‘I want to absolutely destroy myself’: How a Draper runner fell apart and won the Western States 100

Like a Formula 1 pit crew, Caleb Olson’s friends swarmed the Draper runner as soon as he entered the aid station 80 miles into last month’s Western States 100 endurance race.

In just 45 seconds, Olson was back on trail with cold water bottles, a fresh set of nutrition gels and his lead still intact. Heads turned as he trotted out, and not just to get a better look at Olson’s unusual mesh shirt, a Nike prototype that made him look as much a rock star as a runner. He was leading Western States — the original and still one of the most prestigious 100-mile runs in the world — and on pace to break the course record.

But the wheels of this finely tuned racing machine were coming off.

With 20 miles to go through the sauna-esque foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, Olson’s stomach was in full-on revolt. And without water and calories, the rest of his body had begun to shut down. Olson had, in some ways, anticipated this. Prior to the race, he had told Jacob Grant, his pacer for the final stretch, that he had two goals: win or wind up in the hospital.

As they straggled out of that aid station, Grant was hoping for the former but bracing for the latter.

“It felt like we were playing Jenga a little bit,” Grant said. “In that the pieces were falling out, and I was just trying to put them back in before he fell over.”

Going farther

Olson wasn’t the star athlete on his high school cross country team in Seattle. College scouts never looked his way. And anyway, he considered himself more of a mountaineer than a runner. But as he ventured deeper and deeper into the Cascades, he found he could go faster and farther without all his backpacking gear.

And so, an ultrarunner was born.

Olson competed in his first ultra — any race longer than a marathon (26.2 miles) — within months of moving to Utah in 2018. It went terribly. He vomited at the start line and spent the rest of the race cramping from dehydration. He finished, but it wasn’t fun nor pretty. He was hooked.

“After that,” he said, “I just sort of wanted redemption.”

His training, which he works in around his full-time jobs as a software developer and parent, tends more toward quick-paced hikes over steep, mountain terrain than laps around a track. Yet Olson picked up his first ultra win in 2019, in the Antelope Island 50-kilometer race (31.0686 miles). Along the way, he found a group of similarly distance-driven friends within the Salt Lake trail running community.

“I just love running with them,” Olson said. “And the natural question is always: ‘What’s your next race?’”

Last year, the answer was the Western States 100. Established in 1974 on the trails between the Palisades Ski Resort near Lake Tahoe and Auburn, California, it’s the gold standard of American endurance races. It would also be Olson’s first 100-mile run. All he wanted to do was finish.

To his surprise, he took fifth. And so a challenge was born. Olson felt pretty comfortable on that attempt. How well could he do if he totally emptied his tank?

Olson hired Jack Kuenzle, a Salt Lake City-based coach who holds several Fastest Known Time records, including ascents of Mount Shasta and Mount Hood, to give him training advice. He fine-tuned his gel-only race nutrition plan. He partnered with Nike to develop the high-tech and high-profile racing shirt.

Then, in the sweltering Salt Lake City summer, he threw on a heavy puffer jacket and piled on the miles.

Blisters and babies

No one escapes the Western States 100 unscathed.

The race dedicates an entire page on its website to detailing some of the issues participants can encounter. Among them: low blood sodium, heat stroke and renal failure. At minimum, runners cross the finish line with blackened or missing toenails. Blisters can cover the entire width of a foot. Temperatures on course often soar close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit and parched and disoriented racers stumble into the finish-line medical tent desperate for IVs.

But those who finish consider themselves the lucky ones.

The roughly 400 runners who attempt the race each year have 30 hours to complete it. If they make it in less than 24 hours, they get a highly coveted belt buckle as a reward. In 2006, a sweltering summer, only 52.6% of entrants finished. In recent years, the rate has been closer to 80%.

Jim Walmsley of Arizona ran the race record of 14 hours, 9 minutes, 28 seconds in 2019 during his second of four victories (including in 2024). When Olson set out before dawn on June 28, he intended to shave 10 minutes off that time — 10 hours off the buckle time — or almost die trying.

“I went into it thinking, ‘I want to absolutely destroy myself,’” Olson said, “‘and see how much I can get out of my body.’”

