By Davy Crockett 

Both a podcast episode and a full article

(Listen an old podcast episode too, with audio clips from some of the runners.)

 Early history of 100-milers

The sport of running 100 miles competitively has existed for multiple centuries. In the 1800s, the most prolific 100-mile runner was Frank Hart (1856-1908), a black runner from Boston, Massachusetts. He reached 100 miles in at least 85 of his races across his 25-year running career. Most of those races were six-day races where he usually ran far more than 300 miles.

In the modern era, by the mid-1970s, running 100 miles in competition started to become more available to anyone. Before 1980, no one ran dozens of 100-milers during their running career, only a handful of 100s. Ultrarunning legend Ted Corbitt (1919-2007) ran fewer than ten 100-milers.

By the end of 1999, a few prolific ultrarunners had piled up 100-mile race finishes. Richard and Sandra Brown of England were way out in front with 87 and 82, reaching 100 miles in both running and walking events. Ray Krolewicz of South Carolina was next with about 60 100-mile finishes to his name. Don Choi, the prolific multi-day runner from San Francisco, had more than 40 100-mile finishes but had retired from 100-mile running in 1997 at the age of 48. The world's greatest, Yiannis Kouros had an estimated 40 100-milers, most of them wins. As the decades passed, in 2025, there were 37 talented ultrarunners who had achieved 100 100 milers in organized races. Who are they?

Recent News:

Mark Tanaka, age 59 in 2026, of Hayward, California, who finished his 100th race of at least 100 miles on February 28, 2026, at the Grandmaster Ultras in Littlefield, Arizona. He became the 37th person in the world to reach this milestone.

During his emergency medicine residency in Chicago in the early 2000s, Mark ran several road marathons and completed the Chicago Lakefront 50k twice. Upon moving back to the Bay Area for his first job as an attending physician, his transition into endurance sports was rocky; in his first two months, he visited emergency departments as a patient after attempting his first Ironman-distance triathlon and his first 50-mile trail run. Once he mastered his sodium management, however, he fell in love with ultrarunning. The sport provided an essential outlet for the often extreme stresses of his medical career.

Mark finished his first 100-miler in September 2005 at Rio del Lago. Despite arriving at registration having to ask fellow runners what to put in his unprepared drop bags, he finished in under 21 hours. Since then, a third of his finishes have been sub-24-hour efforts. His fastest time came at the 2007 Kettle Moraine, which he won in 16:28:25. He is equally proud of his DFL finishes (last) at the Tahoe Rim Trail (2006, 2022) and HURT 100 (2011). His accolades include being the first runner to earn one (and then two) of each of the three tiered buckles at Tahoe Rim Trail, as well as earning all three buckle tiers at Angeles Crest. He also considers himself fortunate to have finished Hardrock in both directions, given his disproportionate struggles with high altitude as a sea-level dweller.

The final push to reach 100 finishes before his 60th birthday and full-time retirement involved a grueling stretch of 25 100-milers in 25 months. This period included numerous loop races, which were logistically simpler but no less demanding. Having reached the century mark, Mark looks forward to a more balanced mix of distances and combining racing with extended foreign travel. Retiring in the coming year will finally allow him to compete without the burden of clearing a hospital call schedule or recovering from adventures during busy clinical shifts.

 

The 100x100 Club

Determining how many 100-mile+ race finishes a person has is a hard task because there is no official list and no single database has a complete list of results.