The Western States Lottery with RD Craig Thornley and Tim Twietmeyer⎮KoopCast Episode 3

what's going on trail runners how you doing how's your running going how's your training going hey did you get in to the western states 100 if you did raise your hand and i'm guessing not a lot of people are raising their hands right now uh we're just sitting here the week after the western states 100 lottery and 6664 people applied for 264 spots that means that 6400 people that applied for the western states 100 through the lottery process did not get in and that's a lot of crying in your cheerios that's going on this week and we all feel your pain we had 48 cts athletes that applied for the lottery for uh our entire coaching group and only one single solitary athlete made it through that process that's right 48 athletes we had across our entire coaching group and only one athlete made it through our coaches were definitely commiserating that uh throughout the week and so uh given that it's the week after the lottery uh what i wanted to do this week with the KoopCast is really put together a special edition for you the athletes i uh called up uh

craig thornley the race director of the western states 100 and asked him if he wanted to discuss this topic on air and he very quickly uh obliged to that request and brought on none other than the incomparable tim twightmeyer uh who is a member of the western states 100 board and we had a great discussion we talked about how the lottery kind of came to be today we talked about the different iterations that that lottery process has gone through we talked about how the board kind of roll uh how the board really looks at their responsibility at being a progressive force in the space of ultra running and trying to satiate the incredible demand that they have on the race itself we also talk about some of the the financial entanglements that they may or may not have uh with the qualifying races and really their philosophy behind things such as why they charge uh the rate that they do to get into the race it's a really reasonable rate you could you would think that with a supply demand uh proposition that they've got right now where so many people want to get into the race and they're still fixed to these 264 lottery spots not 264 total spots but 264 lottery spots that they could really charge whatever they want to and they don't they try to keep it as kind of a every person uh type of race it's a reasonable proposition for people to afford we discuss a lot of topics uh we definitely disagree on some points but i gotta say overall not to spoil the episode i really appreciate uh these guys

coming on the KoopCast and kind of explaining uh really what goes into the lottery process and the philosophy behind the current two to n minus one system that they do have uh so listen for yourself you guys you guys can decide if it's fair if it's not fair if you're still going to cry on your cheerios or not and if you're going to go out and try to keep qualifying for the western states 100 year after year after year it's up to you guys so without any further ado here we go western states 100 race director craig thornley and incomparable tim twightmire so let's um let's get into some just some raw stats here first okay we'll start with some easy ones how many people are going to toe the line for the 2020 western states 100 369 369 369 okay how many people entered the 2020 western states 100 lottery 6664 okay and those people represent how many tickets uh the total ticket count was 27 872 tickets perfect and out of those 6 000 some odd people that entered the lottery how many people were actually chosen for the lottery and how many weights weightless spots

were chosen uh we chose 264 in the lottery um and then another three from the audience the lottery within the lottery with the playing card so that was 267 and then we drew another 50 for the wait list perfect perfect and simple math how many non-lottery spots are going to be represented in the 2020 field so spots from the golden ticket races top 10 things like that yeah this year was 102 automatics 100 and we'll go through the details of where those automatics will will come from okay basic stats there we got the kind of the ground rules laid out next thing so after so this is all said and done now the thing the last thing that that will play out are is obviously the wait list right who comes who comes into the race from the wait list and who drops out from the field and then the golden ticket races that remain and you want to give a quick overview of the golden ticket races for 2020 uh yeah it's uh bandera uh black canyon uh georgia death race lake sonoma and the canyons okay perfect we also have our 10 utwt spots those will be six overseas athletes and then four north american athletes normally those are chosen before the lottery but we were late uh utwt was late and getting the 2020 schedule done so we got 30 spots

to come in and we also have gordy he hasn't run a plus yet that's why if you look at the entrance list right now it's it's a 31 short of 369 there's always the gordy spot that we got to take into account okay perfect so the lottery is all said and done for all intents and purposes yes it is it's done are you happy with the way the process has worked out this year absolutely yeah yeah yeah tim do you want to opine on that as well no i thought it worked the way we've done it the last uh several years with uh yeah obviously demand's gone up a lot we had a lot more tickets to to work with but you know i think the process has worked so far obviously the demand is continuing to create a backlog we'll have to you know consider that as we go forward but yeah it's so far so good okay perfect and we'll talk about future iterations of the demand and things like that a little bit later last off craig i want to know what your inbox has looked like this week we're sitting here one week pretty much one week after the whole lottery draw so you've had time to like digest however many emails that you've gotten in between the lottery and now what does it look like give us the scope of craig thornley's inbox the week after the western states lottery actually the the inbox is pretty quiet post lottery you know before the lottery is when i get all the emails i get the i forgot to register or i should have

eight tickets instead of one ticket so post lottery it's mostly just um it's social media is where i get it okay so let me expand that out what is your inbox slash social media queue look like the week after the lottery because this is important for the conversation yeah go ahead craig yeah it it's it's been fairly positive um i just posted a bunch of photos today from the lottery and um it's it's you know people love seeing the excited folks getting drawn and and the celebrity drawers that we had this year um i don't know if you if you watched it but tim here got a little over clumped when uh when doug latimer came up to draw names he hadn't been back to the race since um since the early 90s he was the first guy to get 10 finishes first runner to get 10 finishes he was a board president he was involved in um the granite chief wilderness grandfathered in legislative work he went back to washington dc um he had not been back to the race until or or any western states event until the lottery this past weekend and he got a standing ovation he's 82 years old um i posted a a picture of him and tim on instagram today and it's it's it's all positive

um and how many of those you know there's some there's some of the the criticisms are um not uncommon it's um every year there's a lot of people who didn't get selected so a lot of a lot of people scrutinize you know the automatic spots or why someone with one ticket got in and they had 32 tickets so there's there's always that scrutiny after the fact and um it it tends to have a time decay so if we just wait it out it just it just calms down and people sign up for their other races and if if they're so angry with western states they don't uh run another qualifier and enter i'll i'll probably not even know in in a month or so it's just it's going to quiet down sure absolutely well and i i live through both ends of that spectrum kind of vicariously as a as a personal anecdote one of my frequent running partners here in colorado springs got into the lot got into the race twice in two consecutive years 2018 and 2019 with one ticket on one ticket ouch he's so he's the unicorn about a lottery ticket yeah you know the powerball exactly so that's exactly what i told him so he's the unicorn but on the other end of the on the other end of the spectrum out of the 48 athletes that we had collectively enter into the lottery in our whole coaching group 48 athletes

one single person got selected in the lottery wow so we we've got it on kind of on both ends of the spectrum so i can i i feel both the yippee side of it with my training partner last couple years and the boohoo side of it seeing all of our athletes not not make it through so i get it um before we get too far into the weeds and we are going to address some of the criticisms and things like that that that have that are that are inevitable and anything like this let's let's first go through the different iterations of the selection process and the lottery process and kind of how we got to the current iteration of of of the western states water as we know it today do you want to do that tweet all right well you mean from the way back from the beginning yeah way back from the beginning you know the first lottery was in the early 80s after the obviously the entrant list uh you know you know surpassed what they could start with so then it went to a lottery in the middle 80 years and then sooner or later there were they came around norm klein was the race director in the late 80s and they came along with what they called the two-time loser rule so if you went into two lotteries in a row and didn't get picked then you got to go and um go i got into the race automatically and and the demand in the race kind of went up and down a little bit but uh that worked really well until we've had kind of our last wave i was just going back and looking at some numbers here

