美国队在 IAU 100K 世锦赛包揽男女个人冠军并首夺男子团体金牌

Updated September 25, 2026 09:57AM

What You Need to Know

Author Allison Mercer competed for Team USA at the 2026 IAU 100K World Championships in Ames, Spain, on September 20, where she finished 15th. Americans Charlie Lawrence and Courtney Olsen swept the individual titles and the American men narrowly won the team competition for the first time in the event’s storied 39-year history. Mercer draws on her own experience, as well as insights from Lawrence and Olsen, to make her case for why this format is worthy of your attention. 

America won a running world championship last weekend.

Did you hear about it?

Probably not.

That is partly because another road running world championship was taking place in Copenhagen on the same weekend, with the mile, 5K, and half marathon drawing the attention of the running world. Those races have obvious appeal: They are fast, familiar, easy to understand, filled with big names, and increasingly easy to package for television and social media.

And it’s partly because not that many people pay attention to road running beyond the 26.2 distance.

While eyes were turned to Denmark, the 100-kilometer road running world championships put on by the International Association of Ultrarunners (IAU), was taking place in Ames, Spain. There, runners spent more than six hours circling a 5K course as temperatures climbed from a comfortable 61degrees Fahrenheit to over 90 degrees and 87% humidity. That championship was nuts. It was thrilling. It showcased some of the very best of American distance running. And it deserved a bigger audience.

Before I go any further, I should state my biases, because I am quite biased: I ran for Team USA and finished 15th in the women’s race. But that also makes me uniquely qualified to tell you why the race—and road ultras at large—are so special:

For starters, Team USA captured the individual title in both the men’s and women’s events. After DNFing from the last road 100K world champs in 2024 due to injury, Charlie Lawrence from Boulder, Colorado, won the men’s race in 6:09:25. He pulled away from Lithuanian world-record-holder Aleksandr Sorokin just before halfway and ultimately extended his lead to two minutes.

“I knew at that point it was mine to lose, and I wasn’t going to,” Charlie told me. “This has been the big race on the calendar for the last two years. It means a lot.”

Charlie averaged 5:56 minute-per-mile pace, the equivalent of running back-to-back 2:35 marathons and then some.

Meanwhile in the women’s race, Bellingham’s Courtney Olsen passed Miho Nakata with less than 10 miles to go to move into the lead. She won by a minute in 7:10:31—that’s 6:50 mile pace, for 62 miles. The wildest part about it is that Olsen, who had been feeling overworked and overwhelmed at home, almost didn’t even fly to Spain.

“I was very close to not coming at all and the only reason I did was because I purchased everything as nonrefundable and I didn’t want to let the women’s team down,” she said.

And there’s more: The American men put together the kind of team performance that Hollywood dreams about. The team event is scored by the combined times of the top three finishers. Team USA’s result was good enough to beat Great Britain for gold—by just 44 seconds.

Not for the Faint of Heart (or Stomach)

Forty four seconds over three runners and 100 kilometers is almost impossible to wrap your head around. It’s easy to feel like you have all the time in the world to make mistakes in a race this long, but those 44 are a reminder of how every little detail compounds. How aggressively do you start? How much do you drink? When do you take in calories? How do you respond when the temperature suddenly rises? And, perhaps most importantly, how much do you have left when everyone else is beginning to fall apart?

“You need to have the fueling dialed. You have to have the pacing right. The cooling perfected. There are so many other elements you need to perfect to put up a great performance,” Charlie said. “It’s a true distance that can push you.”

That is what makes elite road ultrarunning so compelling. It’s not simply about surviving a ridiculous distance. At the world championship level, these athletes are racing. They are running fast enough to make the marathon look like the halfway point and then asking their bodies to keep going for another 36 miles.

The conditions in Spain made these achievements even more impressive. The morning began relatively cool, but the temperature climbed sharply as the race progressed. Shade was limited, the pavement reflected the growing heat that even a summer of training in Atlanta didn’t prepare me for, and runners had to manage the accumulating stress on their bodies with no reprieve. Unlike in trail ultras, you don’t get an excuse to hike for a minute on the steep or technical sections because there are none.

“Road ultras in general are a massive test,” Charlie told me. “You’re going at a pace that you’re not quite sure you can sustain for the whole distance and you know you’re probably going to be holding on for dear life at some point.”

Beyond the sheer athleticism, a whole lot can go wrong. There are upsets and battles within battles. It’s pretty compelling stuff. Yet in the U.S., ultrarunning—and especially road ultrarunning—still exists outside the mainstream running conversation.

That is strange when you look at what other countries have done with the sport. In South Africa, the Comrades Marathon and Two Oceans Marathon have become cultural institutions. They are not treated as obscure races for a small group of people who happen to enjoy running very far. They have history, rivalries, heroes, traditions, spectators, and a place in the country’s sporting identity.

America has the ingredients to build something similar. We have the races, the communities, and increasingly, the athletes capable of competing for world titles. We have the livestreaming capabilities. What we do not have yet is the same level of attention and cultural recognition.

Maybe that changes when people actually see what these runners can do. Of course, better TV coverage (or any TV coverage) would help. The next time a 50K or 100K comes through your area, go watch. Better yet, if you are a runner, enter one. You do not have to be capable of running six hours at Charlie or Courtney’s paces to appreciate what is happening. Stand along the course and watch the leaders come through. Look at their splits. Think about how far they have already gone and how much farther they still have to run.

Then remember that these are not people simply trying to finish. They are racing each other, making tactical decisions, managing heat and nutrition, and trying to find another gear after their bodies have already been working for hours.

Or don’t—Olsen, for one, certainly doesn’t care.

“It’s in my nature to like things that aren’t so hip,” she said. “This sounds pretentious or self-satisfying, but I also think I like things ahead of their time, meaning I can foresee but I’m also ill-timed. I can totally see the road 50-mile and 100K becoming interesting to people once I’ve exited it, knowing my luck.”

She’s used to the comments about road ultras being for “no names who couldn’t excel at the marathon and had to move up.” And she’s used to tuning them out.

“I love all the people I get to meet and the places I get to see because of running this distance,” she said. “I care a whole lot more about growing my world view than getting a person or a sponsor to see the value.”

The 100K distance is the crown jewel of road ultrarunning, with the world championship at this distance dating back to 1987, 39 years ago. The U.S. just produced two individual 100K world champions and its first ever men’s team world championship. The men’s team won by 44 seconds. That is not some obscure result buried at the bottom of the running world.

It is a story about American endurance athletes reaching the highest level of their sport. We should be paying attention, because if we start celebrating these performances now, perhaps the next generation will grow up seeing road ultrarunning not at the edge of running, but as another testing ground where Americans can race the best in the world.