IN THE SUMMER of 2024, runner and coach David Roche made a stunning announcement. He’d won a slot in the Leadville Trail 100 Mile, one of the oldest and most iconic races in the sport of Ultramarathon, which includes any race over 26.2 miles.
Not only is Leadville one of the most storied races, but it also had one of the oldest course records, which many people believe was unbeatable. But Roche was not one of them. He said he could beat the nearly two decade-old time of 15 hours, 42 minutes and 59 seconds.
The announcement was shocking for many reasons, but one stood out: Roche had never raced a hundred miles.
There were many doubters, including Roche himself. “I was so full of doubt and questioning,” he says now. “I had no idea if it was actually possible. But I knew based on the numbers that I could put out that if I was able to execute the way I thought could, then not only was the record possible, it could go down by a substantial margin.”
There were several reasons for Roche’s confidence. Ultrarunning is witnessing a number of innovations that are pushing times down: New carbon-plated trail shoes, advances in understanding the benefits of heat training, and the adoption of consuming sodium bicarbonate by elite runners to name a few.
But one innovation has garnered the most attention: The growing use of a “high carb” approach to training and racing, a tactic that started in cycling and is now moving into the rest of the endurance world, including ultrarunning.
Roche, as a coach and a runner, is one of high-carb’s leading proponents, and at Leadville he planned to consume between 120 to 140 grams of carbohydrates—around 500 calories—per hour. When he looked at his spreadsheet, it predicted he would be the record by more than 15 minutes.
THE START LINE of one of ultrarunning’s most legendary races was, by some measures, an unlikely place for Roche to end up. He grew up in farming country on the eastern shore of Maryland. In high school he played football, weighed in at 200 pounds, and even played for Columbia University, where he studied environmental science. But after his freshman year, he quit football and started biking and running. He never imagined himself as a ultrarunner
“I used to think that my best event would be 800 meters and anything above that, I would get progressively worse, because I come from a football background. I always assumed it wasn’t going to be my skill set.”
After college, when Roche moved to North Carolina to study environmental law at Duke University, he started running on the trails around Durham. He also met his wife Megan, who was studying neuroscience and playing field hockey. The two started frequenting the trails around the city together and both got more into running. Roche started doing trail races, and started coaching. In 2018, after Megan finished her medical program at Stanford, the two moved to Boulder, Colorado, where they both coach full time.
Roche had always advised his athletes to “shoot their shot” and go for big goals. But life was catching up. The couple had their first son in 2022, and time was slipping by. So in early 2023, Megan gave him a wakeup call. “She was like ‘David look: You’re 35 and who knows how many years you have at the top level. Start to do what you say and shoot your shot.”
That April Roche signed up for the Canyons 100k in Auburn, California, which is a “Golden Ticket” race for the Western States 100 Mile, the most prestigious race in ultrarunning. The race went well, until he took a gel from an aid station that didn’t agree with him. He immediately vomited, then couldn’t keep anything down and ended up walking for six miles, finishing in fifth place. He knew he needed to figure out exactly what nutrition would work.
At the time, Roche was reading about, and experimenting with, higher levels of carbohydrate intake which had become standard in elite cycling, even though it was assumed that the body could only process 60 to 90 grams per hour. More fuel allows you to sustain a higher effort for longer.
Trying different gels and drink mixes, he pushed his carbs up to 120, 130 and 140 grams per hour. And in December of 2023, he entered the McDowell Mountain Frenzy 50 Miler and won. By the summer of 2024, he was ready for the Silver Rush 50 mile in Leadville.
He won by 25 minutes, and earned a slot in the Leadville 100 mile.
ROCHE KEPT TRAINING, both his legs and his stomach, taking in carbs at levels many regard as controversial. But even as he did, getting to the start line of Leadville was itself a kind of victory for other reasons.
In training, Roche only runs five days a week (and at lower mileage than most elite ultrarunners, with a focus on speed). Some days he rides his bike, which is what he was doing in April of 2024 when a car turned into him and sent him flying into a fence. He woke up with a concussion and a broken wrist. But as soon as he was recovered enough, he kept training (running with his arm in a sling) and keeping up the carbs.
“I trained like a competitive eater,” Roche says, learning to take in the amount of fluid and gels he’d need. “People in the competitive eating world actually practice with fluids, because they don’t want to eat hot dogs every day. So I would use fluids to practice the bloat and teach my body not to reject that amount, because I knew I’d have to take in up to 56 ounces per hour and not reject it.”
“I still had so much doubt about whether it was possible, or even a worthwhile goal to chase.”
By August, Roche was ready in his body. In his head, slightly less so.
“I still had so much doubt about whether it was possible or even a worthwhile goal to chase, with kids and work all the stuff going on,” he says now.
But Megan did want him to race, and so at 4 a.m. in Leadville, when the starting gun went off, he pushed those doubts aside and focused on the numbers. Not long after the start, he checked his heart rate.
“I knew how many calories-ish I burned at certain heart rates,” Roche says. “And when I looked at my heart rate, it was saying: ‘Look, you can go faster and still replace your calories.’ So a few miles into the race I was like, ‘All right, I guess it’s time to race now.”
Roche made a rule for himself that he had to run every step of the way, with no walking. He describes the race as “incredibly fun,” which is not something people usually say about 100-milers.
“We saw him at Twin Lakes (mile 40) the first time and he looked great,” says his pacer Teddy Bross. “When came back into Twin Lakes (mile 60), in all honesty, he looked about the same.”
Bross ran the last 40 miles with Roche, and says there was one touch-and-go moment on the “power lines” climb where Roche started getting nauseous. But he was able to slow down, breathe and get it under control. Then the two runners sped on.
“On flats and downhills, I think we were somewhere around seven minutes a mile,” says Bross. “We were cooking,”
As they approached the finish line, Roche’s gap over second place widened. By the time he crossed it, he’d beaten his own prediction by one minute.
His time of 15:26:34 beat the Leadville record by more than 16 minutes.
THERE ARE MANY opinions on the so-called “high carb revolution,” or “carb mania,” as Alex Hutchinson, author of Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, calls it.
“The high-carb stuff is very much an open question scientifically,” Hutchinson says, “There’s some logic, some anecdotes, and a tiny bit of data, but there are also lots of reasons to be skeptical. The thing with ultrarunning is that it’s pretty much impossible to run randomized trials where people do all-out hundred-milers over and over. Everyone is making some guesses and doing some self-experimentation, but some people are more willing to try longshots.”
Andy Jones-Wilkins, a coach who has been running ultras since the 1