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“I’M THE LAUGHINGSTOCK of the Western States.”
That’s Jeff Allen. For ten years, the South Carolina running coach has been applying for a spot in the Western States Endurance Run, one of the US’s flagship ultramarathon trail races. And for ten years, Allen has come up short in the race’s lottery system, meaning he’ll have to wait another year to run the 100-mile course through the Granite Chief Wilderness, west of Lake Tahoe. To be eligible for this year’s lottery, he’s had to run another qualifying race of 100 kilometers or more to have his name pulled in the 2027 edition.
“Every year, I’m like, ‘this is my year’ …well, as the lottery gods may have it, I did not get selected again,” he says. The yearly experience has soured him on what was once his dream race. “I just go through the motions now because I have so many years vested into it. Now, hopefully the day I get in, maybe my sentiments change… but I am a shell of the runner I used to be so many years ago.”
Allen may be one of the runners who’s waited the longest, but he’s not alone in yearning to get into one of America’s premier ultras. It’s a problem facing tens of thousands of American endurance enthusiasts—literally. In the 2026 lottery for the Western States, more than 11,000 runners were vying for 257 spots in the race. And it’s not just this race where runners are being shut out.
“Ultra running is the new marathon,” says Fred Abramowitz, the founder and co-director of Run, Rabbit, Run, an ultra race in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Anybody who’s “got a couple of screws loose,” he says, can train and learn the tactics to enter and finish one of these extreme events.
As running has generally boomed, even more people are showing up with screws loose. In 2016, the first year Allen vied for a spot in the Western States, 58,425 runners entered ultras in the U.S., according to statistics from Ultra Running magazine. In 2025, that number had ballooned to more than 100,000. And as the popularity of the sport grows, the chances of getting into its most sought-after races via the lottery are becoming slimmer and slimmer.
Some runners who have missed out on races spin theories about lottery conspiracies, spots being given to sponsor influencers, and other skullduggery through which spots are being stolen. But the truth is, runners hoping to check big races off their bucket lists face a less nefarious but even more formidable foe: Math.
Ten Times As Many Runners … For The Same Number of Spots
IN 2006, WHEN the Western States featured prominently in Dean Karnazes’ book, Ultramarathon Man, the 100-mile mountain race already had a lottery. But the odds were much closer to a coin flip. Only 841 runners applied to vie for the legendary prize of a silver belt buckle emblazoned with a cougar that year, so about one-third got a spot, even if they were first-time entrants into the lottery.
Twenty years later, a first-time qualifier’s chances of getting picked have dropped to 0.4 percent. The race still starts with the same number of runners—369. Other top ultras are the same way. The Hard Rock 100, held in Silverton, Colorado, has 147 spots for runners at its start line. The Leadville 100 Trail Run starts around 700 runners per year (710 in 2025, 657 in 2026).
With so much more interest in ultras recently, why don’t these races just let more people enter?
The answer is simple, and difficult to hear for desperate endurance junkies: They legally can’t.
“The Western States is unique among races in the world in that we go through a federally designated wilderness area, the Granite Chief Wilderness,” says Craig Thornley, the event’s race director. When the California Wilderness Act of 1984 was passed, the Western States, which was already 10 years old, had to lobby for the race to be able to continue along this protected trail. “We got permission to continue to use the trail so long as we didn’t have more starters than we did prior to the creation of the Wilderness. And it just so happened in 1984, we had 369 [starters].”
“We all have to work together. And if we don’t all do our part to manage it, it’s going to get trashed.”
At the Hard Rock 100, run director Dale Garland and his team need nine different permits from different authorities to have their annual race.
“That means the town of Telluride has a way they want us to conduct business, and the U.S. Forest Service says we can only have so many people,” he says. Factoring in event staff, medical support, and aid station volunteers and pacers for runners, there’s only room for 147 entrants each year.
These races are thus legally barred from making their races bigger, even if disappointed runners don’t always realize it. And these jilted athletes compare the limited start spots to what they see in videos from less restrictive events like UTMB, the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, where more than 10,000 runners toe the line of the HOKA-sponsored race through the Alps that starts and finishes in France.
“[Some runners] can bring an unrealistic set of expectations to Hard Rock… the management of the land isn’t as big of a deal as it is here,” Garland says. “To be honest, I’m not sure I’d want 2,000 people running through the San Juan Mountains… I have to share the land with four-wheel drive people and side-by-side people and mountain bikers, hikers, that kind of thing. We all have to work together. And if we don’t all do our part to manage it, it’s going to get trashed.”
