Woodward tackles ultra run

For the past few years, local distance runner Canyon Woodward has competed in some of the region’s most daunting trail races, running dozens of miles over difficult terrain without rest or the thought of stopping. In the Cruel Jewel 100 race held May 14-16 across Northern Georgia, Woodward posted the lowest time in the race’s eight-year history.

“It’s a 106-mile race in the North Georgia Mountains about an hour and a half from here with about 33,000 feet of elevation gain up and down,” said Woodward. “It’s a big race I’ve been training for since about the beginning of the year. I was shooting for under 26 hours, which I thought was a pretty ambitious goal and would put me in the top five finishers at the course. I ended up doing 22:36.”

In running 106 miles over peaks and valleys from Vogel State Park to the town of Blue Ridge and back, stopping only to eat and drink momentarily at designated aid stations, Woodward is one of few people on the planet who knows what it’s like to run four marathons in a single day. In finishing the race in less than 23 hours, smashing the previous course record by 82 minutes, Woodward joins an even more elite subset of competitive ultramarathoners.

“The prior record had been set by Karl Meltzer, who’s one of the best ultra-runners of our time, and then someone broke that one in 2016,” said Woodward. “It’s crazy. I’m still trying to process it. It really expands my horizons of what I imagined was possible for myself in this sport. If I can repeat that kind of performance, it will make me competitive on the national level, which is really exciting. It’s not where I thought I was.”

In shattering a record once set by Meltzer, who has won more 100-mile races than any runner on the planet, Woodward seems to have earned a place among the finest ultramarathoners in the country. As one of the more strenuous courses in the country in terms of terrain, the Cruel Jewel is also a qualifying race for some of the world’s largest ultramarathons, including the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in Europe and the Western States Endurance Run in northern California. Amazingly, despite the race’s length and uncommonly drastic changes in elevation, Woodward said he actually felt pretty good at race’s end.

“So much of it in my head was just gearing up to enter the heart of darkness in those later miles,” he said. “This was the first really long race or objective that really went phenomenally well. At mile 75 or so in the [Hellbender 100 in Asheville] a couple of years, I totally hit a wall and was feeling super-nauseous like I might faint, and it was all I could do to keep on walking and shuffling forward until I could get some more calories and recover. I was definitely preparing myself for that to happen, fueling and hydrating really aggressively from the start, and amazingly, I felt really good the entire time until the finish. It’s a little bit hard to pinpoint exactly because they tack on an extra six miles on the way back, but I actually ran pretty close to a negative split, meaning the second half was just as fast as the first half.”

Thanks to his rigorous training regimen, which involves running around 60 miles per week, Woodward actually ran the second half of the race faster than he had the first. With the help of a friend, Abby Levene, who acted as his pacer, running with him for the final 30 miles and making sure he was well-fed and hydrated, Woodward was able to average one mile every 13 minutes, including in pitch darkness. Even for a runner of his caliber though, finishing such a race is a grueling task.

“My legs were certainly hurting, especially on the really steep downhills,” said Woodward. “My quads were killing me, but for the most part I was able to push through the pain and keep letting it loose. I was flying downhill restlessly fast. The last six miles or so, I just got the smell of the finish line and was running as fast as I could. … As I got the sense of the finish line, it was a crazy place in my mind.” 

While his victory in the Cruel Jewel stands as a milestone achievement, Woodward is wasting little time resting on his laurels. After a few days of rest following the Cruel Jewel, he has now set his sights on the 50-kilometer National Championship Trail Race in Sunapee New Hampshire this August. A Harvard graduate and former campaign manager for Chloe Maxmin, the youngest woman ever elected to the Maine State Senate, Woodward is also near completion on his first book, entitled “Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and why our Future Depends on it.” While winning races on the campaign trail and running trails are nice, Woodward said he keeps coming back for the connection between man and mountain.

“I just love being out there on the trail,” he said. “As much as anything, its just the day in and day out. When you sign up for an objective like this, you know you’ve got to train, so you put in the miles every day. I love what that does for me in terms of my spirits, my body, physically, mentally, the whole lot. It’s really fun to push the limits and see the boundaries of what your body’s capable of – what your mind’s capable of.”