Episode 51 - Davy Crockett | He Finished Dead Last. Then He Ran 110 Hundred-Milers

Davy Crockett finished his first fifty-mile race dead last, two seconds after the cutoff. He was in his mid-forties, a backpacker who had never heard of ultrarunning and thought he was inventing a new sport when people on Utah trails asked who he was running from. About 110 hundred-milers later, he still likes looking at that result.

Yes, that is his real name. His mother held it for him through the 1950s Davy Crockett craze. He went by Dave for years, then went back to Davy when he started racing, and a coonskin cap made sure people remembered it. A German legend he chased in those early years called him Beaver Boy.

In this conversation Davy tells Mark how a hike up Mount Timpanogos turned into an obsession, how he nearly quit the sport twice in his first year, and how a mentor turned it around by delivering his Bear 100 buckle to his office in front of his coworkers. He explains the training that let him run ten or more hundreds a year: one very long run every week and not much else. At 52 he won the Across the Years 48-hour with 187 miles after waking in his tent at two in the morning to the sound of other runners crossing the timing mat.

Davy is also ultrarunning's historian, the person who keeps the history of this sport. He maintains the list of runners with 100 or more hundred-mile finishes, now 39 people, and directs the American Ultrarunning Hall of Fame. For eight years he produced the Ultrarunning History podcast and then preserved it in 13 books. He tells the story of the Fort Riley soldiers who covered the Western States course on foot in 1972, two years before Gordy Ainsleigh, and takes Mark back to the six-day races of the 1870s and 1880s, when ten thousand people packed into New York to watch runners go for six days straight, bookmakers worked the stands, and a Black runner from Haiti named Frank Hart became one of the biggest sports stars in America.

He also explains why he thinks you should celebrate your DNFs, why he refused to give a 50-mile finish to a runner who quit his 100, and what he would tell someone near 60 who wants to start: go slow, walk every day, and get off the pavement.

For the full video conversation, head to the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel and subscribe.