Mallory Richard | Ultrarunning Data, Athlete Rankings, UTMB Insights

Welcome back, or welcome to, the Single Track Podcast. I'm your host, finn Malanson, and in this episode we're talking with Mallory Rashard, a data analyst and accomplished ultra runner based in Winnipeg, canada, who writes a regular column for I Run Far, called Running the Numbers, which uses quantitative data to talk about trail and ultra run. Mallory and I discussed the pros and cons of the current athlete ranking systems in our sport, interesting performance insights from the UTMB and Golden Trail World Series events and other interesting topics like how often runners improve their performance at a given race. Before we get started, though, this episode is brought to you by Rabbit Features and Kodiak Kigs. Use code SINGLETRACK15 on the Kodiak and Features websites for 15% off your orders there, and use code SINGLETRACK20 on the Rabbit site for 20% off your order there. All of this information can also be found in the show notes page of the episode. With that, let's get started. Mallory Rashard, welcome to the SINGLETRACK podcast.

Hey, thanks so much for having me, Finn.

So before we get started, I did want to make one observation. There's a lot of talk about the growth of the sport these days in terms of bigger brands, better athletes, more money, but one other aspect about this moment in the sport is influx of people like yourself the person that comes to mind is Liam, who goes by Aid Station Fireball on social media who bring this whole new level of data analysis to the sport and draw out all of these really interesting insights about historical events, athlete training, performances, and I just think it makes the discussion about the sport so much more rich and interesting. And I was laughing about this with one of my colleagues of the day, because it wasn't very long ago that race preview articles or shows were mostly exercises and name recognition and name dropping for analysis, and you kind of call it a day there, and so much has changed in a short time and I think a lot of that can be chalked up to the work of your column and others, and so I think, before we get into these questions, I just kind of wanted to give you thanks.

Wow, thank you. I did not expect to have my name included in a list of things that are contributing to positive change in the sport. That's a dream come true. That is the best case scenario for the column, but given that it started out as an experiment and something to do for fun, I didn't really anticipate people reading it and responding positively to it. As I mentioned to you before, there are so many times where I'm working on an article and I don't even know what the conclusion or the findings are going to be when I start to dig into the data. So I still often feel like I'm making this up as I go along, and maybe that's fitting for where our sport is at right now, because you're right, for a long time, pre-race previews were name recognition and so many pre-race interviews, especially in the past, but even still have that personal. It's a conversation between friends, our sport is still so small and still friendly that it feels strange to analyze the data sometimes because we're not talking about multi-millionaire athletes. A lot of people are still paying out of their own pocket to get to these races and it's their passion, and so it feels strange sometimes to strip away that context and talk about the numbers of their performance.

It's so funny. You mentioned the media relationships. I'm still not necessarily positively or negatively, but I know that our sport will truly be big when there is sort of a default antagonistic relationship between athletes and the media. That's way far off in the distance and until then we're all buddy buddy and great friends. I think this is a good place to start though, because for context and we'll in the pre-roll for this we'll go through your bio. But you have this excellent column it's called Running the Numbers, hosted by Irons Far. For me it's been appointment reading alongside Sabrina Littles' column, corinne Malcolm's column too I know she's no longer there at Irons Far. I read that every time it came out and it's great. It's great content. What prompted you to start that column?

I'm very flattered to be mentioned in the same sentence as people like Sabrina Littles. I used to transcribe interviews for Irons Far, so when they would do their pre-race and post-race coverage, I would transcribe those. They had put out a call for help when they launched a Patreon, and so you know I sponsored them on Patreon, but then I also sent them a quick email saying I actually have a background in transcribing interviews as part of my research, as I used to be a historian. Do you want someone to do that? Another person in your roster? And then, when I had a child in 2020, I wasn't going to be available for the quick turnaround that is required to transcribe those interviews. So I stepped away and I just found myself missing that connection to Irons Far and I felt like I had lost touch with the ultra-running community and this big part of myself. I was looking for a way to get back to that and then got inspired by my brother. He used to be really active in a small version of Warhammer 40k and used to write articles on, you know, different like rules of gameplay, things like that. So basically, he found a niche community that he was really passionate about and he wrote content just for people who were as passionate as he was, and he didn't care that it was a really small audience. The idea was just find something you care about, do it well, just try to build something. And I, you know, wanted to keep that spirit alive. So when I was looking for a way to get extra practice myself you know, scraping data and analyzing it and writing about data for a late audience I thought, well, you know, this could be fun and if there's anyone who would pay me for it, frankly, that's easier and more aligned with my values than trying to be like a brand ambassador or something, because I'm really bad at social media.

I did not know that in a prior life or earlier, with our in far, you were transcribing, I'm assuming, their pre-race, post-race athlete interviews. I have to imagine. Just given the amount of time that can take you, you must have either either learned a lot or you just had moments where you'd pick up a part of a question or a response and you think to yourself that's interesting. Can you recall anything in this moment from those years transcribing interviews that you thought were pretty fascinating about our sport, or any of the conversations that you were involved in?

