Avery Collins on HURT 100, and the cannabis argument nobody wanted to have

Avery Collins opened 2016 with fourth place at HURT 100, a race whose reputation rests on roots, mud and the specific misery of covering twenty miles a loop in Hawaiian jungle humidity. The first part of this episode is about that: what it is like to race Gary Robbins in there, and what he would change the following year.

Then it gets to the reason the episode is remembered.

The cannabis conversation

Collins was 23, living in Steamboat Springs, working part-time in a running shop and part-time in a ski shop, and sponsored by two cannabis companies. He was also entirely open about using cannabis in training and racing, at a time when almost nobody in the sport would say so on record.

The interview does not treat this as a gotcha. It asks the actual questions:

• Is it a performance-enhancing drug at all, in a sport measured in hours rather than seconds?
• If it is not, why does it carry a stigma that alcohol does not — in a sport whose social life is organised around beer?
• Where does it sit relative to NSAIDs, which are near-universal in ultras and demonstrably dangerous over long efforts?
• And the harder one: how would he feel about being beaten by someone doping?

He answers all of them. The strongest part of his position is the consistency argument — a sport that celebrates a finish-line beer and hands out ibuprofen at aid stations is on thin ground drawing a moral line elsewhere. The weakest is that “does it help?” and “should it be allowed?” are different questions, and the episode does not fully separate them.

The schedule

The rest is logistics. Collins had built a calendar of some of the hardest races on the international circuit, back to back, in a way that would be considered reckless for a runner twice his age. There is also a practical segment on weight training for ultras, then still a minority position, and a stretch on chafing management that is more useful than any of the above.

What the argument is really about

Strikingly little of the discussion is about pharmacology. Almost all of it is about which intoxicants a sport has decided to be comfortable with, and how much of that decision is inherited rather than reasoned. Ultrarunning has no testing regime worth the name and no governing body positioned to impose one, so the question is being settled by consensus, one conversation at a time.