There’s something magnetic about firsts. Not the kind that marks a first personal milestones, like a first kiss or a first finish line. I mean first editions of new ultras: the inaugural race. The one that no one has run before, and in the end, no matter how many times the race returns, no one else will run it quite experience the same again. There are no race reports to go off, no shaky YouTube footage or Strava uploads, no benchmarks or times that give you an indication of splits. No warnings or someone to tell you which parts are really runnable. Just an open invitation of many unknowns.

That’s what draws me to new races, and to the SOO 200, Eastern Canada’s first 200-miler, this past week: initially a big traverse from Agawa Canyon Park to Sault Ste. Marie (pronounced “Soo”, hence SOO 200), sewn together with singletrack, ATV ruts, old logging roads, and a deep commitment to swamps. A part of Canada I had not set foot in.

This is Sault Ste. Marie and the Algoma region: glacial stone and conifer forests, lichen-covered granite, trails that look like they were drawn by a drunk cartographer and then left to rot. What’s passable in October might be underwater by July. What looks like crown land might, in fact, be leased by a corporation that doesn’t know (or care) what a 200-miler is.

I signed up immediately, probably within a week of the race announcement. It was meant to be my bonus race for the year. A curious victory lap of sorts. But the training never materialized. A lingering knee trouble meant I didn’t get moving well until five weeks out. By then, the decision had already been made for me. When the original point-to-point course fell through due to permit problems, the revised version, stitched together with loops, repeats, and stubby out-and-backs. It just “didn’t speak to me” anymore. I didn’t want to chase mileage for the sake of numbers. I wanted the envisioned journey.

When organizers talk about “working with stakeholders,” it usually sounds sanitized. What they don’t say is that sometimes your key land partner doesn’t actually own the land. Or that someone, no one will say who, is quietly calling other landowners to convince them to pull out…? Or that the government department who approved your trail use last week has suddenly gone silent, and you’re one missed email away from losing 40 kilometers of route.

Unfamiliar land comes with unfamiliar rules. Brian, Kevin, Wanda, and the crew, had to learn the land like locals without being locals. They had to read the place, without the history or shortcuts that locals carry. That means more than plotting GPS coordinates. It means knowing which forest roads might work, which footbridges were repaired last year (or weren’t), and which people quietly gatekeep the trail systems. 

It means navigating the social topography of a place, who really holds influence, which calls get returned, and how much you can push before someone says no forever. Organizing a race like this means you’re always reading two landscapes: one physical, the other political. Race organizers are usually the ones in control, directing logistics, timing, volunteers, risks. In unknown territory, they don’t set the terms. Control is a mirage. They are not the conductor. They take the hit when a key section gets revoked two months out and the vision you’ve built is suddenly unviable. You can design the perfect course on paper, but paper isn’t land, and it sure isn’t permission.

Yet, there’s also a kind of audacity. You can’t just roll over every time a landowner ghosts you. You fight for your weird dream. You find another way in. You reroute. There’s something stubborn and luminous in the way a race persists. You don’t just fold because a phone call doesn’t come back. You rethread the map. You add something else.

Maybe you lose the iconic coastal stretch, but gain King Mountain, and now everyone climbs to a hidden hut in the dark to earn a race coin they’ll carry for life. That’s the paradox of hosting a race in someone else’s backyard: you’re both outsider and architect. You build a relationship with the land and the people who know it best. You build a race that people want to return to, most of all the volunteers. You don’t own the place, but you shape how others meet it. You build a race that belongs. And the best races don’t just belong on the land, they belong to the land.

When races reroute or reformat due to whatever issue (be it permitting, weather, inexperience) those journey shifts. If it shifts too far, you lose what drew runners in. That’s part of what soured the SOO experience for me. I signed up for the version that made a geographical, visual, emotional, and aesthetic promise. The patched-together loops, however necessary, didn’t move me. It was not what I had signed up for. I didn’t want loops. I wanted a line. Something that unfolded, not cycled. So I stepped back and deferred.

