well, they could surely go 200 miles. So that's what I built was a 200 mile race in the mountains of Vermont on a 10 mile loop. It was up and down a mountain for 10 miles. So you did 20 loops? Yeah, 20 loops. Well, they were two different loops. The first was 100 miles was 10 10 mile loops on mountain trails. And then the second 100 miles was 10 10 mile loops on dirt roads, county roads in Vermont. So what was the race called? It was called the New England Ultras. Really original. Yeah. And what year was this? This was 2008. We also had a 100 mile and a 50 mile ultra that coincided with it. I had maybe 35 runners total signed up across all the distances. But you would never know that within the registrants of that event, some of those folks ended up becoming who many would consider to be ultra royalty, like John Fegeverzi, I can never say his name, John Fegeverzi, he is a Barclay finisher. Yeah, absolutely. That was his first 100 mile. So and we only had one finisher in the 200 mile that you're a guy named John from Virginia who ate Chef Boyard D out of a can. Did he do 10 miles? Did he heat it up or not? No. It was cool. Yeah. It was also fascinating. Yeah. He was John Bridges. That was his name. Yeah. We had a great adventure that I learned an awful lot. And how old were you in 2008? I had just turned 27 years old. Wow. So did you come up with the idea of 200 miles? Was it just random? No. Yeah, like I said, Andy was putting on 150 mileer and at that time, that was the longest ultra in the nation and nobody was doing 200 miles. So let's just do it 200 miles around number. So what do you think of the 200 mile race today now? I know we'll go back because I want to be sure. It's a fascinating story as to your journey. But now we're in this world where 200 miles is much more common. And maybe not, maybe as David Goggins would say, uncommon amongst the uncommon. But still, we see 200 mile races. What do you expect that that was going to happen? You'd be a trendsetter? Oh, I don't think I set the trend. I mean, I put on the first 200 mileer and then it grew slowly for many years. Like, others kind of slowly started to pop up here and there. It really wasn't until Candace Bert came on the scene and decided that she was going to have an entire series of 200 mile races and Candace is a tremendous influencer. You know, she's an influencer that directs races. And due to her visibility and her character, I think she was really able to set the trend of what it became today. But I don't think that it's sustainable. I don't think the 200 mileer is, I think it'll survive. But I don't think you're going to see more and more 200 mileers coming up on the scene. In fact, I think there is definitely an oversaturation of 200 mile races and you're going to start seeing more of them disappear. So is Candace a trendsetter with the Arizona monster, the 300 mile race? Yeah, that's hers. Yeah. I mean, when I saw that and I've had a number of friends participate in that race. Right. It's only happened once and it takes a long time to do 300 miles. Sure, yeah. It sure does. And as a race director, it's quite an undertaking. And you know, I pay very close attention to the good and the bad that people share out there in the ultra world. Not because I want to know the juicy info is because I'm a student. And I really want to hear the deep nitty gritty of what is actually going on out there and how do people feel about it? And when I say that, you know, the 200 mile is unsustainable. The 300 is even more unsustainable. They're just to find enough volunteers to adequately and safely put on that kind of event for that many days, truly is near impossible. And I don't see that changing or getting better. Well, let's get back to that because I was fascinating and I want to test that a little bit too. Please. Have you run 200 mile races? I've never run in a 200 mile race, no, but I have run 200 miles. So we talked about that for a second. What was that? 2017. I took on a challenge that I created for myself to run from Colorado's lowest point to its highest. So I started where the rickery river crosses in the Kansas and started running towards Mount Albert. I made it 200 in two miles and four and a half days. I slept at least six hours every night. And then an early season snowstorm was coming into Colorado and there was going to be three feet of snow in Landville. So I stopped my run at 200 miles in Deer Creek Canyon. And then I drove up to the base of Mount Albert, slept in a tent and on a snowy night. And then the next day, I post hold my way to the top of Mount Albert after having run 200 miles. That's wonderful. I think you stopped your race really close to where I live when I think about that. Yeah. Probably. You made it all the way and cast the hog back into the first. I was, yeah, I was really getting deep into into Deer Creek Canyon. It was probably a good five miles in. That's awesome. That's awesome. What prompted you to want to do that? I'd never been down before. It's interesting. Maybe that is something that could be a race, that concept of running from the lowest point in Colorado, say to the highest point of Colorado. Yeah, but I think the structure of it needs to be more in the spirit of something like Vol State, which is a run in Tennessee, right? Or hot another run out that way where essentially viewers don't know you. Hark your car at the finish line and then you get on a bus and they take you to the start and drop you off. And the goal is to run, however far it is to your car. Right. And there's no aid stations, you know, you've got to check in via cell phone along the way. Your self-supported via gas stations and whatever you can find, good nature, good heart from the locals along the way even. I think that's going to be the direction that those types of adventures take actually, even the 200 miles will be more along the line of a primarily self-supported adventure. So let me go back to your journey. Yeah, so you're 27, you're directing the first 200 mile race in the world. And you're starting to now become a race director. How did you become then eventually a full time race director? You