Bonneville Shoreline Trail Marathon 2013 Report

In its 14th year, BoSho (we have more or less given up on calling it the Bonneville Shoreline Trail Marathon because nobody else does) saw a record 128 starters and a record 104 finishers. Course conditions and weather were ideal, resulting in 32 runners finishing in under 5 hours. Ben Lewis joined the small number of all time sub-4 hour finishers with an impressive 3:54:15 time. Collin Anderson narrowly missed joining that club at 4:00:26. Kevin Shilling ran third in 4:08:15, then turned around and won the Zion 100K the following week. Nicely done. Always impressive, Emily Sullivan was the first woman finisher in 4:31:10, followed by Bethany Lewis in 4:35:31, who then turned around and scored a Trans-Zion FKT the following week (read about it here). Nancy Russell finished third and can undoubtedly sympathize with Collin, having finished in 5:00:45. Apparently 16 miles of the BoSho course is the perfect training run for coming in second in the Zion 100K, which both Suzanne Lewis and Greg Norrander accomplished. Congratulations to both on great runs at Zion.

This year saw some firsts, including an early start time at 6:00 for those who might take longer or who needed to get to a soccer game. There was also one 5:00 starter, presumably getting acclimated to the mid-summer 5 a.m. ultra starts. As a completely informal and unorganized event, every result is duly recorded for posterity, including a new event record of 1 mile by Anatoliy Zharkikh. At the other end of the spectrum, Jeff Bertot ran 15 miles just to get to the starting line.

Sincere thanks to those who pitched in to help this happen, including everybody who contributed food and drink for aid stations. John Evans from Petzl contributed two headlamps for aid station volunteers Tony Dearcos and Darcie Mueller, who did a superb job at Morris Meadow. Charlie Vincent also pitched in at the Morris Meadow aid station, as did Carter Williams, who also helped mark the course Saturday morning. Thanks also to John Wells for deflagging the northwest loop of the course and smoothing the rails with the waterworks folks, and thanks also to the waterworks folks for not shutting us down. Once again when sweeping the course Sunday morning, I saw zero litter even arguably related to the event, although the same cannot be said of the individual who appears to have taken up residence near the lower reaches of Uncle F.

What would you do if you threw a party and nobody came? Thanks to the support of  the local running community we’ve never had to answer that question. Thank you for coming out, and we look forward to seeing you next year for the 15th running.

John, Dan, Brian, Bob