Western States Endurance Run

We have added rule #18 to our list of Performance Rules for all runners:

18. The Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run is committed to keeping ultrarunning a clean, drug-free sport. Use of performance enhancing drugs or blood doping as defined by the USADA is forbidden. The Western States board reserves the right to disqualify a runner based on competent evidence of such use.

The 1983 Western States race still boasts the closest top two men’s finish in the 39 year history of the race. Arguably, it is one of the best races ever at WS, and lucky for us it was recorded on DVD on Desperate Dreams II.

1983 Desperate Dreams DVD

1983 was a huge snow year so the alternate snow course had to be used for the first time. Returning champion Jim King hammered through the snow early to open up a huge lead over the field at Red Star Ridge, including 36 minutes over 1981 co-champion Jim Howard. But by Duncan Canyon aid station, King had fallen back to 15th after getting lost for 45 minutes in the snow. Undaunted, King moved back up the field to join Howard again at Dusty Corners and Last Chance (in 3rd and 4th place). King then hammered the canyons, and arrived in Michigan Bluff in first place, 27 minutes ahead of Howard who was still in 4th. King’s split from Last Chance to Michigan Bluff was 2:13! For comparison, Jurek’s split on his CR run in 2004 was 2:19.

King’s lead over Howard remained around 30 minutes through ALT by which time Howard was now comfortably in 2nd place. But Howard was not running for 2nd place. Only 7 minutes behind at Hwy 49, Howard threw down the unbelievable split of 56 minutes to the finish, catching King right before the white bridge and finishing 30 seconds ahead of King. This is still the fastest split ever run for that section. 5-time champion, and 25-time finisher, Tim Twietmeyer says that even if we dropped him off at Hwy 49 fresh, he couldn’t run 56 minutes.

Jim Howard at the finish of the 1983 WSER.

We are going to show the 1983 race on Sunday evening of the Memorial Day Weekend Training Runs. We’ll follow that with a discussion with the two Jims, facilitated by 8-time finisher Andy Jones-Wilkins.

• What: 1983 WS Desperate Dreams screening, followed by a discussion with Jim Howard and Jim King, facilitated by Andy Jones-Wilkins.
• When: Sunday May 26, 2013, 6-9pm
• Where: Canyon View Community Center, 471 Maidu Dr, Auburn, CA
• Cost: Free
• Food: Firetrail Pizza will be on site selling pizzas.

Updated 12/5

As posted on the lottery applicant page, we have 2295 total lottery applicants for the 2013 race.

122 applicants with four tickets = 488 tickets
207 applicants with three tickets = 621 tickets
480 applicants with two tickets = 960 tickets
1486 applicants with one ticket = 1486 tickets

Total tickets in the hat = 3555

Here is the list of tickets (178 page pdf)

We are going to draw 270 unique names in the lottery and then an additional five from the lottery within the lottery. That is, the folks in the audience who have not been selected up to that point. Based on 3555 total tickets and 270 names drawn, the odds of getting selected have been updated as follows:

one ticket odds = 7.9%
two ticket odds = 15.2%
three ticket odds = 21.9%
four ticket odds = 28.0%

We used a Monte Carlo simulation to calculate these updated odds.

The lottery will take place at the Placer HS auditorium. We will begin introductions a little before 9am and start drawing names right at 9am. We expect to be done by 11am. Note that there is no food or drink allowed in the auditorium (water ok).

As names are pulled from the hat, they will be posted at ultralive.net as close to real-time as possible. There will also be a live video feed.

For a little historical perspective, here are the number of lottery applicants and ticket counts  in the lottery since 2000.

2000 583
2001 556
2002 529
2003 638
2004 740
2005 791
2006 841
2007 1,048
2008 1,350 Fire year
2009 337 out of 390 returned 54 two-time losers, 34 autos for a total of 425 entrants
2010 1,693 Last year for two-time losers
2011 1,786 First year for multi-tickets in the hat. One ticket: 1286, two tickets: 500
2012 1,940 One ticket: 1221, two tickets: 461, three tickets: 258
2013 2295 One ticket: 1486, two tickets: 480, three tickets: 207, four tickets: 122

If you’re reading this, you noticed that we have a new website. It’s been a process that began about six months ago. We hope you find it easy to navigate and filled with useful and interesting content. One of the challenging issues web designers face today is the wide variety of devices used to view websites. This site has been designed to be viewed on a variety of browsers so don’t be surprised if it looks different on your phone, tablet, and desktop browser.

The team involved in making this a reality is from all over the US. I am humbled to have such incredibly talented and dedicated people working with me to bring this new website from a concept that began when I interviewed for the RD position last January to a reality today.

• Ian Doremus, from Eugene, OR is the principal designer of this site. I’ve built several websites with Ian over the years and he’s got a knack for incorporating photography into his designs. He has spent countless hours working with me on this new site. Ian will soon be the new WSER webmaster.
• Richard Goodwin, from Colfax, CA has been the WSER webmaster for 13 years. He wrote the original webcast which was cutting edge at the time. Richard is stepping down as webmaster and looking forward to being just a “regular race-day” volunteer in the future. Richard has helped with the new website, while concurrently maintaining the old site. His contributions to WSER have been recognized with a Friends of the Trail and a Little Cougar Award.
• Ted Knudsen, from San Rafael, CA is the new WSER Chief Technology Officer. Ted does all the behind-the-scenes work to keep our domains, servers, and everything tech-related running smoothly. He is the guy who developed the world-class webcast platform ultralive.net and has played a critical role in this year’s lottery. Ted is a WS Friends of the Trail recipient.
• Tim Smith, from San Antonio, TX, is a professional web designer who specializes in wordpress and has been our technical consultant.

Retiring race director Greg Soderlund, the WSER board, and Research Advisor Marty Hoffman also contributed to the new site. In the very near future you’ll see contributions from Ten-Day buckle holder and owner of realendurance.com Gary Wang. Photographer Luis Escobar contributed many photos.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the cadre of friends who reviewed the site. Thanks to each of you.

Now for a little of the technical details if you are interested:

• The site is hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud. A small instance runs the apache webserver, while a micro instance runs the mysql database.
• We are using WordPress as the CMS with a variety of plugins and some custom code.
• The theme is a custom responsive theme. It uses media queries to ask the browser what its capabilities are and then renders the appropriate layout of the content.

We will continue to develop and add content. If you have ideas or suggestions on what we can do better please let us know.