Another edition of the St. Croix 40 Winter Ultra has wrapped! We’ve unloaded our boxes and bins, napped a few times, and have almost rehydrated our chapped and crispy selves after the weekend. Racer and volunteer alike, we hope your recovery from your long weekend is proving to be restorative!
Official results from the race are posted at UltraSignup.
Our social media can be found at Facebook and Instagram, if you want to follow along with any ongoing shenanigans.
If you have photos and impressions you’d like to share, please let us know. You can tag us on the socials, and for longer-form writeups, send us a link and we’ll include it on our website. Race reports and volunteer reflections are invaluable for aspiring racers!
This year was an enormous success. As far as we know, there were no serious injuries or mishaps. We saw a few blue fingertips, but hopefully nothing to cause long-term worry. We watched many lessons in the process of being learned, and we were privileged to witness some of you making really hard, really smart choices.
This year, we saw more racers start than ever before, and we also saw more drops than any other edition yet. The cold and wind were truly forces to be reckoned with. We’re not sure who had it worse, weather-wise: the racers or the outdoor volunteers, who lacked the benefit of relentless forward motion!
Two folks joined us for their fifth St. Croix 40, having been with us every single year since we began. Additionally, two racers completed what’s known in winter ultra circles as the “Ă trois,” where all three disciplines are successfully achieved. And this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what you all did out there, facing down the wind for however many miles you deemed necessary on this weekend. We can only imagine how it felt to look up at the stars from the far end of the course, winking down through the trees, knowing you were doing something that so few people would even consider doing.
We fell in love with this sport as volunteers, taking shifts at the finish line of Arrowhead and staffing the turnaround at Tuscobia. The people we met remain friends to this day, and the lessons we learned from them and their stories are unforgettable.
It’s not all fun and games, of course, and it’s not all warm and fuzzy. Our feelings about this sport are so rich and complicated. Risky? Potentially. Foolish? Probably. It’s said that to run 100 miles is to experience life in a day, and if that’s true, we think that winter ultras somehow manage to cram life into just a few hours. Choosing to go out into the cold and peel back the emotional and mental layers of who you are isn’t for everyone. But gosh, it’s for us. Maybe you learned it’s for you, too.
We’re so glad that you all joined us, and we hope you all learned something worth remembering. Next year’s edition will be on January 11th-12th, 2025, and we hope to see many of you again!
Here’s to 2024! May you be warm, joyful, and only occasionally in a reasonable amount of personally-inflicted danger.
Cheers,
Jamison and Lisa
St Croix Winter Ultra 