SUPERIOR 100 HISTORY: 35 YEARS ON THE SUPERIOR TRAIL

Minnesota's North Shore got its 100-mile race in 1991, six years after the Superior Hiking Trail Association cut its first tread above Lake Superior. Harry Sloan organized it and directed it through 1997, and 35 years later it is the ninth-oldest 100-mile trail race in the United States.

The race runs on the first Friday and Saturday of September. The 2026 edition starts September 11.

The trail came first

The Superior Hiking Trail runs along the ridgeline above Lake Superior from Duluth toward the Canadian border, a footpath built and maintained by volunteers across land that is mostly state forest and county holdings. It was not built for running. It was built to follow the escarpment, which means it climbs to every overlook and drops to every river crossing along the way.

That routing is why the race has the reputation it does. The elevation profile is not a mountain race with three big climbs. It is a saw blade, roughly 21,000 feet of gain accumulated in increments of 200 and 400 feet, over rock and root and boardwalk, for 103 miles.

Runners who come from western mountain hundreds tend to underestimate it. The climbs are short enough to run and frequent enough that running them all is a mistake, and the footing rarely allows a full stride even on the flat sections between.

The original course

From 1991 through 2004 the race started at the junior high school in Silver Bay and finished at the Cook County football field in Grand Marais. Bob Stavig won the first edition in 23:08:57. Susan Gimbel won the women's race and repeated in 1992.

Eric Clifton won the 1992 race in 17:21:42, a time no one has approached on any version of the course. Clifton was in the middle of a stretch where he was winning and setting records at trail hundreds across the country, and the North Shore route suited a runner who preferred to lead from the gun.

Mary Bystedt won four times in the 1990s, in 1993, 1994, 1996 and 1997. Her 24:17:59 in 1994 stood as the women's mark on the original course.

The race did not run in 2005. When it returned in 2006 it had a different route, different organizers and a different character.

The 2006 reroute

The current course starts at Gooseberry Falls State Park and finishes at Caribou Highlands Lodge on Lutsen Mountains, 103.3 miles north along the trail. Donald Clark and Bonnie Riley measured it twice with a surveying wheel to establish the distance.

Organizers were direct about what the change meant. The new course is harder than the old one. The 38-hour cutoff and the average finish time of 34 hours recorded in 2013 both reflect a race where most of the field is racing the clock rather than each other.

John Storkamp has directed the race since the reroute, through RockSteady Running. Under his direction the event grew into a three-race weekend with 50-mile and marathon distances running the northern portion of the same trail, and the 100 capped near 250 starters.

The modern records

Neal Collick holds the men's course record at 18:56:02, set in 2018 when he won for the second consecutive year. He had gone 19:31:40 in 2017. The 2018 run remains the only sub-19-hour finish on the current course.

Ian Torrence came closest before him, running 18:59:58 in 2000 on the original route. The two marks are 62 seconds apart across a course change that added distance and climbing, which is the clearest measure available of how much harder the current version is.

Gretchen Metsa set the women's record of 21:54:10 in 2023, her third win after 2017 and 2022. Her 2023 run took more than two hours off the mark Kristina Folcik set in 2012 with a 24:49:06 that was itself described at the time as lowering the previous women's record by about two hours.

Mallory Richard of Canada won four times between 2014 and 2018, the only non-American to take the title more than once. Her 22:36:39 in 2018 is the second-fastest women's time on the current course.

The names who came through

Courtney Dauwalter ran the race in 2013 and finished second in the women's field. She was 28 and had not yet won Western States or UTMB, and the result appears in the record book without any indication of what followed.

Diana Finkel won in 2002, four years before she began the run of Hardrock 100 wins that defined her career. Sean Andrish won the first edition on the new course in 2006. Jake Hegge won in 2015 at 24 and again in 2022 at 31.

Susan Donnelly won three times, in 2000, 2003 and 2007, all in times over 28 hours. Her wins came in years when the women's field was small and the weather was poor, which is a pattern the results show repeatedly on this course.

Weather and water

September on the North Shore can deliver anything. The 2017 race met a washed-out bridge that forced runners to ford the Split Rock River on foot, and beaver dams put knee-deep water across other sections of trail. Nobody rerouted the race. The runners went through.

That is the general approach here. The trail is what it is on the day, and the race adapts to it rather than the other way around.

The 2020 edition was cancelled for the pandemic, the only cancellation in the race's history and the second year it has not run after the 2005 gap.

Where it sits among American hundreds

By 1991 the American 100-mile trail race was still a small category. Western States 100 had been running since 1977, Wasatch Front 100 since 1980 and Leadville Trail 100 since 1983, and the total number of such races in the country could be counted without much effort.

Superior arrived at the end of that first wave and before the expansion of the late 1990s. That timing matters to how the race is run. It was designed when a 100-mile race meant a hard trail, a cutoff and a buckle, and it has not added much since.

There is no lottery. There is no qualifying standard beyond the entry requirements the race sets. Entry opens and the race fills, and the field that shows up is heavily weighted toward Minnesota, Wisconsin and Ontario rather than the national circuit.

That has kept the race off most people's calendars outside the upper Midwest, and it is also why the course records belong to runners who train on the trail rather than to visiting elites.

The weekend around it

The 100 anchors a three-race weekend. A 50-mile and a marathon run the northern sections of the same course, finishing at Lutsen alongside the hundred, which puts several hundred runners on the trail across two days.

That structure is common now and was less so when the race adopted it. It also solves a practical problem particular to this course: the Superior Hiking Trail is a single-track footpath with limited road access, and aid stations sit at the handful of points where a highway or forest road crosses the ridge.

Crews drive Highway 61 along the lake and climb to meet their runners at those crossings. The gaps between them run long by 100-mile standards, and a substantial share of the race is spent alone with what a runner is carrying.

The finishers who keep coming back

Eugene Curnow became the first person to finish the race 10 times, in 2016. Only three runners have done it.

In 2022 Sophie Tibbetts became the first known member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa to finish the race, running the trail through land her community has occupied for generations.

Those are the results the race tends to be known for locally. The winners rotate, and the field turns over, but a substantial part of the entry list every year is people coming back to a course they have already finished.

The decade splits show it. Through the 1990s the men's winning time sat between 19 and 23 hours, Clifton's outlier aside, and the women's between 24 and 28. After the 2006 reroute the men's times got slower, back into the 21 to 26 range, before Hegge and Collick brought them under 20 again from 2015.

The women's progression is steeper. From 2006 to 2011 no woman won in under 26 hours. Folcik broke 25 in 2012, Richard broke 24 in 2016, and Metsa went under 22 in 2023. That is nearly three hours off the winning time in 11 years, and close to eight hours off where the current course started in 2006.

Some of that is the general improvement in trail running over the same period. Some of it is that the race started attracting women who could actually run the course rather than survive it.

What 2026 looks like

Cheryl Matson won the women's race in 2024 in 27:41:54 and Scott Wopata the men's in 20:54:03. Neither time threatened the records, which is normal. Collick's 18:56:02 has stood for eight years and Metsa's 21:54:10 for three.

The race caps at roughly 250 starters and fills on entry rather than lottery, which keeps the field local and repeat-heavy rather than drawing the traveling elite. That has kept the winning times in a band between 19 and 21 hours for the men and 22 to 27 for the women across the last decade, with the records set by runners who live close enough to train on the trail.

The 2026 race starts at Gooseberry Falls on the morning of September 11 and the cutoff falls 38 hours later at Lutsen. Most of the field will use most of it.