The Vermont 100 Endurance Race set off from Silver Hill Meadow in West Windsor on Friday, marking the 35th running of one of American ultrarunning's oldest and most distinctive hundred-milers. Competitors have 30 hours to reach the finish, with sub-24-hour finishers earning the race's coveted large belt buckle rather than the standard smaller version awarded to those who come in under the cutoff.
The course covers roughly 68 miles of rolling dirt roads, 30 miles of horse trails and two miles of pavement, accumulating around 17,000 feet of climbing as it winds through the southern Green Mountains. Unlike almost every other ultramarathon on the domestic calendar, the Vermont 100 shares its route with a simultaneous, separately scored horse endurance ride, meaning runners spend the weekend passing and being passed by riders on a course built for both.
This year's edition is the third of the five hundred-milers that make up the Grand Slam of Ultrarunning, the season-long test that requires finishers to complete all five qualifying races within the same calendar year. Runners chasing the Slam arrive at Vermont already carrying the accumulated fatigue of June's mountain heat and altitude, which organisers and past finishers say makes the event's relentless rollers deceptively harder than the vertical profile alone suggests.
Vermont's reputation as a grassroots, community-run event has held through three and a half decades even as ultrarunning's biggest races have grown increasingly commercial. Aid stations are staffed almost entirely by local volunteers and the race continues to cap its field rather than expand it, a decision organisers have defended as central to keeping the event manageable on the narrow Vermont back roads it uses.
The race fell on the same mid-July weekend as the Cascade Crest 100 in Washington state, underlining how packed the domestic hundred-mile calendar has become in high summer. With Western States already run in June and Leadville and Wasatch still to come later this year, Vermont's finishers now turn their attention to the back half of the Grand Slam calendar with two of the toughest tests still ahead.