After being discharged from the military, running became a ‘bright
EDITOR’S NOTE: Help is available if you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health matters.
In the US: Call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Globally: The International Association for Suicide Prevention and Befrienders Worldwide have contact information for crisis centers around the world.
Jim Walmsley is the first to admit that he hates to sit still, hates having downtime. It’s one of the reasons he’s ended up with a job that involves running up to 140 miles a week – mostly up hills and almost always on trails.
“I’m a very over-active sort of human,” is how Walmsley characterizes himself. “I need to go do something.”
Right now, the good news for the acclaimed endurance athlete is that he’s getting back to what he loves doing the most.
The frustration of a lingering knee issue seemingly behind him, Walmsley has been ramping up his weekly mileage ahead of the World Mountain and Trail Running Championships in Spain and the Pyrenees in late September. It’s as much a boost for his general mood as it is for his running fitness.
“I get to do longer runs that take me to fun places, so I’m back to a happy part of my relationship with running and being able to do enough that’s quite satisfying,” Walmsley tells CNN Sports. “I see progression quite a bit.”
For Walmsley, one of the world’s most successful ultrarunners, the sport has always been more than a career or a hobby – more than just a way to appease his restlessness. During the darkest period of his life, it provided an escape route.
After graduating from the Air Force Academy, Walmsley was stationed at the Malmstrom Air Force base in Great Falls, Montana, working 24-hour shifts in a small, underground room as a nuclear missileer.
It was a difficult lifestyle and hardly conducive to running, which he had competed in at high school over track and cross-country. When Walmsley did find the time around his work, he would usually set off on runs into the Montana wilderness.
“Having to go into the Air Force, I kind of felt like my running career was done,” says Walmsley. “I thought it was just on the track – I wasn’t aware of this whole trail-running world.”
His time in the military, however, was short-lived. Walmsley’s involvement in a proficiency test cheating scandal at Malmstrom, coupled with an earlier DUI charge, ultimately led to him being discharged from the Air Force.
In the period that followed, his mental health spiraled, and he found himself gripped by depression and suicidal ideation. Even now, about a decade on, memories of that time are painful to recall.
“I haven’t looked back on it too much,” says Walmsley. “I think sometimes it’s still a triggering time and I like being more in the present. … Mentally, it’s easiest for me to not revisit it so much.”
After seeking professional help and taking up a job at a bike shop in Flagstaff, Arizona, Walmsley’s love of running was reignited. He found solace in creating a schedule around his training, after each run making plans to go again the next day.
“This is kind of when life started to be more stable, and I was coming out of my getting kicked out of the Air Force and things not going as well in life,” says Walmsley.
“We identified running as a bright point and something that made me happy and something that I like talking about, and essentially the reality that I was getting positive feedback from running, where most of life wasn’t as positive at the time.”
The key, he adds, was in forming a routine and “not making off-days contagious.” Eventually, that lifestyle proved addictive.
“It’s telltale that maybe I was meant for ultrarunning, in that we tend to just overdo everything,” says Walmsley. “I just leaned all the way into it and got back into making training part of my routine in life again.”
Broadly defined as any distance longer than the 26.2 miles of a marathon, ultrarunning is often viewed as an entirely different pursuit to most other distance-running formats.
Races, often staged in brutal conditions and across punishing terrain, can last many hours or days, with participants pushed to the very limits of their physical and mental capabilities. Here, endurance and suffering go hand-in-hand.
Among this community with a penchant for the extreme, Walmsley’s background in track, road and cross-country running is unique. In 2020, he even broke away from his ultrarunning career to train for and compete in the US Olympic marathon trials, placing 22nd.
But it’s over the trails and longer distances that Walmsley has shown his true pedigree. He previously held the world’s best 50-mile time (4:50:08) and is the course record holder and a four-time champion at Western States, an iconic, 100-mile ultramarathon in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Those four victories came after a turbulent debut at Western States in 2016: around seven miles from the finish and on track for a course record, Walmsley took a wrong turn, ran several miles off the course, then ended up 20th.
That was at the very start of his trail running career, and there have been few wrong turns as dramatic since then. Around 2018, soon after signing a contract with sportswear brand HOKA, his profile in the ultrarunning community soared.
On top of his Western States dominance, Walmsley is also the course record holder and the first and only American man to win the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB), which he describes as “basically the biggest prize you can win in trail running.”
The roughly 108-mile race goes around the base of Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest peak, and is considered one of the hardest, most spectacular footraces on Earth, passing through the mountains of France, Switzerland and Italy. It has 9,900 meters (about 32,480 feet) of elevation gain – roughly 1,050 meters (around 3,445 feet) more than the height of Mount Everest.
To master races like this has demanded a steep learning curve, particularly for an athlete who grew up on the comfort and familiarity of a 400-meter running track.
“Getting brought up in American running culture has set me up to have a bunch of fallacies and kind of fail in a lot of different ways in ultrarunning,” says Walmsley, “I’d say, typically, it makes me not patient enough.”
Now, he’s learned that walking up a steep incline is often faster and more efficient than running, even a way to attack other competitors in a race. He’s learned the need to stay on top of his fueling and eating little and often, even when his stomach revolts against it.
And he’s learned to force himself to slow down and stay patient, even when every fiber of his being – especially the long, bouncy, flowy stride he developed on the track all those years ago – is saying to speed up.
Ultrarunning, Walmsley believes, is “very much” a different sport to the sort of running he did in high school and college. He’s now a veteran of the trail and ultra scene, enchanted by the beauty and brutality of a day-long race.
“24 hours, I think, is a really long, really beautiful length of a race because you’re racing one day, one rotation of the Earth sort of thing,” says Walmsley.
“Something unifying throughout every participant in the sport is that we all go through a point of doubt and questioning it, and it kind of goes to motivation to finish and that drive to keep going.
“It’s a basic thing that’s not so important in the grand scheme of life, but sometimes it’s so amazing because it just brings you to the present to focus on going forward. And I think that simplicity in the race is a really special feeling that we can have as humans.”
Walmsley, having skipped this year’s Western States, will compete in the OCC at UTMB week on August 27, one of a number of races staged alongside the full-distance event. The roughly 37-mile OCC course starts in Switzerland and ends in Chamonix, the French resort which plays host to UTMB and its thousands of competitors and fans each year.
The knee injury, which he exacerbated while racing 120 kilometers (about 75 miles) in Chianti, Italy earlier this year, put paid to racing the full distance at UTMB.
Now a Chamonix resident, Walmsley is frustrated to miss out on the main event at his doorstep – and one in which he made history in 2023. The priority, however, is on future-proofing his knee from further injury.
“I would say I’m not very good at not racing it, and I prefer to be on the start line,” says the 35-year-old. “But this year, I’m more afraid about regressing, and I hope to move past this injury.
“Hopefully, long-term wise, it’s not a problem next year and beyond … I would rather find myself healthy and competing for UTMB again, but after last year, lining up a bit not healthy, I’m taking more time to try to be more positive that hopefully my injury won’t reset again.”
And patience, as Walmsley has had to tell himself time and again in his ultrarunning career, is so often the key to success. Recently, he’s been relying on it to preserve his future health because he doesn’t have plans to ever stop running – even when his competitive career is said and done.
“I would like to hope that I’ll be a lifetime runner,” says Walmsley. “I think I’ve learned that about myself – that it helps me a lot mentally to keep moving.”