Inside the mind of the woman who built America’s 200-mile races
In a world where running extreme distances seems more normal by the day, the creator of the Triple Crown of 200s, Candice Burt can be credited for a lot of that feeling
If running is booming, ultrarunning is going supernova. The Triple Crown of 200-mile races, for instance, was created in 2017, and keeps extreme trail distances in the general running conversation the same way the Marathon Majors does for road races.
The person responsible for dreaming up a series of events that costs thousands of dollars and months of time-on-feet to complete is Candice Burt. She’s no slouch herself, with a huge Guinness World Record, numerous unsupported FKTs and even more podium finishes under her prestigiously-buckled belt.
Growing up on a rural island north of Seattle, WA, Candice tells me her whole childhood was spent outside looking after the animals or painting the outbuildings. She duly took up cross country in her teens, and found her sport.
After having two daughters in her 20s, running became an activity to stay in shape, but Candice’s route into running ultras certainly points towards an extraordinary mind. A nod to how she jokes about “documenting [her] insanity.”
“I needed an outlet to develop myself. At that age I was still so immature. I needed something that gave me time by myself to get away and center myself. It was a desire to still find ways to push myself while being stuck at home being a mom, which was challenging for somebody of my mentality: I'm always go, go go.”
“I couldn't necessarily get out and run with little babies, so sometimes the workout would be just laying down and – in my head – getting dressed, going out the door and visualizing running crazy distances. It was like a meditation.”
Much is made within performance enhancement circles of visualizing one’s goal as an aid to achieve success, and what Candice did in those early years of motherhood sounds like that. So far, so good.
A new bucket list for runners
Candice is the creator of the first point-to-point 200-mile race in the USA. That’s a fact, but how and why did she do it? For those who wanted to run ultras, there were already a smattering of 10-mile loop races, where you could run as many loops as you wanted, but a true, supported, point-to-point 200-mile event? Nobody had taken on the challenge of building that.
“I wanted to kind of create a really big adventure, but mostly I wanted to create a race that goes around Lake Tahoe. I thought, ‘Why hasn't anybody done that? Somebody's gonna do that, it's gonna be amazing, and… it's gonna be me. I had no business organizing a 200-miler, but I figured it out.”
The immediate popularity of the Tahoe 200 in 2014 allowed Candice to quit her job as a massage therapist, where she was “probably making $20,000 a year, tops.” Her company, Destination Trail was born, and by adding the Bigfoot 200 in 2015, and Moab 240 in 2017, the Triple Crown of 200-mile races was complete, and became a new gold standard of ultrarunning.
For 99.99% of people, running a single road marathon is a bucket list item, but we always want more, don’t we? Candice was no different when thinking about what she was creating and why.
“Creating a business wasn't just about making a living. Of course, I had young children, so I had the motivation of supporting them, but I always felt like if my business didn't create value that I wouldn't be fulfilled, so I love knowing that I've popularized the 200-mile distance that other people would have thought was just too difficult to organize [in the US], and make it doable.”
How to run 200 ultramarathons in a row with a job and a family
Another thing about running a marathon is the person running it. The day they run those 42.2km is usually completely set aside for running that race. It’s an event – a big one. They might have the support of their family and friends, and a special dispensation to be relieved of normal daily duties. Just for that special day.
So what’s it like when you’re running 50km every day for 200 days? That’s what Candice Burt decided to do on a whim in the fall of 2022, gaining a Guinness World Record in the process. While it’s an incredible feat of physical endurance, it’s also an incredibly time-consuming thing to do.
What’s it like when you’ve got two teenage daughters and you organize some of the most prestigious trail races in the world? Who does all of Candice’s work? What does the day look like?
Candice’s eldest daughter drove the two girls to school.
Time for Candice to run an ultramarathon
The trails as her office, she would take a few work calls while running
Candice gets home and puts dinner in the oven
Recovery work, including baths with two bags (two bags!) of Epsom salts
The easy answer on the work front is that she undertook the world record during her off-season, between November and May, when there were no 200-mile races scheduled. Putting together week-long events where the safety of people who can become mentally altered in the wilderness is not the work of one person, of course. Building a team of full-time staff to work with her was one of the first things Candice did, meaning the business was capable of withstanding any temporary neglect from its founder.
“For me, the record was about curiosity and I had always wanted to run all day, everyday. I feel like it's the only time I feel really complete is when I'm moving and connecting outdoors. I wanted to see if it was possible to run all day and have it be good for me.”
Running outside all day is what we all want, isn’t it? But, for most of us, life just gets in the way a little too much. There’s something to think about here in terms of work-life balance as we see that Candice has very consciously built her own world, centered around running outside and her family, but that structure allowed the seemingly capricious decision to fill an off-season with 200 ultramarathons. While we all see-saw between work and life, understanding what is most important to us can help us find our true center more regularly.
What did Candice learn from the process of achieving the world record?
“That you can always find a way if you really want something, and that to do a record like that, you really have to love running.”
The humanity of ultrarunning
It’s easy to understand the appeal of bounding through nature, running trails, and even the appeal of running an ultramarathon, but if the thought of running for three-plus days seems a step too far, Candice (obviously) has ideas about why the 200-mile distance is so special.
“If you love hiking, eating, and building a community, staying up late, getting up early, they're the ultimate adventure, and what more do we really need right now? Something that takes us out of this very contained world that we live in with computers and social media. Something that puts us out in a more primal setting where we can feel, I think, what it is to really be human.”
“In ultrarunning, you see a lot of people who've come from addiction and pretty intense lifestyles and who needed something healthier than what they were doing.”
“Drugs are a way of leaving your body – running away from it – and with running, you can do that, but you have to embody yourself as well. Now you're running more toward yourself. If you can feel all the things then you’re going to make healthier choices within the whole framework of your life.”
As you may have gathered from her farm-fresh upbringing, her deep imaginations of endless runs as a young mother, the drive to run 32 miles a day for 200 days, and the vision to popularize the 200-mile distance by simply building the races herself, there’s a lot swimming around in Candice Burt’s mind.
What’s next? A 300-miler, of course. The inaugural Arizona Monster takes place in April 2025 and takes runners through the Sonoran Desert and up thousands of feet of rugged terrain.
From a logistical point of view, Candice considers a 300-mile race to be the limit of what she can offer as a product that is both affordable and fully-supported.
If you want to see what comes out of Candice’s mind next, however, you can read a lot of it on her Substack. Another runner who grew up with blogs and loves her solo time to think, she documents her own races extensively.
Further reading
Housekeeping
SUPPORT - Upgrade your subscription for just $1 a week to support my journalism. There are a lot of perks to subscribing, but you can also buy me a coffee.
WIN - You can win a $100 Janji gift card every single week of 2025 if you upgrade your membership. Yep. One hundred dollars every week.
MERCH - Buy a Running Sucks x Fractel hat, or a limited Glendale t-shirt (very lovely and soft), OR a sticker pack and I’ll donate 100% of profits to Pasadena Humane, who have taken in hundreds of animals displaced by the LA wildfires.
MY SOCIALS - Instagram / Strava
Thanks for reading
- Raz
Raz! This was awesome to read! Candice Burt is amazing and now I'm adding the 200-mile ultra on my radar. Incredible!
I really appreciate the honesty about what it takes in this article and how clearly you’ve set out how Candice’s life accommodates her runs. This isn’t something you see an awful lot and the acknowledgement of how she has been able to build her own world that works for her. Sadly it’s not something afforded to lots of women, but it is a refreshing antidote to the superwoman tropes.