were apprenticing and then how did your path unfold? And actually, after that 200 mileer, it was so horribly run. There was so many hiccups. I swore I'd never direct a race ever again. I had an opportunity along the way to Spartan races was born. I was invited to go on the ride with them around the world to create Spartan races and I declined. That's a whole other story I won't get into. I'll have to read my book at some point. Yeah, I'll have to read the book in a second. Yeah, make sure you book. But yeah, when I finished my degree in outdoor education from the University of New Hampshire, I was getting a degree in outdoor ed. And the whole goal was to move to Colorado and work in the outdoors. Why Colorado? And why not? And do you been out before? I did, yeah, I came out. In 2006, I came to Colorado for a wedding that was at the Stanley Hotel in Estus Park. And I fell in love with this place. I worked at an ABC news station at the time as a production assistant. And I knew after that trip, I was going to get home and have the interview to become a salaried employee of the news station. And I deliberately sabotaged my interview. And the question I sabotaged it on was, is there anything you feel would prevent you from getting this job? And I said, yeah, I don't want to work weekends. Cut out hard for that. I was like, why not? I was like, because I want to be outside. I want to be in the mountains. So I ended up getting into the University of New Hampshire, worked towards my degree and after it, and listened 30 hours after graduating. I was in a U-Haul driving to Colorado. That was the mission. So I arrived in Colorado. I had the great pleasure of working as a professional guide out of a guide service in Boulder, Colorado. I took people rock climbing and hiking and backpacking and rafting and horseback riding mountain bike. You name it, we did it. A lot of sightseeing. And then I became the operations director for the guide company. And I also redesigned their team building product to create what we called corporate adventure training. And I had an amazing opportunity through that experience to do team building for team Garmin Sharp, Tour de France, men's racing team, CU Women's Basketball, and executive boards, or executive employees from Estee Lauder in Miami, flew to Colorado to do four hours of team building with me and Vail in the mountains. It was a great experience. I just didn't like who I did it for. So the New Englander in me ended up not having that job long. And as I struggled to make ends meet here in Colorado, which is sometimes challenging if you don't have a direction, especially financially, I had a great group of friends. So I've been organizing these group runs that we call Fat Assets, which are just glorified group runs. It's a race without an entry fee. And nobody's really keeping score, right? There's no results. We're just running. Those went from just me and one other runner to us averaging close to 130 runners per group run. They were epic. Everybody loved them. We built the most amazing unified trail and ultra community in Colorado history. What was that about what time for him? 2012 into 2014. And then naturally a group of my friends, like that was fun and all, but I wasn't making money off of it. So I had a group of friends who sat me down in a room and held an intervention. And they, it wasn't really much convincing. They told me, you need to be a race director and you need to start a race directing company and do this for a living. So did you do it by yourself or how did you organize it? I did, yeah. Everything at the Him and Potential Running Series has been built by one man. I've had help along the way here and there with little things. We are, we do rely heavily on volunteers. I've built the series to be community focused. So it looks and feels a lot like the ultra marathons. You might experience more on the east coast of the United States, where it doesn't matter who the owner is for profit or not for profit. It's still very much community focused and led. And so I do rely heavily on a lot of volunteers to do a fair amount of the heavy lifting on Race Weekend. But everything leading up to Race Weekend, everything behind the scenes that makes it happen is just me and it always has been. So I ran my first Him and Potential Running Series race in, I believe it was 2019. Was that Sangra? Yeah, I think so. I remember that. And I remember being very excited about a couple of different things. One was of course the setting because you're known for having some of the most beautiful settings. Wherever your races are, you have an extraordinary ability to craft and experience in a very challenging environment. Beautiful and challenging. And in Colorado, that's saying something because we have a lot of challenging environments, but you take it up a level. And that's been consistent with all the races. And I've run quite a few of them at this point. But the second thing is your philosophy. You have a different kind of approach to how a race should be directed and how it should be implemented and what the experience is for the runner. So what is that philosophy? Where did you find it? How do you apply it? How do you think about it? And how do you extend it? Yeah. When I was working on my undergrad degree at UNH and after ed, it was very experiential education focused. Like that is what I was learning. Not, you know, I could tell folks, I took a class and I got college credit by going backpacking for eight days. But we weren't just learning about backpacking. You were learning how to lead backpacking trips. Many of the fellow students that graduated with me in that program had gone on to lead and guide and run programs to be higher up set the programs at Outward Bound and National Outdoor Leadership School. So knows that it's wilderness therapy, which is also a separate degree. You can also get a wilderness therapy, I don't know what the word is. I can attend them, attach to your outdoor ed degree. I didn't quite go to that level. But the psychology piece of what we're doing in the outdoors is what resonated the most with me. So as I'm building a race