A Trail Marathon Race Win Was Stolen From Me

This past Saturday, I ran the Enchanted Forest Trail Marathon by Gemini Adventures. It is a 26-27ish mile course with about 5000ft of climbing, starting and finishing in Red River, NM.

So what happened? The two runners ahead of me ran just under 23 miles, skipping the majority of the final climb and 3.8 miles.

• https://www.strava.com/activities/9545217471/overview
• https://www.strava.com/activities/9545017710/overview

I have little sympathy here, because anyone could tell they were only part way up the mountain and only a mile from town and the finish. The standard is to return to where you left the course and continue on!

The route is below, with the obvious large final climb and descent:

Strategy

I came into this race looking for a good training run and was going to modulate the intensity depending on how I felt after the first ten miles. I had only decided to run the race a few days before as I wanted to take advantage of my current fitness!

My goal race for the year is still the Moab 240, but this would be a great 5 hour long run I thought. And I ran a very conservative race, not keeping track of my place and just staying below threshold given the terrain.

Enchanted Forest Race Splits

Missing Segment

The two racers skipped this segment, https://www.strava.com/segments/35047062, which currently has 56 Strava users spread across a couple years of the race. The CR belongs to someone who ran the 8 mile distance in 2022, 2nd belongs to me with 20+ miles on my legs. The median time was over an hour, but I completed it in just over 40 minutes including about 1-2 minutes to confirm navigation at different points…

At the high point of this segment and the course, there is a final aid station, where the volunteers told me I was the first one through.

Finish Line

When I crossed the finish line, it was a total let down. I wasn’t told I had won even though no one had passed me since the final aid station. I asked some of the officials what was going on and then saw there were two finishers about an hour under the race record time. I did a little searching on Strava and found the two “finishers” ahead of me and pointed out that they didn’t run the full course.

I decided to relax and get some food thinking that it would be an obvious DQ, but then I overheard the race director stating he was going to just add an extra bit of time and that they would still be the official winners. I had enough and didn’t want to deal with it anymore, so I left.

Email to Race Director

A day later, I couldn’t keep from reaching out to the Race Director.

Hi ____,

First of thanks for putting on the race!

I just wanted to comment that I do not believe it was fair to only add 40 minutes to the two men that finished the course while missing those 3.8 miles and the final climb. That 40 minute time is not a penalty and would have been the fastest time on that particular segment yesterday and the second fastest time across all distances and years that the races have been held according to Strava; the median segment time(~1 hour) would have been more appropriate. The only runner to have been at or under 40 minutes is myself and a runner from a shorter distance in a previous year.

I’m reminded of Brian Wilson’s 2006 near finish of the Western States 100, https://youtu.be/tXTrCiAk0Yk?t=69, in knowing that nothing is guaranteed in races. I paced myself such that I would have the physical and mental ability late into the race to make decisions such as these around navigation. I feel like that was taken away from me.

And the response:

Hi Justin,

I totally understand where you are coming from. In retrospect, if I had it to do over, I don’t know that I would do it the same way. I decided to add the penalty on to racer’s times because I thought the problem was much more pervasive than it actually was. And I let our timing company assign the duration, and he was trying to figure it out on the fly.

It was a big portion of the race that was missed by a couple people and it seems we may not have assigned enough of a penalty time for missing the turn. Assigning a time penalty certainly takes out the strategy which is a big part of a race of this difficulty. We were trying to take responsibility for something that may have been our mistake and be fair to everyone.

I apologize that our decision hurt your results. You had a great race on a difficult course!

Thoughts

• A race is NEVER linear (see Brian Wilson’s 2006 near finish of the Western States 100, https://youtu.be/tXTrCiAk0Yk?t=69 or hundreds of other athletes crawling across the finish line)
• The official results are not real, there is no way to estimate how long it would have taken.
• There was no penalty, it was only an “adjustment”.
• The “winners” were rewarded for an aggressive pacing strategy that led to a navigation mistake.
• Trail racing and ultramarathons are about more than just physical ability.
• Can I have my ten minutes back navigating and making wrong turns during the race? 😄