Tommie Runz Is Running Western States. He's Running It for Everyone Who Thinks They Don't Belong There.

Western States has a look. If you've been to the race or followed it for any amount of time, you know what that look is. It skews older, it skews white, it skews people who have been in the mountains their whole lives. That's not a criticism. It's just what it is. And it's exactly why what Tommie Runz is doing at this year's race matters beyond the finish line.

Tommie is a dad, a runner, and someone who built one of the most genuine presences in running before he ever needed it to pay his bills. He qualified for Boston, ran the six majors, logged four hundred and twenty-five miles in May alone, and has spent the last several years quietly becoming someone the running world pays attention to. Now he's lining up at one of the most competitive hundred-mile races in the world with a message that's simple enough to put on a shirt.

Black skin looks good on trail.

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Tommie is clear that his mission isn't to tell people to go run a hundred miles. It's not that prescriptive. It's more of an invitation — a door left open for anyone who has ever looked at a race like Western States and assumed it wasn't for them. If he can make it to Olympic Valley and toe that start line, maybe someone else sees that and goes to find a trail near them. Not Auburn, California. Not the Sierras. Just outside. Just somewhere that isn't the same sidewalk they've always been on.

He posted a photo from Big Alta a while back with a simple caption — black skin looks good on trail — and the response told him everything he needed to know. DMs from people who had gone out and found a trail for the first time. Tags from runners who credited him with getting them outside. That's the whole point. Not the podium. The door.

Tommie has been working with his coach Melissa since 2018. That's seven years of building, adjusting, and trusting a process that most people would have abandoned or overridden long before now. Four hundred and twenty-five miles in May didn't feel dramatic to him because it wasn't. It just happened. He kept running the miles she gave him and looked up one day and that's where they were.

He went to the Western States training camp a few weeks before this conversation, ran thirty-one miles of the course across three days, and came back with a clear head and a lot of curiosity. The vibe was different than he expected — collaborative, welcoming, people out there just because they love the race, not because they needed to prove anything. He would have liked it ten or fifteen degrees hotter to really feel what race day is going to be like in the canyons, but the work got done.

The most interesting part of this conversation is how Tommie talks about what he actually wants to find out at Western States. Not a time goal. Not a placement. He wants to know how patient he can be. He wants to see if sixty miles of conservative running is something he can sustain when the excitement and the nerves and the crowd are all pulling him to go faster than he should.

He references a story from The Alchemist — the one about carrying a spoon of oil through a castle without spilling it while still actually seeing the castle. The point being that if you hold the goal too tight, you miss everything around it. And if you're only watching the spoon, you come back with nothing. He's trying to carry both. Go into the race with a goal, hold it loosely enough to stay curious, and trust that the training is baked correctly.

He's been to enough races where he squeezed the goal too hard and came out the other side feeling like he missed it. Western States is too big and too rare to do that. He wants to run it the way you'd want to live a hard thing — present, patient, and genuinely curious about what happens next.

Tommie had a day job until February of last year. Most of the audience that follows him was built while he didn't need a single partnership to pay his rent. That matters more than people realize. He wasn't making decisions based on what he needed. He was making them based on what he believed. And when you do that long enough, trust compounds in a way that's very hard to manufacture later.

He talks about brand partnerships the same way he talks about training — patience, alignment, doing the work before you ask anyone to believe you. He won't tell you a shoe is good if he hasn't run enough miles in it to know. He won't take a deal that asks him to be someone he isn't. And he won't call something the best if he's not willing to stand behind that when the next shoe shows up.

The goal is to be the kind of person whose presence in a shoe means something. Not because he said the right words but because you've watched him train in it all year and you trust that if it were trash he'd have moved on by now.

Western States is a hundred miles from Squaw Valley to Auburn. The canyons get brutally hot. The climbs are relentless. The runners who do well there tend to be the ones who go out conservative, stay curious, and solve problems as they come rather than forcing a plan that stops making sense at mile forty.

That sounds a lot like how Tommie approaches most things.

He's not going in thinking about winning. He's going in thinking about finishing, about representing, about what it means to cross that line and post that photo and let someone who looks like him see it and think — maybe that trail near me is worth checking out. Maybe I belong out there too.

That's the finish line he's actually running toward.

🎧 Listen to the full episode with Tommie Runz on For The Long Run wherever you get your podcasts.

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Jon is a runner, cyclist, and podcast host from Boston, MA, who now lives in Boulder, CO. For The Long Run is aimed at exploring the why behind what keeps runners running long, strong, and motivated.

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