Jim Walmsley on the 2016 Western States wrong turn

For most of Saturday 25 June 2016, Jim Walmsley was running the Western States Endurance Run faster than anyone had run it. He was minutes up on Timothy Olson’s course record and extending, and the live coverage had stopped being about the race and started being about the clock.

Then, in the late miles along the American River, he missed a turn. He ran a long way off course before the mistake became clear, with one bottle and very little food, and no reliable information about where anyone else was. He got back on the trail and finished the race, well down the results, having covered considerably more than a hundred miles.

The conversation

This episode was recorded a few days later, while it was all still fresh. It covers:

• how he prepared for a course he had never raced, and how much of the recon was done on foot in the two weeks before the race
• the strategy going in, and whether the pace through the canyons was as reckless as it looked from outside
• Foresthill at mile 62, where the crowd noise and the gap made the day feel already decided
• what happened at the turn, and what he did in the half hour after realising
• his sponsorship situation and the rest of the 2016 calendar

The context around it

The background detail that stuck with people at the time was how thin the operation was. Walmsley came to Western States as a bike shop employee from Flagstaff without a major shoe sponsor. He had earned his place with a course record at Lake Sonoma 50, and someone else covered his entry fee. He slept in a garage and camped by the road while training around Tahoe and Foresthill in the run-up.

That combination — an unsponsored runner rewriting the front of the most watched hundred in the sport — is a large part of why the wrong turn does not read as failure. He ran most of a course record and then ran a good deal further than the course.

Before the story got tidy

Post-race interviews usually arrive once the story has been sanded down into something repeatable. This one was recorded before that happened, with the annoyance still audible.