The rogue runners taking on New York state

400 miles. Three days. Welcome to Southbound 400.

Roughly 100 runners are huddled on a highway shoulder, just a mile south of the U.S.-Canada border. It’s the start of an unofficial, unsanctioned relay race called Southbound 400 (SB400). Over the next three days, nine teams of eight runners will cover 400 miles, from the border town of Rouses Point, New York to the southernmost tip of Manhattan.

Kicking off on Friday, May 10th, and finishing on Sunday the 12th, the race is split into three 135-mile segments that follow New York’s Empire State Trail. As an unsanctioned event – meaning no permits and no governing body – SB400 forces runners to throw out virtually everything they know about racing. There are no set legs or hand-off points and few rules, except that one runner must be on the ground at all times.

The competitors line up to start at 5AM every morning, and the clock stops for each team when they pass that day’s finish line. Times are cumulative, so the team with the fastest time at the end of the third stage wins. For the duration of the race, teams must be entirely self-sufficient, responsible for their own food, water and gas. Each team can include a maximum of six self-identifying male runners, is allowed two vehicles and can enlist up to six crew members to drive and navigate.

Organisers provide a map of the route to follow on the running app Strava but won’t offer individual assistance in the event a team gets lost. Instead of passing a baton, team members trade off a handheld GPS tracker – if a runner strays from the route, it’s up to their team to locate them.

Donning reflective vests and headlamps, the runners vaguely resemble a roadside construction crew. Race Director Aingeru Zorita directs the first batch of runners to assemble a makeshift start line, shouting into a megaphone: “Team captains, send your starters to the front!” As the hour strikes, the runners take off sprinting.

“They know they have to run 400 miles, right?,” someone joked.

One team called SXSE (pronounced “sexy”) was still in sight of the start line when the van pulled over and another runner hopped out – their plan was to trade off every 1/4th of a mile, allowing them to break away from the other teams early on.

Compared to a traditional relay race with set legs, the liberty to change runners at will warps most teams’ conception of pacing. Ahead of the start, a handful of teams described their strategies as various versions of sprinting as fast as they possibly could and switching runners every mile. Rotating through a team of eight, most runners are more equipped to sprint a 5-minute-mile when it comes to their turn every 40 minutes, rather than attempting to maintain a similar pace for longer stretches.

Back to defend their title, SXSE won the inaugural SB400 last year, finishing with a cumulative time of 42h 59m. Ahead of last year’s race, SXSE’s team captain reportedly spent 35 hours mapping out their strategy, down to the exact times runners would switch off. The second-place finishers, a team previously known as Outdoorsy, also returned with a rebrand. Competing as Möttley Crüe, the new name was inspired by the gym in which they all train, located on Soho’s Mott Street.

While the first iteration was carried out with five teams, the team roster has nearly doubled in 2024. Local run clubs that caught wind of the event or were invited by the organisers formed five new teams: Running in Clouds, Mile High Run Club, Dirty Bird Run Club, Latin Legs and World’s Most Reckless. Another run club hailing from Washington, D.C. signed up as team Hard 2 Kill and a Los Angeles-based friend of the organisers assembled a squad of runners from the West Coast dubbed Rhythm Section.

“There are a lot of bodies this year,” Zorita says. “It’s cool to see that teams from last year want to do the same event, perhaps this time with a different angle and new strategies.”

As with any sport, there’s a “home turf advantage” to SB400, something SXSE and Möttley Crüe possess, Zorita notes. The Empire State Trail isn’t exactly what one may picture when they hear the word ‘trail.’ At 750 miles long, only a few sections actually run through the forest – the bulk of the route is composed of country roads, highway shoulders, sidewalks and bike paths. One segment of the trail traces Lake Champlain, while another snakes through a university campus. Even the fastest team can take a wrong turn and get lost, tacking on additional time in the process. In fact, two teams got lost just a few miles from Friday’s finish line and wound up joining forces to find their way to the end.

For Zorita, the Empire State Trail is familiar ground. His house is located on the trail, and over the past few years, his friends have regularly taken trips upstate to spend the weekends running the local trails. The Empire State Trail only existed in fragments before a renovation in 2020 transformed it into a continuous path, making it the longest multi-use state trail in the country. The group of friends and trail runners – Zorita, alongside Nick Fung, Will Temple, Matt Roberts, Josue Rivas, David Jou and Ben Morrow – began loosely ideating ways to make use of the newly overhauled trail.