um you know we were talking about 6600 plus entrance this year and if you look back in 2016 that's we had half that we had we had 3300 new applicants or around 3300 new applicants first year applicants this year that was the entire pool back in 2016 right that gives you an idea kind of the hockey stick effect of the the number of people that are interested in running the race or if you look back in the early 2000s you know we might get a 50 or 100 more people in a year that's you know almost rounding error for what we're dealing with so when when the when the changes came in we looked at well you know the two-time loser thing is going to become unmanageable here when we have much larger volumes of people we'd have literally a year where we started no one but two-time losers and so that's when we reconsidered that and thought the uh you know the two to the n minus one was kind of the way to go so that as you consecutively entered the lottery and qualified you would get more tickets and your probability of going and getting into the race just continue to climb as you continue to apply so that's kind of where we are today as you know your first year you have one ticket your second year two then four you know eight 16 32 and so it kind of escalates as you continue to apply yeah and there was actually two years after the two-time loser rule where um there was just one additional ticket for every consecutive year so it was one ticket two ticket three ticket four ticket five ticket and that obviously didn't didn't increase the probabilities of those multi-year folks so

it was in 2015 when we first did the uh two to the n minus one okay so this is the so if i'm counting correctly and let's see we did the wait list for the first year we did the first um uh wait list in 2017 so before that we would we would overbook just like the airlines we would pick more than 369 and we were trying to to guess at what the dns rate was and we were we were not doing a very good job guessing because the dns rate was plummeting so we were getting in sideways with the forest service um the wait list obviously allows us to start exactly 369 but i think it also changed the dynamics of of people um stepping out of the race you know dropping out of the race before the race starts they now have an they now have an incentive um somebody else is going to get their spot it's not going to be wasted so it changed the dynamics a little bit but and then uh last year was the first year we implemented the buys both the the pregnancy deferrals and the one-time um lottery deferral okay one-time buy so this is so by my count this is basically the fourth iteration of some type of application and or lottery process that the western states had initially it's just whoever wants to get in and then it becomes a standard lottery process and then it becomes a weighted lottery process with one additional

ticket for each year and then it becomes an exponentially weighted lottery process the n minus one yeah that's correct correct summary okay so tim this might be a bit a little bit of a better question for you i want to kind of go inside of the board's thoughts every year when you have to cut when whenever you have to evaluate is this the right entry mechanism for the western states 100 because you guys have already demonstrated that you're willing to ebb and flow and change the entry and the lottery process based on the conditions that you guys are seeing and those conditions are not only just the sheer number of applicants but as craig just mentioned how many people are not starting how many people are withdrawing from the race and do we need to overbook it and things like that so tim like take us into a little bit of of how that works from a board perspective and how you guys have specifically come to the to the n minus one system that you have right now yeah i mean the other gonna go but just one other additional a little bit of analysis there that they kind of came in a few years ago right we actually made the qualifier more difficult right it used to be finish a 50 miler finish a 50 miler in a certain amount of time and that was another way to and hopefully to dampen dampen some of the applications but obviously you know the the ultra running community tends to adapt to whatever we we do right so then uh you know it kind of maybe ticked down i think you know craig was this point now in

2015 the number of applicants went down just a dribble we went from uh it looks like about you know 2 800 to 2700 and then everybody started putting on 100ks and everybody started applying for 100ks now the 50 miler is just a a distant you know history lesson of uh you know what we use to get into the race and obviously nobody's shying away from the 100k or the 100 miler but you know really really uh you know the process that we have today seems to be working it might not be ideal for everyone but i think for most of the people apply they understand it they understand how it works they realize that their their odds are getting in the longer we go we kind of adapt that i know the one thing that happened this year by the time we'd finished all the name drawing we had drawn eight of the nine people that were had been in the lottery for their eighth time we had one guy one person one runner i don't recall who it was but we said okay rather than put that person in and they can become the first nine-year entrant we just put them number one on the wait list so it's almost a guarantee that that one runner is going to get in so next year again we we will only have eight time um lottery folks but we'll see i you know i don't know when we'll revisit this but it is a fairly you know there's some guys that have been around the sport for a long time like john meddiger uh you know he's been around ultra running a long time he has kind of the heartbeat of the sport he was you know the ran ultra running magazine and now carl's running it he's on the board we do get a pretty good read of what people are talking about we talk to a lot of people on the trail when we're running

and we spend a lot of time out here in auburn see a lot of visitors talk to them that's our opportunity to kind of get feedback on anything that it's it's quite often you might go out with someone from out of town and you're on a run and it might start now to say you know going into a dialogue but you know giving us suggestions or here's you know another thing to consider and i'd say the vast majority of the time we've already run through all those in our head or been just discussed at a board meeting it's uh normally uh something that we address but uh i don't know when we'll revisit this again it really will it'll really depend on the demand and uh you know when this particular to the n minus one strategy um you know runs its course but but take take me into like a little bit more intimate detail about why and how in like the philosophy behind the current n minus one strategy i mean i understand that you have a variety of board members that have their finger on the pulse of the entire ultra running space and and and that's absolutely part of it but are you guys also looking at statistical trends historical trends of who enters the lottery the landscape of the qualifiers i want to know a little bit more like intimate detail behind how that decision making process actually looks without having to read your board minutes yeah yeah you start all yeah i mean most of the um hard work um with this board is

is accomplished in committees and there's a there's a small committee that works on on the qualifying races and the two to the n minus one so there there's not and and this is for almost all of the the topics that we have the hard work is done in committee not not at the board meetings where we only meet four times a year um and you know this two to the n minus one while it it definitely rewards perseverance which we think is appropriate for this sport um it it it hurts people who are not able to run qualifiers every year or if if their time in the sport is going to be short um so we're we're what we could what we would possibly do i don't know if you read ryan whitko's analysis of the lottery that we have posted on our um our geeks only page on the website but what what what we're likely to do or likely to recommend is that instead of two to the n minus one it would be three to the n minus one or some some higher multiple but but then we have a real practical problem um printing more tickets for those higher in folks if we still want to have a lottery drawing in front of a live audience where we pull out names you know we have a real practical practical problem um if we start changing that multiplier too much so if we let go of

that and say okay we can go to electronic draw which the western states did that for two years in 2012 and 2013 and it was it was disastrous um the electronic draw was not popular at all um but then it would allow us to do a lot more um you know playing around with the numbers we could look at ryan's ryan's recommendations and run more simulations but um it's yeah it's easy to to say it on paper but when you when you print it when you print the tickets and put them in the big barrel there's 27 000 tickets um i don't know how many this is the biggest barrel i could find and we could probably fit 75 000 tickets in there when it'd be over stuff you guys hold on i got a solution for you i know an ultra runner that's got access to big blue blake wood in los alamos new mexico he just retired i'm sure he can still get his way back in the los alamos national labs and work his way into big blue and you guys can run all the simulations that you want to yeah let me uh let me throw in philosophically one of the things that we we always talk about in board meetings is being able to mature with the sport and the demand in the sport while carrying on the tradition of the race and you know people have come to us hey you know why don't you make people run 100 miler before you get into the race well yeah then everybody go run 100 mile i don't think it would tamp down the demand