series, I wanted to use adversity. So the word challenging, for me, adversity is the vehicle that I am using to effectuate change in my participants, whether they know it or not. I will design a course. And you've run enough times now with us, Troy, that you know that the hill, the hill in the right, that crux of the course that you're running in, it always seems to happen at the most in opportune moments. Oh yeah, you've been hacked for that job. And there could be many, right there. Maybe there is multiple. But every time you reach the next one, it's just a little bit different than the one before it. So the way that I chose to design my courses wasn't with the race and mind. We don't have podiums. We don't do prize money. We don't do age group awards. That's not ever what I've wanted to do at HPRS. I'm changing lives. I'm recognizing that 98% of all of the runners in our sport. And I believe this, whether it's a fact or not, I don't necessarily have the dated back it up. But I believe that 98% of all runners in the sport are here to do good work on themselves. They don't care about the race. They don't care who wins. They don't-- that doesn't matter to them at all. They're here because for many years, I was just talking to a race director friend and forgive me for going on, Troy. But I was just talking to a race director friend who I've known for 20 years. He said, you remember like 10, 15 years ago, everybody that was in this-- but none of us liked running. We were broken. We were beating ourselves up because we wanted to feel something different. We came to run these races because-- We wanted to hurt, so the sports shifting a little bit, these people actually like running, and it's kind of sick. And he's not wrong, but I still believe that 98% of everybody who's out there, they're trying to work through overcoming addiction or a divorce, or the death of a loved one, or any myriad of unfortunate or mental illness related type of things that have occurred in our lives. They're trying to be human, they're trying to be more human. The other thing I realized in my years of running Ultras, because I've run Ultras for a real long time, I started running Ultras in 2005, and 20 years later I'm still running them. The first decade that I ran in Ultras, I always found myself in a small pack of runners in whatever race I was in. So there before five of us, and we'd run miles and miles and miles together, and we would talk about everything from who's the greatest guitarist of all time. Is it Eric Clapton or Prince? You know, all the way to the psychology of the decisions that we make. Some of the most profound conversations I've ever had in my life have been on a trail, even as a kid with my dad, our best moments, our best time together was on a trail. So when I design my races and I design these courses, the purpose is to give you purpose, to give you an experience that you won't ever forget, not because of where you were and what you were doing, but because of what you learned while you were there. So the interesting part of the background of the philosophy is that you've run more than a hundred races, right? In terms of emergency. So you have a very deep connection as a runner to running. Yeah, absolutely. I was a runner first. Most race directors are, most of us are runners first, and we experienced something and we found something out there that we wanted to share with others. So without naming, there's no need to name names or anything, but you know, I would say as someone who's run, you know, a lot of races, but has run since 1978 and was very much a runner who was just a runner of my era. I healed striker, you know, five, eight high school, yep, short shorts, yep, short shorts, heck, Frank shorter even came to our practices sometimes. Absolutely. I mean, it was a different era, but very conventional in an era when not that many people ran, but then had a very kind of conventional path. And then eventually as I got all started to do trail running, even like group Colorado, we didn't trail run. We had to be backpacked, but we didn't trail run. That came later. Some of us did need a Krebs Ortiz, a mutual friend of ours, for example, she's been running for, you know, since he was 38, she's been an ultra runner on the trails, but, you know, we were on the same cross country team together, running very conventionally. In the late 70s, early 80s, you have had a really interesting combination where you had a lot of experience in ultra running and trail running, and then also begin to direct and then very seriously directing, putting some experiences together. So my question is, you could have gone in a lot of different directions with how you do these kinds of races as a race director. There are different models. There are models where there's a podium and there's maybe prize money. There's a lot of marketing going on by two companies and apparel companies or whatever it might be. There's a lot of focus on the elite athletes or those, maybe the top 10 finishers in a race, and then there's not a lot for anybody else, which is, you know, the vast majority of people in the race and the ones who are probably paying for most of it as well. But you didn't do that direction. You actually brought a different philosophy that you just described. What was the motivator? What is the motivator for you to be so different? Because now you're quite different, my experience is because the sport has shifted a lot more to the commercial commercialization side, I think. And a lot of the podcasts, if you go out there and again, no criticism, I listen to quite a few of them. But they're, they're, they're always focused on who finished top three at UTMB or, you know, what, what two was this particular runner wearing? Why did you go into this personal improvement, trying to save lives, journey, and how do you sustain that as a race director? Well, I'll say first Troy, there's a, put a bookmark in your brain there because there's a blind spot. Okay. And I want to talk about that's the line spot. What is it? I'll get to it. So, so for me, it, yeah, I mean, I, I'd run Western states and Barclay and Leadville for