Zach Takes on the UTMB Qualification System

What I previously tried to make sense of, but only focused on everyday folks (read amateurs) Zach Miller expands on this for iRunFar and includes a few ways to qualify I omitted for simplicity reasons.

You can get into the lottery registering as a group:

To enter as a group, you put all of your names in together, but the maximum number of stones you can use per person is the minimum number of stones owned by any one member of the group. 

Zach details the process for elites:

With the UTMB World Series structure now in place, elites must race their way into the series finals (OCC/CCC/UTMB).

And mentioned age category ranking, and priority bibs.

In his conclusion he asks:

Change isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it is often a good thing, but it is at times of change like this that it is important to step back and ask the big questions. Like where is this all going, and is that a place we want to end up?

It’s a tough place to be, especially as an elite runner. On one side we love trail running for its simplicity, almost purity, on the other side UTMB has positioned itself as the premier race around the globe, and its popularity demands a complicated system. Western States and Hardrock have their own complicated process, that’s equally dismayed by many. If elites would stop going to these races the importance of the race would subside. So, for elites who have sponsor deals to fulfill, they have to dance the dance and I doubt there’s a sport easier to manage as a professional athlete. Climbers and mountaineers often complain about the challenges of sponsor demands far from the mountains. For everyone else there are still thousands upon thousands of races all over the world that are managed in a grassroots fashion and have that simple feel we cry about losing by wanting to run around Mont Blanc each year.