Some of the earliest “official” modern race reports were typewritten or dot-matrix printed and circulated among enthusiasts in the 1970s. Here’s a look at the three main leaps in its format, in the past 50 years. Postal Service to smartphones and Strava. When it comes to the modern sport of ultrarunning, race reports have been created and circulated using the changing technology of the day, from printers and the U.S. Do FKTs count? What about the Tarahumara running traditions of Rarajípare and Ariwete? Or Kipchoge’s sub-two-hour marathon? In the end, people have always run and told stories about it. Running is even older than humanity, and not all runs are races. After all, the race report is a form of storytelling, and storytelling is as old as humanity.

This introduces a number of challenges in chronicling the history of race reports. Today, we associate race reports with the internet, but that wasn’t always the case. The race report has officially hit the media multiverse. During ultras today, runners often capture and post footage on smartphones, while GPS watches chirp like birds. With digital media, a variety of race report formats emerged, from vlogging to TikTok to Strava recaps. Since then, the landscape has changed tremendously. In 2010, when I started running, blogs were de rigueur for race reports.

Not only that, but many shared them far and wide-suggesting that if the story wasn’t shared publicly, the work wasn’t finished.īut was anyone actually reading these race reports? Why do runners create them in the first place? Are race reports simply navel gazing, or is there more to it? Setting out to answer these questions took me on a fascinating journey through the technological history of the past 50 years. Something had happened to me in those 32 hours of rain and mud, and documenting it seemed like the best thing to do. I’m a writer, so perhaps that wasn’t surprising, but what was surprising to me was how so many other runners of this race also chose to document their experiences in race reports. The first thing I did after finishing my first 100-mile race, Ohio’s Mohican 100, after sleeping for 16 hours, was write.

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