The first weekend of May saw a trio of ultras play out in New England, with several record-breaking performances in New Hampshire at the White Lake Ultras, and big performances at the Forgotten Forest 9-Hour Ultra and the Blue 2 Blue Challenge 50K in Connecticut. We have them all covered here in Part II of this week’s roundup.

May kicked off with a jam-packed slate of ultramarathons in New England, including two in Connecticut – the Forgotten Forest 9-Hour and the Blue 2 Blue Challenge, as well as the White Lake Ultras in New Hampshire. We’ll have those ultras covered in Part II of this week’s roundup, but here in Part I we look beyond New England and catch up on how runners from the region performed at other ultras throughout the country, from New Jersey to Oregon and points in between.

In Part I of this week’s roundup we focused on ultras in the East with a big spotlight on the record-setting action at the Jack Bristol Lake Waramaug Ultras. Here in Part II we turn to events in the West and Midwest, including the Arizona classic Zane Grey Highline Trail Runs, the Royal Gorge Groove 50K in Colorado, and the multi-day Earth Day Bucklemania festival in Kansas.

The New England ultrarunning calendar closed out April with a pair of big events, the Trail Animals Running Club’s TARC Spring Classic in Massachusetts (to be covered in separate story), and the historic Jack Bristol Lake Waramaug Ultras in Connecticut. While New Englanders also ventured beyond the region to more than a dozen other ultras, we lead off Part I of this week’s roundup by focusing on ultras in the East, beginning at Lake Waramaug where a dynamite female field did serious damage to the 100K record board and two runners toppled a milestone that stood for more than 35 years.

Easter weekend means two things in the New England ultrarunning world: Traprock and “Don’t Run Boston.” Both iconic events typically fall on the same weekend, and occasionally the same day, offering runners a pair of burly challenges on technical trails to kick their seasons into high gear. DRB will have its own separate recap, but the Traprock 50K leads off the April 18-20 weekend edition of the roundup. Additionally, we catch up on results from a few New Englanders who headed west to ultras in California, Colorado and Arizona.