Getting In · Coveted ultra
Triple Crown of 200s
Bigfoot 200 through the Mount St. Helens blast zone in August. Tahoe 200 around the entire lake in September. Moab 240 through canyon country in October. Roughly 640 miles and 100,000 feet of climbing, inside three months.
- Total distance
- ~640 mi
- Races
- Bigfoot 200Tahoe 200, Moab 240
- Window
- August to October
- Gap between
- 3 to 6 weeks
- Total climbing
- ~100,000 ft
- Finishers
- A handful per year
Destination Trail created the modern 200 mile race and then created the challenge of doing all three in one year. Each event on its own is a multi-day undertaking with sleep stations and a 100+ hour cutoff. Doing them consecutively means the recovery between races is the actual event: three to six weeks to repair 200 miles of damage before starting again.
- Bigfoot 200: Washington, roughly 206 miles through the Mount St. Helens blast zone and old-growth forest. The most remote and the most technical.
- Tahoe 200: a circumnavigation of Lake Tahoe at altitude on the Tahoe Rim Trail. Runnable and beautiful, with the altitude never letting up.
- Moab 240: the longest, hottest, and coldest, in canyon country.
How to get in
- Open entryEnter all three
Each race has its own registration and each fills. There is no combined entry: you register for three separate events and the Triple Crown is recognised when you finish all three in the same year.
- Time qualifierQualifying résumé
Each race requires an appropriate ultra background. Realistically, nobody should attempt this without multiple 200 mile finishes already.
The recovery is the event
- Weeks 1-2 after each race: essentially nothing. Walking, eating, sleeping. Runners who train in this window are the ones who don't finish the next one.
- Feet are cumulative. Damage from race one is still present at race three. Aggressive foot care and shoe rotation across the whole summer.
- Eat far more than feels reasonable. Caloric deficits from a 200 take weeks to repair and compound across the series.
- Get bloodwork. Iron and inflammatory markers after multi-day efforts are genuinely informative and worth acting on.
- Protect sleep. The single strongest predictor of whether the third race goes well.
Questions runners actually ask
How many people finish the Triple Crown of 200s?
A handful per year. Entry into all three is achievable; completing them in a single season is a very small club.
Which of the three is hardest?
Most finishers name Bigfoot for terrain and remoteness, and Moab for the temperature swing and the fact that it comes last.
Go to the source
Entry rules, dates, standards, fees, and odds change every single year, and the interesting races change them the most. Use this guide to build the plan; use the official site to confirm the details before you book anything.
If this is your kind of thing
Need the races in between? The hard part of a bucket list year is everything else on the calendar: the qualifier, the tune-up, the long run with a bib on.