It was actually neat being a transcriptionist because you have to really listen to what's being said and I run far. It makes a point of interviewing the most competitive athletes. At any event it's covering in person. So to be hanging on every word of these people I really took away. I was struck by the quiet confidence that competitors have. Like plenty of us in the sport, I probably deal with imposter syndrome or have many moments of self-doubt like was my training enough? Do I deserve to be at the starting line? And it was really neat to hear how many of these athletes had some of that like they would acknowledge that their training might not be perfect, but just to see that they could take certain aspects of preparation to a whole new level. And then at other times I still feel like you could see a little bit of yourself in them. And then I also just had fun feeling like from afar I was connected to the scene. Or sometimes you would have to in the interview in parentheses, explain something that's happening off camera just to enrich or help someone understand why they stopped talking for a moment. And I used to have some fun with the editors about that because every now and then I just kind of see like what will they let me insert without them catching it at editing and removing it? Because anytime Brian Powell would interview Kylian Jornay, it would just come across the immense respect he has for Kylian. Because, of course, but like every now and then, if you go back and read some of those, it's possible that in parentheses it might be like Brian looks adoring Lee at Kylian. I think every now and then they left one of those in that's awesome.

Well, I know you mentioned earlier that your process for coming up with content can be a bit ad hoc or like it'll just kind of be like where you're at in your career or in your life and your mixing and matching topics. I feel the same way with this podcast. I do. I would even say I have a pretty haphazard approach, like a lot of the episodes that come about, they happen in real time. I don't sit on them to get published basically immediately. Do you have any other additional process for how you identify sub topics or how you think about the direction of the column?

We keep a Google Doc myself with the editors and we all add ideas in there and we put them through a funnel. The idea is anything can go on the idea list and then from there we ask some questions about how feasible is this, although there's a lot of data out there? I have a full-time job. I have a family. I'm trying to still be a runner myself. There's a hard limit on how much time I can put into these. I was listening to your podcast with Abby Levine. It was really good. She mentioned that same thing that these articles that you're really passionate about. Like if there was an extra couple hours every day, we can take them to a new level. But sometimes you're just working with what you've got. There are articles we would love to write but the data just isn't in shape to pluck readily. We have to put those on the back burner or we have to wait and see if we can ask someone to give us a ready to go data set. It's pretty much when an idea comes to one of us, we jot it down and every few months we meet and talk and figure out which one of these will resonate with our audience and can be done and go from there.

What is your process for aggregating and interpreting data? Are you going on Strava and manually plucking insights from athlete training? Are you going to these public databases or UltraSignup or UTMB indexes? What's typically your process for the Western States article, for example? We talked about like temperature, its impact on finisher rates and times and stuff like that.

So my data harvesting process is not sophisticated. One of the reasons I wanted to start doing this article was I thought it would be a kick in the pants to get better at using coding languages and scraping data from websites, and I found that that would be efficient in the long run if I invested the time and really mastered that skill set and instead, by the time an article deadline comes around, I just didn't get around to becoming pro at those or the other issue is, I know how passionate our community is and so if I make sloppy mistakes in gathering up the data, people will catch that and it will hurt the credibility of the column and like, despite my best efforts, it's happened before. People have been so classy about how they've pointed out oh you missed something. But there are a lot of times where I'm just taking it off of pages like. Ultrasignup is one of my favorite. My favorite races to cover are often Western States and AeroVipa events, just because they put their splits online in Excel format and things like that. So it's just a lot easier to analyze. So I will take spreadsheets like those and aggregate them or copy things like from a UTMB website result data and make my own spreadsheet.

It's fun. You mentioned the critics and I have. Definitely. I am not somebody that has great attention to detail. It's something that I'm working on and I have a regular cadre of 30 or 40 people that listen to this podcast, that correct me Like I'll get texts and emails and comments on social media correcting things and I found it actually to be a pretty good process and it's forced me to get better, which is good. One thing you mentioned a moment ago was that there were, there have been, questions that you've had in the past that you would love to address in your column, but you find that there isn't sufficient data or there's data behind you know, apis and stuff like that that you don't have access to, that you would love to unpack. What are some of those that you've like had to shelve because there just wasn't access or enough there?

I would love to be able to look under the hood with ultra signup data. I would love to be able to plot something like, say, race registration fees over time. I'm very interested, for some reason, in the business side of the sport. When it comes to the human performance element. I just feel like there are people who can do those topics better than me and, frankly, academics will spend months working on those questions as opposed to someone doing it part time for a monthly column. I love thinking about the costs associated with the sport, the growth of the sport, where the money goes in our sport, where the people go in our sport. Those are the questions I love digging into and it's just that it's very, you know, I can only work with what I've got and even with the public data that is out there. Like there's some limitations. In every article where I talk about demographics, I'm limited to gender and age group because, and sometimes like region, but I, you know, it's not that I forget that, say, race or socioeconomic status exist. It's just that there's no column for that in the ultra signup results.

Gosh, that race registration plotting would be very fascinating. I know some of the ultra signup folks. They're great people. They're incredibly generous in their very like growth of the sport focused. I wouldn't be surprised if, like they listen to this episode. You might get a get an email in a couple of days saying like how can we help? I don't know, I don't want to speak for them, but I could imagine something like that happening.

That would be awesome. We've traded emails before and I know that they would they probably consider helping, might just come down to, can they find the time? And I guess I should start with like an ask that's nice and small so they don't get scared away.

I've only listened to a few episodes, but I do believe they now have a podcast dedicated to interpreting data from their platform, which is fascinating. We'll link to it in the show notes, I think. In general. The other question I wanted to ask in this front, do you feel like the sport has a strong culture of data, or do you still think there's a lot of legwork in this area of the sport to create opportunities for more interesting analyses like the ones you do?

