I was at Hardrock this past weekend. As we know, the course is massive. Its world-wide appeal is huge. It’s very intimidating. The altitude is literally dizzying. When you’re there, however, it’s somehow not as intimidating as you’d be led to believe. It’s small and intimate. It’s welcoming. It’s humble. If you want to spectate or volunteer there is a place for you. If you want to meet Courtney, Tara, Ludo or Tom you can simply say hello as you see them in town. If you want to run the course before or after the race, have at it. There’s even an unofficial name for that - Softrock. Hardrock is THE biggest little race in the world.
In Silverton we all awake by the sun and crawl out of tents or RVs dirty, smelly and hungry. After all, there are few lodging options and renting a house is an insiders game. The school gym serves as the race HQ. For several days it’s littered with people napping in the bleachers. Race merch is piled up on foldable tables like a garage sale. There’s a crew napping area partitioned with wrestling mats where a lonely 80s Transformers sleeping bag lays abandoned. The locker rooms are queued with runners and campers looking for a quick shower and the live broadcast “studio” requires dodging weight room equipment. Throughout the week we either eat at the same handful of mediocre restaurants or we opt to breakout the JetBoil and heat up some ramen in the back of a truck.
Nothing is glamorous or opulent. A puffy and running shorts is the uniform. The only outfit changes are peeling your pants as the day warms to reveal said running shorts or ditching dirty trail shoes for slides or sandals. In this setting, there’s a different definition of luxury - running water, power outlets, wifi, cell service, air conditioning, heat, or in the year of our lord 2026, fresh, non-smokey air to breathe. A single paved road runs through town before abruptly giving way to dirt precisely in front of the old Mayflower Gold Mill that has sat abandoned since closing in 1991. What a metaphor. When that mine closed, development stopped and the local economy froze. The first Hardrock Hundred Endurance Run was held in 1992.
Many common conversations at big races seem trivial in Silverton. Paris Fashion Week doesn’t exist. Mothtech comes from actual moths. Influencers are nowhere to be found. Even the Olympic conversation gets a shrug at best. These things all seem to exist somewhere else. Somewhere far away. Hardrock strips the trail running experience found at bigger events down to its primordial elements - running, mountains and community. Any superfluous brand “activations” are replaced by community trail work, course marking and the kids race - Hardblock draws quite the crowd after all. While a hike up to 12,900’ Grant-Swamp Pass might be a bit analogous to the Escarpment at Western States, the UTMB showmanship of the Light Tunnel or the “Conquest of Paradise” have no counterpart.
Despite the lack of bright lights and glitter, there’s a sense of wonder in a place like Silverton - wonder around possibilities not probabilities. While the probabilities are slim, the possibilities are endless. The miners were chasing that very dream. When I first showed up at Hardrock in 2012, only Kyle Skaggs, at 23 years old, had broken 24 hours in what was truly a generational effort. Here’s Kyle’s finish video. He literally left everything out there and never raced 100-miles again. Kyle now operates an organic farm in New Mexico. He ran in New Balance 790s that day and carried some gels, a jacket and a single handheld bottle that he refilled in creeks. Kyle won the race by 6-hours. Read more as recalled by his Ashland, OR roommate and training partner, Anton Krupicka. Much like 2026, the New York Times wasn’t interested in interviews with the Hardrock winners but I was able to track down an old interview with Kyle after that 2008 win.
“I didn’t think this was possible,” Garland said. “I don’t know if there is a superlative I can use for this. This is one of the great athletic barriers that we thought would never be broken.” [Race Director Dale Garland in a 2008 Plant Ultramarathon article]
The next year, 2009, Diana Finkel finished 3rd overall and won the race in 27:18 breaking the previous women’s course record by over two hours. In 2010 Diana led the entire race for 45 miles before finishing second and landing in the hospital with severe rhabdo.
Seventeen years have passed and the science, tech and popularity of the sport have advanced considerably. Our collective dreams around what is possible continues to drive times lower. The men’s Hardrock record has fallen from 23:23 to 21:11 and the women’s has fallen from 27:18 to 26:03. While these times have improved and the larger sport of trail running has grown, Hardrock continues to chart its own path. The spirit that drew me to trail running back in 2012 is still very much alive at Hardrock - the camaraderie, the challenge, the beauty and the required self-reliance. It reveals the things that are truly necessary and unmasks the things that are not. Like the sport as a whole, we’d all like to see it include more women and more a more diverse field. At the same time, despite so much commercial temptation, Hardrock has managed to stay true to its grassroots nature and allow us the space to dream.
