While the trail world’s attention was fixed on Chamonix, the fifth running of the Midwest States 100 in Westboro, Wisconsin, produced two of the most emphatic course-record performances of the North American season. Nicholas Kopp won the men’s 100-mile race in 20:22:14, taking more than two and a half hours off the previous course best, while Nicole Severin cut roughly three and a half hours from the women’s record with a 21:40:44 that placed her third overall in the field.
Margins of that size are unusual at any distance and almost unheard of over 100 miles, where pacing errors and nutritional problems typically compress the gap between what a runner is capable of and what they actually deliver. Kopp led the men’s race throughout and finished more than an hour clear of Brandon Lewallen, who ran 21:38:58 for second. Jared Anderson completed the men’s podium in 21:53:16, also finishing fourth overall behind Severin. That the third-placed man and the women’s winner were separated by less than 13 minutes gives a sense of how far Severin had gone beyond the rest of her field.
Severin’s winning margin was the more remarkable of the two. Michelle Pitt was the second woman home in 24:10:07, tenth overall, nearly two and a half hours behind, with Sarah Krebs completing the women’s podium in 29:03:50. Records set at a fifth-edition race are always somewhat provisional — the depth of the field varies year to year and the historical mark may simply not have been contested by anyone of Severin’s calibre — but a sub-22-hour finish on a Wisconsin 100-miler is a strong performance measured against any reference point.
The Midwest States 100 sits alongside 100K and 50K races on the same weekend, and it forms part of a growing cluster of Upper Midwest ultras that have quietly built credible fields without the qualifier-and-lottery machinery that governs the sport’s marquee events. The region’s races tend to trade altitude for volume of runnable singletrack, which rewards a different kind of athlete: the runner who can hold a rhythm for twenty hours rather than the one who climbs best.
The final weekend of August carried 34 North American ultramarathons on the UltraRunning Magazine calendar alongside the UTMB World Series Finals, and Wisconsin was not the only venue producing fast times. In Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Olivia Rowland won the Continental Divide Trail Run 50K in 4:51:16, holding off Chelsea Factor by 15 seconds, while Nate Iler took the men’s race in 4:22:27. At Backcountry Rise in the Mount St Helens wilderness, Brooke Hill-Deans set a women’s course record of 5:18:28 and finished second overall, with Niles Desmarais winning the men’s 50K in 5:11:51.