a number of times. I've been all over the country running an interest and really gathering a tremendous amount of experience from the experience. And just picking up what I, what I had mentioned, like that it's different for everybody. But the majority seem to be after the same thing. And so, at the same time, when I go to a race that has the corporate feel, the corporate structure, the prize money, the, the oogling of the elites, the podiums, like all of that, I don't feel like I belong. That doesn't feel like belonging to me. It feels like a lead is it feels like something else. It feels like there's a, there's a shiny and a fake that gets put up front for all to see. And it's, and it's this spectacle. It's a display. And that's cool and all. But that's not the dirt bag ultra running that I started running in 2005. That's something else. And there's a home for it, right? Obviously some people want that. Some people enjoy that. But someone like me, a mid-pack runner, who has also sometimes been a front of the pack runner, who has also sometimes been a very back of the pack runner. I, I never felt like I belonged. And so for me, it was about building a place where everybody felt like they belonged. Every runner felt like they mattered. Now we fly a flag at the finish line of our races that say that says until the last and what that means is those eight stations are up and functional and 100% supportive through the very last runner that runs through it. We're not packing up early. Same thing with the finish line. Everybody paid the same entry fee. Everybody gets the same experience. Everybody gets the same love and admiration. So I wanted to build something that I wanted to build a place where I felt like a lot. And everybody else could feel it too. So the other side of it was, I kind of lost my, my child here. The other side is, oh, Steve Jobs just throw it to throw a name out there. Steve Jobs, a market disruptor. The myriad of times that people told him he was crazy or that you shouldn't do it this way or you shouldn't do it that way or that's not the way that we do things. That's not the way that it's done yet he soldiered forward did it anyway and build the most remarkable technological empire that our nations ever seen. Now I'm not saying I'm Steve Jobs or that I ever will be Steve Jobs, but what a place to get inspiration like Steve taught me through his example that I don't have to be like everybody else. And for the first three years that I was in business at each piece, I had an awful lot of people within the community telling me, if you're going to make it, you need to do it like this. If you're going to succeed, you have to do this. If you're ever going to compete with everybody around here, you have to do it this way. And in my head it was, but I don't, what if I'm not competing, what if I'm building my own market within the market. So I'm going to build something that yeah, it's a part of trail and ultra running, but it is so different that you can't compare it to the others. I can't be in competition with the others because I am not, I am so unlike them. So through Steve's example and many others, that's what I wanted. I wanted to be so different. The hard part was the amount of pushback that I got along the way. The the blind spot in all of this is you're absolutely right. I'd say that through the Born to Run boom, which is the Born to Run book that came out 2010 to about 2016 that six years span of time that Born to Run was really in the focus of our brains in the sport. Running became big business. So I was entering, I was starting a business here in Colorado during the time when it was big business. But so it was easy for people to assume that I was a part of that boom and I want to make as much money as I could. No, actually, I'm here to push back against that. I don't believe that. I don't think that's sustainable. I don't think that's long term. I think this is fleeting. It's short lived. So for me it was really seeing the blind spot that eventually what I'm building will be cool. What I'm building will be the priority. At in today's trail and ultra running there is a lot of corporatization. There's a lot of focus on the elite and the race and the UDMB and all of those things Troy. The blind spot is none of them see that in the last three years every national or international running survey that has been conducted by interviewing runners. More and more each year runners are saying I'm here for belonging. I'm here to belong. I'm here to feel good. I'm here to make friends. They're not none of them are here for the race. In fact, every year in those surveys the level of interest in the race and in that flashingness is decreasing. But there is a culture of individuals, a group of individuals in our sport who very much want the culture to continue to move in that trajectory because they make more money if it does. There's more visibility. There's more sponsor dollars. There's more revenue to be made. But you can't make that revenue without runners. I'm seeing that my model which wasn't cool when I started 11 years ago is very cool right now. I'm in the driver's seat and I've been doing it all along. I can clearly see that my series what I have is really poised to explode over the next five years just based on knowing what runners are truly interested in and want. And it's not that. And what are your goals for him in a potential running series for the next five years? To downsize actually. I'm getting pretty tired. We'll talk about that. Yeah, I mean race directing is a very physically, emotionally and mentally demanding job. And doing it by yourself for as long as I have. I'm actually pretty shocked that I'm still doing it. It's a lot. There's been many times that I've wanted to quit as we do, but I'm an ultra runner. We don't quit. We keep moving in the face of adversity. We know one direction and that is forward. And so I've just always been moving forward. And so for me it's, but what does forward look like for me knowing where I'm at, knowing how I feel. We're not selling out every race we never have. I know which ones do. But with fewer and fewer people