I think that at the participant level there's a strong culture of data and I see that again based on the fact that people actually read my column and then also some of the race reports that are out there. Like in a perfect world we wouldn't even need my column. We would just have like a Nick Curry race report every month that we could dig into, because there are some athletes out there like him and Bob Hearn, to name just two examples. There would be more who they're so thorough and they keep such good data. So on the runner side, I think there are people out there who look at the numbers and they plot and anticipate their splits for their goal races. On the business side, I don't know if the culture of data exists yet. There are individual races, like I mentioned Western States and Aravipa, the Superior Fall Trail Race and the other Rock Study running races. They keep good records on their website, but I know that it can be tough to get UTMB related results. The appearance of them is beautiful, but when I had to, for a previous article, pull out how many elite level runners DNFed at UTMB, I actually went page by page through the results and it was listed with something like 50 runners per page to pull out the DNS, so it wasn't like a spreadsheet I could download or something. And then even for last year's article on UTMB where I was looking at their splits, like so many races, the location of their checkpoints changes from one year to the next and so you can't make an apple to apples comparison, even when you scrape the results from one year and then try to put it all into one spreadsheet. And I'm not looking to pick on those individual races.

No, not at all. No, not at all. All right, we mentioned it briefly earlier. You wrote this article recently about Western States and the impact of temperature on the finisher rates, etc. I think it's called feeling the heat, and there was a really interesting quote you had in there. You said I love when quantitative data helps us spot patterns and gain insights that we may have otherwise overlooked, and sometimes the numbers simply help us articulate a phenomenon we already existed. So I have two questions here. The first one is what have been some good examples in your research of finding the overlooked insights in some of these races and in some of these performances?

I did do an article earlier this year on shoe costs and I already knew that shoes would be more expensive. Now, like there are shoes out there that have materials and processes involved in them that just make them more expensive than shoes we've seen previously, I didn't expect that the affordable shoes, like the shoes at the bottom of the price spectrum, really hadn't changed in price compared to, say, 10 years previous. So I know, for me personally that was surprising.

And how about examples of anecdotal speculation where for years people have been saying something. The data wasn't quite there or it wasn't readily available for them to back it up. But when you ran the numbers, it turns out this common truism about a particular race or a style of training. It ended up being barred out by the data.

You know what? There are probably lots of examples of that, Maybe a few that come to mind. In the Western States article, one of the big takeaways was yeah, heat slows you down, and so there were probably some people reading that article being like you spent a month to tell me this, Like I already knew that.

But it didn't affect DNFs, right, it didn't affect DNFs.

Yeah, and that was a little surprising. I don't even think the full weight of that had stood out to me until somebody mentioned it in the comments and it was sort of a you're right. Another one is I had done an analysis previously for a particular race on where you're most likely to DNF and I thought that was interesting. You can give that information to your crew and say like this is probably going to be a toughest section of the race Try to keep me from DNFing here. But at the same time it was from about, let's say, mile 60 to 90 in that area and like anyone who's run 100 milers could probably say that's where I'm most likely to DNF, because I'm tired but I can't smell the barn yet. So again it backed up something we already, anecdotally, are intuitively new.

Thank you to HVMN for supporting this episode. Lately I have been using their ketone IQ product during long runs as well as right after those big efforts. I find that during long runs, taking a shot of their ketone IQ product maintains my mental clarity and focus, and when I take that shot post run, especially in the midst of consecutive big weeks of training, I find that it expedites recovery. So if you're interested in giving it a try yourself, head over to HVMNcom forward slash, single track 20. And if you use that link you'll save 30% off your order If you choose to become a subscriber, or you can use our old code, single track 20 for 20% off your order at checkout If you're just choosing that. One time purchase. With that, let's get back to the conversation. You've written a lot before about all of the ranking systems that exist in trail and ultra running. If we look at some of the predominant systems for ultra trail specifically, you've got the UTMB index, itra, ultra, sign up. When you look at all of these and others that I haven't mentioned, what do you see as the current pros and cons for what's available out there for runners to compare and contrast, to see their progress, to qualify for races, stuff like that?

The UTMB index and the ITRA performance index are very similar in the sense that they both focus on trail races and they have similar waiting models. I'll talk about them both a little bit as one. I think the biggest drawback for those is because they focus on trail races and it makes sense that what you would expect a UTMB index and a trail runner index to do, but it does leave out performances. In that article I mentioned that there would be some runners, like Camille Herron, who her index might not capture just how important she is in the sport because some of her best performances have been on roads. Those ones they're very upfront about their limited focus, but it does mean we struggle to find one perfect system to measure all ultra or MUT races. Otherwise, ultra Signup is handy because there's no real barrier to put your results on there. Anyone can upload their race results to Ultra Signup, as I understand it, but it's mostly North American so there's a lot of global results that aren't represented there. Then they have such a defensible methodology for waiting race performances If you win, you got 100%, that was your performance ranking. But they don't acknowledge that a win at certain races really counts for more than a win at other races. Winning Western states is a lot harder to do than winning your local 50K. I respect them for avoiding that subjective discussion and being upfront about it, but it does mean that if you're doing a pre-race preview, it could be hard to decide who to talk about just based on Ultra Signup data, because you can't always tell who's a breakout runner, who's new to the scene and I haven't heard their name yet versus who races prolifically but at small events and happens to be doing a destination race. They're not a favorite for their win, but they're still a great runner.