that much but we'd also like to carry around the tradition of this could be your first 100 mile race and what a better way to you know have maybe your only 100 mile race be western states it's kind of a you know you get kind of concierge service on the course for you know your time out there but that's an example we've had other things well why don't you just go take you know the 369 fastest guys you can find well then then you take the common man out of the sport right most of ultra running today even still we have a few fast guys that everyone knows but probably you know 98 of the sport is a bunch of guys that run on the weekend and enjoy being out in the woods and so you you get these uh you know dialogues going in the board meeting that are always trying to find happy meeting where we kind of meet all those things i think right now we we've you know we're probably close when you look at seating and elise you know we've got the golden ticket races we've got the top 10 women and top 10 men from the previous year the race so we can get a very good collection of fast runners as well as with the lottery and being able to take entries from everywhere in the world your regular guy that lives in uh italy or some other place can uh enter the race and get in yeah well so you guys obviously put together a lot of thought into what the current lottery system looks like but one of the things i want to know and i don't know

if you can even know the answer to this but when you came up with the current with with the current n minus two to the n minus one system did you ever imagine that in 2020 you would have six thousand and six hundred six thousand six hundred and sixty four applicants um i did not um but we were doing a lot of other things um you know our involvement with utwt has given us exposure worldwide and um you know we were we're making these progressive policies with pregnancy deferrals and transgender policies and i think it's just elevated our our appeal and status worldwide um so no i personally didn't think it would grow at 15 percent a year but um which is higher than than the than the whole sport but i guess looking back it's probably not surprising based on all the things we've done yeah and that's a little bit decade or so yeah go ahead tim i was just going to say um you know we we've tried to expand some of the qualifying races so we can cover other places in the world just so that we can get a good representation of the ultra running as a sport across all the geographies right so that's another thing that kind of you know tends to bring some more people to us you could say the same thing about 100 mile races if you went back and looked at

you know how many 100 mile races there were in the united states 15 or 20 years ago it's probably a fraction of what it is today that that's another you know kind of evidence that the sport in general is you know spreading from what was a pretty niche small sport back you know 25 years ago and much more of a widespread uh multinational geographical deal but but it's fair to say and the the statistics actually bear this out it's fair to say that the interest in the western states 100 has grown at a markedly greater rate as compared to the interest in ultra running or 100 mile races worldwide yeah i i don't disagree with that and and that's a lot i mean it's kind of like you almost you guys are almost in the situation where like you're in the beast of your own making because of all the things craig that you just mentioned right i mean you guys are you guys are a north star for a lot of problems yeah yeah and it's hard to have but it is it can be it can be frustrating as a board trying to keep everyone in the sport accommodated absolutely and i and i and that should not be lost in this entire conversation that you guys because of a lot of the things that you have done creating an elite field being progressive across a lot of areas craig you mentioned a couple of them with the pregnancy deferral and the transgender policy you guys are thinking about these things before a lot of other races a lot of other races are all of that adds to this aspect that the western states 100 for a lot of

ultra runners is their north star and as you guys mentioned it might be the only 100 mile race that they run and that's a cool thing but the the downside to that if there is a downside is that the interest in that race will always be extremely lopsided compared to ultra runners as a whole like you guys are always going to get more attention you're going to get more influx than the entire space sees it all that sees as a whole yeah i'll tell you that let me just uh hand like the comment that i made to somebody over the weekend pacing at cal international marathon you know running in general is a unique sport only because when when you stand at the starting line at western states or i stand at the starting line of cal international marathon or boston i am running in the same event at the exact same time as the absolute elites in the sport and i don't know of another sport where you can say hey i want to go you know drive in the indy 500 or i want to go and uh you know play a baseball game at uh fenway park you can't do it it just doesn't happen but in running you have this unique opportunity what as as your common man runner to be able to you know participate alongside maybe not with but you know certainly in the same environment and the same event as anybody in the sport and so i think that that is kind of cool to think people come here and they're going to stand next to jim walmsley and uh you know and tracen or some of the other uh people that they see in the magazines and hear about at places and it's pretty cool they run into them at the at the race before

you know the day before you can chat it up it's kind of a unique uh sport from that standpoint for the race director right stand next to craig thorley and line up with him uh yeah i was just thinking about that sitting in my hot tub today after the track they just want to send them emails they don't really want to see him i want i want one more finish and i don't know if i'm gonna i'm gonna do it before i retire or not but um i yeah i want one more finish okay can't stop at nine let's let's let's talk about some of the uh some of the non-lottery entrance and kind of bust some myths around there but before we start out what is the limiting factor on the field size and i want you to explain that to everybody just so we can kind of set a box around that sure i gave my lecture before the lottery drawing i'll do it again yeah uh so gordy first ran in 1974 and then it was an independent event separate from the horses in 77 it continued to grow um independent of the horse race in 1984 the california wilderness act uh in granite chief wilderness was part of the california wilderness act and four miles of the course uh were in that wilderness area in general no organized events are allowed inside wilderness areas um but western states along with tevis and three other events

mostly the two big events tevis and western states represented um all of these events in washington dc and after four years of uh legal wrangling um we were grandfathered in these five events three of them are defunct now we were allowed to continue to use the trail through granite chief provided we didn't have any more starters than we had in 1984 and it just so happened that that was 369 for the run if it was the year before it would have been less it would have been in 200s uh so it was just this um it seems like a random number but we're stuck on 369 right now um are we trying to increase that yeah we have been trying uh we work with our local congressman here mcclintock we've met with him quite a few times in the last uh three or four years but it's not um it's not easy and we actually risk being booted out of granite chief with um the problems that angeles crest is going through right now they're coming to us for for help and guidance and we're in a situation where uh we have to be careful not to lose our access to granite chief too so um yeah we're stuck at 369 and um it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon unless we change the course to not go through granite chief

wilderness that's a great lead-in so explain to the listeners out there where on the course is the granite chief wilderness yes so after the first 2500 foot climb out of squaw valley when you crest the top you you go downhill and it's probably 100 maybe maybe two maybe 200 meters uh down the west side of that you'll enter granite chief wilderness and just a few years ago um there was a big purchase of land that used to be owned by timber companies uh 10 000 acres and an additional three miles was added to granite chief additional three miles of our course so at lion ridge aid station which is mile 10 and a half that's the wilderness boundary now that's the western wilderness boundary west of that or outside of wilderness okay and that will and that wilderness goes until when it goes from about three and a half miles to ten and a half miles so that's that just that one section three and a half to that one section yep so when people say oh you should get rid of pacers you can add more runners no pacers don't come in until later it's all that three and a half to ten and a half mile section okay that's that that was going to be another one of my add-on questions for the pacers

specifically so if it weren't for that one section let's just wave a magic wand and say that you get you know some sort of eminent domain that through that one section and it's not part of the granite chief wilderness what could your field size potentially be well the board has asked me that several times what what what the infrastructure could handle and as you know you've been here um our shuttles up to robinson flat into the river they're they're they're already pretty pretty maxed oh yeah so i think with the current shuttle and aid station we could probably handle about 450 if we went higher than that we would significantly change the experience for the crews and the runners and that may not be good for the race it may be it may be um it may be okay people would probably get used to it but um if we didn't have to worry about getting crews and and runners seeing their crews which again it's a it's a significant part of the western states experience so it'd be it would be um it would be scary to to make changes like that um but let me let me let me let me put a pin in that really probably do like 750 750 runners maybe a thousand runners okay let let me let me pause you just for a

