Hardrock Media Coverage

It’s Hardrock 100 weekend. The summer camp for trail runners in Colorado has a fascinating number of media outlets covering the race run – almost as many as runners at the start line. Pick your flavor and follow along as an elite and exclusive group of runners take on the counter clockwise loop through the San Juan mountains. Below is a list of the America media outlets I know of reporting live from Silverton. I am sure some French and other outlets will cover the event as well.

• iRunFar – the OG coverage reporting from their hometown, offering “twitter style updates from the course as well as pre-and post race interviews.
• Mountain Outhousepost is doing the official live coverage, but they too have pre and post race interviews with the top athletes on their Youtube channel.
• Freetrail is in town, which is somewhat incredible considering the media marathon at Western States they just completed. Those Ketones with caffeine in the afternoon must really work.
• And somehow Trailrunner Magazine (by Outside) is providing coverage on their Instagram page too, which is super weird as it seemed they had given up on actual reporting awhile ago.

First off, all these outfits are calling their interviews “pre-race“, but Hardrock is very specific that their event is a run, not a race, but that’s besides the point.

I’m sounding a bit snarky and for that I apologize. After all I’m just another media outlet also just adding to the noise. In general I do welcome more coverage and would hate if we already clamp down and only allow exclusive and single-threaded coverage for these type of events. But this proliferation did really result in three Zach Miller interviews on three different channels:

• iRunFar: Meghan Hicks interviews Zach Miller for 12min.
• Freetrail: Dylan Bowman interviews Zach Miller for 29min.
• Mountain Outpost: Corinne Shalvoy and Majell Backhausen interview Zach Miller for 47min.

In totality the pre-race coverage by these outfits amounts to:

• iRunFar: 8 interviews: 4 men, 4 women for a total of ~1hr 17min of content.
• Freetrail: 6 interviews: 4 men, 2 women + 1 pre-race show for a total of ~2hr 51min of content.
• Mountain Outpost: 11 interviews: 7 men, 4 women + 1 pre-race show, race briefing, kids’ race and women of Hardrock panel for a total of ~ 8hr 43min of content.

That’s just amazing. And is an incredible amount of content to consume ahead of a single race.

Tomorrow, Friday July 11 at 6am (MDT) the 30th running of the world famous Hardrock 100 Endurance Run kicks off, and the talking stops. Or rather the actual live coverage will take over and the action begins.

Here are the links to follow the runners along the course:

• MAProgress GPS tracking
• OpenSplitTime Aid Splits
• Mountain Outpost Livestream

Let’s go!