by It’s midday on a warm winter’s day on Monday and Camille Herron is sleeping. She is lying on a cot in a tent next to a flat dirt track. Lined with palm trees and white stone and desert grass, it meanders two and a half miles along the lip of a large olive-green lake. Over the lake, towers a screen of steep mountains covered in bush scrub. It’s one option among many in California’s Coachella Valley and the location for Lululemon’s MORE event, an opportunity for 10 select women to run as far as they can in six days.
It’s the penultimate day, and his sleep is getting long – five hours – and the timer near the line is ticking – and Herron has less than 24 hours to run 48 miles . If she can do it, she will break a record that has stood for more than thirty years.
Related: ‘These races are epic’: why ultrarunning is so popular
Once the gold standard of what people could endure on foot, the race is six days ahead of both trail races and the modern marathon. In the 19th century, thousands of spectators came to watch these “pedestrians” walk six days – in the Empire Skating Rink at the PT Barnum Hippodrome, where the Met Life Building is now in lower Manhattan, and in fairs across the States United. They were very popular in Europe and America, and they brought better and challengers and diversity. The first six-day race for women was held in Chicago in 1876. According to Davy Crockett of the Ultrarunning History website, “more than 300 women” competed in these nearly week-long events in the 19th century. In 1880 a Haitian immigrant, Frank Hart, “daunted the audience in New York’s Madison Square Garden” when he completed 565 miles in six days. He walked away with $21,567, about $679,000 in today’s money.
Then came accusations of cheating, poisoning, bike lifting, and the ultimate death knell, baseball. The 1980s saw a boom in timed ultramarathons and the men’s six-day record was broken for the first time in a century. But it seemed a high water mark had been reached. No one has come close to Yiannis Kouros’ 645 miles in 1988 and Sandy Barwick’s 549 miles in 1990, the men’s and women’s records respectively. “Their record is resistant to successors,” says former Trans-America race director Jesse Riley.
Then in 2015, a lanky 5ft 9in runner from Norman, Oklahoma burst onto the ultramarathon scene. With an odd gait, a wide smile, and an eccentric personality, Herron, a 2:37 marathoner, began an unprecedented streak. In 2017, she became the third American to win the Comrades Marathon, a storied 55-mile race in South Africa, and in 2023 won the Spartathalon, a 153-mile ultramarathon in Greece. She is the first athlete, male or female, to win both. That same year, she logged 270 miles around a 400m track in Bruce, Australia. She did so in 48 hours, not only bettering her own mark but becoming the first woman to hold an overall American record – for men and women – in distance running.
When the MORE event started last Wednesday, Herron was already the holder of multiple world records from 50 to 250 miles. A small crowd gathered under four towers of stage lights and rows of orange and white tents. The 42-year-old was in shades, a water bottle stuffed in the crotch of his shorts. On the first day, she chugged a Coke float and ran 133 miles. Day two, she cut back on tacos and added another 113 miles. On March 8 International Women’s Day, she broke the American road record for women 48 times. More would follow.
Every time Herron broke a record, she held her arms out wide, her hands pointing to the sky as if to say, “isn’t this incredible?” Since she is openly passionate about what she does, she is sometimes a target in the running community. His pre-race whimsical mantra of “let the magic happen” only adds to that. But it’s hard to argue with the numbers. And the numbers and records kept piling up: new 300km mark, 48 hour American road record, new 300 mile road record, women’s 500km world record, women’s 500 mile. When she finished second, she danced around the starting line in pink compression stockings, celebrating with high fives and hugs.
But the six day mark was still out there – Barwick, 1990, 549 miles. As Herron slept through the day on Monday, questions about running Facebook forums and groups began to emerge. “Lap ball!” written by ultrarunning veteran and stats master Mike Dobies. “Did she save enough for the final push?”
The pressure comes at 2.30 in the evening. Herron is moving and moving and will soon welcome cooler air and more miles at night. But after a few loops, she is off course again. Rest in peace again. “Run the routine,” she says to herself: Run, eat, hydrate, sleep, and repeat. But it’s getting harder to do any of that now. As Christian Griffith once said of his run across America, the goal is “too close for too far.”
Down is now 40 miles in 18 hours, and Herron is up and moving, recording a mile in 15 minutes; for her, speed of walking, slogan of death. Then another stop. She is now in the realm of uncertainty that the late Ultra Daily News called ultrarunner Al Howie: “She’s dying … she’s back from the dead … she won’t make it.”
Throughout the night she keeps up the fight and at 3.30am Herron crosses the invisible threshold: 550 miles, a new world record, the Biggy, the six days. However, the International Ultrarunners Association, which sanctions the six-day race, does not award any marks over a 48-hour world record run. In the phraseology of the IAU, its meaning is simply ‘best’.
Herron quickly takes the stairs, and praise flies fast and furious. “It was just a matter of time,” says Trishul Cherns, head of the World Organization of Multi-Day Ultramarathoners, an organization that tracks actual running statistics. “Camille’s performance has proven that women entering the game can compete on an equal footing with men.” Crockett says she is “the greatest female racer of all time, on tracks and roads.” And Barwick, the New Zealander who broke her record or “best” or what Herron has achieved, says she is “surprised at her speed. A fantastic performance, so encouraging and inspiring to all the athletes.”
But Herron isn’t done. As the sun rises over the Santa Rosa Mountains, she lifts herself to her feet again. One more pressure. One more loop, then two, three. She reaches 900km, another record, then it’s over. Subsequently 11 world records have been recognized by GOMU and the best performance in the world by the IAU. Either way, read the numbers on the LED screen 560.3 miles clear. There is one word above in each cap: MORE.