second there but what you're saying is that it's not a permit cap that you have with the exception of the granite chief wilderness it's more of an infrastructure issue that you think would limit the field size well i think it's both i mean obviously the permit is limited to 369 so we we can't explore going past that but when i'm asked that um how much we could increase then i look at the infrastructure and and the roads pardon me you know we go through towns forest hill and auburn and michigan bluff and and cool so all of those stresses that right now are stresses at 369 runners they would just be compounded if we increased and we'd have to carefully evaluate those and and probably significantly change the crewing experience yeah and you guys probably remember leadville had that problem a few years ago where they increased their field size too much from one year to the next and put too big of a strain on the infrastructure of the race itself and the infrastructure of the race being the roads how the crews get there the aid stations aid stations were running out of food and things like that and and i i met with ken and mary lee after that uh after that uh race and expressed my disappointment to them and they said yeah we screwed up and so the things that

you're mentioning in terms of this theoretical magic wand that we can wave and say okay well what if what if we could avoid the granite chief wilderness that doesn't automatically give you liberty to say we're going to have 3 000 runners you still have constraints that it's real life constraints that you have to deal with to create a reasonable field size to have a runner experience that is conducive to people just simply enjoying the race and be safe absolutely and believe it or not not everybody likes western states you know some of the townspeople in these smaller places they don't like the race tevis or the run so we're constantly dealing with those stresses at these current levels okay yeah and there were a couple years too in there where we might have had a little bit more leash from the foresters i think in 1998 when we were doing the 25th running they gave us a few more slots just kind of as a 25 year celebration and you could kind of see in those that remember greg mentioning yeah you could really notice that with another let's call it 50 runners or 35 runners how places like parking at robinson flat and shuttling people are parking in michigan bluff when craig says you know we're running through towns uh you know forest hills about as big a town as we run through and it's about you know two or three blocks of you know retail and then you're back into the woods again so i mean there's really not any infrastructure you know in the first 60 miles of the race it's just lonely you know paved and single single lane roads out there so you know if anything were to happen where

we got you know some kind of you know natural thing take off you know that you you really have a hard time handling a lot more than a few more runners than we have today what's the and that's one of the reasons we we work with the forest service all the time what's the population of forest hill when the race isn't there oh it's probably oh i'm guessing it's less than a thousand and what is it during the race on a normal on a normal day it's probably less than a thousand what what about during the race oh um uh you have a hard time finding a parking spot for uh three quarters of a mile i think we guess that there's 2500 spectators at western states and forest hill you can definitely feel the the strain um and we you know we get the the occasional um landowner like was it two years ago so that somebody found a diaper a used diaper on the corner of main street and california street and i got the email after the race they were sure it was from a runner's crew that left this used diaper and and and then business owners you know sometimes they're affected you'd think that the businesses that were selling stuff that crews wanted to buy would be very happy and i think generally they are but there are some that that aren't happy with all the all the traffic and and uh that's the case that's the

case with any event that's the case with any yeah sure yeah yeah let's pivot a little bit and talk about the landscape of qualifier races because that's another aspect of having western states be so popular and have athletes continue to enter the lottery year after year after year they have to keep their qualifiers up so why don't we just broadly paint the picture of what like how do you qualify for western states what do those races generally look like we're not going to go into every every single one of them and what you have seen those races go through as they become western states qualifiers well just because you're a western states qualifying race does not guarantee that you're going to be successful some race directors believe that that's their ticket to being successful and we actually have dropped races recently because they were they were losing um you know entrance they were dropping an entrance but you generally have to run a race uh the year one qualifying race the year before the lottery um there's 100ks in the united states that are um they have what's the the ur ur ur magazine ranking of um surface and terrain they have to add up to four or something i don't know the exact stat right now and then the 100 milers um we've tried to start with the 30 largest 100 milers in the united states um

and the same with the 100 k's they got to in addition to being um difficult enough they have to have enough finishers and the reason we do that is we are collecting the results from all of these races and we vet the qualifiers um but it we also let the the runners tell us what the best races are overseas it's a little bit different because we're trying to get geographic representation and i my inbox gets filled um almost year-round with um runners and race directors requesting that there's a qualifier in their state or country um it's constantly um a battle with us you know i hate to say no tropical john looks at most of these races um and interacts with the race directors but to just fix it and say there'll be no more qualifying races that would um you know that would exclude people in in in areas where there isn't a a qualifier we do look at this qualifying list every year and we publish the new one in um sometime in september before october one for the following year and how many uh how many races are on the qualifying list right now no i think it's like 120 it's a lot it's a lot it's kind of what i'm getting at and you get good

geographic not only domestic geographic distribution but also good worldwide distribution on that yeah in the worldwide ones uh we actually don't get as many it shouldn't be surprising but we don't get as many applicants from those races we get them from the united states races if we add a hundred miler in the united states it will definitely generate a lot of applicants the overseas ones you know we're like we add races in thailand or hong kong and um they they generally don't give us a whole lot of applicants so they're not as impactful i guess on the on the total applicant count as uh u.s races so to become so for a race to become a western states qualifier they send you a request and somebody probably tropical john looks at it and says yeah or nay is that it yeah that's pretty much it yeah there's no financial incentive or no financial entanglement that you have with any of these races none whatsoever you don't get a dime from them not a dime for many which is not which is not always the case with qualifying races uh i don't know what what event you're talking about but uh western states has never done that okay well and i think that's an important important part to bring out like you guys are simply looking at

the quality of the races you're not looking at it as a revenue stream or anything like that no no no no no no no no no okay let's talk a little bit about sponsor spots how many how many sponsor spots are there this year there were 12 sponsor slots which is a significant decrease in 2016 it was it was uh 22 um and we have made a um you know part of of this growth that we've had um has has made us more attractive to sponsors so we we have more income from sponsorship than than we had just even last year um but fewer spots and is that a is that decision that western states is making to reduce the number of sponsor spots or is that just however many sponsor spots that you can that you can sell essentially no that's us we're trying to reduce it yeah we yeah we are trying to reduce it uh with the the brand new hoka presenting sponsorship deal it's definitely changed our our sponsorship landscape uh significantly and yeah it this this 12 should be going down even even farther than that in the next few years how many how many uh requests do you get from either individuals or companies to get a sponsor spot that you have to turn down

oh ballpark you don't have to name names i just want what i'm trying to do is i'm trying to pay the landscape that you guys are turning business away oh absolutely yeah um yeah it's it's a it's a you know i don't know 10 to 20 a year of of that level there's a lot more sponsors at the lower levels that um that want to get in and and and often it's probably in the upper 90 percent of of the the companies who contact me wanting to be sponsors when i send them the the sponsor deck they we end up not making a deal or they don't even reply back when they find out how much it's going to be you know and then they're some of them are incredulous it's like you're going to get what for yeah we're going to get that for this and if you don't want to do it then sorry um seriously but yeah yeah really yeah i i think your sponsorships are really reasonable yeah for the for yeah i don't think they're bad either but but they just i don't know what they expect so yeah well that's enough i don't know what UTMB is but i know we're nowhere near what UTMB is yeah it's getting well i i'm kind of shocked well one i'm not surprised that you're turning down 10 to 20 companies to get the sponsor entries like that's about what i was expecting i i did not expect people to like balk at what you guys ask for sponsorship