But I did go. I went to crew and pace my friend Jeff, from Quebec City, who was racing, his first 200. A one-man crew, my job was simple on paper: meet him at the aid station (basically only at Searchmont ski resort, that was race HQ), keep him moving between them, and do my best to cover 120 kilometers as his pacer, from 105 to 225. Searchmont was the race’s gravity well. It pulled everyone back, again and again. That’s where I’d wait, then follow him into the dark.

It was going beautifully. Jeff was running the race of his life, I would say: strong, smooth, relentless, competent. He was locked in at the front, first with Michael, than with Paul (the eventual race winner), calmly floating, mostly in second place, eating like a pro, never rushing or unraveling. It was a masterclass in pacing and patience. Then, 185 kilometers in, his left hip stopped cooperating. No blowout or fall of some kind, just a slow, steady refusal to keep doing its job.

Points-of-failure
That’s when my role became something else entirely: problem-solving, route-finding (or more like keeping on course), managing the quiet panic below the skin, and search-and-rescue activation. Not much to it, but the fact that we were out in the middle of a loop we’d been told was 17 kilometers. By then it had already stretched into something much longer. No signal and staff in sight, not even close to be honest. Jeff couldn’t move properly, and we didn’t know what lay ahead, we decided I couldn’t stay.

I gave him one of my bottles and headed out. Backtracking wasn’t an option. The last station had been just a water drop, unmanned. The one before that was 31 kilometers back, through what can only be described as everlasting mosquito-soaked branch-whipping warfare. It would mean taking a machete to the forest with my legs. Waiting for M3, Michael at that time, was not an option; he was about 3 hours back.

So I went forward (while I should’ve reversed the loop). I hoped, foolishly, that the “7K” to the next station was accurate. It wasn’t. Instead, I hit a never-ending furnace of rocky service roads, sun glaring at full tilt in 40-degree heat, horseflies dive-bombing with the precision of trained assassins. Each kilometer past 17 added a new layer to my unease. Where was the aid station? Why wasn’t anyone here?

When I finally looped back to the same unmanned water station we’d passed earlier, I started to lose it a bit. Was this the station? If so, did that mean I had another 30K until the next? What kind of race runs a 55K segment with no one, really no one,on course (back then I actually thought it was 77K)? Was Jeff going to sit there in the woods for 4 or 5 more hours waiting for help? The frustration started to calcify into something colder.

But just as the trail changed, the heat softened and shadows got longer, just when I found a groove, I found the aid station I had given up on. It was there, all of a sudden, far beyond where I had expected it, but in full glory nonetheless. At it: three volunteers, Colette, Rick, and Luna (the Lab) calm, warm, waiting. In a heart beat, my panic and temper was gone, well before I even could explain what happened. They called in the rescue team. Everything was managed as professionally as one could.

I sat down on a folding chair next to Luna, gobbled my noodles, and tried to make sense of what had happened. Not just the 20 kilometers I’d run alone, worried and mad, but the whole thing, the race, the effort, the bad luck, the care. Jeff was out and his race was over. He had nothing to prove and nothing to regret. He’d run with purpose and patience, with grit and grace. When his body said no, he listened. All in all a lot to process. Some races you finish on foot, some you finish in reflection.

As for the race? It held up, perhaps barely at times, but it held together because of people like Colette and Rick (and Luna of course), and the others, who waited in the forest with quiet competence. By Brian, the Sinister Sports director, who manned an aid station through the night, solo, because there was no one else to do it. Because of the locals who waited patiently for headlamps to flicker through the trees once every few hours, far from

Some of these events aren’t backed by slick operations team or global brands. They are run by a small group of tireless people. Wanda, the race director, everywhere and nowhere at once, answering radios, tending to logistics, offering calm when things teetered. Kirsti, the media lead and secret linchpin of operations. And of course Shep, trailmaster, groundskeeper, miracle worker. The one-man force of course creation, bushwhacking the paths. Without Shep, there’d be no flagging, no runnable segments, maybe not even a race at all, at least no one would have made it very far. The trail steward worked round-the-clock to make the course somewhat accessible.