These space-limited American races, then, have to use more exclusive lotteries and qualifying races and standards to fill their limited spots than UTMB’s events (which are still limited by qualifying rules, but have more spaces). The Leadville 100 has a plain-old lottery. Sign up, and your name goes into a hat. You either get a spot, or you don’t. Apply for a few years, and unless you’re unlucky, you’ll get in.
The Western States provides a list of hundreds of qualifying races that are 100 kilometers or more. Finish one of these races with a qualifying time, and you’re awarded with a ticket in the Western States lottery. If you’re not selected in the first year (and with a 0.4 percent chance, it’s unlikely you will be), and you’ll get two more tickets for running a qualifying time in your second year. The number of tickets goes up by 2^(n-1) for each year a runner qualifies and applies. In a runner’s third year, they’ve got 4 tickets. After waiting 9 years, like Jeff Allen had been at last year’s lottery, they’ve got 256.
For the Hard Rock 100, the bottleneck for runners starts at qualifying. There are fewer races runners can choose from to qualify for what Garland and the other race officials call the “post-graduate” difficulty of Hard Rock, meaning fewer entrants are in the lottery pool.
Those who do enter that pool are put into a Beautiful Mind-level lottery system that’s actually four lotteries. There’s one lottery for men who have never finished the race, one for men who have finished it before, and one of each of the same for women. The split between men and women is determined by the ratio of applicants, so if there are 80 percent male entrants, 80 percent of the spots will be for men. The split between “never finished” and those who have finished before is 83 total starters who have never finished (split between men and women), and 64 who have finished before. Both groups get more entries for each year they don’t get in.
This finished/never finished split, though, means people who have run Hard Rock before are more likely to get in again. In the 2025 Hard Rock lottery, 265 previous finishers applied, and 64 runners were selected, a 24 percent chance of getting in. People who hadn’t finished before had just a 2.9 percent chance of being selected.
“It’s one of those really weird things about the sport that it’s supposed to be so egalitarian, and everybody’s the same … except when it comes to this, then it’s really different,” says Scott Kummer, an avid ultra runner, race organizer, and host of the 10 Junk Miles podcast. “All these people, it’s their dream to do this race someday. And then every year I’ll see a post by Western States or Hard Rock that says, ‘we’re welcoming Jim Smith to his 29th Hard Rock.’ And I’m just like, ‘that’s great. All these other people, screw you.’”
Allen, who has been applying for the Hard Rock 100 since 2018 in addition to his 10 years of trying to win a spot in the Western States, says he always knew the Silverton race would be tough to get into. He’s frustrated by the “finished/never finished” disadvantage, but is more frustrated by his white whale, the Western States. In most years, runners who have waited as long as Allen would be added to the top of the race’s wait list, but in this year’s edition, Thornley says, there were too many runners who’d been waiting for years for this to be feasible.
The number of long waiters for the race may continue to grow. While the rules used to stipulate that runners needed to qualify each year to stay in the lottery, prospective runners can now skip a year without losing their tickets. That means they can’t be selected in a year when they didn’t qualify, but if they have 32 tickets this year, they’ll go to 64 when they qualify again.
Allen, like other Western States waiters, feels rankled by this, and by the race’s “automatic” slots. This group of roughly 100 runners is pulled from a bunch of different groups—those who finished in the top 10 of the previous year’s race for men and women, people who win a series of “Golden Ticket” races, but also board members and representatives of a few corporate sponsors. (Contrary to the beliefs of the conspiracy-minded waiters, the corporate sponsor spots have actually gone down slightly over the past 10 years, from a peak of 22 in 2016 to 17 last year.)
“I don’t know how many special consideration spots were given out before I got here,” Thornley says, “but I think it was more common.” For what it’s worth, the Western States is transparent about the number of slots taken up by these automatics, and publishes a breakdown from each year on their website.
Why Not Just Run Another Race?
GARRETT BURTON HAS dreamed of running Leadville for years. The former Navy SEAL drives from his Indiana home to Colorado each year, where he’s slowly been ticking off climbs of all of the state’s fifty-three 14,000-foot peaks, also called “fourteeners.” His first fourteener was Mt. Elbert, found in Leadville, Colorado. So the 100-mile trail race there has an almost magical draw for the 33-year old. But he hasn’t had a magic touch in the lottery. For five years running, he’s been shut out.
