Welcome back or welcome to. Welcome back or welcome to the single track podcast. I'm your host,

Finn Melanson, and in this episode, we're joined by Katie Shide ahead of the 2023 Western States 100.

Before we get started, though, this episode is brought to you by Hoka, Morton, Rabbit, and Features.

Head to the show notes page of this episode for discount codes and new product

releases from each of these four sponsors. With that, let's get started. Katie Shod, it's a pleasure

to have you back on the single track podcast. Yeah, always good to see you guys. So going back a

little bit in time a year ago, maybe a little bit less nine months, you won

UTMB and in that moment you earn a golden ticket for Western States, how long did you have to

think about that opportunity before saying yes to Western States this coming Saturday?

Well, I think my bib number kind of gives it away because I'm the first non-S-4M

BIF number, so I'm number 11.

So it was not that long.

Has Western States been a race that had been on your radar that you wanted to uh compete in for

a long time yeah um i definitely had been like eyeing it but had sort of been something kind of on

the to-do list like yeah maybe sometime in the future um what yeah what complicated it was just that it

it is complicated to get a spot um like a spot you can count on outside of the lottery so

what makes it hard what made it hard before was that there weren't any, as far as I understood, there

weren't any like golden ticket races other than UT&B that weren't like in the American

desert in the early spring.

And yeah, I wasn't really ready to just like totally put an X through skiing and then try to go for a golden ticket and then not be sure to get it.

And yeah, it just seemed like an enormous commitment of the entire year to try to get a ticket.

So, yeah, I would just kind of put it on the back burner.

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