When I was out there alone, with no crew in sight, the thought that this race shouldn’t have happened yet, or not in this form, crept in my mind. And maybe there’s some truth in that. But that’s probably only if you’re not familiar with the team behind it. One thing is true, it did happen, and volunteers showed up, not many, but just enough, and runners ran, and runners finished, most of them. So did a race and course, very much imperfect and improvised, still came alive.

Yes, first editions are hardly ever smooth. Maybe they shouldn’t. They’re held together with duct tape and willpower, stitched with late-night, last minute GPX uploads and many backcountry guesses. They have sections too long in the wrong places and too short in the right ones. But they matter because they bring us closer to what’s possible, and what still needs fixing. Most of all what becomes eventually a meaningful journey.

What I learned out there wasn’t just about terrain or distance. It was about what it means to show up, for your runner, for a race that’s still becoming itself. It was about the weight of responsibility, and the weird beauty of watching something unfold  without breaking. That’s the paradox of an inaugural race: you’re not just testing the physical aspects, you’re also testing the story and the people, and if it’s worth carrying forward.

Between vision and reality
Inaugural races are experiments in logistics, lived at human scale. Every map is a theory. Every route a hypothesis. You can scout a trail in training, ATV it with a clipboard, or fastpack with daylight to spare, hike it with a stopwatch, but until you run it at hour 32 of a race with no sleep, you haven’t really felt the course. There’s a difference between knowing a section takes 3 hours fresh, and knowing how it feels to be on that same section at midnight, disoriented, heat-shattered, or emotionally wrung out.

It doesn’t tell you what it feels like to be out there at mile 110, when the gravel starts poking through your feet and every footfall feels like a lost negotiation, what pushing through sharp branches feels like when your shins are already open, or just how slow you move 30 hours into a race through a section that on paper seems runnable. It doesn’t quite show you what the trail takes. Out at the SOO, I got to see that difference up close.

That’s why inaugural races almost always have moments of “logistical naiveté.” Not intentionally of course. Aid station gaps that looked manageable on paper, say 25km, in practice become hard, disorienting stretches. Mapping a route isn’t the same as metabolizing it. There’s no substitute for embodied knowledge. Race directors need to feel what it is to run that part, not just what it looks like in GPX data. They need feedback from runners at the front, middle and back of the pack.

That’s why many inaugural races get it wrong. It’s not negligence, but more a type of disembodiment. A kind of delusion that comes from designing without exhaustion. You see only the map. Not the body that will move across it. Still, I always believe that’s the charm and the challenge of an inaugural race: it can break in all the wrong places, and still hold together.

You can’t fake that. You can’t plan for it either. Not for many parts. You can model drop distances, predict average paces, estimate attrition rates, but you can’t spreadsheet your way into a race that works when the wheels fall off. In a 200-miler, the wheels always fall off somewhere, sometime. You don’t know a place just because you’ve run through it. You know it when you’ve tried to get twenty strangers permission to run through it and a dozen support crews on standby.

The reports from other inaugural races echo this theme. An unexpected July heat can turn a straightforward 50K into a crucible. Marshals became makeshift medics, checkpoints improvised into oases. The takeaway isn’t that you need perfection. It’s that you need presence. When the plan stops working, what’s left is people.

The more remote the race, the more local the responsibility. What’s striking in every inaugural race report is how much success rides on the commitment of a few key people. The infrastructure of a first-year ultra is often skeletal. What fills in the gaps is social capital: trust, improvisation, flexibility, forgiveness, and willingness to go beyond the plan. This is beautiful and hard to sustain. It builds community, but it can burn people out fast too. Many inaugural races never see year two because the invisible labor of the first was too high a cost.

This also is what inaugural races teach us: they aren’t just about marking trails or preparing trackers, they’re about stepping into uncertainty both for the organizers and the runners. Both are building something together while it grows and breathes. That’s perhaps a bit scary and also rare. As the ultra world becomes more professional, polished, branded, the rough edges get sanded off. Logistics tighten, risks shrink, and what’s gained in efficiency is sometimes lost in intimacy.

