Jamil Coury launched another new project this month, and when Jamil creates something for the ultrarunning community, pay attention. Chances are, it will be big. Trendsetting. Even disruptive.

Coury, 41, is arguably the most innovative—and one of the most influential—figures in the sport. He initiated the new era of livestreaming events. He hatched January’s monthlong Burrito League, a phenomenon that spread to more than 17,000 participants running the same short segment in their hometowns across the U.S. and Canada, as well as Mexico, Chile, Australia, and New Zealand. And he has expanded Aravaipa Running, the race management company he founded in 2009, to more than 70 events in seven states through organic growth and regional acquisitions, and promoted the Black Canyon Ultras and Javelina Jundred into two of the premier events in the U.S.

His long-term personal quest to create a route stretching across Arizona led him to launch the Cocodona 250 in 2021, and five years later, it is the most competitive and sought-after 200+-mile ultra in North America. The event, which starts May 4, has morphed into a weeklong festival with numerous equally enticing race distances. The namesake 250-miler sold out within minutes, had some 800 people on the waitlist at one point, and will implement a lottery for 2027 that opens next week.

On April 1, Coury posted a casual video of himself on the trail talking to his 55,000 Instagram followers, but it wasn’t an April Fools’s Day joke. “Today kicks off a 30-day run streak, and if you are looking for some motivation this spring, join me on this website obsession.run,” he said. “We’re aiming to set a good habit. This is something I’ve been needing personally. … My goal is to run every single day in April, so if you want to join in, join up.”

Three weeks later, his new Obsession website with the tagline “The Committed Runner’s Log” has some 530 runners participating in the “We’re Going Streaking” challenge. The home page shows top streak totals and recent activity, with the label “Perfect” attached to those who’ve maintained an unbroken streak. (Participants must run at least one mile each day to maintain a streak.) Each runner’s profile shows their runs and upcoming races, and it updates automatically through Strava or manually. The functionality to sync directly with smart watches is in the works.

Said one user on the website’s message board, explaining why he signed up, “I saw Jamil’s post 4/1 and figured if I could do at least a little each day, I’d get the consistency I need and have something to keep me accountable. … I’m really enjoying it!”

The website is basic and browser-based—for now. Coury will create an app for it as soon as he figures out how. He built the site entirely by himself using Claude, the behemoth AI-assistant tool used for coding and myriad other tasks.

He has bigger plans for obsession.run. The “We’re Going Streaking” challenge is a harbinger of a greater online runners’ platform, potentially creating new challenges and community interaction to harness the surging popularity of run clubs and to spread the fervor of the Burrito League challenge.

I reached out to Coury to learn more about his new Obsession.

Jamil Coury at Hardrock by Peter Maksimow — Amid managing a business and continuing to innovate, Jamil Coury is also running the Hardrock 100 for the ninth time this summer. Photos: Peter Maksimow

A Multitasking Mastermind

Coury talked via Zoom from his office at Aravaipa’s Phoenix headquarters two days after he road-tripped to Utah to run the April 11 Zion Ultras 60K. Panning his camera around the room revealed a mess of cardboard boxes, styrofoam packaging, and metal shelving because he was in the midst of building a server rack to improve storage of the company’s burgeoning videography. The task typifies his hands-on leadership, tech-savvy capabilities, and his think-outside-the-box creativity.

“That’s the thing about me, I love big-picture vision, but I also like being in the weeds and the dirt,” he said. “I could tell you the most mundane micro detail about something—some little piece of technology—and then I could zoom out and be like, how should we structure this big thing? That’s just what I enjoy doing.”

I asked why he made time for a new website project given all he does—not just managing a company with over 80 employees, but also publishing UltraRunning Magazine (which he acquired in 2024), engaging in marketing collaborations with brands like Janji and Mount to Coast, parenting a 10-year-old son, and training for his own ultras. (His 2026 lineup of races includes the Mingus Traverse during Cocodona week, plus his ninth Hardrock Hundred and the Angeles Crest 100, which was his first 100-miler in 2007.)

“I wanted to learn some of these new coding tools that are coming out,” he said. “It just popped into my head to get my running data in a place where I could do interesting things with it, like maybe track a run streak. … I’m someone who loves creating things, and I was never able to build something like this in the past [without coding skills]. But now someone like me who has some sort of vision in mind has the ability to make it using [AI] tools.”

Coury envisions the site hosting other challenges with added functionality. “We have a ton of experience with creative virtual race formats” hosted by Aravaipa, “but we have never had a platform native to those challenges that could do a really good job digitally tracking it and keeping you inspired. It was always a tack-on to something else that never did it quite perfectly.”

Excitedly, he talked about Aravaipa hosting new challenges on the Obsession site, and then making the platform available to run clubs to host their own challenges, and also having prizes and schwag in the mix.

