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​The Rut 50K In 4 Minutes​

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I was standing in the dark in the starting corral at the base of Big Sky Resort this past Sunday morning, with my friend Mitsu and the rest of the 100-plus people in Wave 4 of The Rut 50K, thinking, “How am I going to remember this race in a few years?” Then everybody started running, and so did I, and I forgot to start my watch for the first 300 feet or so.

Around the 1.5-mile mark, I decided I’d try to shoot one 10-second video every mile for the rest of the race, or about 30 videos throughout the course. That might seem like a lot, but The Rut 50K is 31 mountainous miles, with 10,500 feet of elevation gain, and I was pretty sure I’d be out there for 9ish hours trying to complete it. Five total minutes of video is a very small chunk of that.

I tried to keep the phone steady, and keep the lenses from getting steamed up with sweat while it sat in the pocket of my running vest, and I mostly succeeded, but when you’re trying to shoot video and also not fall on your ass/face/other parts of your body that are softer than rocks, the not falling part kind of takes precedence. And I only fell once. On my ass. On dirt, which is softer than rock, usually.

I compiled all the video clips into a quick tour of The Rut 50K course, with my Strava 3D flyover on the side, for this video: The Rut 50K In 4 Minutes. I wanted to capture a bit of what the race feels like: You make very slow progress sometimes (my watch said I “ran” a 45-minute mile at one point), you run downhill sometimes, and you breathe hard a lot (the race starts at 7,400 feet elevation and the high point is 11,167 feet). I hope it communicates what it's like being out there, for a middle-of-the-pack runner. As it was the first time I ran it in 2021, The Rut 50K is still a steep, punishing, rewarding romp.

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