Caleb Likes to Race Someone, Somewhere

Great post by Caleb Olson who’s joining the choruses of guys post UTMB who are shooting their shot. He concludes with the following paragraph:

If you’re reading this and you see your name on this list, let me know if you want to race and let’s figure something out. There’s no rule that says we can only have super deep competitive races at WSER and UTMB, it would just take a little coordination and planning for a bunch of us to show up for MIUT or TGC or Andorra or something. My schedule is pretty open right now. If the much more likely thing happens where the people on this list don’t read this, maybe I’ll message some of them and see if I can find out where I can test myself against them next.

Where have we heard this before?

Jim Walmsley, Zach Miller, Kilian Jornet all announced, shortly have having had varying degrees of success at the UTMB Finals in Chamonix, that they’d like to find a different race for the top elites to gather and race each other. “Will it succeed this time?” Is probably the wrong question. But what I do wonder is what it would actually take to make this happen? If several of the top athletes actually would pull it off to coordinate their calendars and travel to a ‘different race’ all in the same year, and not get sidelined by injury, would the media follow, immediately, like for the first year, not just in consequential years, after they had success at whichever event they choose to gather? I’m not suggesting that this is a pointless endeavor, I am just wondering what it would actually take for this to be successful. It could possibly, open up the annual trail racing calendar and create a shift and possibly a different focus and storyline around a new event.