because i've always thought it's really reasonable and fair because of what you guys have built the race into that's just well thanks i i agree um i think it's still a pretty good deal okay okay but so we we we grapple with um you know some what do do we have sponsorship income um which takes a few spots away or do we completely go no sponsors and increase the entry fee and so far we've wanted to keep the entry fee low and it's subsidized that the cost of getting a runner from squad to auburn is probably around 750 to 850 right now um we could easily go up to that not have any sponsors we'd have but it would exclude many people the the price does affect people and i get those emails from um it it tends to be the the the younger runners who don't have established careers you know there's a lot of older runners that run ultras um and they're successful in their careers but but the new young kids don't necessarily have a lot of money and 410 is a hell of a lot of money for them so raising the entry fee instead of having sponsors i mean we're constantly dealing with that tension and trying to resolve that um in the way that that reflects the values of the

organization then um yeah some of those younger runners they even end up selling their buckles back after they complete the race that's unfortunate man that's unfortunate uh so this actually brings up another good point like you guys have mentioned that that you're that you're progressive in a number of uh of areas i want to i want to get i want to get a little bit of a better finger on the pulse or have the listeners get a little bit of a better finger on the pulse on how you guys view western states role in being a leader in the ultra marathon space you want that yeah we talk about that a lot even in the board meetings of the responsibility the race has to the sport a lot of it has to do with the people that are in the room when you look at the 15 people that meet for the board it's a really nice wide cross section of people that some are pretty new to the sport some are been around since uh you know gordy or maybe not quite that long but close but um you know almost everything that that we have is something like you know the by rule or the pregnancy rule or the transgender stuff that we've been working on or even drug testing is stuff that we probably batted around in a board meeting for months if not years we know it's something that we need to address we're just it takes us a while to you know really find the right level of engagement there and do it right and when we do it we want to put it out there and make sure we nail it for instance uh you know we

have a couple i don't know how many lawyers we have on the board three or four and just something like a drug policy went went around and around and around on how we would handle that and uh you know i know diana and some of the other um gals worked on some of the transgender and the bi stuff and the pregnancy stuff and it was you know months of dialogue meetings on the phone talking to people that would be affected by that rule or that opportunity and then bringing that feedback in and then rotating it back through the board a lot of these subcommittees like those um handle that pretty well within their own right and then bring a proposal to the board most of the time they do that it's pretty well vetted out and we just ask a lot of questions and think about how it's going to play out in the sport but you know whether i know that uh from from the three pillars that we work on in this in the race you know when you think about when we think about at a very high level of western states there's putting on a you know a super high quality event there's um our responsibility to the trail and the history of the trail and and maintenance of that and carrying that forward and the third one is really around medical research um that those are kind of the three things that we talk about most often they're addressed in every board meeting um somebody comes and does some kind of report or review but uh we we find all those compelling to the sport because uh we can do that with the people that we have and the infrastructure that's in place and the kind of people that we have available to us to drive it uh we feel not only we can do it but we have a responsibility to do it as kind of the uh event in

the sport that that has the facilities to do it so yeah and and after these policies are are released or published or implemented um we often get immediate and we're going to do the exact same thing um and for me i i i notice it on the world stage when we have meetings with ultra trail world tour um or itra uh um i know it's not me personally but almost every single time the people in the room want to know what western states thinks about something and you know it it would be easy for me to think oh they want to know what craig thony thinks about it but no it's the it's the status of the race i just happen to be the race director right now um so we we we definitely feel that and we feel the responsibility and and and you know we're not shying away from it well so i'm going to bring up a challenge question to that aspect um and i first off let me say that i completely appreciate a lot of the progressive things that you have done craig you both you and tim have mentioned the pregnancy deferral drug testing which is really progressive and i echo craig's sentiment that what you guys do we immediately see adopted in other aspects of of ultra running so going back to my earlier point where it's a north star the western states 100 is not only a north star for athletes it's also a north star for other races where people are looking at you to develop and design policy and procedures and they'll and they will follow

suit but one of the areas that i think that you guys are behind on is the the the percentage of participants that are female i think that constantly in the race and this is demonstrated in the data year after year your race under represents the amount of females that are in the sport as a whole and once again being that north star being something that everybody looks at every single year i don't think that that's a good look for the sport and i do think that you guys have the keys and the tools and the wherewithal to somewhat fix that now i'm not going to advocate for a 50 50 split in the field i don't think that that's reasonable but i certainly don't think that you should be behind the curve meaning the percentage of men and the percentage of women that participate in your race i don't think that that should be misrepresented compared to ultra running as a whole if anything because of your progressive stance on other things you should be more progressive in that area compared to ultra running as a whole so i want to know what you guys think about that well i'm not surprised that you brought this up when you wrote your last year during the race man i don't i don't think we're that far behind remember we've had 50 representation in our elite field

both through top 10 well through the top 10 it's top 10 men and women uh the top golden ticket races it's 50 it's 50 percent women 50 men um and our utwt spots are 50 50 so some of there were other races that were behind on that where they had 10 women or 10 men and five women so i don't think we were that far behind um but as far as is changing how we get more women in through the lottery i don't exactly know how we're supposed to do that um the two uh pregnancy deferrals the the lottery deferral pregnancy lottery deferral which allows women who either um were pregnant during the qualifying period or had a baby during the qualifying period and they they couldn't get a qualifier it allows them to skip a lottery or two and not lose their ticket counts it's not making a dent in this um we've had i think it was 10 pregnancy lottery deferrals in 2019 and then i think it's 15 right now we're not disclosing the the which of the buys or pregnancy buys right now because we we were revealing uh information that personal yeah the story i said on saturday is there was a woman last year who told me she was pregnant before she

told the man who impregnated her um so we're not revealing those until the whole year but but that we thought that would be significant but it's not make it's not going to make a dent in 6600 applicants if if there's 20 women on a on a pregnancy deferral right now the pregnancy entry deferral which is if you're in in the race and you and you get pregnant or you have a baby um and you can then come back to the race skipping the lottery uh for the next two years um so far we've had one woman take that so these these policies while they are very significant to the women who you who take advantage of these policies um it's not going to make a dent it doesn't seem like it it's not going to make a dent in getting that percentage up so i i'm open to what you think we should do well let me give you the stats right so just based off of your lottery and i get it you can you can rebalance the field with the top 10 entrance the utwt entrance the sponsor entrance and the things like that that you have a little bit of control over but the things that are purely lottery driven to this year 17.4 percent of the lottery women or the lottery winners were women 17.4 percent if we compare that to the number of women finishers at the 100

mile distance for 2019 to date i just looked this up right before we got on got on the phone it's 24 24 so you guys are behind the curve in terms of the number of women that are getting through your lottery compared to the number of women that are finishing 100 mile races in the u.s and my point is is that when you're behind the curve in that area and you're progressive in so many other areas that's a bad look and i don't think that that's good for the sport because people look at that and they go where are all the women on the start line uh yeah i don't i don't know what to say to that i mean we we still have you know the best elite field and maybe that's i agree only because we can control that more um but do you think it's a bad look do you think it's a bad look well i think craig made the point which is you know um it's getting people to apply right i mean we can't force people to to apply to the race it'd be interesting to know um we can only pull names out of the of the lottery the people that are in the bucket right if if 24 of the 100 mile distance finishers are women and only 17 or 20 or 15 or 5 apply to western states um that's the pool that we have to work with that that apply to the race i get it i totally get all that but what i'm asking you guys is you've been progressive in so

