The 2024 Hardrock 100 was a success with legendary ultra runner Courtney Dauwalter breaking her own women’s course record with her win and Ludovic Pommeret won the men’s race with a record-breaking time on Saturday.
Dauwalter has won the last three Hardrock 100 women’s races and finished the iconic 102.5-mile race this year in 26 hours, 11 minutes and 49 seconds. In each of the past three races, she beat the previous course record.
This year the course went clockwise after starting in Silverton and the finish line was also in Silverton. Runners went from Silverton toward Telluride, then on to Ouray, then Lake City before heading back toward Silverton toward the finish.
Dauwalter led for most of the women’s race and extended her lead as she got to half-race distance. She continued her strong record-setting pace and ended up beating second-place finisher Camille Bruyas by over two hours.
Katharina Hartmuth finished third in the women’s race with a time of 30:29:12.
In the men’s race, Pommeret finished with a course record of 21:33:06. This beat the previous record set in 2022 by Killian Jornet by over three minutes.
Pommeret led a pack of runners to start the race but broke open a gap on the descent into Ouray and kept increasing his gap until the finish. Diego Pazos finished second with a 24:39:36.
France’s François D’Haene was a contender but had to pull out of the race at the aid station at Animas Forks 58 miles in. D’Haene had been sick in the weeks leading up to the race.
“The statistics with a men's course record and a women's course record and one of the highest finishing rates we've ever had, at over 80%,” Hardrock 100 Run Director Dale Garland said. “So the metrics are real good and then kind of the anecdotal stuff, a lot of smiles and good feelings, as everybody left with no real major medical things to report. So everybody had no real injuries to report or things like that so I'm calling it a win. I'm calling it a very successful year.”
Garland said Pommeret had a lot of experience on the course before this year which helped him and Dauwalter had fresh legs because she didn’t compete in the Western States races prior to the Hardrock 100.
The conditions on the course made the runners faster, according to Garland. There wasn’t a lot of snow on the course which slows runners down when they have to go through it.
For the mid-pack and back-of-the-field runners, there was lots of cloud coverage on Saturday afternoon so that cut down on the heat, according to Garland.
Garland was also happy to see two local runners in third and fourth. Durango’s Jason Schlarb finished third with a time of 24:48:18 and Jeff Rime from Silverton finished fourth with a 26:30:59.
It was a long comeback for Schlarb who was the co-winner of the men’s race in 2016 with Killian Jornet. He tore his ACL and meniscus skiing at Purgatory three years ago.
Schlarb moved to Durango in 2014 because of the Hardrock 100 and his love of the San Juan Mountains that he got when he visited as a kid.
He became a pro trail runner in 2012 and made it his mission to compete in the Hardrock 100. Schlarb eventually did that and tied for the win in 2016.
Schlarb said his tie for first in 2016 with Jornet was controversial and put a bad taste in his mouth sometimes when he thinks about it. But Schlarb and Jornet worked together the whole race and happened to be on the same pace even as they pushed to the end.
But he hadn’t finished the race since his win in 2016. After coming back from a race in Madeira, Portugal, where he had some stomach issues that slowed him down, Schlarb did a six-week training camp that his wife Whitney called Camp Hardrock. Whitney is pregnant and was taking time off work so all of the focus was on training for the Hardrock 100.
He started this camp in late May and Schlarb trained hard on the Hardrock trails and even did some training with Pommeret. Schlarb would have a rest day and on the weekends he’d run 20-30 miles a day with between 6,000 and 10,000 feet of vertical on those runs.
Schlarb had good pace to start the race. But unfortunately, Schlarb ran into some issues with his stomach about halfway through the race. He couldn’t keep anything down and it slowed him down with all the throwing up he was doing.
Pazos caught him in second place as Schlarb started to struggle at the end of the race.
“It really wasn't so much a race against anybody else,” Schlarb said. “It was just me surviving out there. When I was going back and forth with Diego in the last couple aid stations, I wasn't thinking, ‘I'm going to pull a move here and then get ahead of him here.’ My thinking was he was faster on the downs, I was faster on the ups, and we were leapfrogging. It finishes downhill with a 7-mile descent. I wasn't even thinking about Diego at that point.”
Schlarb said the finishing distance between him and Pazos was deceiving. He said friends and family thought it was a battle but Schlarb was surviving to the finish.
If the stomach issues didn’t slow him down, Schlarb thinks with his training he could’ve run under 23 hours.
Since he won in 2016, Schlarb likes how the Hardrock 100 has stayed the same size and has kept the values and focus it’s always had.
“It's not profit-driven, it's not huge sponsorship like a road race or triathlon or cycling where it's very sterile,” Schlarb said. “It's still a group of friends and it's still a group of volunteers and a community that really gets to know each other and that is core. It's just almost as core as the fact that this is a one of the kind race in the world that continues every single year to bring the best mountain runners in the world.”
bkelly@durangoherald.com