I can't tell you how many times we've started to do our research for a race preview, like the Black Canyon 100K this past year, and there would be four or five females, four or five males with Ultra Signup rankings somewhere between 95 and 100% and you'd click into their history and it would be a lot of local races. Maybe your first inclination is like, okay, maybe they're operating more in the minor leagues of trail and ultra running, but also, at the same time, maybe they are actually a great runner that could really be a threat in this race and they've just been slowly, bit by bit, like getting experience and finally realizing, okay, I'm ready to step up and do go for a gold and take it, or something like that. It's hard to know exactly what the context of that race history is.

Yeah, that seems like that's data for you, right? It's usually most useful when you have a human to interpret it. So this is why we need pre-race previews like the ones you do, because there isn't one place we can just go and skim and know who's the favorite to win.

You mentioned earlier, like the case of Camille Herron, one of the greatest ultra runners in our sport, but tends to be operating mostly in a very specific discipline, on the track and on the roads, where she's had most of her success. Are you someone like Putting on your own personal, like judgment had here? Are you someone in terms of creating like an ideal ranking system? Do you want to see more discipline specific and context specific Ranking systems or do you like seeing these more blended systems, both for fans to reference, people in the media like myself to reference, and athletes to reference?

Oh, it's a good question. I don't know, like if, if all of the different ultra running and mountain and trail running disciplines were Olympic events, we might not worry as much, because you know if you well, if you win the, the goal that the IAU 24-hour World Championships like, there is no doubt that you are a phenomenal, world-class runner. But we're we have a sport where we have these multi-talented people who can go back and forth across them. I Don't think they have to apologize for doing that and and I'm not even sure if it matters that we are able to rank them. Like it's, it's fun and I mentioned this in a lot of my articles like it's great food for Conversation on your long run with your buddy if you each pick a runner and then, like argue why they're the best. But yeah, in my mind, at the end of the day, these rankings don't really matter. But I'm saying that as someone who you know, like has taken money out of the equation for these runners. If, if it helps you become ultra runner, beer in the ultra magazine, sign up. Or if, if these rankings actually help land you sponsorships or impact the size of your sponsorship, I can see how it matters. I just I'd be out of my depths to comment on that.

I'm also gonna editorialize here myself. This is more like a Piece on my own wish list as a member of the media, but I would love to see one of these ranking systems attempt to further contextualize the status of an athlete by mapping out either their Upward trajectory in the sport how well they're maintaining their current position, or even like a Potential downslope, like they're at the tail end of their careers and maybe they've already hit this inflection point. We're like that was there one of their last great performances and the data is showing us that. Like they're, they're kind of in the sunset of their career because, as I was mentioning earlier, with ultra sign-up and a lot of like the jumps from Local races and just sort of like testing the waters to these higher profile races, there's not much Context or storyline for that jump and also the jump from you know, like a Western states to a lesser scale race. So I Don't know if I articulated that well, but I would love to see that type of context, if it was possible, added to these systems.

I I like that idea and I think that e-tra is trying to do that in a way, because I you might have seen that when they last made revisions to their ranking system, your Result is worth a little less six months after and then again 12 months after the result. So the idea being that, like if you win UTMB and then never race again, they will maintain a record of you know the peak you hit in your career, but as far as where you're currently ranked, that will start to go down gradually. I like that idea too, and especially the holding on to the historical piece, because I Know, even just for personal experience, if you check, like e-tra or something like, I don't exist as a runner right now. I I had a kid in 2020 and then just, I have done races since then, but I've done small races and I wouldn't be getting an elite level ranking with them or anything anyways, but it it was an interesting feeling to go from Having been there and having actually met the elite standard for a little while to I don't exist as a runner now, and so capturing that historical data would also protect people from auto relevance.

Yeah, we'll make it. We'll make sure to mention it in the pre-roll too, but you're an excellent runner in your own right. That should that should be stated for the record that you are. In addition, no great writer, you're a talented runner as well. One of the things that I'll mention because I think they deserve a shout out Travis Longcar at free trail, on the back end of their whole fantasy free trail system, if you click into each athlete, they now have this tab where you can go right directly to their Instagram, their Strava profiles, all of those ranking systems if they've free trails recorded a podcast with them before you can click into that. So those are interesting Sources to kind of get like the heartbeat of these runners and where they're at heading into races to help make picks and stuff. But yeah, if there was a way to you know, like in the same way Strava has like the training score from the training log, like Okay, you're now at like a 75 out of 100 because you've had, like this, many consecutive weeks of, you know, consistent training and workouts and long runs, it'd be. It'd be cool to see if it's possible to create a similar score in the racing world. I guess the UTMB index does intent attempt to do that, but I don't know. I'm just speculating in real time. Are there any other reasons in your opinion why we tend to overlook up-and-comers in the sport or top contenders based on these ranking systems? Like one of our famous phrases on this podcast is random ballers the people that seemingly come out of nowhere and have great performances, and there wasn't much context or evidence to Predict that that would be the case on race day. Are there any other Shortcomings in our systems that come to mind for you?

