Four-time winner and course record holder Jim Walmsley lines up at the 2026 Western States 100 knowing that it’s going to be a special year. In the following interview, Jim talks about the cool weather forecast making it a “unicorn” year for the race, how he’s changed up his training ahead of this year, being pushed in the final miles of past editions of the race, and his not-so-secret strategy for trying to claw a few free minutes back on the course.
To learn more about who’s racing, check out our men’s and women’s previews before following our live race coverage on race day.
[Editor’s Note: If you are unable to see the video above, click here to watch it.]
Jim Walmsley Pre-2026 Western States 100 Interview Transcript
iRunFar: Megan Hicks of iRunFar. I’m with Jim Walmsley. It’s a couple days before the 2026 Western States Endurance Run. Here you are at Western States again.
Walmsley: Yeah, it’s fun to be back and lots of memories here.
iRunFar: You’re the course record holder. You have four wins of this race. One could say that you’ve achieved the things to be achieved here, but you keep coming back and this race keeps speaking to you.
Walmsley: Yeah. I think Western States is one of those few races in the world that each win is special and important. And if you keep doing the sport and you want to keep building your career and stuff, you need to keep coming back and trying your hardest at races like Western States and seeing how many you can try to win or how many you can place top 5, top 10. These sort of things matter here. So it’s fun to chase that and it’s still exciting for me.
iRunFar: You’re 10 years on at this race now. This is the 10th anniversary of your first Western States. I’d say a lot about you is different. The hair is back to being the same.
Walmsley: Yeah, I think I’ve meant to get my hair cut the last two months, but never got a haircut. But I’m just wearing it down today instead of tying it up, but I live with it every day so it doesn’t feel too strange.
iRunFar: This is a race you’ve run several times. Do you press repeat on your training or do you sort of refine your training year to year?
Walmsley: I have certain long runs, like The Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim. Certain times before the race is kind of the most repeatable thing I do. I’ve settled on. I like doing it twice before Western States. I know in 2024 I felt a little beat up after Western States not racing before earlier in the year. So this year I added in another long run that I did in Flagstaff. So I feel hopefully durable and beat up enough that I should handle race day okay.
iRunFar: Isn’t it kind of crazy though that like, okay, your longest training run for Western States is like actually half the miles, half the time that you have to do then?
Walmsley: I tend to train on slower and more vertical than the racecourse. For me, if I kind of focus more on strength of steep, it tends to balance me out a little better. So I think my longest long run was maybe nine hours.
iRunFar: Oh, okay. You got up there then.
Walmsley: Yeah. And it was a little over half the distance, but yeah, it’s not the same as race day, but the point of training isn’t to do the race, it’s to prepare yourself and stimulate yourself in a way that you’re going to be ready to take on the challenge and hopefully, ready to push yourself to a new limit and faster than you’ve ran before.
iRunFar: It’s kind of funny in ultra running that like most sports you get to practice like every piece of race day in your training.
Walmsley: The marathon’s fairly similar.
iRunFar: That’s true, yeah.
Walmsley: I mean, you just start running further and the reality is like running is a contact sport and the recovery takes a long time and it’s hard. So I think one thing I’ve gained a lot is like these long runs I do beforehand need to be a training effort, which for me, like I jokingly say, I can’t be trusted with a bib anymore because I’ve proven it again and again and again. Once I put a bib on, I wreck myself and I just go. So training races are becoming very, very few, which is also sad because I like racing.
iRunFar: Yeah.
Walmsley: But yeah, I can’t hold back enough to allow myself to do training races because I’ve kind of lost that privilege for myself.
iRunFar: I love that. I can’t be trusted with a bib. I think the big conversation point that we have to touch on is the weather. We’re coming up on a weather forecast replicating the second-coolest weather in the race’s long history. 2012, that’s when we saw course records in both the men’s and women’s race. You’ve seen a cool year here, but you haven’t seen quite as cool of a year here. What are we thinking?
Walmsley: Yeah. So 2019, I ran 1409. I think it was 82-degree high, but we had an overcast, so it was really nice. I think this weekend will be a little sunnier, so you’re still at altitude, the sun is hard. But it’s a unicorn year. In so many ways I need to kind of forget past experiences of like, “Oh, I’ve been hurting so bad here. Oh, I’ve ran out of water here. Oh, I’ve gone in an extra creek dip here.” I need to forget about some of this and look at it a bit more with fresh eyes and not worry and just go because I think little stopping is going to be more important compared to… I think you’re going to see just less attrition than normal. People are going to not be cracking and still be running fast. Everyone’s going to be running a fast last 20 miles, 50K sort of thing. So you got to keep something probably in reserve to race late.
iRunFar: The last time you were at this race in 2024, Rod Farvard kept you honest and made you race it in pretty hard the last 20 miles. And you also reminded us off camera that Jared Hazen did the same thing for you in 2019. I’m guessing you’re envisioning that scenario replicating.