volunteering and giving back, which is the challenge for 200 miles and 300 miles and even 100 miles. I have to be a lot more strategic about where I put my resources and how do I utilize the resources I have, which is my community? I can't burn my community out. So for me, I need to downsize just a little bit, just a little bit, not a lot. I got to downsize a little bit so that I don't burn my volunteer pull out. So don't burn myself out. And so what races that I do have, I can continue to focus on that purpose of providing a space of belonging where people can come and do good work on themselves in a healthy way. And if there's just too much, it becomes unhealthy for all of us. So your races, sir, you've had some extraordinary race settings and experiences. But just to bring one reason, one up, silver wheels race. I was part of the 100k this year. And I have to say that among all the courses I've ever run, whether it was in a race or just out on a long training run or a fat ass or whatever it might be, it was one of the most interesting, challenging, fun courses I've ever been on. And maybe talk a little bit about you plan that race out. I thought like a virtuoso conductor, you really had an experience from start to finish. Maybe explain where the race started and finish, where is it? And what was your vision of how that experience was supposed to unfold? And just to set it up a little bit, all the racers gathered the night before. And there was 100 mile racers, the longest. But we all gathered and you had us gather in the railroad roundhouse in Como, Colorado. This is a turn style of anyone knows about old railroads. The locomotives would go in and then the wheel would spin around. And that way you could get on a different track. That's how they did it in the old days. And there's an old roundhouse that's been mostly restored up there now and is a historic site. And so we're sitting in there in that building inside that building. So I'm going to get access to it. The old trains are in there being restored or otherwise parked in there, which is amazing. And then you told the story of silver hills, which you might start with, the why it was this called silver hills, who was silver hills. So maybe talk about that experience because I think this I want to try to give our listeners a sense of why these races are so unique. And they are unique. You know, we could go on for an hour about silver hills alone. So I'll try to do the Cliff Notes version, but you were sitting in a a roundhouse built by Italian immigrant mason's in the 1800s. And that roundhouse served the many rail ride rail lines that went up and over almost every mountain pass that you ran over during the race. Silver hills is a mountain in fair play that was ultimately named after a dance hall girl, who in the 1800s saved the mining encampment called Buckskin Joe from the smallpox epidemic. She put her life and health on the line to care for all the miners. So it come down with with smallpox. And in fact, she's the only one in town that had money. So she's the one who went back to Denver to buy the vaccine for everybody and cared for them back to health. And then unfortunately, as the legend goes, she ended up acquiring smallpox herself. And so what a what a tremendous sacrifice of somebody to give that much of your being to others. And she did it because who she was and her way of life depended on them. So when they wanted to thank her for helping her in that way, the she was gone. She disappeared. So they just named the mountain after her instead. Big part of the history and the emotional makeup of that race. So you folks are running in this event that basically goes back to the rail history of Colorado, which served so many of the mining encampments on both sides of the continental divide that you straddle and run up and over the continental divide many times in and weaving in and out of these areas where these encampments and these mines exist where miners by hand built massive trenches to fill with water to float materials uphill and downhill throughout their encampments like the fortitude that that has to have the guts, the grit, to be able to do that but then endure the conditions while they were there to continue to do it. And you think about that way of life and then and then here we are paying good money to go out there and just run on some trails. It's a very different world that we live in. But for me that course is but how much can the world of yesterday, many yesterdays still teach us that through hard work and grit and determination we could find and create a better life for ourselves and along the way perhaps we can't stay on our feet without the loving care and help of others and how very important that that is. So for me, you know, Silver Hills was a race that used to just run on and around Silver Hills Mountain. I always wanted to expand it into these other areas. It took many years of lobbying for our group to be able to get a permit to do that. And once I heard that I could get the permit, it still took three years to get to where the course currently is and Silver Hills has been going on for 11 cycles now. But for me, there are all those lessons you could learn along the way but where you take it in is on the Vistas. It's when you stop and admire the view and you just take a moment for yourself where you contemplate, where you think about it all, where you ask yourself, what am I doing? What is, why am I doing this? You know, I grew up in Colorado and this race is a point-to-point race, 100K. I'm speaking of, but other races too, in your series on the Silver Hills course. So you're starting on Quinella Pass and you're running multiple passes up and down. You're on top of the final divide for a long period of time. There were mountain goats, there were moose. You see lots of moose, actually. There's all kinds of weather, clean, violent thunderstorms for me and a little average. Yeah. And it was just a-- very poetic sort of experience and made some tremendous friendships on that race, the kind of conversations you're talking about, you know, you're moving really hard and it's a challenge and you