Western States 2026 Recap

"Quick" Recap

This year's Western States Endurance Run was wild! Imagine telling someone that three men would go under 14 hours, four under the course record, and none of them would have been named Jim, Kilian, Hans, Hayden, Zach, or Adam? Or that all of the top 10 women’s field would be faster than last years 2nd place?

Although my men’s fantasy bracket was broken, I did predict Jenn winning it all. I also made this dumb prop bet in my comment section, too bad I didn’t lay down real money:

*Technically, there were at least 3, 4 total sub-16 in the women's race

But people don’t read this blog for my bad hot takes…

Temperature Heatmaps

The big story going into this year’s Western States was the colder weather. I made a few iterations of these charts this week (which I was honored to share with Freetrail on two of their videos this week -- thanks again, Dylan, Travis, and Liam!) that’s worth updating to show how the day actually went:

I love the heatmap, but it only shows one data point, the maximum weather of the data. Thinking of a better way to display this data, I stumbled upon this second chart. This was actually my favorite thing I rendered leading up to the race; sadly it didn’t make it to Freetrail:

I also came up with this sliding window chart, that I thought was pretty cool, to better reflect the weather racers might see / saw throughout the day:

It still got decently warm, especially around Rucky Chucky, but was still cool enough to set perfect conditions for the two new Course Records to be set.

But let’s analyze the actual race itself, via my rally and carnage charts, to see racers’ movement throughout the race. And boy was there a lot of carnage this year.

Carnage Charts

Carnage was the name of the game for the men’s race:

Notable drops from four of the top 10 through the Escarpment; (the fade from Hayden makes this. chart a little difficult to read). Without Hayden, the chart then looks like:

Heavy carnage was also at play in the women’s race:

Super impressed with Molly gutting it out over the course of a long day that didn’t exactly go her way.

Rally Charts

Although the front of the pack was grouped pretty closely at the first of the race, there were a few people that significantly increased their positions over the course of the day:

Notable rallies from Jeff, Canyon, Will, and Hiroki

There was a lot of jostling during the first 50k of the race, then impressive rallies from Caitlin, Fuzho, and Fiona.

Foresthill Charts

“The race doesn’t start until Foresthill.” Maybe some years, but not in 2026.

Hans and Anthony started to fade after Foresthill, but otherwise the rest of the top 10 were dialed in by that point. As for the women’s race,

Again, some minor fading but otherwise the race pretty locked in by this point. I suppose that’s why Dbo changed his script to “the race is over by Foresthill.”

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New Top 10 Charts

So how do this years’ performance stack up to previous Western States attempts?

Half of the men’s top 10 is new to 2026; Interestingly Zach Miller’s impressive run (and Western States debut) barely made it to the top 10 fastest men’s run of all time. As for the women’s top 10:

7 new entrants this year; Fuzhao becomes the the only runner with two finishes in the top 10.

Updated Podium Charts

Lastly, here are updated podium charts:

Interesting that 10th place men’s was higher than 2024.

The women’s top 10 were all extremely dialed-in; kind of difficult to see in my chart, but 2026’s 10th place (Hannah Allgood, 16:45:56) was faster than last 2025’s 2nd place (Fuzhao Xiang, 16:47:09)!

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One more quick chart, what was the delta between each check point? I’ve acknowleded before that the carnage/rally charts can be someone deceiving, because they don’t show time-based positioning. To overcome that, I quickly rendered this chart to show the standard deviation between the top 10 through each aid station, illustrating just how competitive this entire race was (though, more competitive for the women’s race).

But slightly different story when we just look at the top 5:

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Another update, inspired by my friend Matt - chasing Jim and Courtney’s ghosts:

Ahead of CR all day:

Ahead of CR most of the day for the top three women’s.

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Again, what an exciting Statemas this weekend. There is a lot of content here, so I’ve likely goofed something up, so I’ll fix errors as they come up. Congrats to all finishers, especially the new course record holders Vincent and Jenn!