There is nothing at all performative at Hardrock. There’s no space for it. You simply cannot survive in these mountains, this race or this town by pretending. Nobody at Hardrock cares about how you look, where you’re from, what’s trendy or what’s “cool”. You could draw conclusions from afar or make assumptions based on a social media take, but, on the ground it’s truly a “come as you are” atmosphere. On top of that, the whole endeavor raises money toward a scholarship for local students. It’s as authentic as it gets and that is freeing.
In a digital world growing more complex and suffocating by the minute there is a growing value to that simplicity and disconnect. Each year the trip to Silverton serves as a needed reminder of just that. It’s increasingly important to step away from the outside world’s cluttered expectations and make space for your own dreams. Any creative knows that space and time allow your creativity to flourish and if the San Juan Mountains have anything it’s plenty of space and time. For me, seeing someone whose cell phone doesn’t even hold a charge pull up in a Toyota station wagon called “Deerslayer”, grab a handheld and some gels and effortlessly trot around that insane course in sub 24 is so cool. It’s like the legend of Marco Olmo who won UTMB in ‘06 and ‘07 as a 58/59 year old cement worker. You can’t make that stuff up because nobody would believe it these days. Possibility over probability.
Each year in Silverton I accumulate more friends and more memories. My family has come to Silverton since my kids were very young, often as our summer vacation. I ran Softrock in 2013 with my friend Scott Jaime who finished second to Skaggs back in 2008. I put in the lottery for a couple years back in 2014/15 before my qualifier ran out. I’ll likely never run it officially and that’s okay. In 2012 I showed up not knowing a soul. I had never shot a race before and I dreamt of a career doing just that. By 2015 I was making a film with Anna Frost, Billy Simpson and the legendary Hans-Dieter Weisshaar. I was able to interview Rick Trujillo, Blake Wood and Kilian Jornet for that project. When COVID cancelled the race I captured Jim Walmsley’s FKT attempt on the course. For three years I paced Mike Wardian around different sections. One year he dropped me on the descent into Cunningham, the second year he dropped me on the descent from Putnam and the third year I badly sprained my ankle at the top of Engineer but was stubborn enough to take him the entire way to Ouray in his fastest split ever. I’m still proud of that one. Mike’s marathon PR is easily an hour faster than mine. The past two trips I’ve camped with my son to spectate and spend time together. He’s almost 12 and these are the times I’m going to cherish. It brings a tear to my eye to write that. We hiked the 3200 vertical feet to Grant-Swamp Pass both years. Each year he’s the most excited to meet Courtney. This year we got up early for Golden Hour and watched the final 10 finishers break 48 hours.
All of this to say that Hardrock is a special event. It’s a small town race not unlike many others around the US, yet it receives an outsized level of attention globally. It doesn’t have commercial aspirations. The top sponsors, VF brands Smartwool, Altra and North Face, occupy very little of the spotlight and sit far behind the people, the running and the mountains in importance. That’s how it should be. I have no doubt there have been countless opportunities for the event to grow commercially but that just isn’t of interest. In the film I made back in 2015, “Kissing the Rock”, Billy Simpson points out how Hardrock shows us the value of preservation and not exploitation. I don’t know that I fully understood that statement at the time. Without the awareness to fend off the outside factors encroaching on our space, we inadvertently give up the very thing that allows us to dream. Our thinking flips to a world of probability not possibility. If we let them in, expectations will temper our dreams. Ten years on I think that’s what I was trying to get across in that film. Like many of us I can get caught up in the hype around the fashion conversation and the brands that dot the High Snobiety headlines. That’s an angle into the sport that didn’t exist in 2008. It’s fun in so many ways. But, as I stand in that gymnasium in Silverton, I’m unsure if that fashion angle really knows or understands what it is they are packaging up and selling. What I do know is that long after the current hype around trail passes and the trend-driven consumer skips to the next shiny thing, the shear improbability of running 100-miles in a place like Silverton will simply carry on and allow us that space to dream in possibilities.
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