He stopped talking suddenly and laughed, “I shouldn’t give away too much of my business model. You could say that the ‘We’re Going Streaking 30-Day Challenge’ is the first of more challenges to come for free on the platform to motivate people and to connect community. That’s the overarching thing.”

Speaking more generally about Aravaipa, he said, “there have been some growing pains … and one of my priorities is figuring out how to step up in that leadership role and empower our whole company to step into the next phase as we keep adding events in new regions. How do we maintain everything we’re doing so that it’s a continual good experience? And how do we keep innovating?”

Learning the tools to build the Obsession platform and imagining its possibilities are part of his ongoing effort to evolve as the company leader. “That’s kind of my job as the head guy—like, what’s next?”

I pointed out that his Strava shows gaps in his training, and I wondered if his work projects have been derailing his running. Not really, he said. He just doesn’t upload all of his runs there.

“Honestly, I haven’t been going on Strava as much lately,” he said. “I just go right to Obsession, so it’s my own personal Strava at the moment.”

Are You Obsessed?

Of course, I signed up at the Obsession site for the monthlong streak challenge. Jamil has had that effect on me for at least a decade.

In 2016, I got hooked on following the wacky challenges and buddy humor that he and his sidekick Schuyler Hall broadcast on the Mountain Outpost channel on YouTube, starting with their classic Mystery Drop Bag Challenge. At that year’s Quad Dipsea, I watched in awe as they met a holiday-themed challenge to gulp Pumpkin Spiced Lattes and carry dog-sized gilded metal reindeers as they ran.

At the start of the pandemic, I signed up for one of the early virtual challenges that Coury pioneered through Aravaipa. Thanks to his Limitless vert challenge, I logged a Double Everest (58,058 feet of elevation gain) during one week in May of 2020.

The following February, I and hundreds of others watched the first fully livestreamed ultra on YouTube: Aravaipa’s 2021 Black Canyons 100K.

Finish-line webcams with commentary had been around for several years, but that event marked a turning point in broadcasting ultras because Coury and his crew set up drones, cameras and commentators at points along the route to broadcast in real time. They recruited influencers in the sport to provide updates like news anchors. The chat box on the YouTube livestream blew up with people following the race, riveted by the coverage. Ultrarunning suddenly became a spectator sport in ways previously unthinkable given its remote nature.

Reflecting on the dawn of livestreaming, Coury credits the pandemic restrictions for encouraging him to get creative. In 2021, he recalled, “the first 50 miles of Black Canyon 100K, a Golden Ticket race, had no crew, no spectators” due to regulations to prevent the spread of Covid. “For me, that was not acceptable. We had to have some way for people to watch the race, and technology had finally gotten to a point where I figured out how to get drones in the feed, and how to get runner cams, and we pulled it together.”

In January of 2025, Coury again captivated the wider ultrarunning community, but in a completely different and unplanned way. He entered the second annual Strava-Chipolte City Challenge, which took place in 25 cities and incentivized participants to run the same 0.2-mile segment repeatedly. The one who ran the most over the month would be crowned “Local Legend” and win a year’s worth of free burritos.

Coury embarked on running the designated segment of a Tempe sidewalk repeatedly, aiming to become Local Legend, and he was joined—or perhaps, haunted—by competitor Kevin Russ. The two pushed each other to new levels of endurance, each logging more than 700 miles on that sidewalk as a growing mass of fans watched in person and online. Coury barely edged out Russ for the prize.

The absurdity and camaraderie of their duel “was one of the most insane personal running experiences ever,” Coury said.

“I called it a transcendent running experience,” he said. “I did so many miles in such a short amount of time, and went way beyond what I thought was possible. There was very much a community feeling, rivalry, sportsmanship and everything.” He wrote a detailed feature-length article about it for UltraRunning Magazine.

This January, when Strava and Chipotle didn’t start their annual City Challenge as expected, Coury and a handful of local runners in Tempe launched their own grassroots segment challenge. In a matter of days, they created the Burrito League, which quickly mushroomed to 115 chapters around the globe. Coury ran only a fraction of the number of segments as he did the prior January, but he became immersed in championing the new Burrito League with official rules, livestream segments, and even merch.

What role will he take on for the Burrito League next January, and how might that phenomenon evolve?

“I don’t know, I think I need some time away from it,” he said. “To be honest, I think everyone does, because it kind of overtook the world for a month. But no doubt it will be back, and I think it’ll probably be just as big or bigger in January.”

His focus has shifted to his new project—building and growing the obsession.run platform—and for now, he’s running with that.

“I’m just trying to have fun with everything,” he said, “and that’s why I need things like Obsession to sink my teeth into. I’ve always tried to follow my passions where they lead me, whether it’s organizing events or doing videography or editing YouTube videos or trying my hand at tools to code. I use that as my guiding light.”

About the Author

Sarah Lavender Smith runs and lives near Telluride, Colorado, and writes a weekly newsletter called Mountain Running & Living at sarahrunning.substack.com.