Defending Badwater 135 girls’s champion Ashley Paulson has smashed the ladies’s course document she set final yr, chopping almost two and a half hours off her 2022 time to complete first general at this yr’s race.
Paulson, of St. George, Utah, accomplished the course—an infamously scorching and gruelling 135-mile (217-km) run by California’s Dying Valley to Mount Whitney—in 21:44:35. In doing so she not solely demolished the ladies’s document she set final yr (24:09:34) however completed greater than 20 minutes forward of this yr’s males’s champion, Simen Holvik of Norway (22:28:08). Temperatures through the race have been recognized to soar effectively above 100 F (37 C).
Inserting second within the males’s class and third general was final yr’s winner, Yoshihiko Ishikawa of Japan (23:52:29), who has two Badwater 135 victories underneath his belt. He was adopted by fourth-place finisher and second-place girls’s runner Sonia Ahuja of Thousand Oaks, Calif., who trailed Paulson by almost two hours, ending the course in 25:42:51. Rounding out the highest 5 finishers was 2021 champion Harvey Lewis of Cincinnati, who accomplished his twelfth Badwater 135 in 27:26:49, ending third among the many males. Rounding out the ladies’s podium was Maree Connor of Lambton, Australia (27:49:24).
Viktoria Brown, the one Canadian within the discipline of 100 runners, completed robust, working 30:11:52 to put fourth amongst girls and declare thirteenth place general. It’s been a stellar yr for the Whitby, Ont., ultrarunner, who in March broke her personal 48-hour Canadian document and 72-hour world document whereas competing on the GOMU (World Group of Multi-Day Ultramarathoners) six-day world championships in Policoro, Italy.
Along with her commanding victory this yr, Paulson turns into the primary girl to win back-to-back races at Badwater since Japan’s Sumie Inagaki received the occasion in 2011 and 2012.
Paulson’s win final yr got here amid some controversy. In 2016, the skilled runner and triathlete accepted a ruling from the US Olympic Committee Nationwide Anti-Doping Insurance policies (USADA) banning her from competitors in triathlon occasions for six months, the results of an anti-doping rule violation. She had a constructive consequence for ostarine, a selective androgen receptor modulator (SARM), throughout a random sampling. Observe-up exams discovered ostarine in a contaminated complement the athlete was taking. In an evaluation of Paulson’s GPX recordsdata and different knowledge, Derek Murphy, who runs the positioning marathoninvestigation.com, concluded that her Badwater knowledge was clear and confirmed no proof of dishonest.
This yr’s race, which began Tuesday at 8 p.m. PDT, and lasts 48 hours, marks the forty sixth working of the Badwater 135. Thought of by many to be the world’s hardest foot race, the ultramarathon begins at 85 metres beneath sea degree—the bottom elevation in North America—and takes runners as much as 2,548m of altitude.
