Seth who? Second place at Western States 2014

The live coverage of Western States has a recurring moment: a name appears in the top ten that the commentary team has to look up. In 2014 that name was Seth Swanson, who kept moving up all day, climbed out of the canyons towards Michigan Bluff still gaining, and finished second in 15:19.

Anyone from the Pacific Northwest or Montana had seen it coming. Nobody else had.

What the episode covers

This is a straightforward post-race interview, recorded in the week afterwards, and its value is in the training detail. Swanson trains in Montana, which means a long winter, a lot of it indoors or on snow, and a build to a June hundred that looks nothing like a Californian’s.

The conversation works through how he structures a year around one target race, how long he had been running before any of this, and what a runner without a sponsor or a coaching setup actually does differently — which, as usual, turns out to be less than people expect and more consistently.

Coming through the field

Second at Western States from an unheralded position is almost always a pacing story. The front of that race goes out fast, the canyons take a toll that does not present itself until Foresthill, and the runners who finish well are frequently the ones who looked unambitious at Robinson Flat. Swanson describes it without dressing it up as strategy: he ran a pace he could hold, and the race came back to him.

What second place at Western States was worth in 2014

Worth noting, because it dates the sport precisely: a podium at the most prestigious hundred-miler in the United States did not, at that point, come with a living. It came with a buckle, an automatic entry for the following year, and a modest bump in whatever sponsorship conversation the runner was already having. Swanson trained around a job, in a state with no professional trail-running infrastructure, and turned up in June ready to run 15:19.

The field that year was deep enough that finishing second required beating a number of runners with considerably more support behind them. That gap — between the resources at the front of the field and the results at the front of the field — was one of the more interesting things about American ultrarunning in this period, and it closed rapidly over the following few years.

Preparing through a Montana winter

The practical detail runners write in for is the winter. A June hundred in California means the hardest weeks of a build land in March and April, which in western Montana means snow, ice and short days. The episode covers what that actually looks like: treadmill work that nobody enjoys admitting to, snowshoes, long days on roads because the trails are not available, and a heat-acclimation problem that has to be solved in about three weeks once spring finally arrives.

Californian runners preparing for the same race do none of this, which is worth remembering when their training logs get published.

The rest

There are digressions, because there always are. What he thinks of DeLoreans is covered at more length than the subject strictly requires, and the episode closes on the beer question, which by 2014 had become the show’s standard exit.