“I’ve been unlucky,” he says. “I haven’t really felt frustrated until this year … I’ve tried to get into it for half a decade now, and I have no more information than when I first started. It’s to the point where it’s like, I don’t necessarily know if I want to run the race anymore.”
Burton’s experience underlines one issue with “just run another race.” The premier ultras are bucket list events for many runners, given their long tradition and reputation—not unlike the Boston Marathon for road running, but even more exclusive. Each year, they not only have to sign up for some of these races, but run a qualifier. During his 10-year wait for the Western States, Jeff Allen says he’s run 100-kilometer races with a torn calf, among other injuries, to continue to pile up chances at his dream race. For this year’s qualifying, the now 40-year old Allen ran an ultra in Arkansas just months after being immobilized with a stress fracture in his pelvis. “I’m doing harm to my body,” he says, “because I’ve put this race on a pedestal.”
“It’s one of those really weird things about the sport that it’s supposed to be so egalitarian, and everybody’s the same … except when it comes to this, then it’s really different.”
When Burton missed out on Leadville last year, he did choose another race for the year: Run, Rabbit, Run. As of 2027, the Steamboat Springs race will boast the largest prize of any American ultra—$100,000 each to the male and female winners. Burton says the views and experience were stellar.
But while they’ve benefited from people like Burton using it as an “alternate” run, the race directors of Run, Rabbit, Run think “just run another race” isn’t always great advice. Unlike road marathons, where you’re never far from other people or a hospital, ultras are held in real wilderness, where bad situations can quickly become dangerous. At the Moab 240 held in October of this year, 70 runners needed to be evacuated when they were stranded by extreme rain. At a race with less experienced organizers and resources, those situations can become dire, Abramowitz says.
“I would be reluctant to enter a race that does not have an established history of putting on a good event, of being safe,” he says. “I would never enter a race that’s new. I’ve done it before. I’ve regretted it.”
Should Veterans Step Aside?
THE SOLUTION TO runners being shut out of these races could start with veteran ultra runners, says Kummer.
“I always use the analogy of there’s a restaurant in town and nobody can ever get in, and there’s a big line of people waiting outside every day getting turned down,” he says. “If you walk out of there for the fourth time this week, don’t you feel like an asshole?”
Having veterans in the mix is part of what keeps the community, we’re-all-in-this camaraderie of ultras, says Garland—but he understands this frustration. At the Western States, there’s an incentive that keeps previous finishers entering the lottery. After finishing 10 (or 20) editions of the race, runners get a special belt buckle that’s different from the single finish award.
“I wish my predecessors hadn’t put that 10-year buckle out there as a goal,” Thornley says. He doesn’t fault people who are near that goal from achieving it, as they spent many years chasing the special prize. “I do wish, at times, that once you hit 10, you stop.”
“It’s to the point where it’s like, I don’t necessarily know if I want to run the race anymore.”
Runners may also choose to run different races. More events are becoming established with different skill sets and experiences in mind: Longer races, like the two-day Cocodona 250, the Big Foot 200, and the Arizona Monster 300, have begun to capture the imaginations of the endurance-inclined. But even these are filling up quickly and becoming lottery-limited, with Cocodona instituting its first lottery for next year’s edition.
The solution may come down to race directors helping runners feel safer running races that aren’t as well-established. Abramowitz and his fellow Run, Rabbit, Run race director, Paul Sachs, think ultra running could benefit from an organizing body that sets standards.
“Some kind of organization that tells runners, ‘hey, this one follows safety protocols. This one is well-organized,’” Abramowitz says. The Run, Rabbit, Run directors say they’re in the midst of conversations with other race directors about just such a body. Garland mentioned similar discussions.
Until such systems, or new bucket list races, are established, runners will have to continue to wait. With 512 tickets for this year’s Western States’ lottery, Allen’s wait, for one, is likely to end at December’s draw. In last year’s lottery, that number would have given him an 88.8 percent chance of being selected. But he’s not so sure of the outcome.
“I don’t know until I know,” he says. “My love for Western States has dissipated over the years … but I hope that when I do eventually get in and get to run it, maybe some of my jadedness turns around. I’ll be like, ‘hey, this is my story. This is what it is. This is how it happened, and I’m OK with it.’”
Greg Presto is a fitness and sports reporter and videographer in Washington, DC.