Morrow recalls that an early suggestion was to set a record for the Empire State Trail by having Zorita run it entirely solo. Whilst seemingly far-reaching, Zorita had recently completed Marathon des Sables, a notoriously grueling race in the Sahara desert, where he ran the equivalent of six marathons (a total of 157 miles) over the course of seven days.

An early idea of the group, Morrow explains, was to set a record for the Empire State Trail by having Zorita run it entirely solo. Whilst seemingly far-reaching, Zorita had recently completed Marathon des Sables, a notoriously gruelling race in the Sahara desert, where he ran the equivalent of six marathons (26.2 miles, for a total 157.2 miles) solo over the course of seven days.

That concept sounded lonely, particularly after a year of quarantining, and brutal for Zorita. It was quickly abandoned in favour of a team-based event that would invite more runners to experience the Empire State Trail for themselves.

Hundreds of grassroots races have emerged over the past decade, created by runners bored with the rigid structure of traditional marathons and seeking an outdoor adventure. Not all unsanctioned races are ultra-lengthy – Darcy Budworth’s Take the Bridge, for instance, is a nighttime 10k (6.2 miles) that starts on pedestrian bridges throughout the U.S.

Whether they're a few miles or multiple days long, most unsanctioned races are carried out continuously. Of a similar distance to SB400 is Nils Arend’s The Speed Project (TSP), where participants run 340 miles from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Runners sleep in their vans and the whole ordeal is typically over within 48 hours. Teams don’t meet one another until a pool party the day after the race concludes. The swiftness of TSP, and other events like it, is somewhat pragmatic – without permits, the races are effectively illegal, and the routes sometimes see runners cut across private property. It’s best to wrap things up as quickly as possible to avoid catching the authorities attention.

SB400’s founders were driven by a similar desire to recontextualise running as not an individual but a team sport; simultaneously, they wanted to create an intimate event conducive to camaraderie even in the throes of competition. Though SB400’s organisers still skirted the legal requirements to hold a race, it helped that the Empire State Trail is open to the public. They opted to split the race into stages, with teams regrouping at campsites in the evening. Finish lines were positioned at the camp entryways so that stage finishers were cheered on by those who had arrived before them.

Zoom calls were scheduled. Emails were sent. And the group gradually adopted roles (although SB400 is truly all-hands-on-deck come race time). Zorita serves as Race Director, while Fung oversees operations. Roberts, a lawyer, is on legal duty should an incident occur, and Rivas leads content production. As the owner of a physical therapy studio, Jou manages the communications between organisers and athletes. Morrow, the founder of the performance-wear brand Miler Running, is in charge of safety and designed custom vests for the runners.

Clocking 18-hour days running on the side of a highway and sleeping in a tent is far from most people’s ideal weekend but elite runners can be extreme. With organisers entrenched in the running community, finding people willing to partake proved surprisingly easy.

“We had a pretty good amount of reputational social capital as people who had done these kinds of extreme races before,” Temple says. “We weren't this group of guys with some harebrained scheme. We’ve always been plugged in and that certainly helped in terms of getting runners onboard.”

Since the races can’t be advertised using traditional means, participation is solicited by word-of-mouth. And as unsanctioned races surge, a legion of runners who have competed in the same handful of events has spawned.

Malcolm Ebanks, a crew member for Running in Clouds, has run all 340 miles of TSP solo on three separate occasions, while SXSE’s Vito Lentini ran the same race in March as part of a team and “figured [he] may as well do SB400 too.”

“The Speed Project was great but I like having a full night’s sleep,” he says, laughing. “I feel a lot healthier during this race than I did during TSP, that’s for sure.”

At the end of the first day, Rhythm Section was in first place with a time of 12h 57m. Running in Clouds finished four seconds behind them and SXSE came in third, 25 minutes later.

Where Friday’s route largely consisted of highway shoulders, Saturday covered suburban towns and a few woodsy trails, including remote sections of the Empire State Trail that were inaccessible by car for three or four-mile stretches at a time. Two volunteer cyclists rode an hour ahead of the leading team to scope out the route and report on if any portions of the trail were sectioned off, texting updates to the race’s group chat.

Teams were allowed to make use of their own bikes beginning on Saturday. For the segments of the trail closed off to cars, one runner-in-waiting could bike behind the active runner until it came time to switch.

Several teams forgoed the bikes, deciding it was too much hassle and they’d simply run longer legs. That didn’t stop one team from complaining about SXSE using an electric bike. Perhaps it’s just their competitive nature, but for a race underlined by a “no rules” ethos, the runners were quick to argue that there should, in fact, be a rule prohibiting e-bikes.

