The Midstate Massive Ultra-Trail 100-mile race course is daunting during the best of conditions. It is front-loaded with climbing, the majority of it on rugged, technical singletrack trails where the footing is tricky and progress is often slow. The back half has several miles of road, so runners who’ve made it that far can try to pick up the pace, only to then be smacked with even more technical trails during the late miles in Douglas State Forest.
The event earned its reputation during mostly dry conditions through its first four years. The fifth edition of the race – which took place Oct. 7-8 – took course conditions to a diabolical new level as rain drenched the course, making rocks extra slippery and turning portions of the trail into rivers.
Hundreds of New England ultrarunners stayed close to home during the Oct. 7-8 weekend to race the Midstate Massive Ultra-Trail, Bubba’s Backyard Ultra or the Big Brad Ultras. Those events are highlighted in other coverage on this site. But a number of other runners ventured beyond New England – as close as New York and New Jersey and as far as Illinois, Arkansas, Arizona and Utah, to tackle other events. We’ve caught up on as many of those races as we can in this edition of the roundup.
The Oct. 7-8 weekend was Midstate Massive weekend for hundreds of ultrarunners throughout New England as the three-distance event – 100-miles, 50 miles and 30-miles – took runners into four of the region’s states. Still, it was far from the only ultra event in New England that weekend as two other popular events also took place: Bubba’s Backyard Ultra in New Hampshire and the Big Brad Ultras in Maine. There were several other ultras across the country that attracted runners from the region – and we’ll have them covered in a second roundup – but this edition stays in New England.
The fifth annual Midstate Massive Ultra-Trail 100-mile, 50-mile and 30-mile trail races took place Oct. 7-8, 2023, on point-to-point courses starting in New Ipswich, N.H., as well as Rutland and Spencer, Mass., with all three distances finishing at Douglas State Forest in Douglas, Mass.
While dozens of New England ultrarunners ventured outside of the region to race during the Sept. 30-Oct. 1 weekend, many stayed in the Northeast to tackle courses nearby, from steep, mountainous terrain to rolling singletrack and doubletrack, to easy-running gravel and even a track. Here in part two of the weekly roundup we catch up on the ultras that happened in New England and nearby New York and New Jersey. Big performances abounded, from a 100-miler with more than 40,000 feet of climbing in Vermont, to a record-setting night at the Joe English Twilight Challenge in New Hampshire that leads off this edition of the roundup.
September ended and October began with another jam-packed weekend of ultramarathon racing for New Englanders. In fact, runners from the region tackled more than a dozen ultras from coast to coast. That’s more than enough ultras to make Sept. 30-Oct. 1 a two-roundup week so we’re splitting it up between ultras in the Northeast and everything else. Here in part one we highlight a half-dozen ultras – most of them in the west, including the 25th edition of The Bear 100. Three others outside the Northeast (Saddle2Surf, Rio Grande 100, and the Stanky Creek 50K) had New England entrants but haven’t yet posted results. Even without them, this made for a looooooong edition of the roundup.
The Sept. 22-24 weekend was surprisingly quiet in Massachusetts, but it was busy in the rest of New England as the legendary Vermont 50 turned 30, the Angevine Farm 50K and Enchanted Forest 6-hour took place in Connecticut, and Uphill Will made its debut in Maine. All of those regional races are featured in this edition of the roundup.
After several weekends of ultras in Massachusetts, Sept. 22-24 was quiet in the Bay State … but not anywhere else. Runners from the Commonwealth and throughout New England were busy tackling ultras seemingly everywhere else. There were so many races, in fact, that they merit being split into two roundups this week – one for New England races and another for ultras elsewhere. We start beyond the region with a look at how local runners performed in New Jersey, California, Oregon and Arizona. Additionally, we catch up on New Englanders who completed the Run Rabbit Run 100-miler on Sept. 15-17 in Colorado. It’s a jam-packed edition of the roundup – and it’s only part one this week.
A few new surprises were in store for runners at the Berkshire Ultra Running Community for Service’s (BURCS) Free to Run Trail Races this year.
The event still raises funds to support Free to Run, Inc., a nonprofit organization that seeks to enable women and girls in conflict regions to engage in physical and outdoor activities. That part of the event was unchanged.
NEEDHAM, Mass. – At its core, the format of the backyard ultra is rooted in simplicity: a set distance, a set time, repeated over and over again.
For runners at the second annual MetroWest Backyard Ultra, that simplicity may have been summed up best by the official race timepiece. There was no fancy digital clock next to a blow-up arch. Instead, there was a classic plastic circular clock with hands on it to track the hours, minutes and seconds.
MassUltra 