Well, I guess there's not a good system right now to acknowledge if you are joining our sport from another sport, and that would even just include road and track. I know that I, you know, dipped my toe into the waters of riding a pre-race preview when I did an article about Patrick Reagan, and I was. I was interested in how Consistently he can run through in an ultra. Like we all know, you get slower in a race, but his pacing line was like there was no decline to it, basically, and when I spoke with him on the phone he was Very passionate about sharing the spotlight and making sure that we talked about okay, I have run Havilline a hundred in the past, but let's talk about who's going to be running it this year. And so, at his suggestion, I tried to include some of the people who were doing this, who were registered, and I completely overlooked Heather Jackson and and like, yeah, with the benefit of hindsight, wow, like she is incredible. And I just I knew nothing about triathlon so I didn't know who she was, and Meanwhile, the fitness and experience that she was bringing into that race Was top-notch, even if she hadn't run as many ultras yet, and so there'd be people like her. And then as more and more younger athletes are coming into the sport, you know they will have great road and track PRs and performance records that someone like me would not really know anything about, unless we took the time to dig into each individual runner.

Well, that's interesting. You mentioned Heather Jackson because I remember that, heading into the Havilline a hundred, she, if you knew her triathlon background, you knew that she was probably gonna be a threat. But if you went to ultra sign up, her name was at the very bottom of the list. You had to like control F Type in Heather Jackson and because she hadn't had a result yet in the sport, she was at the very bottom of the list. So you really had to be in the know, like tracking on her social, her YouTube channel, all that kind of stuff, to get the sense that she might be there. But yeah, that's another. That's another example of that's. That's a really good one. I Love to talk with you too about the Perceived increase in the depth of competition at races like UTMB in Western states, both on the men's side and the women's side. Maybe we can even compare the rate of change in the two fields, just based on the research you've done. What are some interesting insights from what the data says?

other people are finding these things too, so I am not looking to take away credit from their findings. I love that it feels like we're having this giant discussion and, you know, someone's idea peaks my curiosity and then I'll dig a little further into it. But you and I spoke briefly about this before. What stands out to me right now and what I've been thinking about as I prepare an upcoming article for iron far is with the recent Western states results. What happened on the women's side and the. The men's race was so much fun to watch and it was really interesting and competitive. But, having run Western states myself in 2017. I was just blown away by. So in 2017 I finished in under 23 hours and that was good enough for 11th place. So sub 23 compared to this year at the 11th place finisher finished in under 19 hours. So you know just how fast the field was and I know that you know. Course, conditions and temperature always play a role in that, but a margin of change that big in a relatively short span of time. Like there are people like Casey Lichtag who were at the 2017 Western states and were at this most recent Western states, so it's not like there's a whole sea change of who's participating in the sport, but the field has gotten so much faster and I think that the way that they are racing also is different because of that and one of the examples that stood out for me is Ryan Whitcoe had this great article Like if you're an ultra-entrails running nerd, you'll probably want to bookmark the nerds only page or tab of the Western states website and it's full of statistics and it's even gotten some statistical analysis on there, including a paper by Ryan Whitcoe about, like, the statistical guide to getting a silver buckle at Western states, and he wrote it in 2017 about the 2017 event, and he looked at some runners who were on track to finish in slower than 24 hours and he found that at the first aid station, which is like mile 10, red star ridge, in the race, jacqueline Merritt had like a 19% chance of finishing in under 24 hours. Not only did she go on to finish in less than 24 hours, she finished hours ahead of that as the seventh place woman. Yeah, and you know it was held up at the time as like this is a masterclass in how you pace Western states. She nailed it because the the advice at the time was the race doesn't start until forest hill. You Get those miles out of the way efficiently At the start of the race, but basically don't do anything stupid like nail your basics and just be ready to hammer when you get to forest hill onwards. And if you were to run a race like that these days, I I don't know that you could make up the lost ground starting at forest hill, because there are so many women who are going out aggressively and Even if you eat into that lead that they have on you, I'm not sure you could catch them any longer. Other people pointed out was it a station fireball? I you've even yes on your podcast that by forest hill it was practically a lock for who was in the top ten on the women's side. Eight of the ten Top ten finishers were already there. And of the two women who were in the top ten at forest hill, one was keely Henninger, who had to drop from the race because of an injury. So if she hadn't gotten injured, you know, maybe that's maybe it would have been nine of the top ten who were already in position there. And the other person was Jenny Quilty, who finished 11th. So she didn't have a major, massive blow-up either. Right, she wasn't like walking in the last 20 miles of the course, I'm assuming, with a finishing time that fast.

I was in bed by then, but and it's it's amazing one of the biggest Paradigm shifts for me, or just the ways that I interpret the race. Again, credit to Liam here. He talked about how the data from the last 10 to 15 years even longer, 25 years shows that you really have to Be in the thick of it by forest hill and that those Jackie Merritt performances tend to be outliers. And I think this year the data kind of proved that. I think you 70 to 80% of the men's and women's top 10 at Western States this year were also in the top 10 at Robinson, flat 30 miles into the race. So it's just amazing how you know you crunch these numbers and some of these you know speculations about how to race the race and where it all begins and what position you need to be in at Forest Hill can kind of change on a dime. It's fascinating.

And it sounds like that's happening on the men's side too. I remember hearing in post race interviews with Tyler Green that he talked about, even though he might like to pace conservatively and run comfortably in the early miles of the race, he knew he couldn't do that this year, that he had to bet on himself and take some chances and it paid off for him. Maybe that is the way to race now. Sorry, this is something I'm still not getting used to. About writing this column is pretending to comment on these elite runners, performance and racing strategies as if I know what I'm talking about, like I can comment on what I see from the numbers, how you folks do what you do. Like I still don't get it, but I'm in off.

