LEADVILLE TRAIL 100 HISTORY: THE RACE ACROSS THE SKY

In 1982 the Climax molybdenum mine above Leadville, Colorado cut thousands of jobs and took most of the town's economy with it. A year later a former miner named Ken Chlouber proposed running 100 miles through the mountains as a way to bring people back to a town that was emptying out.

The Leadville Trail 100 has run almost every August since. It is now one of the most recognizable 100 miles races in the United States, and the town it was built to rescue still hosts it.

A town at 10,000 feet

Leadville sits at roughly 10,152 feet, the highest incorporated city in the United States. It was built on silver in the 1870s and spent the following century tied to whatever metal the market wanted.

By the early 1980s that dependence had become a problem. The Climax operation had been the largest molybdenum mine in the world, and when it wound down the surrounding county lost its main employer within a few years. Population fell sharply.

Chlouber, who had worked underground, put the race forward as an economic proposition rather than a sporting one. The argument was that people would pay to come and suffer at altitude, and that they would bring money into hotels and restaurants that had nothing else to fill them.

Local officials were not immediately convinced. The objection was the obvious one, which was that somebody would die. Chlouber's reported answer, that a death would at least generate publicity, has followed the race ever since as part of its founding story.

The first race

Chlouber founded the event with Merilee Maupin, who ran the operational side of the race for decades. The 1983 edition sent a small field onto a course that started at roughly 10,200 feet and stayed high for its entire length.

Skip Hamilton of Aspen won that first race in 20:11:18 at age 38. The race has been known since as the Race Across the Sky, a name that describes the altitude more than the terrain.

The event grew steadily through the 1980s as 100 miles racing itself grew in the United States. It arrived at a moment when only a handful of comparable races existed, and its altitude gave it a distinct identity from the start.

The course

The route is an out and back from Leadville to Winfield and returns on the same trails. Runners cover roughly 15,600 feet of climbing across the full distance.

The defining section is Hope Pass, which tops out near 12,600 feet and must be crossed twice. Runners reach it around mile 45 on the way out and again near mile 55 on the return, usually in the dark.

The course never drops below roughly 9,200 feet. Altitude, not technical difficulty, is what makes the race hard. Much of the route runs on dirt road and smooth trail that would be straightforward at sea level.

Runners who arrive without acclimatization tend to fall apart somewhere on the second Hope Pass climb. Finish rates have often sat near half the starting field, and the attrition is concentrated in the middle third of the race rather than the closing miles.

Pacers are permitted from Winfield at the halfway point, and crews meet runners at a set of established aid stations including Twin Lakes, which sits at the base of the Hope Pass climb on both directions of travel.

The buckles

The cutoff is 30 hours. Finishers under 25 hours receive the large silver belt buckle, and those between 25 and 30 hours receive the smaller one.

That split has produced a distinct racing pattern. A significant share of the field targets 24:59 rather than a placing, and the hour before the 25-hour mark produces a steady stream of finishers running harder than they otherwise would.

The buckle system also drives the race's culture of repeat participation. Leadville tracks cumulative finishes and awards milestone buckles at 10 and 20 completions, which has produced a group of runners with long unbroken records at the event.

Ann Trason and the 1994 race

The 1994 edition remains the most discussed in the race's history. Ann Trason ran 18:06:24, won the women's race, and finished second overall.

A group of Tarahumara runners from Mexico's Copper Canyons had traveled to Leadville that year, brought north by an American promoter who had been working in the region. Juan Herrera won the race outright, and Trason finished behind him after leading for long stretches.

Trason's time stood as the women's course record for 31 years. She also won the race in 1988 in 21:40:26 and again in 1998 in 20:58:32. No other athlete has shaped the race's reputation more.

The Tarahumara appearances at Leadville in the early 1990s were later written up in Born to Run, published in 2009. The book pushed the race into a much wider audience than ultrarunning had reached before, and entry demand rose sharply in the years that followed.

