Coastal Trail Ultramarathon Caps Entries in Under Three Hours
The race's reputation for brutal stairs and generous aid stations continues to outrun its permit limits.
Entries for the Coastal Trail Ultramarathon closed in two hours and forty-one minutes, organizers said, the fastest sellout in the event's twelve-year history and nearly three times quicker than last spring.
All 620 slots — 480 for the 50-kilometer distance and 140 for the shorter 24K — were gone before lunch on the first Saturday of April. Race director Corwin Ashby said the registration server logged just under 4,200 unique visitors in the opening ten minutes, a load that briefly pushed the queue past eleven minutes and generated, by his count, forty-three emails of varying politeness.
"We planned for a busy morning," Ashby said. "We did not plan for the entire waiting room to arrive at 8:00:04."
The course stacks driftwood beaches, bluff stairs, and a muddy forest section that veterans simply call "the apology." Total elevation gain is listed at 6,340 feet, most of it accumulated in short violent doses rather than long climbs: the Ferrand Stairs alone contribute 412 steps at mile 19, and the beach traverse between miles 8 and 12 offers no firm footing at all unless the tide cooperates.
Permit caps remain firm after past overcrowding complaints from hikers.
The caps come from the shoreline conservancy that manages the bluff corridor, which since 2021 has limited event traffic to 700 participants per calendar year across all races on the trail. The Ultramarathon's 620 leaves almost no room for anything else, a fact that has strained relations with two smaller local events that lost their permits in 2024.
Conservancy stewardship coordinator Ruth Vandermeer defended the number without much apology. "The trail has one tread and it is eighteen inches wide in places," she said. "We counted 190 hiker complaints in 2019 and eleven reports of people stepping off-trail into nesting habitat to let runners pass. The cap is not a negotiating position."
## The lottery question
A lottery for next year is under consideration, a cultural shift for a race that prized first-come purity. Ashby said the board is split, and he was candid that he is not certain which side he is on.
The argument for a lottery is straightforward: a sellout measured in minutes rewards whoever has the fastest connection and a free Saturday morning, which in practice favors runners in town over runners two ferry hours up the coast. The argument against is that the current system, for all its brutality, is legible. Everyone knows what happened and why.
Ida Coburn, who has run the 50K nine times and finished eight, made the case for leaving it alone. "A lottery means I might not run this race for three years running through no fault of my own," she said. "Right now I set an alarm. That is a thing I control. I would rather be beaten by my own slow typing than by a random number."
A hybrid model — half the field by lottery, half first-come, with a guaranteed entry after two consecutive rejections — is on the table for the June board meeting. Ashby said any change would be announced by August 1 to give people time to plan travel.
## Real food and search-and-rescue
Aid stations are known for real food rather than gels alone. Station 4, at the top of the stairs, has run the same menu since 2017: boiled potatoes with flaked salt, quartered oranges, broth, and a covered tray of grilled cheese cut into squares. Volunteers went through 90 pounds of potatoes last year and, according to the station captain, exactly one bag of commercial energy chews.
The volunteer roster is the race's other constraint. Roughly 240 people work the course, most of them recruited through the trail club and the two high school cross-country programs, and Ashby said the number has been essentially flat for four years while entries have climbed.
Search-and-rescue volunteers will again staff the high bluff segment on race morning, positioned at the two points where the trail runs within six feet of an unprotected edge. The team has been called on eleven times in twelve editions, most often for hypothermia in the back half of the field rather than for falls. Two evacuations in 2023 required a litter carry of just under a mile.
Local gear shops report a spike in trail-shoe fittings. Sten Okonkwo, who has fitted runners at a Harbor Street shop for six years, said the week after registration is reliably his busiest of the year, and that he spends most of it talking people out of shoes with too little lug depth for the forest section.
Weather remains the wild card. The race has been shortened twice, both times for surf on the beach traverse rather than for rain, and the contingency reroute adds 2.1 miles of gravel road that veterans describe with less affection than they describe the apology.
Ashby keeps a laminated card in his jacket with the cutoff times written on it. He has pulled 34 runners at the mile-32 checkpoint over the years, and he says he remembers the face of every one. On race morning he will stand at that checkpoint at 4:15 p.m. with a stopwatch and a clipboard, and at 4:16 he will start turning people around, including — as happened in 2022 — the woman who had driven nine hours and missed it by ninety seconds.
Reporting for this story was prepared for The Harbor Ledger’s sports desk. Tips:newsroom@theharborledger.com