Walmsley: Yeah. It gives me a lot of confidence knowing that I’ve been in hard positions in this race and I’ve found a way somehow. Yeah, I was saying like Jared Hazen in 2019, it was almost imaginary because he was so close that everyone told me he was right behind me, but just enough distance that I couldn’t see him. So it’s just imaginary fear that I was carrying all day. Rod and I had a lot of back and forth. So we were seeing each other and that was a brand-new experience and we had a pact going into the swinging bridge for the first time in my career in 2024. Usually by then, I’d kind of broken away already and it’s going to be a long day off the front in some capacity, maybe with imaginary like chasing behind me the big fear of 2019.
But yeah, in cooler years, it’s always been a fight, it’s always been a battle and people run really fast in cooler weather. So I would say something is likely to be similar like that. You see a lot more people have difficulties and get more tired and slow down when it’s properly hot here.
iRunFar: You ran a super-fast split in being chased by Rod Farvard from Rucky Chucky to Pointed rocks last time. It was more than seven minutes faster than anybody had put down before running scared.
Walmsley: Yeah.
iRunFar: When I see numbers like that, I think about like are we minding the data, are we looking at splits too much? When you just put everything away and just run like hell, what can happen?
Walmsley: Well, I know I was definitely like racing the race and then, it was a really, really good close and the fact that if I can race similarly, it gives me a really good opportunity to try to win again here. So yeah, it gives you confidence that you’ve done it before and potentially, but at the same time, I also have a lack of confidence that I’m going to feel that good that late. That felt really special. But I know it can be there, I hope it’ll be there. But cooler years, I think we don’t have enough data in cool years to know how fast we truly can run on the course. If we ran Western States again in October or something like this, we would have a whole different dataset, it would be much faster.
iRunFar: Can we just do that onetime, by the way.
Walmsley: No, please don’t.
iRunFar: Okay.
Walmsley: We already have such a weird unicorn year this year and I think we have a spectacular field that’s got a lot of depth and experience that-
iRunFar: Now we don’t need October.
Walmsley: … essentially we’ll be able to find out, yeah. We should be able to find out and we’ll see how aggressive people race. I think not racing last year in 2025, but looking back on the race, a lot of the aggressors from last year are missing and I wonder if that’s going to be felt in the early pace. Like almost everyone that had an impact at pushing the pace early last year is not racing.
iRunFar: That’s interesting.
Walmsley: You have David Roche from probably pushing the pace the most before the race. Then once the gun went off, you had Caleb Olson pushing the pace. You had Chris Myers right on his toes. Rod Farvard stuck his nose of he’s coming back as M2 in the top returners and wanting to put it in. Seth Ruling made probably the first big move down the road. So I think all those guys will be a bit missed with potentially the early pace. But I think with the cooler weather, I actually think a lot of the Europeans are going to feel good.
iRunFar: I was going to say, I wonder if the Europeans will be the answer.
Walmsley: Yeah. And so that being Toma, Vincent and Francesco.
iRunFar: Yeah, Francesco.
Walmsley: I could see them being like, “Oh, he’s okay.”
iRunFar: Let’s go.
Walmsley: “It’s easy.” So we’ll see. They all have good perspective. Vincent was in that early pack pushing right up there too. So he’ll be looking to have a really good day as well.
iRunFar: So last question for you. Interesting men’s race, like men’s competition. Incredibly interesting weather. Are we going to see finally the sub 14 that trail running fans are just dying to see here?
Walmsley: I don’t know.
iRunFar: Okay.
Walmsley: Yeah. It’s not like I’m going off the star line trying to dictate my plan. I’ll run my hardest and I think I hope to run my personal best time here. So where that lands, I don’t know. I hope to run a cleaner race than I ran in 2024, but we’ll see. You have to address things if things pop up. But yeah, I tend to be a sucker to stop at aid stations longer than I should.
iRunFar: Turning into a European aid station visitor.
Walmsley: No, Europeans are really, really fast.
iRunFar: Really?
Walmsley: Yeah. I think UTMB has really set the standard as far as 100 miles in stopping time because they measure it really well. Western States actually doesn’t have a in-to aid station, out-of aid station met and I think they could really improve some interesting statistics on that.
iRunFar: By seeing how much people…
Walmsley: Yeah, you’d see actual running times and you’d see actual aid station times. And I think we’re actually missing that data a lot. I have my own data, so I know a lot more than everyone else does. But yeah, I think by this point, it’s no secret that I need to improve some of my efficiency at the aid stations and that’s just kind of on me and having a bit more urgency with it. And yeah, I’m trying to streamline more of a possibility of how I’m doing my aid stations to get in and get out a bit faster.
iRunFar: Save a couple minutes there at it.
Walmsley: Yeah. I mean-
iRunFar: It all counts.
Walmsley: 15 minutes gets us somewhere very interesting.
iRunFar: Very interesting number.
Walmsley: Yeah. I think that would knock two years under 14 without this weather and who knows how much time we’ll get late in the course. But I expect people to close very hard top to bottom. Yeah.
iRunFar: Jim Walmsley, best of luck with the unicorn weather and a unicorn day.
Walmsley: Thanks so much.
