This is the Moment Before the Breakthrough

I’m going to tell one of the most incredible stories in sport, and I already know I won’t do it justice.
But I have to try.

There’s something in this story that’s been working on me for weeks. It keeps rising to the surface during long runs, in moments of dread, in quiet prayers. Not because it’s dramatic (though it is), but because it’s honest. Because it’s me, in a different body, fighting a different race.

The Aid Station

Meet Jim Walmsley. A tall, skinny guy with curly hair from Arizona. Not a college superstar, not an olympic marathoner, just someone with a scrappy guy with a ridiculous engine and a drive that wouldn't leave him alone.

Jim races ultramarathons, 50-100+ mile races through terrain that destroy legs, lungs and often the soul. And what’s great about Jim isn’t just incredibly how he wins, but how epically he fails, over and over, before he wins. If that doesn’t resonate deeply, you’re not human.

Before Jim ever made it to the world stage, he had his eyes on Western States 100 — the most iconic 100-mile trail race in the U.S. He famously went out fast in his debut in 2016. Jim was on pace to set a course record, and then took a wrong turn at mile 93 and didn’t even podium. It became one of the most talked-about failures in ultrarunning history.

He came back in 2017 and pushed hard again and blew up. Finished 5th.
In 2018, he came back a third time. This time he nailed it. Course record.
Then came 2019, and he broke his own record.

In 2018, I turned 40 and set out to rediscover my body, my spirit, my limits. I hadn’t run in nearly 20 years, and I decided to go all in. I started training for my first ultra. That same year, Jim was putting down his Western States course record. He became kind of mythical — this lanky Arizona runner with insane volume and a calm, unassuming presence.

I first met him in person at my debut ultra race, the Stagecoach 50k in Flagstaff. He was volunteering, casually handing out water at an aid station. No fanfare, just there to help. I didn’t really know who he was yet.

Two years later, in 2020, I volunteered at a world-record attempt where Jim ran a 100k on the road and missed the world record by 12 seconds. He had gutted himself in front of the world, then quietly jogged off the track.

It’s hard to explain the affinity I feel with him, but it’s strong. We’re both from Arizona. We’re both tall, wiry, a little quiet. He runs with this sense of deep internal drive that feels more like purpose than ambition. I’ve always found myself in his story, somehow — not because I’m anywhere near his level, but because of the way he handles loss. The way he turns back toward the mountain instead of away from it.

And eventually, that mountain became UTMB — the biggest ultra race in the world.
106 miles through the Alps. 32,000 feet of climbing, more than 2000 runners attempt it each year.
No American man had ever won it, ever.

Jim tried. Again and again.

• 2017: 5th

• 2019: dropped

• 2021: dropped

• 2022: led halfway… fell to 4th place finish

By that point, he had moved to France, lived in a remote alpine town, trained on snow, learned to ski, studied the course from every angle. He did everything the Europeans do. But the race still broke him.

There’s a moment from the 2022 race that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. It’s caught on film in the short documentary Walmsley. Jim’s sitting at an aid station somewhere around mile 70. He looks shattered. His wife is refilling his pack as a group of strong runners close the gap behind him. You can see the pain in his body and the fear in his eyes, and then he says the words:

“Sorry if I don’t hold on...”

He wasn’t just apologizing for the race. He was apologizing for not being enough.

The Dread That Comes With Letting Go

Every one-star review still sits with me. I don’t shake them off. They don’t just sting, they linger.

Not because I think the person is wrong or unfair. I actually assume the opposite. If someone goes public with their pain, it probably wasn’t just one thing. It was a series of moments where we made small mistakes or failed to respond or didn’t notice something they were counting on. It was a breakdown they didn’t want and probably didn’t expect when they hired us.

That’s my aid station.

I’m not replying to every message or picking up the phone or walking the properties. I’ve built a team, and most of the time they hold. But I carry this quiet fear that somewhere, right now, someone is being let down and I won’t know about it until the damage has already happened.

And the hard part is that I asked for this. I chose to grow. I chose to stop being the one who fixes everything. I chose to build a team. And I’m proud of that. But sometimes I still wonder if I can hold it all together.

Climbing Through Complexity

Eventually, climbing the mountain wears you down.

The small, seemingly isolated problems that I could skip through when the business was small started to stack. And not in a linear way more like exponential weight. Things got harder in ways I didn’t expect. The systems that used to work stopped working. The feedback loops got slower. The friction got stickier. I kept trying to spot the one problem I could solve that would make things feel clear again, but that moment never came. There wasn’t one.

The worst part was I couldn’t put my finger on a single fixable issue. It was the mass of the thing that felt overwhelming.

Almost every decision became a tug-of-war between going back to what I knew: brute force, heroic effort, reactive intensity or letting go of control long enough to build something more resilient. And that letting go? That was the hardest part.

Letting go required humility I didn’t want to face. It forced me to admit where I was weak. Where I had plateaued. Where I needed help.

Staying in the mountains, in this business, means facing the parts of the company that are no longer energizing or obvious. It means training differently. Hiring better. Slowing down to actually solve things instead of just hammering harder. It means finding people who are better at certain things than I’ll ever be and then getting out of their way.

And it means something else I only learned when I was too tired to fake it anymore, that I was never supposed to carry this alone.

I used to think needing help meant I wasn’t enough. That I wasn’t smart enough or good enough or strong enough. But the longer I stayed in the mountains, the more clearly I could see:

I am enough.
And I was never meant to do this alone.

What Winning Actually Means

In 2023, Jim came back to UTMB. One more time.

He ran the race.
He finished.
He won.
First American man to ever do it. Course record.

But that wasn’t the win.
The win happened at mile 70, when he kept going.
In the quiet adaptations.
In the humility.
In the staying.

If you’re at mile 70 right now and if you’re tired, or scared, or carrying a weight you don’t know how to name, I want to tell you something I wish someone would’ve told me earlier:

You’re not doing it wrong. You’re in the middle of becoming.
Don’t walk away from that!

Stay in the mountains a little longer.
Ask for help.
Learn something new.
Stop gripping so tight.
Do the quiet, unsexy work that doesn’t pay off right away.
And remember that nobody finishes UTMB by accident.

Become first
Then win

– Mark

P.S. Here’s the film Walmsley. It’s quiet and beautiful and absolutely worth your time:
🎥 Watch it here