Molly Seidel might have dropped out of Western States if it had not been for her crew addressing solvable problems that gave her the ability to keep going. You can benefit from the same kind of help from your crew.
Western States and Hardrock this year produced some of the most talked-about DNFs the sport has seen in years, and some of the most gut-wrenching finishes.
Tom Evans, running second at Hardrock, dropped around the halfway point. Tara Dower finished third in the women’s race just 13 days after finishing sixth at Western States, running on legs that hadn’t recovered from the first race. Both came from races that were met with significant challenges, and a decision about what to do with what was left.
That decision, not the finish line and not the DNF list, is the actual subject of this piece.
The question people ask after a DNF is whether the runner, or ourselves, had a good enough reason to stop. I think that’s the wrong question, because it assumes there’s a checklist you could refer to at mile 80 in the dark, some objective bar your suffering either clears or doesn’t. There is no such checklist. The question that actually governs the moment is smaller and harder to answer honestly: is there still something left to try?
Sometimes the answer is a nap. Sometimes it’s calories. Sometimes it’s broth and a sleeping bag and 20 minutes of warmth before the cold again. Sometimes, and this is the harder truth, there’s nothing left to try, and stopping is the accurate conclusion, not the weak one.
But underneath that is a harder problem, and it’s the one actually worth sitting with. The state that might justify stopping, a mind stripped of calories, sleep, and hours of compounding damage and disappointment, is the same state that makes you the worst possible judge of whether you should stop. You need intact judgment to determine whether your judgment is still intact.
That’s not something you resolve in the moment. It’s the reason the real decision has to be made earlier, while you still had the standing to make it, and then handed to someone else to hold on your behalf, or built into a method you can call up on command from within.
Molly Seidel’s Western States Debut
I was there for one version of this at Western States—Molly Seidel’s epic 100-mile debut—though I didn’t understand the full shape of it until Molly and I talked afterward.
Molly’s day started controlled, running in the back of the top 10 through Michigan Bluff, well within her capacities. Serious chafing forced early problem-solving, which pulled her attention off her fueling plan, which produced total collapse in the miles before Michigan Bluff. Between there and Foresthill she was reduced to a hike in caloric ruin, and dropped from 10th place to somewhere beyond recovery. That’s not a small setback. It’s the kind of low point that ends most 100-mile efforts, especially on a first attempt.
At Foresthill, calories went back in, veteran Alyssa Clark joined as pacer, and she came back to something resembling herself. Then the same collapse hit again between Green Gate (mile 80) and Pointed Rocks (mile 94.3), except this time it wasn’t just depletion, it was hypothermia, falling output, falling temperature, compounding deficit.
We forced calories again, got her into a sleeping bag, warmed her up, and she ran well the rest of the way to a finish more than a day after she’d started. She wrote afterward about the strange shift in her own head, from believing a 20-hour finish would be embarrassing to feeling something closer to pride, crossing at sunrise with the people who’d stayed up all night to see it. Pride is appropriate after all she has been through.
What actually happened in that stretch wasn’t a straight line. At Michigan Bluff, at Foresthill, at Pointed Rocks, and everything in-between, she genuinely wanted to quit. She didn’t just suffer through some stoic silence, she wanted out, more than once. I didn’t fully understand that until our post-race recap.
What kept her moving wasn’t that the want went away. It was that the want never got a clean shot at the decision. Every time it showed up, it ran into a crew who met it with a specific, solvable problem instead of a debate: eat this, get warm, let’s solve one thing before we think about what’s next. The wanting to quit and the choosing to continue happened almost simultaneously, over and over, and the second one kept winning by a narrow margin, mile after mile.
That’s a different picture than the usual story we tell about finishing, the one where toughness means the thought of quitting never surfaces at all. Molly’s race says something closer to the opposite. The thought showed up again and again in one night, fully formed, and she kept choosing against it anyway, right up until the finish after 24 hours and 29 minutes out on the course.
Solving Solvable Problems
Adam Peterman’s race the year before came apart on a similar early timeline. He ran comfortably through the opening miles, on pace for the day he’d trained toward. Then the goal was gone, no shot at the outcome he’d built the season around, as a former champion returning to the race. He kept walking to Auburn anyway, because a finish line still existed even once the race he’d planned no longer did. It wasn’t the day he wanted. It may have been the day he needed, though only he could say what that day was actually for. Whatever his reasons, I admire that he finished.
Both are accounts of elite athletes whose races failed completely, and neither of them let the want to quit win. Whatever it cost them to keep choosing against it is a private reckoning that belongs to them, not for me to speculate on. But both kept locating the next solvable problem—eat, warm up, cool down, take the next step, and kept finding one—until a finish line arrived and no problems remained that couldn’t wait for the next training cycle.