many other areas do you think it's a bad look to have females underrepresented compared to the whole well i i'm not sure i agree that they're being underrepresented but why statistically they are i just i just mentioned it 17.4 got pulled through your lottery 24 24 is not everybody that's finished a 100 mile race a wheel that finished 100 k's uh it's whatever's in the applicant pool i mean we can try to encourage more women to apply to the race to try to get from 17 to 24 but that's not really you know i was trying to give you i was trying to give you a compare a fair comparison from 100 mile finishes so if you want the whole stats it's 34 percent women finish 34 percent of 2019 finishes are from women compared to 17 for what you do it's half so if you want to brought it would be why are those women not applying to the race well i'll i'll give you my opinion is because they look at the field and they see women up underrepresented there and they say that's not for me and so i back out i back up to my my kind of original discussion well i i guess so i mean i don't want to bat this around too much but i want to know when so i presented you the stats as the race director

and as a member of the board are you proud of those stats and do you think that that needs to be changed i'm not proud of that stat no but i don't know exactly what we're supposed to do to get more people to get more women to apply i i i can't i don't think i agree with you that women look at this and say that race is not for me i mean we have so many awesome women that that are examples for for women in the sport they they look at these awesome women um and we i think we promote them equally or you know we probably over represent them in our in our social media posts and our um and that's good our race program so i don't i don't know if women i don't know if i'd agree with that jason that women look at this and say that race is not for me um i mean how many women are looking at the percentages how many i are they do they know these percentages like you just i can tell you that i have women come up to me and for both western states and hard rock in particular hard rock's an even worse worse example of this and they look at the start line they go that race is not for me because i don't see people like me lining up well they're they're only reinforcing that then

okay but at least we had that discussion i remember this i know the board meeting i don't know how long ago it was but we discussed you know all of the utwt spots we talked about the qualifying races and there have been times where you know certain qualifying races you know maybe some of the people that were there weren't as fast as some of the other people we could have gotten into the race but we want those people in because we have to grow that part of the sport along with everything else right i mean we're not gonna we've tried to represent all of those uh both the men and the women both on the top 10 men and the top 10 women that's been a tradition at western states for i don't know how long probably since the race began and then uh from the golden tickets the same thing so and i totally appreciate what you guys have done there as a coach to a lot of the elite women i absolutely see the way that you promote them in your social media the way you put them on the exact same pedestal as the men and i think that is good to bring more women to the sport my opinion is is that i think that there's just a little bit more that you can do across the representation of the entire field and your proposal would be to i okay you want my proposal i think that you should i think i think that you should look at the prior year statistics and base your base your gender balance off of that so in the prior year and you can take the 100 mile finishes or the finishes as a whole 36 or what did i

say earlier 36 or sorry 34 or 24 and look at your lottery in your field and find a way to design the field that comes from the lottery and the field that comes from all of the other areas and try to get it close to that not make it half that's the big issue is it's so far away from the current representation and once again it doesn't have to be 50 50 but you got to inch it close you got to inch it closer every year that that would be my suggestion no we can take that to the board and see what they seem batted around and see what they think yeah so are are you are you suggesting that our lottery is is the reason why this is low initially i mean obviously you said that women look at the percentages and say they don't want to they don't want the race is not for them but how did we get low uh to begin with yeah so you're a lot i've got these stats right in front of me so 20 so out of all of the lottery applicants 20.6 of them were women and out of the out of the tickets point four 17.4 were selected and out of the tickets it's 16.1 so for sure women are underrepresented and applying for in the ticket count in the lottery for sure now we could there's a big board level discussion that you guys can have and will probably play out on social media as to why that is but my point is is

that as a progressive race you should be progressive in this area as well and not regressive because the percentage of women that come out of your lottery are from the it's like the early 2000s that's regressive not progressive yeah i don't know if i can pick one stat and then call everything well no no no no in that in that in that area so if you guys propose that to the board here's my other request if you propose that to the board and somehow it makes it through just call it the Jason Koop rule and i get all all the hate mail okay but but but i do think that the the the pregnancy policies that we have recently implemented i think women i know women i i've heard in fact i just heard it from a friend from eugene he said his wife cried when she found out about our pregnancy deferrals i think women look at our policies and they say that is awesome that is progressive they don't say what a regressive race that is no i i just don't i don't i don't see that okay i i agree with you on the policy side of it i just disagree with it in the way that the like the the gender balance in the field shakes out i totally give you a gazillion credit points for the pregnancy deferral policy and the transgender policy and things like that it's just the way that the field shakes out let's move on though can we can we put that to

bed for a second and move forward that want to apply to the lottery are happy that those other women are more hey more chance for that but okay i'll leave it at this though everybody everybody can play a part in that and just getting more women to apply a lottery i'll play a part in that i encourage all my female athletes to apply so and i think the one thing that happens here and it happens in this board that happens in every sport is is you have to continue to promote those representations at a low level and let them percolate up it's kind of the same thing where they say hey you know there's uh no women as uh you know head coaches in the nfl yeah because there's no assistant coaches no offensive coordinators no defensive coordinators no college coaches if you're going to go there you have to start somewhere and starting there is at the bottom and have everybody work their way up and represent that and then that's part of it is have kind of that grassroots start of saying hey how are we gonna you can't just go ahead and you know say okay we're gonna go put 50 and 50 that probably wouldn't go over well but i think each one of these even realtor running if you look at where the sport was probably 15 or 20 years ago it was probably even more men than there are women and and those women are starting to come to the fore you're getting more women apply it's probably completely different if we went looked at the numbers five or ten years ago the sport is maturing and changing 100 100 100 and that's all i'm asking is that you like western states continues to change with it it's interesting that you mentioned the grassroots level because as you guys are well aware of uh uh

skip down at the lake sonoma 50 is trying to put together a 50 50 field and he has a women's only half marathon that's associated with that race that's a golden ticket race for you guys and i think that i think that things like that at the grassroots level those are practical solutions to continue to get more women in the sport can i tell you about your way too cool idea yeah sure okay were we letting the cat out of the bag here yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna tell secret so tim had this idea years ago maybe seven years ago right when i got down here that way too cool which is a popular race here uh in the american river drainage um we have saturday is the men's race and sunday is the women's race and on sunday all the men work at the aid stations and on saturday it's the other way around um that would be awesome to see that happen and i think it would it would highlight the women's race more instead of it just being you know kind of in the in the middle of the men's shuffle in the men's field um it hasn't gotten traction with the race director but well part of it was you know we they were trying to put the whole race on in one day and it was oversubscribed right i mean it basically run off its permit and it couldn't start any more people and it's like well it's such a popular race and everybody wants to do the event and just split it up you can send the dudes out on one day and the ladies on the next and alternate i don't know if there's ever been a 50k race that's been only women a women's only 50k race in the us it'd be kind of cool yeah i don't think so i mean if you look

