Western States 2015 preview: Ryan Smith and Michele Yates

Five days before the 2015 Western States Endurance Run, two runners with very different routes into the race sat down to talk about it.

Ryan Smith

Smith earned his entry at Sean O’Brien 100k in February, a hard, hot, heavily climbing race in the Santa Monica Mountains — and did it by beating Seth Swanson, who had finished second at Western States the previous year. That result did not get the attention it deserved, which is roughly the definition of a dark horse.

The conversation covers his preparation, his read on the course, and the question every non-favourite has to answer: whether to race the field or race the clock.

Michele Yates

Yates took her Golden Ticket at Gorge Waterfalls 100k a few months earlier. The relevant detail, which the episode does not let pass, is that she ran it four months post-partum.

Her stated plan is characteristic: race aggressively, from the front, and take no pacer at any point — right through to the finish on the Placer High School track. Running Western States unpaced is a real decision rather than a stylistic one — the last thirty-eight miles are where pacers exist to be useful, and going without means the low patches are yours alone to manage.

The Golden Ticket system

Both entries came through the Montrail Ultra Cup — the Golden Ticket series, which allocates a small number of Western States places to the top finishers at a handful of designated qualifying races. It exists because the lottery, by 2015, had become so oversubscribed that the race would otherwise have had no reliable way of getting the best runners in the country onto its start line.

The side effect is that the Golden Ticket races themselves became serious events. Sean O’Brien and Gorge Waterfalls both went from ordinary regional 100ks to races with genuinely deep fields, because a win or a runner-up spot is worth more than the prize money at almost any race in the country.

What a preview episode is for

Preview interviews have a short shelf life and a specific value. They record what runners believed about themselves before the day tested it, which is information that becomes unavailable about six hours into the race. Both of these are unusually concrete: specific splits, specific sections they are worried about, specific plans for the canyons.

Five days out, neither of them knows anything yet. Both are specific about it: the splits they want, the sections they are worried about, what they intend to do in the canyons.