The men's record

Matt Carpenter ran 15:42:59 in 2005 at age 41. Carpenter, a Colorado mountain runner with a long record at altitude and the fastest times on Pikes Peak, set a mark that no one approached for the next 19 years.

David Roche broke it in 2024 with 15:26:34. He returned in 2025 and lowered it again to 15:12:30, taking a further 14 minutes off and finishing well clear of the rest of the field.

Between Carpenter and Roche the race produced a series of winners well short of the record. Rob Krar won in 2018 in 15:51:57, the closest anyone came across those two decades.

Ian Sharman won in 2015 in 16:33:54 and again in 2017 in 17:34:51. Ryan Smith won in 2019 in 16:33:24. Adrian Macdonald took consecutive titles in 2021 and 2022, running 16:18:19 and then 16:05:44, and JP Giblin won in 2023 in 17:07:25.

The spread across those years, from 15:51 to 17:34, is wide for a single course. Conditions at altitude vary enough between editions that winning times here say less about the depth of the field than they would at a road race.

The women's record

Anne Flower ended Trason's 31-year hold on the record in 2025, running 17:58:19 to become the first woman under 18 hours at Leadville.

The years before that produced winning times mostly between 19 and 21 hours. Clare Gallagher won in 2016 in 19:00:27 and returned to win in 2022 in 19:37:57. Katie Arnold won in 2018 in 19:53:40, Magdalena Boulet in 2019 in 20:18:06, and Devon Yanko in 2017 in 20:46:29.

Liza Howard won in 2015 in 19:34:09. Annie Hughes won in 2021 in 21:06:58 and Jacquie Mannhard in 2023 in 21:24:55.

Mary Denholm won in 2024 in 18:23:54, the fastest women's winning time since Trason's record and the first sign that the 1994 mark was within reach. Flower broke it the following year.

Streak finishers

Leadville tracks cumulative finishes more carefully than most races, and a set of runners has built long records there.

Bill Finkbeiner became the first person to earn the 2,000-mile buckle for 20 finishes in 2003. He went on to record 30 consecutive finishes beginning in 1984.

Kirk Apt completed his 20th Leadville in 2014. Eric Pence finished his 25th in 2019, joining Finkbeiner and Garry Curry as the only runners past that number.

Charles Williams finished the race at age 70 in 1999, the oldest finisher in its history. GQ profiled his preparation that August, comparing his training volume to that of a professional athlete.

The 1994 aftermath

The Tarahumara results at Leadville in 1993 and 1994 were treated at the time as a curiosity, and the coverage focused heavily on the runners' sandals and their unfamiliarity with the equipment the rest of the field used.

What the results actually showed was narrower and more interesting. Runners with no exposure to the American ultra circuit, arriving at altitude from a different range entirely, were competitive at the front of a race that the domestic field had been contesting for a decade.

Trason's second place overall in that same year has aged into the more remarkable line on the results sheet. A woman finishing second outright at a major 100 miles race remains rare, and she did it against a field that included the eventual winner running one of the faster times in the race's history to that point.

The reporting that followed, and the book that came 15 years later, gave Leadville a profile that no amount of promotion by the organizers would have produced. The race became shorthand for American ultrarunning in a way that Western States, older and arguably more competitive, never quite did.

The series and the present day

The running race is now the anchor of a summer program that includes a 100 miles mountain bike race, a 50 miles run, a marathon and shorter events, most of them on overlapping terrain.

The mountain bike race was added in 1994 and grew large enough on its own to change the town's summer economy in a way the running race alone had not. Life Time acquired the series in 2010 and has run it since.

The 2020 edition was cancelled during the COVID-19 pandemic, the only interruption in the race's run since 1983.

Entry now moves through a lottery, and the field is capped well below demand. The race retains the qualities that made it distinct in the 1980s, which is to say a course that gains nothing from technical trail and everything from thin air.

Chlouber's line at the pre-race briefing, that runners are better than they think they are and can do more than they think they can, has become the most quoted sentence in American ultrarunning. It has outlasted the mine that prompted the race in the first place.

The 2026 edition is scheduled for August 22.