A month of records, and an eye on Hardrock
A ridiculous week of racing
I don't think I've seen a stretch quite like the last week or so. Three of the sport's biggest races, three sets of shattered records, back to back to back.
Western States kicked it off on June 27th, and the weather did exactly what everyone hoped it would. A cool day at Auburn — third-coolest finish-line temperature in the race's history — turned into the fastest 100 miles the Sierra Nevada has ever seen. Vincent Bouillard ran 13:46:15, taking 23 minutes off Jim Walmsley's 2019 course record, with Francesco Puppi second in 13:51:08 on his 100-mile debut. On the women's side, Jenn Lichter held off the clock all the way to the final 300 meters of the Placer High track, breaking Courtney Dauwalter's 2023 record by under a minute and a half. Not every big name had the day they wanted — it was that kind of race, brutal for some and perfect for others — but the times at the front were extraordinary.
Four days later, Val d'Aran by UTMB started in the Pyrenees, and the 163km "Torn dera VDA" course got rewritten too. Gabriel Rueda ran 21:32:05, nearly two hours faster than the previous record. Katarzyna Dombrowska did almost the same thing on the women's side, taking close to two hours off the mark that had stood since 2022. Two records, both broken by margins that are hard to process at that distance.
And then, this past Saturday, Quebec Mega Trail got in on it too. Kamil Lesniak won the 135km in 16:40:30, more than half an hour clear of last year's winning time, and Valérie Arsenault took nearly an hour off the women's record. Records fell across the shorter distances at the same event as well. Three huge races, three days apart from each other in some cases, and records falling at almost all of them. I can't remember a week like it.
Watching the sky over Silverton
Hardrock starts Friday morning, and I want to talk about it honestly rather than just build hype for it, because the situation on the ground isn't straightforward this year.
The Gold Mountain Fire has been burning near Ouray, and while it's currently moving away from the course, two other fires — Ferris and Doe Canyon — have been pushing smoke into Silverton itself. Air quality was bad enough on Sunday that it cancelled a day of pre-race trail work, and San Juan County is under Stage 2 fire restrictions. The race's committee, board, and run director have been meeting since the start of the month to track it, and as of the latest update, no part of the course itself has been affected. There's some hope that better weather midweek brings in enough moisture to clear the air before Friday's start.
I don't have any special insight into how this resolves, and I'm not going to pretend I do. What I do know is that the people who make this decision take it seriously, and they'll get more information than any of us watching from outside. So — for now, assuming it goes ahead as planned: good luck and stay safe out there to everyone toeing the line in Silverton. It's one of the most demanding races anywhere in the world even before you add wildfire smoke into the mix, and this community deserves a clean run at it.
What's been happening with Crewed
Quieter news on our end, but real progress. Over the last few weeks we've been cleaning up rough edges on both the app and the site — nothing flashy, mostly the unglamorous work of making things faster, more reliable, and easier to actually use. A few things worth mentioning: the app is leaner than it's been in a while, having shed a handful of features that weren't earning their place, so the parts that remain — the feed, the race calendar, athlete tracking — get more attention and work better. On the site, if someone shares a race-tracking link with you, it now takes you straight into following that runner rather than dumping you on a generic page — small thing, but it's exactly the kind of friction we're trying to strip out everywhere.
None of this is the exciting part of building an app, but it's the part that makes the exciting parts actually work when a hundred-miler is unfolding live and people are refreshing constantly. That's been the focus, and it'll keep being the focus through the rest of this stacked summer calendar.
Android is live on the Play Store now — if you've been following along and haven't grabbed it yet, this is a good week for it, with Hardrock about to start. iOS isn't far off; we're targeting early August.
More soon — there's no shortage of racing to write about right now.