Biggest Race Weekend of the Year

Outside the UTMB weekend this last weekend might be trail and ultra running’s biggest race weekend of the entire year? There were several key races happening in Europe and the US as the mountains are melting out and the summer heat isn’t yet too intense.

• Western States Endurance Run captivated all of North America and saw 305 finishers.
• Lavaredo Ultra Trail is probably biggest ultra next to UTMB and had ~3,800 finishers across all four races.
• Trail 100 Andora is another ‘by UTMB’ race that happened with 1,100 finishers across it’s four races
• Golden Trail Series had their second World Series event in Chamonix with the Marathon du Month Blanc and multiple events seeing over 7,000 finishers.

Of course, at any given weekend there are dozens of grassroots community events happening all across the globe and I am not discounting any of these. I’m just looking at the big picture and development of our mountain sport.

A couple of notes:

Western States with a small field, good PR communication, and just offering a single event is easy to follow for the fans and the media. It’s nice to have things packaged so neatly.

In Europe events offer races in varied distances and spreadsheets of athletes and finishers are harder to find. The number of runners for each event is staggering. In the same weekend all of the US was glued to Youtube following just over 300 runners at the WS coverage, in Europe over 12,000 trail runners finished a race in one of just 3 events.

Other events/weekends:

• The prior weekend saw 1,800 runners at Broken Arrow across 5 events (not counting their kids race) which truly puts Broken Arrow into the place most closely mimicking the Euro-Alps-Mega events.
• Squamish 50 has 1,100 registered runners across the four races for 2022.
• Javelina Jundred has 1,200 runners signed up across three events for 2022.
• Leadville 100 had 324 finishers in 2021.