Leadville Trail 100 Run, live.

The Race Across the Sky

A hundred miles out and back from a Colorado mining town, none of it below three thousand metres.

The Leadville Trail 100 Run has been going since 1983 and has never got any easier. The gun goes at four in the morning on Harrison Avenue, and the course runs out along Turquoise Lake, over Sugarloaf and down Powerline, along the Colorado Trail to Twin Lakes and then up and over Hope Pass at 3,840 metres to the turnaround at Winfield — before doing the entire thing again in reverse. The limit is 30 hours and the finish is a strip of red carpet on the same street the race left.

The altitude is the race. Nothing on the course drops below 3,000 metres, and Hope Pass has to be climbed twice, the second time in the dark with sixty miles already in the legs. On Livebib the whole out-and-back is drawn with the runner on it: distance covered, the aid stations in order, and an arrival estimate for the next one — which is what a crew at Twin Lakes is really waiting for.