3 minute read
TRUE GRIT
At 32, British athlete TOM EVANS is one of the world’s most talented ultrarunners, a specialist in running extreme distances with unprecedented pace. His secret? He doesn’t just endure these gruelling races, he enjoys them
Despite being in California in June, world-beating British ultrarunner Tom Evans had run more than 30km on snow – a task he admits is as difficult and discombobulating as you might imagine – when finally the trail began to thaw, at first in patches, then entirely. “There was a line where the snow suddenly stopped,” recalls the 32-year-old athlete. “That was a real switching moment in my mind. The prelude was now over – the race had begun.”
Evans was competing in the 100.2-mile (161km) Western States Endurance Run, a prestigious and almost unfathomably gruelling ultramarathon that sees runners climb around 5,500m of elevation –greater than that of Mont Blanc, Western Europe’s highest mountain – and descend another 7,000m as they traverse the rugged, boulder-strewn terrain of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
He had thought about this race for years, and had been training – unrelentingly – for it for months, but he couldn’t control the weather. Thanks to the unseasonable snow, Evans began this new chapter of the race 37 minutes down on the course-record pace. But he didn’t let it worry him. “In ultrarunning the race doesn’t start until you’re six or even eight hours in,” Evan says. “That’s how long it takes to know if you’ve got things right.”
On this particular day last year, he’d done exactly that. “I felt great and just put my foot down,” he says. Evans went on to beat the course-record pace for the remainder of the historic race, breaking off from his closest rival at 110km, and winning in a time of 14 hours, 40 minutes and 22 seconds – the fourth fastest men’s time ever in the event’s 47-year history. And as only the second European athlete to ever win it, Evans cemented his reputation as one of ultrarunning’s most formidable talents.
Instagram: @tomevansultra
