Cool canyons. A start list that looked like a video game. And then the times arrived, and they did not look like Western States times.
Vincent Bouillard turned onto the Placer High track in 13:46:15. Jim Walmsley's 2019 record — 14:09:23, a number the sport had started to treat as geology — was gone by twenty-three minutes. Francesco Puppi, Ryan Montgomery, and Thomas Cardin all finished under the old mark. Zach Miller's fifth is now the 10th-fastest men's time in the history of the race.
Jenn Lichter had to race the last 300 meters. The record was not safe until it was. 15:28:05, eighty-eight seconds under Dauwalter's 2023 clocking, her second course record of the year after Black Canyon. It was the fastest women's top-10 in race history. Fuzhao Xiang's seventh is already a trivia question.
The ghosts DNF'd. Walmsley was in the mix through 30, worked on something at Michigan Bluff, and stepped off at Foresthill. Jornet had taken two weeks off before the race to nurse the knee and never found the day. Both are pointed at UTMB. Both now have something to answer.
Bouillard is the seventh person to win Western and UTMB. The others are Jornet, Walmsley, Tom Evans, Dauwalter, Katie Schide, and Nikki Kimball. He is 32. The two names above him on the myth list are 36 and 38. The ranking did the obvious thing. The valley in August will test whether the obvious thing is true.