at like uh there's some half marathons out there that are women's only half marathons that are enormously popular and and that's been really good for the sport of running so things like that i can i completely encourage once again it makes it more accessible for women to get in anything like that i think is is is is good yeah i think there was she rocks the trail that uh was a women's only race 50k and it didn't it wasn't successful but with cool there's already a big following a big field yeah i think it could actually work yeah so julie if you're listening now we've told the whole world how many people listen to you how many people listen to you jason oh man dude we had like every episode's getting a couple thousand downloads right now and just the first couple yeah so i'm pretty happy with it maybe this one will like break the internet though because probably not okay but i want to know are 24 of them women uh well i could i wonder if i give me the numbers man come on you got the numbers i'll try to pull that stat just for you too all right let's let's talk about something uh less less polarized and and and probably less interesting on the surface but something that's attracted a lot of attention and this has to do with math that's why it's less polarized but it still attracts a lot of attention so there is a fair amount of criticism with the current lottery setup this current weighted lottery setup setup that gives tickets based on two to the n minus one based on the years that you've applied that the first two or three years that you're in the lottery you have no shot so you might as well throw

your name in the hat way before you're actually ready for the race and that floods the lottery applicant field with people who aren't ready it's too early for them and then it becomes an unsustainable problem because everybody's trying to enter at too early of a point in their ultra running career because of this math problem i want you guys to address that yeah first off i mean how is this manifesting itself you would think that if this was a problem if people are entering the race when they're not prepared then our finishing rate would go down we had the highest finishing percentage of all years where we didn't have just one runner which was 1974 and 1976 gordian cow man all the other years we had the highest finishing percentage last year so how does this manifest itself i i don't i don't understand the premise of that when people run a qualifier we have we have deemed them prepared to run western states that's why we have the qualifier they've run a qualifier they're prepared i don't understand the premise of this well i just like to take the the decrease in dnf rate i like to take credit for that as a coach so i don't know whether your qualifiers could take credit for it or not you've heard me say that at the medical conference too i just i just the the i that i don't that doesn't get any traction with me there's a million reasons why the finishing rate is continuing to go be better anyway even particularly

but i guess when it out when people get when people get a spot on the line when they get in they train and they run and if they aren't ready then they can withdraw and someone on the wait list will get in who's ready i mean i just just this is just not a problem but do you think outside outside of the readiness piece of it do you think the market influx in the number of people that are applying to the western states 100 has anything to do with the weighted lottery system uh if if it if if it does i don't think it's that significant these people want to run western states right so they they put their name in to run western states is it forcing them to put their name in i i don't think it's forcing them if they don't want to run it then don't don't enter if i mean it's it's hard to run a qualifier year in and year out the lottery definitely rewards the type of runner that can run qualifiers year in and year out if you're not that type of runner you're going to look at this lottery system you're going to find flaws in it and that's generally the the the voice that um you're describing here is it supports the type of runner who is not a year after year qualifier getter

wow and and almost all of the the criticisms we get or the suggestions we get for the lottery they are selfish suggestions they look at well this lottery is flawed because it doesn't favor me so let's change it so that it favors me so that i can get in sooner i mean that that's what i get all the time that this it's it's always self-serving you may be different jason if you gave me something i would i would trust that you would give me something that would that would make the lottery better well but generally it's self-serving for for what it's worth craig i'm with you on this one we might disagree on the women's side that should not be that should not be your standard of approval by the way what i think let me see if i can rephrase that premise what you're saying is people are applying to the race so they can get their tickets going even though they're not interested or qualified in starting that year 100 and i could tell you once again going back to my anecdotal story with my training partner when he got in with one ticket he was like holy shit i didn't expect to get in the first year i didn't expect to get in the first year and he was perfectly ready he did great same thing with the second year he got it on one ticket i didn't expect to get in and he did better the second year but i think that's a pretty common theme only but if you did qualify and put in for the lottery then you're ready yeah and there's so much information out

there now to get you prepared and there's so many coaches uh you can you can get prepared and if you ran a qualifier then you obviously have the ability to run at least 100k and probably ran 100 that's one of the reasons why we uh in a way strengthen some of the qualifying stuff from 50 miles to 100k or finish 100 miler i mean you go down the list of stuff you know better knowledge better equipment better nutrition better coaching uh better information about the course being the ability to run the course and have it be marked you know when i started running the race man if you didn't have somebody that lived in auburn and knew the course you you would have been to get eaten by wild wolves out there because you know where you were going right i mean now there's just so much more information available and the runner even in their very first year that applies and gets in even though they didn't hope to has so much more information to work with their chances of being successful or dramatically improve from somebody that was involved in the sport 15 20 years ago well craig knows this because he's seen the talk that i've done you know a couple years in a row at the medical conference i i attribute a lot not entirely but certainly a lot of the decrease in dnfs the increase in success rates specifically at western states to the research that you guys have done there because i can tell you in my own coaching practice i've used that i i've used that an enormous amount to get athletes prepared for races and i've been coaching for long enough to where i went from hardly any information that we had on

ultra marathon runners from a research perspective to now we have a what i would call a good a decent amount of information that we can draw of in the literature and you guys were a catalyst for a lot of that so i give you a lot of credit i think there's still a lot more to come too i think we're just for sure starting you know we're just kind of at the infancy of understanding how we all do this yeah keep doing it okay so i i'm i'm with you on this i did want to give you a chance to address that criticism because it is a big piece of it that is out there thank you yeah absolutely is there anything else you want to say on that since we're on a roll of agreeing okay well it is funny how craig says that only because yeah we get a lot of you know healthy suggestions on how things could be better there's always little things that people can provide and we look at them for sure but but in in the general entire scheme of things when you look at it at a high level one thing that's nice about this lot of people do want people do understand it they understand how they get in what it does and if they like it great if they don't you know that's the way it is too now we will we change it who knows like say we review it pretty often just to make sure we're trying to do the best we can what's the dumbest everyone what's the dumbest idea you've ever gotten craig like what's the stupidest idea to fix the lottery that you've ever heard where you just look at it and go oh my god we can never consider you don't have to name names i just want to hear the idea well i think without any waiting everybody has the same chance of getting in every single uh year that they put in i think that's

an absolutely ridiculous idea wow oh that's the dumbest one for the dumbest one that's actually not far away i was expecting something totally different yes like pick everybody from california or something like that okay well those aren't even serious right i mean yeah you get the ones that are that are not serious and trust me we heard from the locals you know i'm sure i'm sure so yeah when um i'm when i hear it from international folks say yeah there's too many local runners selected and then i hear it from the locals oh there's too many international runners we know we're we know we're we're probably somewhere in the right spot if we if we've got both extremes thinking that the other side has an advantage yeah so there's always that kind of that that kind of pressure to oh you need to make it more favorable for for for this user group than the other user group okay next thing i think it's probably gonna be the last thing that that we discuss um one of the things that i've always appreciated about the way that western states has managed the race and in particular the entrance that that that get into western states is you guys do it with absolute utter complete transparency everybody knows where every single applicant and every single entrant to the western states 100 comes from you guys make that obvious on your website and that's not always the case a lot of times these things are behind you know the you know the proverbial curtain that nobody gets to peel back except for the