That’s a different situation from what happened to Kilian Jornet and Jim Walmsley this year. Both carried documented knee injuries into the race, public well before the start. Jornet’s day ended at Dusty Corners, 38 miles in. Walmsley’s ended near Foresthill at mile 62. Neither is a story of a runner who stopped searching for the next solvable problem, because there wasn’t one left to find.
No amount of calories, ice, or resolve reverses structural damage in a joint that’s already been failing for months. Stopping there wasn’t the want to quit winning. It was the accurate reading of a situation that had run out of its own possibilities. I respect both of them for protecting their health and whatever seasons are still ahead of them.
But theirs is the easy case, and it’s worth admitting why. Part of it is medical, but part of it is a math problem the rest of us aren’t solving. For a non-elite athlete, an aggravated knee is often still a solvable problem, tape it, maybe take something for the pain, walk it in, deal with the longer recovery. For a professional whose season, sponsorships, and next year’s earning capacity are sitting on the other side of that ledger against one race that’s already going badly, the calculation is different, and it’s not a question of toughness at all.
Protecting the ability to race and earn a living six months from now is a legitimate variable in that decision, one that most of us reading this don’t have to weigh at mile 38 in the dark. That doesn’t make their call easier to live with. It makes it a different call than the one an everyday runner is making in a similar spot, and worth naming as such rather than pretending every DNF is being measured against the same scale.
RELATED: How Turning to the Trails Revived Molly Seidel
Solvable vs. Unsolvable
Even accounting for that, most DNFs don’t come with anything close to this kind of clarity. Most of the time, the runner standing at that aid station can’t actually tell, in real time, whether they’re facing hyponatremia or a bonk, a knee injury or significant acute fatigue, and whether what’s in front of them is genuinely unsolvable or just feels that way at hour 20, alone and out of your mind with fatigue.
The distinction I’m drawing here, solvable against unsolvable, is easy to apply after the fact. It’s nearly impossible to apply with any confidence in the dark, at mile 80, inside a head that’s stopped working the way it should. That’s not a flaw in the framework. It’s just an honest account of how hard the actual problem is.
That, I think, is the line worth drawing, and it’s not the line most people reach for. It’s not “fatigue is a bad reason to stop, injury a good one,” set against some vague sense that gutting it out is always the more honorable move. It’s whether a next move exists that doesn’t compound into lasting harm. It’s contingent, and it’s specific to the person living it.
Sometimes fatigue and fueling failures offer a dozen remaining moves we never let ourselves attempt, and sometimes an injury offers none. The category that matters is solvable against unsolvable, and it can only be judged in real time, by the person inside the decision, and hopefully a support network that can help them tell the two apart. We can speculate all we want from the outside, but only those closest to the runner know what was actually true. That’s why I’m cautious to criticize a DNF.
Fortunately, Molly had people around her shaping and informing her choices without ever making them for her. The want to quit showed up repeatedly, and it never once got to make the call by itself. At every low point, her crew met the immediate need and held the line on her original intent. My role was to name the problem, offer a fix, and hand the choice back to her. Every choice she made was to continue, but the choice itself had to stay hers alone. Saying “eat this first, then we’ll deal with what’s next” instead of “you’re amazing” or “you’re behind pace” is already shaping the outcome before the athlete says a word.
But that influence has a limit, and the limit matters as much as the influence itself. A crew can hand someone broth and a dry pair of socks. It cannot manufacture, from outside a person, the will to keep solving problems once that will is genuinely gone. The decision to try the next thing still belongs to the runner alone. Support can shorten the distance to that decision, through reasoning or through accountability, but it can’t make the decision for them. Choose whoever stands beside you on race day with real care, because what they say in your worst hour will matter more than almost anything you did in training.
Most people reading this will likely never race Western States or Hardrock, and most will never have a sponsorship riding on a single result. But anyone who’s run long enough has lived their own version of mile 80 in the dark, whether that’s a 100-miler or the unraveling back half of a first 50.
What’s useful here isn’t a lecture on toughness, and it isn’t permission to quit either. It’s a sharper question to ask yourself when the day comes apart: not “Do I have a good enough reason to stop?” but “Have I actually exhausted what’s left to try?” Most of the time, you haven’t. So give yourself the opportunities and, ideally, have a support crew ready to get you through those moments.
Some who probably should have stopped didn’t, and the sport remembers them for it. Some who should have kept going stopped anyway, and no one will ever know what they had left. There’s no way to know in advance which one you’ll turn out to have been. That’s the part of this sport nobody mentions when you sign up for your first hundred miles, and maybe the only part actually worth fearing.
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