I think now that I know what I know about the sport sorry, the more I get into the sport, the more I realize I really know nothing, and I think for some people it's just being more confident about knowing nothing. I think you know more than a lot of us, myself included, but it's fascinating, you know. So we're recording this. In mid July, utmb is six or seven weeks away. You wrote an article in your column that specifically looked into the data around how competitive male and female runners at UTMB should be in order to win to podium top 10 at the race, whether they should be conservative, aggressive placement at aid stations. One of my favorite stats was the DNF rate among iron far interviewees on the men's room as I, which appeared to be equal, which I thought was interesting as a percentage of the field. Any interesting insights that you want to share for viewers and listeners that haven't read that article, since we're almost coming up on what I consider to be the greatest time of the year UTMB season.

So, admittedly, because I wrote that article about a year ago, I will not know it off by heart, but one of the things that stood out for me is I know that as North Americans we get excited to watch Jim Walmsley at that race and kind of a it's funny because he's at a whole other level performance wise. But that idea of facing setbacks and not getting the result he wants and going back and trying it again, I think we can still identify with that and want to cheer for him in that sense. And sometimes I've heard in after previous UTMB additions people talk about well, did Jim go out too fast? Is that why, you know, he blew up later in the race? And when I was looking at the data it felt like there's not really a much alternative for a runner of his caliber and ambition If you want to be in contention for the win. The way that they are racing, where they're making sure that they're at the front of the field early on and, you know, trying to blow by blow, match the paces of their competitors that does seem to be how UTMB is raced and then with those huge risks of aggressive pacing and letting your competitors dictate your paces a little bit, you know, can be those big rewards of setting course records. We're getting the win finishing up the podium but not all runners like. They're racing to break each other and so people get broken. There were a lot of DNFs. There was, I remember from the article, and if anyone's curious, please go to Iron Fire and read it again, because I did not memorize it. Oh, perfect, thank you. But I do remember that there was some nuance between how men and women were generally to date racing UTMB, just in the sense that I think that the winners the point at which, in the race where the winner was decided, there was a clearer trend on the men's side than on the women's side, if I remember correctly. And so I think that's interesting, and I'm curious to see if I went back and reran that analysis three years from now, would it look different?

I was just going to ask you from the data you've analyzed, are there any discernible gender based differences in the race strategies between men and women? Like I know, I've heard people say in the past that men tend to run a race UTMB, for example more carelessly, aggressively, and a lot of them pay consequences later in the race, whereas women take this more measured approach. They're smarter in their execution, they have more left in the tank later in the race. There's less attrition, less blow up. Can you comment on any of those stereotypes?

It did feel like looking at the data. Run your own race is a common piece of advice that all ultra runners receive. And it felt like women at UTMB were taking that a little more seriously, and it seemed as though some of the men's runners were more likely to be running together or setting their pace based on what someone around them was holding to. What makes me curious if that's going to evolve is just having just seen Western states where women were running close together or together, and again faster than they were even just a few years ago, for the entire top 10. Is that going to give them a narrower margin of error and make them more likely to be running in close contact with their competition, where there is that temptation to match somebody else's pace? Maybe one thing that would make it a little bit different is because the men's winner of UTMB is historically always the overall winner of UTMB. If you're in the lead, there is no one else around you except your closest competitor to set your pace. For the women, there would be some of the men's runners around them too. So, that might sometimes be like a benefit to their racing and pacing options, and then other times might make it more complicated.

That's a great point and that's something I wish I did not ask for this. I wish I had asked Courtney, post-race at Western states, can you speak at all to the influence of being in that men's top 10 for such a long portion of the race and did running alongside Machu Blanchard, ryan Montgomery, dan Jones, that whole contingent of runners did, having people around you inspire you to push harder in some of your dark moments versus, you know, I think Tom Evans, for a large portion of the race after Forest Hill, after Dakota dropped back, was sort of on his own island and needing to self motivate and go off his crew. I think it's just an interesting psychological phenomenon to consider, but that's a great point. Okay, there's another thing that I want to talk about. I have two more articles that I wanted to go in depth with you on, and the first one is your article comparing the UTMB World Series to the Golden Trail World Series over in Europe and looking at how their formats and their funding models foster elite competition. And I think again, I'd love to just give you free reign to just recall any interesting insights you found looking at the data it could be about, you know, the density of elite runners relative to the field. Proportion of female runners in the elite field time spread. Percentage of DNFs. Among, as I mentioned earlier, the I Run Far preview interviews, which I thought was interesting, anything come to mind for you off the bat that you think the audience would be interested to hear about?

Well, so, given that I write for a website called I Run Far, I've been writing mostly about ultra marathon so far, and one of the biggest takeaways for me as I prepared that article was just how impressive the Golden Trail World Series was, that its format of having shorter races throughout the season and not that many of them, with the specific goal of getting runners to come back and do at least three races in the series, I like that. I think it's, you know, has the potential to give us the closest thing to rivalries that we would have in our sport, because, as you know, you know, our best runners could go their entire careers without ever facing off. If one specializes in races like bad water and someone else is the best at hard rock, and just two random examples. That idea of you can have such different specialties, or the same would apply for distance, and so at least for runners who are interested in racing at marathon distances and shorter, on really technical mountainous routes, there's the incentive for them to go to these races and see each other multiple times, and I love that. And then I believe that there may be some funding support through the UTMB World Series to get elite runners at some of its events, but I don't know a lot about it. And so, in contrast, the Golden Trail World Series puts right on its website the idea of here's how you get free entry to our races and here's how you might qualify for us to cover some of your travel and accommodation costs. So I think that they are, you know, setting the bar when it comes to going out of their way to attract runners and to and get them coming back to all of the races. I think that there's it's set up to be one of the most spectator friendly series, and I think that even just for arm tape, armchair spectators like me, because you can follow along and get to know them, and then they, you know, can put together this great media coverage and social media content. So I think that was my biggest takeaway, was just kind of a wow. I really like how the Golden Trail World Series has done this.

