Features

On my first day as UR editor, I received the following email: “Welcome to the job, from the first editor. What a great 10 years of my life getting UR started! IBM Selectric typewriter. Film cameras, struggling for a c...

As humans, I fear we often have rather short memories. In the racing scene, if we’ve not heard from someone for 12 months, we’re prone to forgetting their former podium dominance. It’s too easy to get caught up in...

When I was asked to write something about the 40th year of UltraRunning Magazine I thought, “This will be easy.” After all, I have literally grown up with the magazine. I could not have been more wrong. How do yo...

Remember when we used to gather around the television to watch sports on Saturday afternoons and a grainy, black-and-white broadcast was the only option? Yeah, me neither. Color TV was mainstream by the mid-60s, o...

When UltraRunning put out its first issue in May 1981, some doubted that the magazine would prevail. But the doubters were proved wrong as it has succeeded for 40 years. World ultrarunning historian Andy Milroy observ...

My first ultra was a while ago. On Nov. 16, 1974, I placed second in 8:30:28 to future Hall-of-Famer Park Barner in the C&O Canal 100K. The point-to-point course ran along the Potomac River from the Washington Mon...

Ten years ago, when we last examined the future of trail running – circa 2010 – we saw nothing but blue skies and snow-covered mountains. Our future looked bright. And that’s pretty much what happened – until it d...

“Do you ever still hear them?” I knew exactly what he meant. Yes, all I needed to do was close my eyes. For the past 25 years, they’d been a reminder that Joe Braninburg, in the midst of his own finest athletic moment...

The 1980s: In the Beginning April 1981: Ronald Reagan had just been inaugurated to his first term as president, James Michener’s The Covenant topped the New York Times best seller list, and Hall and Oates had the nu...

2020. I think it’s safe to say that none of us have ever experienced a year quite like this one. I think it’s also safe to say that all of us hope that we never will have to experience another year like it again. Lik...

Before the invention of trail shoes, handheld bottles and energy gels, ultrarunning gear used to be pretty simple. However, as all ultrarunners know, the sport is centered around problem-solving. Advertising in the early...

On the night of my 30th birthday, I set a world record: I ran 30 continuous miles. I knew a marathon was 26.2 miles, and it was common knowledge that the marathon was the outermost zenith of human endurance. I’d gone...

Once upon a time, in a land on the left coast of the continent, there existed people considered by some to be wacky, but certainly different. Among them lived a man who decided that he’d race alongside horses acro...

Most of today’s ultrarunners probably don’t know that I used to be a blogger. In December of 2008, I started what became a fun few years of regularly posting ultrarunning articles that were a blend of humor, opini...

Shortly before 5 o’clock Saturday morning, a few hundred of us will present ourselves to the starting line of the Western States Endurance Run. A shotgun blast precisely on the hour will send us westward along th...