Scott Cooper had been running in the Rocky Mountains south of Calgary for 38 hours when he began to hallucinate.
It was midnight.
Bushes on the edge of the trail appeared as coiled snakes. He ignored them and kept going. Then he saw a woman walking a dog across the trail in front of him who floated up into the sky.
Mr. Cooper, one of the top ultramarathon trail runners in Canada, knew the inaugural Divide 200 – a 200-mile race held last September – was going to be a challenge, but this was something else.
Maybe he should get some rest at the next aid station, he briefly thought. Instead, he kept running. Not only did he complete the race, he won, crossing the finish line nearly 12 hours after the hallucinations began. He ran the 200 miles in exactly 49 hours, 47 minutes and 59 seconds.
Imagine running from Toronto to North Bay. Or from downtown Vancouver to Whistler, turning around and running back, and then continuing on for another 80 kilometres. Could you do it in under 50 hours? Could you do it at all? Or does even the thought of it make you collapse on the couch?
Mr. Cooper’s nine wins in the 14 races he has completed in the six years since he took up ultramarathon trail running is proof enough that he is not like you and me.
On Friday, the 36-year-old Everett, Ont., native will take that experience to Chamonix, France, where for the first time in his career he will join the world’s best 2,300 trail runners to compete in the sport’s Super Bowl, the UTMB Mont-Blanc. The 170-kilometre race with a total elevation gain higher than Mount Everest is regarded as one of the most challenging trail runs on the planet.
Preparing for the race, and competing in it, means not just accepting, but properly adjusting to his sport’s most basic, punishing fact, Mr. Cooper says.
“You’ve got to be ready to suffer.”
Long-distance running has always been an ideal metaphor for overcoming hardship thanks to its one-foot-in-front-of-the-other simplicity. “I have learned that there is no failure in running, or in life, as long as you keep moving,” American marathoner Amby Burfoot, winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon, once said.
Ultramarathons – defined as any race longer than the 42.2-kilometre length of a regular marathon – have become the extreme test of that maxim.
Typically, ultras are between 50 and 160 kilometres, but some go beyond even that: The longest certified foot race in the world is the aptly named Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race, held each year in New York.
Ultra running traces its beginnings to the 1970s, around the time Nike was popularizing the mass appeal of running, with California’s Western States Endurance Run among the first and most famous races.
They are meant to be difficult. Western States, a 100-mile race through the Sierra Nevada Mountains that must be completed within 24 hours, was originally done on horseback. In 1974, a runner named Gordy Ainsleigh showed up at the race on foot. He didn’t win, but he managed to complete the course in just under 21 hours.
The Barkley Marathons, a gruelling 100-mile race in Tennessee with a 60-hour time limit, has seen only 20 runners finish the race since it was established in 1986. The course is so difficult that in some years, of the 40 runners who start the race, only one manages to reach the finish line.
The very real prospect that a runner may not finish an ultramarathon is part of the challenge.
For example, at last year’s Canadian Death Race, a 118-kilometre slugfest through the Rockies, of the 286 runners who started, only 173 finished – a completion rate of just over 60 per cent.
The finishing rate at France’s UTMB Mont-Blanc is about the same. Last year, 1,758 runners completed the race; 931 did not.
An ultramarathon that is easy to finish is not a good ultramarathon.
“We don’t want to do things that are easy. We do things that are going to push you,” says Brian Gallant, owner and director of Sinister Sports, the company that operates the Death Race and Divide 200, among other races.
“It’s meant to push you, break you down a little bit, beat you up and put you back together,” he says of ultra running.
For ultramarathon runner Dean Karnazes, the sport is a chance to confront pain head-on: 'There’s magic in misery.'Tom Pennington/Getty Images
The question ultra runners get asked most often is: Why do you do it?
The answer is simple, says Dean Karnazes, an American runner and author of the 2005 memoir Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner.
“Life is kind of easy these days. Convenient, if you will. We try to do everything we can do (to) avoid pain, and an ultramarathon is just the opposite,” he says. “There’s magic in misery. When you’re out there, you’re never more alive than when you’re out there struggling and suffering.”
If pushing yourself beyond your limits to see what you’re capable of is the reason for competing in ultras, the next question is: How do you do it?
Mr. Cooper is a good person to ask. A medical-science liaison with the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, he has won nine of the 14 ultra races he has completed since 2018. Before that, he spent six years competing in Ironman triathlons, winning his division at Ironman Canada in 2016, the same year he placed third in his division at the Ironman world championships.
Of course, there have been setbacks. At last year’s IAU Ultra Running 50-kilometre world championships in Hyderabad, India, Mr. Cooper had to drop out of the race halfway because of food poisoning.
In 2022, he was forced out of a 100-mile race in Alberta after he tripped and dislocated his shoulder.
Paulo Saldanha coached Mr. Cooper for several years when he was competing in triathlons and living in Montreal, where he earned his PhD in chemical engineering at McGill University.
