Gordy Ainsleigh: the man who started the hundred-mile race

The Western States Trail Ride — the Tevis Cup — is a hundred-mile horse race from the Lake Tahoe area to Auburn, California, with a 24-hour buckle for those who finish inside the day. In 1974 Gordy Ainsleigh entered, as he had before. His horse went lame in the run-up.

He started anyway, on foot.

4 August 1974

Ainsleigh set off with the riders and covered the hundred miles to the Gold Country Fairgrounds in Auburn in 23 hours and 42 minutes, inside the 24-hour standard the ride was built around. He had set out to prove it could be done on foot within the day, and it was.

At the time this was a stunt with a point to prove, not the founding of anything. The trail itself is old — a route through the Sierra with a history long predating either the ride or the race. What Ainsleigh established was that a person could cover it in a day, which nobody had seriously proposed.

What followed

Others repeated it over the next couple of years. In 1977 the Western States Endurance Run was held as a foot race in its own right, run in conjunction with the Tevis Cup, with sixteen entrants. It grew from there into the most sought-after hundred-miler in the United States, with a lottery, a qualifying system and a global entry field.

Every hundred-mile trail race that exists does so downstream of that day.

The episode

This was one of the show’s earliest recordings, from June 2011, in the run-up to that year’s Western States. Ainsleigh has told the 1974 story many times and tells it well, and the interest of the episode is in everything around it: what the trail was like before the race existed, what the horse community made of a man running alongside them, how the ride’s organisers reacted, and what he thinks of what the race became.

He has continued to run Western States for decades, holding an entry that recognises what he started, and has been a consistent and sometimes contrary voice about the sport’s growth — the lotteries, the sponsorship, the qualifying rules and the distance between a modern hundred and the thing he did with a borrowed pair of shoes and no aid stations to speak of.

The entry he never lost

Ainsleigh has run Western States for decades since, holding a standing entry that recognises what he started, and he has been a consistent and sometimes contrary voice about what the race became — the lottery, the qualifiers, the sponsorship, and the distance between a modern hundred and what he did in 1974 with a borrowed pair of shoes and almost no aid.