My Farewell to Frozen Head State Park 

🙏

I can second that.

Whenever I lose training motivation I load up the doco to amp myself up. I've watched it at least 10 times already.

Listened to the documentary for motivation hundreds of times

Thank you so much! 🙏

​@@GaryRobbins @ghostpos Same here! I didn't finish my first backyard ultra in Slovakia 🇸🇰 called big bears backyard ultra. Started running on paternity leave 3 years ago. Had a second kid, never stopped. One of the reasons I signed up is your inspiring story, Gary. Thank you for sharing your experience and the interviews with fellow runners. You all are awesome human beings. 🙏✌️

Thank you so much! Really appreciate your kind words.

Thank you so much for the kind words and balanced take on things. I appreciate so much when people hear what I'm saying and take me at my word on this stuff. All the best to you in your future endeavours as well.

Really nice to read this, thank you so much 🙏

Thanks Jenn!

Much appreciated 🙏

No, but they book out the entire campground for the race. The park is still open to the public.

Thank you so much for the kind words of support 🙏

Thanks my friend!

the thing to keep in mind here is that they are never trying to make it impossible, they are trying to keep it near a 1% finisher rate, so once someone, or multiple people finish, they have confirmed the current iteration is in fact doable. There have been years where the adjustments made were too drastic and proved undoable, where people haven't even come close and they've (Laz + team) then altered things accordingly. To answer your question then, they will always make changes to keep increasing the difficulty just slightly after people finish, but it's already in a space where you kinda need some luck with weather to be able to do so. The start time also greatly affects the challenge as an early start means more darkness and finishing in the dark as well, which on lap 5 is no easy feat. This year the runners lucked out a bit with an ideal weather window, and an ideal start time. Alter either of those things and we'd maybe only be looking at a single finisher in 2024. One final thing that is noteworthy, is that with a 5 lap race, each small change you make is 5x in added time, so if the course is but 10 mins harder, it is in fact 50 mins harder overall. All in all it's a fine line they manage to walk with the course design and by and large they get it right more often than not.

My son is far too smart to get into a dumb sport like ultrarunning 😆

Ethan is a good friend, but I do not have the answer to that one for you.