Meet the Mammoths; Devon Yanko!

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Meet the Mammoths — Devon Yanko: Twenty Years In, and Her First 200

Today's guest has been racing at the front of this sport for the better part of two decades. She's run Western States multiple times, kept winning races through a lupus diagnosis, moved up to altitude outside Salida, Colorado, and won the Tarawera Ultra in New Zealand outright this year. She has never run an official 200-mile race. That changes this October.

Devon Yanko joins us to explain how crewing Heather Jackson at Cocodona led directly to her pulling over on the side of the road an hour outside Flagstaff to email Tim Tollefson and sign up for Mammoth — right after deciding she'd never do anything like it. She talks about what she learned watching Heather's race up close, why adaptability beats a perfect plan, and how tearing a tendon at mile six of Scout Mountain 100 turned into the best possible rehearsal for a 200.

We also get into sleep — she's a self-described terrible sleeper who's never taken a dirt nap and has never hallucinated — plus a 2016 Western States chair, an hour lost, and the lesson she's been practicing for ten years since.

And then there's basketball. Devon owns one of the coveted MBA jerseys from Mingus, and it turns out there's a very good reason for that: she played Division I basketball at Fresno State, and won her state's three-point shooting contest as a high school senior, beating a future WNBA player. We're comfortable calling her the best basketball player in ultrarunning.

In this episode:

Mammoth 200 kicks off Friday, October 2nd in Mammoth Lakes, California — 214 miles around a 760,000-year-old caldera, bookended by two summits of Mammoth Mountain. Catch live coverage on the Mountain Outpost YouTube channel, and follow @Mammoth200 for updates and tracking throughout the race.