The Grand Slam of Ultrarunning, and the day it started sending legal warnings

The Grand Slam of Ultrarunning is a simple idea. Get into Western States, then finish Vermont, Leadville and Wasatch in the same summer — four of the oldest hundred-mile trail races in the United States, inside about ten weeks. Finish all four and you are a slammer for life.

It has always been a sideshow, and a good one. A few dozen people attempt it each year at considerable cost in entries, travel, food and body, for a trophy and a permanent entry on a list.

Why 2013 was different

Two genuinely fast runners were doing it at the same time, and they could hardly have been less alike.

Ian Sharman, based in San Francisco, excelled on the flatter hundreds — he had run 12:44 at Rocky Raccoon in 2011, a 7:38 per mile pace over a hundred miles — and could also handle mountains.

Nick Clark, based in the Rockies, was a mountain specialist who held the fastest combined Western States and Hardrock times, at 15:50 and 27:43 respectively, with third overall at each, two weeks apart.

Through three of the four races they were separated by minutes. It was the best thing the Slam had ever produced.

The problem

Clark’s name did not appear on the official Grand Slam list, because he had not registered or paid the $80 fee.

That fee covers three things: a trophy on completion, a place at Wasatch that bypasses the lottery, and your name recorded on the Grand Slam website as an official slammer. Clark had a Wasatch entry by other means and was not interested in the rest.

Then the Grand Slam organisation posted a notice — carried also on the Wasatch 100 site — stating that “Grand Slam of Ultrarunning” is a trademark, that only official entrants and finishers are entitled to use the term in any form, and hinting at legal consequences for those who did otherwise.

Why this landed badly

The commentary’s objection is not to the existence of a trademark. It is to the introduction of legal threat into a sport that had run for forty years on informal recognition. The Slam had always looked like an FKT or a Western-States-Hardrock double: an unofficial thing people did, with bragging rights attached.

The practical questions were awkward. If Clark finished with a faster cumulative time and mentioned it on his blog, was that infringement? Was a running website reporting on it infringing? And on the notice’s own wording, an entrant who attempted the Slam but did not finish would apparently not be entitled to say so.

Sharman, for his part, was consistently supportive of Clark’s attempt and said so publicly. Clark’s own position was that he would leave the recognition question to the community, and that if some people thought he was too cheap to deserve it, he could live with that. As he put it: “at the end of the day, it’s just running.”

The larger argument

The piece closes on the point that survives the specific dispute. Ultrarunning at that stage badly needed some organised framework — for rules, for testing, for sponsorship norms. But governance arrives as a package, and the package includes exactly this kind of administrative dispute over who owns a phrase. If that is the price, the writer’s stated preference was to stay where the sport had been.

A committee member contacted for comment referred the question to the Wasatch statement and to his attorney.