Life Time Adds Leadville Qualifier in Tahoe

Life Time, fitness club operator and Leadville 100 owners are expanding their “qualifier events” to Lake Tahoe and on the same weekend as another trail race, the Tahoe Rim Trail Endurance Runs. It’s hard to shove more content worth extrapolating into one sentence. High end fitness club operators Life Time bought the Leadville Trail Series a few years ago and while Leadville is considered one of the historic 100 mile races it has been sort of floundering and sitting stale – until last year David Roche broke the long held course record. Leadville has (always?) been a somewhat weird hybrid event by offering mountain biking and trail running races at the same event. Life Time club members also get priority registration. So, if you pay membership dues at a fancy fitness country club you get a benefit when registering for a 100 mile trail race. It works, somewhere, but it also feels a bit like a stretch. Anyway, part of the Leadville Trail Series are small handful of shorter races: a couple shorter races in Leadville, one in Austin, TX, and now one in Tahoe (and one coming in October to Anniston, AL). When completing a qualifying race one is given a “coin” (not a stone!) which acts as registration access for the full Leadville 100 event. This feels like a subtle attempt to copy the UTMB World Series qualifying system – not a bad idea.

But the biggest thing that sticks out here is the fact that Leadville chooses to put a trail running event on the same weekend (July 19-20) at the North Lake Tahoe region right next to the already established Tahoe Rim Trail Endurance Runs. Anyone bothered by this? I wonder what’s different here to when UTMB expands their series in North America?