talk about adversity. It's this hardcore. There are times you're grinding so hard, but yet you're still making, you're able to still make friends and there were times when I was running with another person and, you know, just at random and having those kinds of friendships form and, of course, that's sort of the great thing about ultramarathon. You said you have times when you're in your head and then times when you have other people and you never know where that relationship's going to go and some of the best friendships you get are frankly often emerging in the trail, as you said. And as an extraordinary experience and yet there's so many of those kinds of experiences that you've designed and as a Colorado, and what I was going to say is that I thought I'd knew Park County in some of County, Colorado. I really did. I mean, I grew up in Jefferson County within the can. And I couldn't believe how much terrain I saw on that one race of 65 miles. I think it ended up being for me that I'd never seen before. Even though Breckenridge was like right over the edge of maybe the next mountain, I just had never seen that part of the state. I thought I knew it. There were times I thought I was in the San Juan Mountains. It seemed like I was almost in Urey or something. There were times when I felt like I was maybe in the front range. I mean, it's so diverse. The diversity is so remarkable. So it took you away, Troy, but my question is, what did you learn? What did I learn? I learned that this is something you talked about born to run. It's so interesting. And Chris McDougal, of course, wrote born to run. And Chris McDougal, and if he's listening, he's a friend. Chris is a lot like you. He is ironic that that book ended up being such a commercialization vehicle for so many people. Because if you've re-running with Sherman, you realize Chris McDougal is a big thinker who really understands human relationships and the importance of trying to improve oneself and trying to love and help the people around you. He's just a very kindhearted person. And I went to a running camp that he did a couple years ago. He's got a very similar philosophy, I think. And it's interesting because, you know, McDougal and you, you know, really emphasize, relaxing your mind. When you're worried about how you're going to place in a race, when you're worried about, you know, all the details you worry about in races like the Boston Marathon, on the Rose, or the New York Marathon, I mean, those races I did for years. And it's like, you live on your watch. I mean, everything is the watch. You live by the watch you die by the watch. You live on those races. Everything is about pacing. And I love that sport. I still love it. But there's a time and place for it. This is the opposite of that. I wasn't worried about my watch. I wasn't worried about my splits. I don't know that I even looked at my watch, except to try to make sure that I didn't get lost from time to time. I was worried about calling my mind and taking in the experience and really trying to see if I could run with the land, if you will, to really try to blend into the landscape. And I really felt like I was blending it in the landscape. I was moving across the landscape. And the landscape was working with me. And I was trying to fight the landscape. But that makes any sense. So first thing I'll say is the number one piece of advice I always give aspiring trail and ultra runners is to ditch the watch. There's an A and a B. The matter how long it takes you to get there or how fast you do it just as long as you do it. A and A to B. That's it. Two is what you just said tells me that I succeeded in my mission. Everything you just described. That's what I'm looking for. That is what I've built. Not, yeah, not the other things that I don't feel truly matter. Big picture. The long, nobody's going to remember your time at Silverhill. Nobody's going to, I often ask me, Hey, who won Leadville four years ago? And most people, there's some anomalies out there. Most people will be like, I have no idea. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. You're right. But man, every runner that ran in that race remembers that experience. Yeah. I remember just that being astonished at one point, we came around a bend. And there was a railroad trussle that you remember that railroad trussle. Of course, you designed the race. But I was so astonished there it was. It had to be left over from probably the 1870s. And it's falling down, but it's still in pretty darn good shape. It's not being preserved because it's too into remote location, but it is a huge railroad trussle. And in all bait out of logs, and there it was. And I thought, oh, my gosh, it's not been looted. It's not been dismantled. No one used it to build a log cabin or, you know, when I was a kid in Colorado, I mean, so much of what was in the ghost towns is going now. But that's a great example. You went to so many remote areas. There were there were mining operations that looked like they've been basically untouched since maybe 1910. Also along that whole route is astonishing route. So and as you said, it was a railroad route. Most of most of the trails that were on road road routes. And if you sit in those places long enough, Troy, everything you see becomes a metaphor for something, you know, including that trussle, which I would say is a metaphor for you to give you a metaphor for your knees. So who knows what it is? My knees need a metaphor, but they probably do. So I want to get back a little bit to the to the distances. And that I first decided to run a tuner mile race because I was on the son of a crystal course. Yeah. And it was my first 100 K I'd ever done in the mountains. And boy, that was a hard race for me. I had run the 50 mile and I had had a great experience, but I wanted to jump up to the 100 K. And you had 200 miles on that race. And I remember seeing these people and they were they were different. They were so tired. They were tired in a different way than 100 miles tired. And they were also very cool about what they were doing. They were all very confident in what they were doing. But you