200-race milestone on UltraSignup: quite off actually!

I've mixed feelings about UltraSignup providing us so many results in a single place: while it's such a convenient feature, I know some people feel that their own results have been stollen from them. Actually, I don't know about the legal implications behind the scene, but more frequent are now the races which don't have their results showing on UltraSignup anymore (e.g., those using RunSingup).

With that disclaimer, I noticed last night that UltraSignup has 200 races listed for me. I checked Athlinks and it's harder to determine because they don't give you a precise count and their results don't get copied and pasted well in Excel. I estimate they have more than 280 results. Per their name, UltraSignup was initially focusing on ultra, then expanded to trail running. Conversely, Athlinks started with the populous road races. And each moved over the other's turf. 

One of the reasons I still keep a running log manually in Excel is to avoid relying on such race registration and result platforms, or the various GPS watch vendors. In that log, I actually have 358 races listed since I moved to the US in 1998 and started training and running seriously (I had ran a handful of races in Paris over the previous 10 years, plus a few cross-country races as a kid but I don't have any record of them).

Note that, on the ultra running side, the German DUV database is amazingly accurate and exhaustive. For me it shows 183 results and 179 events, versus the 193 ultra starts and 176 finishes in my spreadsheet (and it doesn't show last month's Tamalpa Headlands 50K yet). By the way, that of course doesn't include 308 more ultras I ran as training runs.

So, while 200 race results is a cool milestone to celebrate, it's quite off, and behind reality. And so far away from Jason Reed's 343 (and Jason might have many more misses given he races several other formats like snowshoeing and orienteering events). Similarly, behind JR Mintz's 356 UltraSignup results, a number which is also way under representing the mind blowing 1,750 races he had finished as of early September!

Did you know there is also a rather exclusive club for those who have completed 100+ races of 100+ miles? The list is maintained by ultra historian Davy Crockett, and his last induction, member #25, is actually a French fellow whom I will meet at Spartathlon next week as he goes for his 19th finish there. Just mere 2 years older than the age I'm running this mythical event for the first time! You see, always feeling so behind... Anyway, that's Gilles Pallaruelo.

One more thought about the 200 milestone: these races span from 5K to 24-hour (133 miles PR so far), from road to track or trails, from flat to hilly and technical, so hard to compare. And it may be challenging to comprehend but a 5K all in the red zone can be much harder than shuffling 100 miles. Among all these formats, my favorite distance remains 50K and, with 79 so far, that shows on this graph!

Years ago, you would have told me I'd run so many ultras, I wouldn't have believed it, that would have seemed impossible or just crazy! But craziness is actually very relative in our sport... there is always someone making your achievements pale in comparison! By definition (anything beyond the marathon distance) ultra running has no upper bound limit, this can get quite addictive, doesn't it? Borrowing from Ultra Hall of Fame's Roy Pirrung, who closes every of his messages on Facebook this way: see you in a few miles... Wait, just a few miles? One race at a time, one training run at a time...