race management and and that's a deliberate decision that you guys have made to put that transparency out there and what i want to know is is what why why have you chosen to be that like utterly transparent in this process well i used to be a lottery applicant and i did not like uh the fact that it wasn't revealed how people got in and i and i really didn't like the appearance of the 50 60 70 people who showed up on the entrance list after the lottery like in the this week and the next week and i as a as a participant i absolutely hated that and when i got the job i i i pushed really hard and and um you know the board went along and there are times when um it's kind of opened up us for criticism my predecessor said oh don't do this greg don't don't put how people got in the race because it's just going to open you up uh for criticism and i said well if we're proud of how everybody got in the race then put it out there if if we're hiding something um then yeah maybe you don't want to reveal it so it it works both to let everybody who's in the lottery or everybody in who's looking at it know but it also holds us accountable there's no you know there's we are totally on the up and up

there's there's no secret deals and um my friends don't get in the race um so yeah i i that's where it really came from and and the board has um has embraced it and i think now we're we're probably the the gold standard on transparency is that fair enough yeah so let me let me um jump on uh craig's note there uh is that uh said not to pump his tires but when craig came in uh we did try to make all that stuff as transparent as possible because one we we hope we're doing the right thing and if not then people will let us know and we can adjust accordingly like like you mentioned earlier in in the podcast you know we our sponsor slots have gone down that's a concerted effort to try to limit that so we can get more and non-sponsor related runners into the race it's a few slots all that matters over time so um if we're proud of what we do as far as the race and who we put at the start line then we should be able to back that up and of course you know we'll take the feedback that's part of the process being on the board is is taking the feedback from people and adjusting accordingly as as we can and we continue to do that yeah and the it's interesting when i talk to race directors about that transparency piece the thing that they come back with is they don't want people to feel bad like the people that they're giving spots to and they're they're hiding behind the curtain as to how they actually got in the race they don't want them to feel that bad and i just don't buy that i think

that's such a bullshit excuse i don't disagree with you jason okay we could agree on another thing there we go i'm done two two points of agreement oh here we go all right um hey let's wrap it up you guys i first off i really appreciate you guys coming on something that you don't have to do but uh pinging off your dialogue of transparency just the fact that craig i can reach out to you on a tuesday and we can get this going on a friday and have so much enthusiasm uh with you and with tim on the board i think that that demonstrates the the credibility and that and that transparency statement just brilliant just brilliantly brilliantly that's what i wanted to say um let me also say that this is a i would be remiss if i didn't mention that this is a good problem to have the fact that we have so many enthusiastic eyeballs on one race in particular that generates a lot of discussion and that discussion always moves things forward um but also you guys have done such a great job at putting together your elite fields and making sure that kind of the world is watching when that race unfolds that's all good for the sport and the fact that it has generated so much interest and so much enthusiastic interest interest i always view as somebody who's in the space as well as a really good problem to have so those types of things are luxury problems right you know it would be it would be another thing if you

guys were beating down the door trying to get people to actually enter the race and and obviously you guys don't have that so keep doing what you're doing the the whole ultra running world although we might have our gripes about how this works or how that works and if you know my favorite flavor of tortilla chip is served at the michigan bluff aid station or whatever other whatever the gripe that whatever other small gripe that we have in general i think you guys handle yourselves and you do a fantastic job representing the sport of ultra running and moving things forward in the sport and it's something that all all obviously all athletes aspire to get into but it's all also something that all races aspire to be as well wow thanks jason um yeah it um it is a good problem to have and for me it's often a challenge when post lottery when i i or even during the lottery leading up to the lottery where i hear a lot of criticism um it's it's often challenging for me to remember that that's a pretty small percentage of the folks out there um who are paying attention to what we're doing and um and i appreciate you you saying what you did that um that's good to hear thank you tim any final remarks no it's great i'm anxious actually to see the feedback from the podcast when you post it out so you get some ideas from some other folks right i mean that's we we we welcome the feedback only because you know we have

a responsibility to hear it with the race and the sport and you know again we're trying to continue reevaluate how we're doing things and try to stay right at the at the top of the the list and the top of uh the sport as far as how it's done and and and that so well as i was telling you guys on the onset i record the intro and outro after the fact so i always get the last word that's what i really that's why i really do that and i'll include i'll include you guys's personal email address cell phone number and addresses in the outro just so people can you know hit you up and tell you what they really think unload a wagon oh everybody can find my email address that's not a problem but yeah i was excited to hear that you were starting this podcast i i listened to the to the episode zero with billy and um yeah already you're you're you're definitely meant for this you're a pro i'll hop on a podcast with you at any time jason oh i appreciate that i i don't mind the the the difficult questions i just don't want to get hammered with nothing but those kinds of questions so you had a good mix today and um um yeah i wish you the best of luck i told i told you i was going to be critical yet fair and i think that that came out so anyway yeah well i i really appreciate what you guys do like i said and uh i think everybody looks forward to the 2020 western states we got a few other spots to fill with the golden ticket races and we will see everybody in squaw all right we hope to see you there all right

jason thanks guys take care yep bye bye okay what do you think runners do they make a good case for the lottery if you didn't get into the race and you're upset are you still upset or do you kind of get where they're coming from now well i i gotta be honest at the end of the day well there's a lot of things that you know frustrate me as a coach and as a kind of steward of the sport so to speak the western states 100 is is faced with this improbable supply demand proposition there's just a lot of people that want to run the race and they only have a fixed amount of spots and you can push on the demand side of that however which way you want to you can reduce or you can uh try to tighten up the qualifying standards you can even manipulate the facets of the lottery where people are looking at it as a multi-year proposition versus a single year you know straight up everybody gets one ticket uh proposition but i gotta be honest with you i don't think that that is really going to make a dent on the demand side of this issue there's still going to be thousands and thousands and thousands of people that want to run western states for the hundreds of spots and as long as that supply demand and equity exists we're going to have a lot of people disappointed and i think that one of the things that kind of comes out from all of this is

we just have to talk about what we value as a community and what's fair and what's not fair and from my personal perspective i think this is a fair system it rewards the aspects of longevity and stick-to-itiveness and even a little bit of grit to survive the lottery and if anything ultra running embodies all of those qualities and people so not only do i think it's a fair lottery i think it's one that is representative of the culture of ultra running but i realize that not everybody's going to agree so if you disagree you can hit craig and tim up they made it open they listened to feedback you can hit me up on social media i'll take that criticism if you disagree with me have no problem with that because the dialogue here is important because we do want ultra running to be a healthy sport for years and years and years to come and when you do have a lot of this disappointment we don't want that to kind of come in the way of of the progress that is to come in the sport so i hope you guys have fun listening to the podcast i hope it illuminated some of the aspects of the lottery that maybe you didn't know before um this podcast is really nothing without you the runners you know i don't take a dime from anybody i don't have advertisers or sponsors or anything like that and i'm not looking for anything so if you want to support the podcast you want to support me talking about topics like this go ahead give it a five-star rating on itunes and if you hate it send me some hate mail i don't mean i don't mind that at all uh share it with your running partners share it with your friends

and continue to listen to the KoopCast i always appreciate your listenership uh big thanks to craig and tim for coming on the show that was not easy for them but i just really appreciate their openness honesty and just really the frank pragmatism that they exhibit when they're talking about things like this that they they know they know they're an impossible situation they're not going to please everybody thank you guys for doing what you do and thank you guys for keeping western states as a north star for the ultra running community as a whole once again thank you guys so listeners and i will see you out on the trails um um um Thank you.