know, almost like they were postgraduate students or something in Ultramarathon AR. And I remember thinking to myself, you know, I think I want to do that someday. That seems completely crazy out of reach. And, you know, I've now run three 200 mile races and have others on deck. You had the first 200 mile race, I think in Colorado, right? Is that the first 200 mile race? No, there was another. There was another one before mine. It's really one of the first. Yeah. It was a second. And there's a remarkable race on a spectacular course, a really hard course. You're going up and down music pass alone is, you know, enough to wipe almost anybody off the map, I think. And you, you, you, you really pioneered that concept. But, but I'm interested in in you say 200 mile races are not just not sustainable. Yeah. And is it a function of the volunteers? Is it a function? So say a little bit more about it, because it seems like when you say that the 200 mile race market is saturated, I think that that's true too. But I also think that there's some races that I never expected to get the popularity that they're getting that like Cokodone is a great example of one that's become so much more popular that people are even participating in a live stream over it. So there's, there are some people responding to this model. So what do you, what do you see the sort of 200 to 300 mile race going, at least in the United States, where you see it going? Well, I would say first that the ones that I feel are the most popular are clearly the races that have the most influence. And when I say influence, I mean influence or five, the place for you to be live streamed a place for the Graham, as we would say, it's like, why'd you pick that race? It costs so much money. There's others out there who are just that are just as beautiful, just as stunning. Yeah. Probably better run from a race direction standpoint and a hell of a lot cheaper, but you pick that one. And I think a lot of people might be hard pressed to admit that they picked it because their ego needs it. They want to be seen. I sometimes ask a question. If you couldn't post that you did it on social media, would you still do it? And I know a lot of folks would say, no, what would be the point of doing it if I couldn't tell others that I did? And I was like, ah, interesting. So that highlights that you're not doing it for yourself. In the traditional, I want to be better sense. Yeah. If you're doing it for yourself, so that you could be noticed. And I don't think that that in it of itself is sustainable, right? We are, we could debate until the cows come home, Troy, that we are definitely moving into an anti social culture that we have just based on everything that I don't, I don't know that you and I would debate that. And I think that Jen alpha and Gen Z, you know, they're what they're enjoying, they're, they don't want the done up. They don't want the flashy. They don't want the people that are being fake on screen. They want the raw, the gritty. But again, a lot of folks aren't thinking that far ahead and seeing the big picture about what is the next generation going to want? What's important to them? And so you'll continue. Some of these folks, some of these race directors are going to continue to go down this trajectory of trying to force feed us their vision of what this can and should be. But it's not going to resonate with the next generation of runners that come up. And so they're going they're going to be behind the April. That's one part, and I don't think it's the sale. The other is two is there are only so many people who even want to run 200. And there's just, God, there's got to be over 30 of these races now in the nation. And really only five get more than 50 runners to sign up for me as a race director. I've never had more than 15 people sign up for that 200 mile. And we always use a joke. If I, well, if you charge $1,500, John, instead of 400, you'll sell it out, right? Because there'll be this perception of value or prestige. Yeah, that's right. And yeah, but I don't believe in that. I don't understand that at all. So I respect that too. But at the same time, so 15 runners shine up, sign up, and then eight start. Well, whether it's eight or 100, I still need the same amount of volunteers to make it happen. And at some point, you've got to decide, is it really worth having these volunteers sit out here for for three days before any of the other distances even start at this event, the 100 mile, 150 mile all the way down to eight miles, right? We're out there for five days. The first three is solely in support of eight people doing a 200 mile race. So when I say like, I got to be mindful about not burning out my community, I got to be mindful to not burden my volunteer base by asking them continuously to do things that they really don't want to do. They don't want to support a race for just, they're just camping out. And eight runners are trickling through in wide gaps. Oh, yeah, so very wide. It's, it's just not sustainable. And then on the flip side, I see a lot of these 200 miles and like the monster 300, they've got all the runners, but they don't have the volunteers. Right. And so if you don't have the volunteers, that very definitely creates a negative, net negative experience for the runner. They're not getting the care and the support that they actually need. It's just there's bodies there to help them quickly and then off they go, so it's almost as if you're self-supported, you might as well just be self-supported at that. And there's been a lot of discussion. I know another podcast, but you know, a couple, couple of friends who will be on the podcast in the future ran the monster 300, but both described some great things about the race. And again, I'm not getting into personality. There's a lot of great things, but also the fact that there wasn't water for a long time at one of the eight stations right now. And so I mean, issues like that that that that could be, you know, it isn't just that when you spend the money, you expect those things to be there. I think it's symptomatic, maybe, and this is part of what perhaps what