I think that's an excellent point about a race organization going out of its way to make life easier for professional athletes and facilitating, you know, getting them to the start line, making life as easy as possible in that regard. And it makes me wonder, because I know that you mentioned in that article, that of all the races across the globe, Western States is this great outlier in the process where the relative competitiveness of that field is somewhat on par with the UTMB World Series and the Golden Trail World Series? I guess, Mike and again this would require you to sort of take off the data hat and just speculate more. But how do you think the relative competitiveness of these series is are going to evolve over time? And do you think In the years to come there are going to be more or less western states type independent races out there with similar features?

So yeah, speculating I, I do think that these yeah, I think these series are on track Like they have a realistic shot at succeeding at their goal. I don't. I hope that it's not going to be an existential threat to small, grassroots races, but I wonder if, increasingly, runners are going to use the small local race as a tune up race and save their absolute best performance for some of these larger series. I know even myself I was looking at like running something like UTMB would be a bucket list race for me. It would be cool to do once in my lifetime. And Now that it's complicated to get in, it might be that, you know, one option would be to run one of those races when I have a chance to, you know, place well in my age group and get entry that way. And so, yeah, in years ahead there could very well be a season where I'm going to pick my race based on, or my season based on, you know, training for a UTMB series race, and I'm saying that as an amateur. But they, they're investing media coverage and Things like that into their events. That matter a lot, I imagine, to the professional athletes who you know are using Sponsorship or occasionally, when it exists, prize money to pay their bills. So I could see that happening, that that Transition to people doing more and more races that are part of these series and as that happens they would become more competitive. You would have seen in that article that I did right now with the UTMB world series there were a few races that are competitive and they are mostly held in Chamonix, with the most notable exception of Western states. But it might become eventually that all of those races are, you know, drawing at least a dozen elite athletes on on either side.

There's one other article that you've written in the past that I want to make sure we cover here because I think it's absolutely Fascinating, and you talk about the rate of improvement at any given race. If a runner you know races Western states in 2017 and has the privilege of returning in 2019 and then in subsequent years to ostensibly improve on that 2017 result, I think that the question I have and you use it as sort of your central question the article but how often do we see runners improve at a given race? Is it worthwhile to return if, if you want to hopefully get more out of yourself, like what is the day to show there?

Sure so, and for that article I looked specifically at hundred milers. So if it was a shorter distance, like 50k, I Can't venture to comment on that. I think that your fitness alone Probably has a much bigger impact on your race performance on race day on a shorter distance. But for something like a hundred miles, where there's so much issue management and mental preparedness that you can do and that that really Impacts your performance, I seem to recall that it was almost like a 50% chance that you were going to do better the second time around. And that might not sound like a lot. We're all probably looking for a guaranteed improvement, but at the same time, 50% like if you're a gambling person those are insanely good odds. And if it's a race that you like, why not return to it? It's? It's so tempting to think that having that extra familiarity with the course and the chance to learn from mistakes you made with your choices and timing that those, could you know, help you set a PR.

Are there any ways for runners to know in the moment if they more or less nailed it or had their best performance on that first go, or do you need to go back a second time to or third time to really know, to get a good sense that Either that's true or it was not true?

Sure, like Just to. I will verbally paint you a decision matrix and Question one would be did you DNF the race the first time? And if the answer is yes, then yeah, there's room for you to improve there. Go on back beyond that. Yep, I don't know, it might be some soul searching would have to factor into that, probably, like, are you motivated enough to put in at least of good, as good of training and preparation as he did the first time around? And then also, possibly Can you think of legs of the race where you gave up time? Did you hike something you didn't need to? Did you spend too long in an Outhouse and you can even compare yourself to your peers, like when you look at the people who finished around you. I Do you know in your heart that you are more fit than them? Or did you actually feel like you kind of punched above your weight class there? Because if it's the flatter, then yeah, maybe quit while you're ahead and go. Go find a new race.

Is there any non Running content that you either regularly consume because it's like a news outlet or a website, or maybe it's some standalone book you read at some point that has either consciously or maybe subliminally influenced your Perspective and creativity in the sport?

I can't think of a good single example, but as far as the mindset I try to carry when I tackle this column, I draw the distinction between being part of the running community and being consumers of running, and so one of the reasons why I'm often intrigued by the business side of the sport is I Always want to find out more. I'm looking for clues on Are we just being defined by the things we consume the races in the year or or does the community still exist and I'm I helping contribute to the community by creating something like these articles? Like am I keeping running something that we're passionate about talking about? Or, you know, am I a producing content that people consume? And I don't have a big answer for that, it's just something that I like to think about in my long run.