“The bikes might not be worth it for some teams,” Morrow observes, “but SXSE was here last year, so they’re familiar with how to use it on the trail.”

Later that afternoon, a team messaged the organisers accusing runners of taking shortcuts. Not long after, another team alleged that a competing crew held up traffic with their car instead of pulling over when they swapped runners. Organisers conceded that the shortcuts weren’t material enough to merit penalties but sent a note to the race’s group chat warning against straying from the route and driving recklessly.

Teams were given an SB400 rule book, which states that the race directors can enact penalties or disqualify a team for breaking the rules. But as a race still in its infancy, there was no precedent for these offences or what a “fair” penalty would look like. For SB400’s organisers, as the race grows, the challenge lies in ensuring a safe, principled event without raising a heavy hand. Establish too many rules and it’ll dissuade runners who prefer grassroots events for the loose organisation they’re expected to inhabit. Let things run amok and competitive runners will cast doubt on the race’s integrity, especially if it affects their teams’ standing.

A day and a half in, sore muscles and drowsiness began to take hold. The longer a team took to finish, the less time they had to sleep, a punishing consequence for the slower among them. For other runners, lack of sleep wasn’t the issue but rather the pattern of sprinting a few miles, and then sitting in the car. In an attempt to minimise fatigue, teams adopted a “one car on, one car off” approach: using one car to cycle through the same four runners for an hour, while the remaining team members in the second car rested.

Alternating also reduces the risk of injury by avoiding having runners who aren’t warmed up out on the trail, though it doesn’t make the experience any less painful. Runners with a background in relays more readily adapted to running in turns, while some were coming up against the feeling for the first time.

Mile High Run Club’s David Sheehan regularly competes in ultra-marathons, yet found SB400 to be a more taxing endeavour. “For me, Southbound is harder than ultras,” he says. “I can’t deal with the constant stopping and going. Having to sit down in the car makes it worse.”

On Saturday, SXSE crossed the penultimate finish line nearly 20 minutes before Rhythm Section, although it wasn’t quite enough to catapult them into first place overall. Running in Clouds slotted comfortably in third place 30 minutes later. As the evening wore on, it grew dark and intervals between teams widened: the fourth-place team arrived two hours behind Rhythm Section, while the ninth-place team finished five hours later.

SXSE finished first on Saturday with a time of 13h 17m. Although they crossed the finish line nearly 20 minutes before Rhythm Section, it wasn’t enough to catapult them into first place – Rhythm Section remained in the top spot, followed by SXSE in second and Running In Clouds in third. As the evening wore on, intervals between teams grew: the fourth-place team arrived two hours behind Rhythm Section, while the ninth-place team finished five hours later. From a purely competitive standpoint, the majority of teams were no longer racing to win SB400. It would be Rhythm Section and SXSE down to the wire.

By early Sunday evening, Rhythm Section’s Kam Casey could see the New York City skyline in the distance as he trekked downward to the city. When Casey reached White Plains, about 35 miles from the finish line, he knew his team had secured the win. He had been running a three-and-a-half mile leg when he turned the corner – “I was like, there’s no way that’s them.” A runner from SXSE was half a mile ahead. “We had been three or four minutes behind SXSE all day, and now we were just about a minute and twenty seconds behind them,” Casey explains. “I knew that there was enough of a lead already, so even if we didn’t totally catch up to them, we still had it.”

In NYC’s Battery Park, SXSE crossed the finish line 30 seconds ahead of Rhythm Section. But with a cumulative time of 39h 25m, and six minutes quicker than SXSE overall, Rhythm Section would be returning to Los Angeles with the 2024 SB400 title.

Forget bikes, maps and strategy altogether. For Rhythm Section, the key to winning SB400 was simply being the fastest runners out on the road. The gang of veteran distance runners approached SB400 like a normal race, pacing themselves and embracing longer stretches of mileage.

“Do you want to hear something crazy?”Casey says. “We didn't have a strategy until we got in the car to start on the first day,”. “We had no idea where we're getting ourselves into. We had heard that people were going to run these short relay legs, but we were like, ‘we're not doing that.’ That's not what distance running is about. We just played it by ear.”

Rhythm Section was awarded a trophy of a taxidermied New York pigeon, which will now be engraved with the team name. In SB400 tradition, they’ll hold on to the pigeon until the race returns next year, when they’ll pass it on to their successors or prove themselves on the trail once again.