you're saying, too, is that it's symptomatic of a larger issue, which is that if you're going to plan a 300 mile race, you got to make sure that you're really taking care of people at the same level, frankly, as you'd be taking care of them in a in a at least, as you'd be taking care of them in 100 mile race. Because it does become having been out there myself for, you know, up now to 225 miles, it does become an issue. And if you don't have any crew or something with you, you really are at somewhat a risky situation or you can be fairly quickly. You know, the number one job, a lot of people forget this, the number one job of the race director is risk management. Yeah, that's my job. It's not to host a party. It's not to say go or give you medals or to be an influencer. It's risk management. Yeah. And number one in risk management and one of these races and making sure that those runners have food and water. Yeah. And running out of water in any race, I've run at this point in my career drive, I've directed 113 trail events with an ultra marathon present. I've run out of water one time. And after that one time, I said never again that it cannot happen. That is how I learned how many people can I adequately care for on one of my events? How many? How long can I care for these people for at one of my events? Is that the forefront of my mind every time? And so if you're paying $2,000 to enter a race and they run out of water, that to me highlights the way that I view it in my head is Judy, the maid and the Jetsons. Yes. And when things aren't going right, the gears start popping out of her back and some smoke starts. That's where the 200 mileer is. The gears are popping out. The smoke is just starting. And I don't think that enough folks are thinking big picture enough to fix it. So I guess, you know, as we start to wrap this up and we could go on for hours and I'd love to. But I guess I would just ask you, you know, you've talked about maybe pulling back a little bit. And you're looking at sort of longer term sustainability. And how do you accent the philosophy that you've described? I mean, how do we clone you? And how do we get that sense of community back into ultra-running and ultra-racing? I think it'll have to happen organically. I think that I haven't always been somebody Troy that delivers my message in the appropriate methods. I'll say, like I'm, I'm a New Englander. I'm, and I'm neurodivergent. So I'm very black and white, blunt, literal. Here it is. I had a professor one day describe it. You're the guy that puts Ajax in a glass and a glass. You put Ajax in a glass and forces someone to drink it. So yeah, yeah, that is my style. And so I wish that if I could go back in time and be a younger version of me that I would have explored different ways or better ways to get my message out and the importance of what I feel that we're doing at HPRS for the longevity of our sport and it just didn't happen. I don't know who that person is either. I really don't, I think everybody who is in the sport right now looking to make money off of it and to be fair, I'm one of those people. I think most of them want to continue to highlight the race and live streaming and making a real spectacle of it. But doing, they're doing it in a way that really forgets who's really paying the bills out there. And that's the mid and back of the pack. And I think a lot of races are eventually going to go away before the lesson starts to get learned. And the mental churn occurs that we, wait a minute, we got to rethink about this and do it different. And so I think it's honestly it's just going to happen organically. And I think more of these new race directors that are coming in have this mindset. I'm seeing a lot a lot of the new race directors have this mindset. So I think eventually there'll be a flipping of the sport where some of these race directors who are in the corporate race structure today, eventually they're going to burn out or they're just going to move on to something else. And these other race directors who are new right now are going to kind of take over with with their mentality. It's just going to organically happen. I wish we could speed it up. I wish we could we could shake people, you know, and get them to like in the movie airplane with all the people sitting in the seats. We're just going to shake them and slap them into seeing what we're seeing. But that's just not how it works. And so it'll be organic. It'll take time. But I think there's going to be a lot of shifting and carnage along the way. And for me, I've got my popcorn ready. I'm kind of interested in watching so that I can be continued to be a student of the evolution of the sport. So last question. Your favorite race that you've ever directed. And then also your favorite race you've ever participated in as a runner that you didn't direct. Man, I get this question a lot. For me, Silver Heels is my baby. It's I love it the most. It's the most fun. It's also the most challenging. Races that I've run into. Me walk 100K in San Francisco as to me and the single greatest ultra I've ever experienced. And why was that? Tell us about that race. And why was it your favorite? It's in the Marin headlands north of the Golden Gate Bridge. You come very close to the bridge. You're on the Quad-Dipsey Trail, which is a very historical place to run. Pirates Cove. But just the feel of the race, there's community there. There's grandeur. There's gorgeous views. You're on a mountain looking at the ocean, which is unique. But also the support, all of the run clubs from the local area come in and man the eight stations. You feel like a rock star. And then when you get to that finish line at Stinson Beach, you feel like something bigger. And I've just the I've always felt cared for and valued. And like I belonged at me walk more than any other race. Well John, thank you for your time. It's always great to see you and congratulations. You have had such a positive impact on the sport. Not so many lives too. I think you've saved a lot of lives. Thanks Troy. Appreciate you having me. It's interesting being an interview for a podcast by a lawyer.