Defending Badwater 135 ladies’s champion Ashley Paulson has smashed the ladies’s course report she set final 12 months, chopping almost two and a half hours off her 2022 time to complete first total at this 12 months’s race.
Paulson, of St. George, Utah, accomplished the course—an infamously sizzling 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 report she set final 12 months (24:09:34) however completed greater than 20 minutes forward of this 12 months’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).
Putting second within the males’s class and third total was final 12 months’s winner, Yoshihiko Ishikawa of Japan (23:52:29), who has two Badwater 135 victories beneath his belt. He was adopted by fourth-place finisher and second-place ladies’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 area of 100 runners, completed sturdy, operating 30:11:52 to position fourth amongst ladies and declare thirteenth place total. It’s been a stellar 12 months for the Whitby, Ont., ultrarunner, who in March broke her personal 48-hour Canadian report and 72-hour world report whereas competing on the GOMU (World Group of Multi-Day Ultramarathoners) six-day world championships in Policoro, Italy.
Together with her commanding victory this 12 months, Paulson turns into the primary lady to win back-to-back races at Badwater since Japan’s Sumie Inagaki gained the occasion in 2011 and 2012.
Paulson’s win final 12 months got here amid some controversy. In 2016, the skilled runner and triathlete accepted a ruling from the USA 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 end result for ostarine, a selective androgen receptor modulator (SARM), throughout a random sampling. Observe-up checks discovered ostarine in a contaminated complement the athlete was taking. In an evaluation of Paulson’s GPX information and different information, Derek Murphy, who runs the positioning marathoninvestigation.com, concluded that her Badwater information was clear and confirmed no proof of dishonest.
This 12 months’s race, which began Tuesday at 8 p.m. PDT, and lasts 48 hours, marks the forty sixth operating of the Badwater 135. Thought of by many to be the world’s hardest foot race, the ultramarathon begins at 85 metres under sea degree—the bottom elevation in North America—and takes runners as much as 2,548m of altitude.