Olson had experience on the course now. But, he also had an 8-week-old son, Marshall. In the lead-up to the race, his wife, Morgan, had agreed to take all the late-night shifts with the baby so Olson could sleep and his body could recover. Olson took that as a gift, and as a mandate.

“That was motivating. It was, OK, we’re going to do all this sacrifice for two months before Western States,” Olson said. “I may as well go all in and give it my very best and maybe actually come away with the win.”

If it was a really good day, he’d come away with the course record as well. But good day or not, it was going to hurt.

‘Puke and rally’

Olson slipped into the lead about midway through the race. After grinding out 36 switchbacks over two miles with Colorado’s Chris Myers — who would eventually finish second — Olson broke away during the descent into the El Dorado Creek aid station.

By that point, though, Olson’s nutrition plan had already begun to go south. The gel he’d slurped down at the previous aid station had long ago come back up.

“He must think I’m cooked,” Olson wrote in his blog of one of the runners he was tailing. “But this has happened before, I can puke and rally.”

This time, though, was far worse. Olson estimates it was probably the second-worst experience of his racing career. The first came during the 2023 World Mountain and Trail Running Championships in Austria. In that race, he became so sick that he had to lie down next to the trail and put his legs up to get blood back into his brain.

This time, stopping wasn’t an option. But walking was.

At the 80-mile aid station, Olson put on a brave face. Crew members greeted him with massive posters of his son in varying states of cuteness. They handed him water and gels and doused his mesh shirt, which he said efficiently kept him cooler as long as he could keep it wet. Within seconds, Olson was trotting back down the trail.

As soon as he and Grant, his pacer, were out of eyesight, though, Olson slowed to a walk. Any food or drink triggered instantaneous, debilitating stomach cramps. He wanted it to be over, but he also realized the slower his pace, the longer it would take for the ordeal to actually end.

“Last year I was conversational, and this year, it was like, ‘You can talk, and I’m just going to listen,’” Olson recalled telling Grant. “[It was:] How can I not be in my body as much as possible? I tried to just shut everything down.”

Grant said usually when they’re together, he’s the one that’s hurting. He’d never seen Olson so beleaguered. After trying every revitalization trick he could think of — singing, combing through memories, telling jokes — Grant settled on just keeping Olson moving forward.

“I almost felt like his soul was leaving his body,” Grant said, “and I was trying to keep him there a little bit.”

The stick and the carrot

Grant alternated between using a stick and a carrot to keep Olson moving. The stick was the specter of someone passing Olson in the final stretch, or forcing a sprint to the finish line. Olson kept hallucinating he heard footsteps behind him for most of the final 15 miles.

The carrot was the course record.

Olson puzzled out the math as he limped along. He could probably still break the record if he hammered up the last climb and sprinted down the track. But his hamstrings were cramping and his stomach was still in revolt. All of his “check engine” lights were on. That kind of effort could also lead to an unrecoverable collapse just a couple miles from the finish line.

Win or wind up in the hospital: That had been his goal. It didn’t have to be either/or. But, if Olson had to pick one, he’d take the win.

Olson shuffled down the final straightaway, a stark contrast to the spring in the step exhibited by second-place finisher Myer and third-place finisher and former winner Killian Jornet. In fact, Olson went 11 minutes slower over the final 20 miles than he had the year prior. Still, Olson broke the finish-line tape with a time of 14:11:25 — officially the second-fastest time in race history.

He held Marshall, gave his wife a hug, held himself together for an interview and then stumbled to the medical tent, where he spent the next five hours. A couple days later, he returned to Utah with a belt buckle, a cougar statue, 20,000 new Instagram followers and a bum ankle he doesn’t remember spraining.

He also has a new sense of self and his limits.

“I think of myself differently now, as an athlete,” Olson wrote in his blog. “In the same way that last year’s fifth place was eye-opening and made me believe I could start trying to mix things up at the front of races, this year’s win makes me believe I could take shots at other big wins..”

Olson’s next shot at the checkered flag is at the World Long Trail Championships in Spain on Sept. 27. Olson will be representing Team USA in the 82-kilometer (50.95-mile) race.