But inaugural races? They always feel personal. They ask for collaboration, patience, forgiveness, and adaptability. And sometimes long stretches of silence between aid stations. They also offer something few events can: the feeling that you’re part of something being born. At the heart of it, inaugural races aren’t polished by any means; they’re field notes in real time. A live cartography where runners trace the first line, and volunteers hold the corners of the map so it doesn’t blow away.

Good race design isn’t just about route, it’s about empathy encoded into space. Hard sections followed up by easier ones, or cut up in parts, for some relief. A descent that gives back just enough. 

You need a different kind of professionalism. One that knows how to fail. Polish can be a liability in a first-year event. The illusion of smoothness can mask real gaps. What’s better is a kind of provisional professionalism with clear communication, hard limits but flexible mindset, and well-articulated backups. Volunteers and runners alike are more willing to forgive missteps when they’re treated like participants in an unfolding story, not just customers at an undercooked event.

This is especially true for big-mileage races. The longer the race, the more points of potential failure. Course markings vanish, trackers die, sections get flooded, food runs out, aid stations are not set up on time. Runners need to believe that even if things go sideways, the structure will hold, that someone will come looking for them. That the race understands not just the route, but the reality of running it.

And so, what does it take? To organize and run a first-year ultra, you probably need:

• A vision compelling enough to forgive its own early flaws
• A team willing to be awake longer than is healthy
• A route that can withstand navigation, weather and doubt
• An aid station plan that answers why there
• Communication systems that don’t assume best-case scenarios
• Local partnerships stronger than your spreadsheets
• Contingency plans built not just for logistics, but for the loneliness, confusion, and breakdowns that come in unexpected parts.
  

Above all, it takes humility, to listen and to learn. Wanda waisted no time coming to me asking for feedback. That’s impressive. After so many sleepless hours, being able to work on the spot like that is truly amazing. To hear that something didn’t work and not flinch away.

Inaugural races offer us a first draft. An opportunity to build something unique. If we treat them with the same patience and grit we ask of our runners, they become something worth returning to. Something that remembers our footsteps, and learns from them.

There are many single-point-of-failures a race might have to deal with. Because everything, maps, meals, morale, funnels through one person’s inbox. When that person gets sick or loses a family member, the whole race holds its breath. When they’re back at it, posting course updates at 9:16 a.m. on a Sunday, you realize how fragile the whole system really is, and how much it depends on care and love.

It’s the only reason anyone would deal with this kind of constant recalibration. The last-minute reroutes due to downed bridges. The calls to Ontario Hydro to confirm transmission line crossings. The dozens of Google Forms for meals, transportation, dietary restrictions. The hours spent cross-referencing inReach devices and ribbon markings so that people don’t get eaten by the forest.

You can feel it when a race is being built in real time. It’s in the rerouted trail that wasn’t there last week, the aid station tent still being hammered into place as you drive in, the race director’s shoulders a little higher than they should be. There’s an intimacy to being here. You watch it all stretch into shape: the checkpoints, the signage, the stories, the locals learning what it means to volunteer at such events. You see what it costs.

Every 200-miler is a feat of endurance. But the first edition? That’s something else. That’s someone laying track while the train is already moving. That’s one person chasing down land agreements while others sleep. That’s dozens of small bets all saying: this is worth doing, even if we don’t know how it ends.

And it doesn’t end at the finish line. It ends when the last headlamp blinks off. When the last drop bag gets hauled home. When the trackers are turned off and sent back to their boxes. When someone like me sits down and realizes: a race doesn’t have to be polished to matter. It just has to be born and have the opportunity to grow.

What the race proved this year is simple and significant: they have it in them to pull off a 200-miler in this region. The bones are there: the vision, the grit, the people, the runners. And while this year’s course was shaped by necessity more than narrative, next year offers a chance to return to the original dream. And it will have to.

Because for this race to grow into a staple on the North American ultra calendar, it needs more than just distance. It needs a story. Not six loops and an odometer, but a journey with shape and arc, tension and release. A route that invites runners to cross a landscape in a way that feels real and meaningful. That’s what turns a race into a rite of passage. That’s what will make the SOO 200 not just memorable, but magnetic, each year it’s organized. A race that anyone curious about the edge of 200 miles would feel called to.