That's such a great mindset to approach the sport with, though. Like how can I be generative, how can I be additive, how can I Create something that didn't exist there when I first got into? I think that's an incredibly you know generous mindset to approach the sport with. That's a great answer. I Know that, again, a lot of this stuff can come to you in the moment, but can you tease out any content that might be on the horizon for Running the numbers, which, by the way, is such a good name for a column? I didn't acknowledge that earlier. That's a great name.

Oh, thank you. So one of the things we were thinking about doing is a multi-part series coming up that we'll look at Experimenting with data for storytelling. So up till now, most of my articles have been using an aggregated data set where we pull together a bunch of race results over multiple years or multiple Events and then find the trends within them. But we are talking about doing a Series that would span a few months to look at individual runners or individual race performances where it's like the unsung heroes, where what are those performances that we didn't appreciate enough at the time, just how good they are, and we need some numbers to contextualize, like what makes them stand out. And One of the things that makes it fun is we emailed, I run for our contributors with that question and said like go hog wild. We, you know, if interpret that as you will, we will. We will take your suggestions for Aged graded performances where you know an athlete does really well but Because they didn't win a race outright, people don't necessarily appreciate how good it is. Or someone who has Consistently performed really well over multiple years. You know things like that. Or even just you know a really impressive race win, that or course record that people acknowledged at the time. You know it Made a headline, but we should still be talking about that because it's just so game-changing. So yeah, we're, we're gonna have some fun talking about those.

I Love that idea. Okay, I, yeah. I cannot wait to see that come out. If and when it comes out, I'll throw again. This is from the peanut gallery. This is just as one of your avid fans I would love. I would love to. So I listen to a podcast. It's now defunct, but I'm a political junkie in a former life. I've worked on a lot of political campaigns, stuff like that, and one of my favorite podcasts the theme of it was they would bring on a candidate that Lost a pretty key election and they would spend the entire episode with the candidate deconstructing how they lost. And I think it could be interesting if you could get these runners to collaborate with you to Deconstruct some pretty notable DNF's out there. So, especially in high profile races like at UTMB Western States, where expectations were sky-high, if you could Help them go back into their training logs, conversations with coaches, personnel, family and then even, like in the race, stuff you know, getting in touch with their, their crew members, etc. I think that could be really fascinating to I.

Like that a lot.

So that's totally from the peanut gallery, but I was. I listened to this Like how I lost, type political podcast and I just thought like that could be interesting as well. Last question for you, and you can take this in any direction you want We've covered a lot of what you've written in this column, but are there any other Interesting insights you feel compelled to share, or any interesting potential implications from what you've analyzed, and or just any anything you want to leave the audience with, like in terms of what to think about before we go.

I guess I would just say it feels like an Interesting moment in our sport, and we probably say that every year there is it's so popular to talk about the way our sport is changing. But you know, one of the things that stands out for me is I I'm doing this column because I maybe I was just the first person to pitch it to. I run far and say I'm willing to do the work if you're willing to publish me. So I'm not even like the best person for the topic and you know, in the long run, ideally we'll have like a co-contributor or something. But it we've now reached a point where there's someone willing to you know in multiple people willing to dig into the data and present that, and there's an audience for that content. And yet it wasn't that long ago that there's. This was a sport with no money in it and everyone was an amateur athlete. And even now, when recovering some of the races that I'm looking at, most people are amateurs, even at the elite level, and so there's this interesting tension between Trying to talk critically about their performances while understanding just how much of themselves they put on the line, and I know that that's something I grapple with. I also grapple with just the fact that, like if our sport now merits a whole column on analysis and there's an appetite for that. Like you know, I'm still in the little leagues as far as what I'm producing, because it's what I can do within the time I've got available. What is, what is the next step for that? Who's going to pick up this mantle? And you know it take it to a whole new level. So I, I guess I just want to reiterate that I, I know this is just the beginning and I I'm beyond flattered. They asked me to be on the podcast. I was a little surprised because you know, I just I do this thing for fun. I Want to be really upfront that it still had, like I will be the first to admit that it often has an amateur feel and the Community is helping me learn at the same time, like we're growing together here.

Well, no, it is an absolute honor to have you on the show and we cannot thank you enough for the insights you provided here today. And perhaps most importantly, I'm sure there are many people listening to this show that you got the gears turning in their head for from a data standpoint, but also like it's sort of like their own little call to action for how they can Take their unique skill set in addition to running and applying it to our community. So I think that's Typically my favorite Outcome from these types of conversations. It's like how can we get the unique skill set of all of our listeners to take a Similar type of path that someone like you has taken? So thank you so much and we'll make sure to link to all of your social media the column in the show notes and Hopefully we will. We will see you somewhere online and also, I'm sure as the column evolves over the years, we'll have more to talk about, so maybe there's there's around to in our future as well. One last bit of news before we go. If you're a longtime listener of the podcast, do you know that throughout 2022? We had a weekly newsletter summarizing all of the interesting happenings and figurative Watercooler talk across the ultra trail running landscape and we have some interesting news to share on this front. We will be restarting the newsletter later this month via our patreon page. It will come out at least two times a month, maybe more. The first edition will be free to consume. After that it will be $5 a month, which is a great way to support the show directly. So be on the lookout for that first edition launching later this month will make sure to mention it on the show as well as across our Social channels. If you do want to check out that patreon page. In the meantime, head to patreoncom forward slash run single track. And Thanks for checking it out and considering a monthly donation. And, as always, thank you so much for listening you.