“His biggest asset is probably his resilience and mental toughness,” Mr. Saldanha says. “His stamina and his endurance, combined with his resilience, both mental and physical, create this perfect storm of an ultra racer.”
At Scott Cooper's Calgary home, trophies on the windowsill remind him of past feats.
Mr. Cooper competed in his first short triathlon when he was 20 years old at the invitation of an uncle who was competing in one to raise money for charity.
From there, he progressed to the Ironman.
But he was beginning to fall out of love with the sport by the time he moved from Montreal to Calgary to work at a sports-technology company in the spring of 2018. He never really loved swimming, and the isolation of cycling training was beginning to wear on him.
In Calgary, he found not only gorgeous landscapes for running, but a welcoming community of fellow runners. New friends he met were doing a 100-mile relay race. When one of them had to drop out after suffering a stress fracture a week before the race, Mr. Cooper took their spot.
He’s never looked back.
Comfortable, durable shoes like the one in Mr. Cooper's collection are a must for ultra runners, but they can only do so much to offset the physical hardship.
The key to his success, he says, isn’t a simple matter of accepting suffering, but rather of giving the pain meaning.
Endurance athletes like Mr. Cooper are able to withstand pain for long stretches because they have honed a skill called cognitive restructuring, says Kim Dawson, a professor in sports psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University who has worked with many runners.
Essentially, it is a way of reframing negative thoughts or experiences.
For many runners, sustained pain is reason to quit; for others who are good at cognitive restructuring, it is proof of their strength and capabilities.
“First thing comes with acceptance – this is going to hurt,” Prof. Dawson says. “And then when it comes on, it’s the interpretation of ‘What does it mean?’ So I’m able to persevere through this, and it can build my confidence, because now I’ve demonstrated my resilience.”
Also central to Mr. Cooper’s ability to persevere is ignoring the enormity of the undertaking and instead breaking a race down to small, achievable goals, he says.
“If you think, ‘I have to get through the next 280 kilometres,’ it’s overwhelming,” he says. “You break it down into one little section at a time – just get around the next corner, or just make it to the next checkpoint where I can see my wife and the dog.”
These were the “tips and tricks” that helped him win the Divide 200, Mr. Cooper says.
“The most important thing that led to success on that day was I never thought about how far I still had to go.”
Mr. Cooper will need to rely on all his tips and tricks when he arrives at the starting line in France.
When the 170-kilometre race was first held in 2003, it was known as the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc. In 2023, it was renamed the UTMB World Series Finals.
The route that takes runners through France, Italy and Switzerland is regarded by many as the pinnacle of ultra trail running. It has a total elevation gain of more than 10,000 metres – nearly 1,200 more than Mount Everest’s peak. Most runners will have to run through two nights to complete the race.
If all goes well, Mr. Cooper is hoping to finish in the top 10. He is ranked among the top 1 per cent of UTMB runners. No Canadian has ever won the event.
Courtney Dauwalter celebrates at the finish line at last year's UTMB in Chamonix. She and fellow American Jim Walmsley were the top female and male finishers. No Canadian has yet claimed either title.Jeff Pachoud/AFP via Getty Images
As punishing as the uphill stretches of the race can be, it is often the descents that are the hardest on a runner’s legs, says Alberta’s Ailsa MacDonald, who finished seventh among female runners last year.
“If you hammer the downs too much and you wreck your quads early on, the downs can be very painful,” she says.
But as much as the race is a physical challenge, it is a mental test more than anything, she says.
In 2021, she dropped out of the race after running for 18 hours because she was not mentally prepared to keep running for what she estimated to be another eight hours.
“I just couldn’t fathom spending that much more time on my feet. It was the first time I had ever had a mental block like that.”
Chris McNamara, at right with Ailsa MacDonald, is Mr. Cooper's friend and running partner. 'Both of us have very positive, upbeat personalities,' Mr. Cooper says.
Helping Mr. Cooper stay positive will be the company of his friend and running partner Chris McNamara.
The two qualified for the race earlier this year thanks to top-10 finishes at a 100-mile event in California that featured cold weather, rain and water almost knee-deep on some parts of the trail.
At one point, Mr. Cooper had dislocated his shoulder – again – and Mr. McNamara was vomiting. But as they carried on running, they kept things light by cracking jokes and telling stories.
“Both of us have very positive, upbeat personalities,” Mr. Cooper says.
Accepting hardship is the key to being a good ultra runner, Mr. McNamara says. “A lot of it has to do with just knowing that things are probably going to go wrong and being okay with that.”
Still, if nothing too terrible happens, Mr. Cooper believes a top-10 finish is possible. But ultimately, he’ll consider the biggest race of his life a success if he can push himself to the limit.
“The No. 1 goal is to finish the race and be able to walk away from that finish line and say that I laid it all out there and got as much as I possibly could from the experience.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Ailsa MacDonald’s name.
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