Inaugural Bay Area 100 on June 13
Endurance racing is not a sport usually conducted in urban areas. Most 100-mile races are out in the desert, far from population centers. But Piedmont resident Adam Ray had an idea: What if you ran a race in the hills of the East Bay?
The result is the inaugural Bay Area 100, starting by Memorial Stadium on the campus of the University of California and finishing at Skyline High School. The course will run through Wildcat Canyon Regional Park in Richmond to San Ramon to Lake Chabot and even pass the Chabot Science Center.
“That’s what makes the Bay Area 100 so unique,” Ray said. “Most endurance races tend to happen in the middle of nowhere. Ours is the one that’s urban adjacent.”
He described the race as, “A point-to-point race planned with no regard for common sense or the collective liver of the race team.”
Nearly 200 runners are registered. They will toe the starting line at 5 a.m. The first runners should finish at Skyline 17 or 18 hours later. Other runners will finish into the next morning.
The course is approximately 100.43 miles and has 18,000 feet of climb. Runners will have to finish in 33 hours.
Ray has been a race director for 15 years for other events. He said it took about five years for him to negotiate permits, mainly with the East Bay Regional Parks District.
“All of this came about pretty organically,” he said. “Our starting in front of Cal Memorial Stadium, I thought about what would be an epic start, that took me a while to think up. I felt passionately about having the finish line be at a track [which ended up being at Skyline].”
Ray said he has a combination of elite runners as well as first-timers.
“We are [attracting a different crowd],” he said. “How many people we have who are, ‘I can’t afford to go to Lake Tahoe and do this’ or ‘I can’t afford to go to Utah.’ There’s a crowd of people, especially first-timers who either haven’t done this before or they’ve done it but haven’t had their entire community there. We made the sport more accessible.”
The Bay Area 100 will have the Dapper Don Award, named after former Piedmont Middle School teacher Don James, who was an ultra-marathoner and passed away in 2022. Three local teachers will be honored: Piedmont’s Hannah Swernoff and Oakland’s Amy Chinn and Samuel Cooper. A memorial bench at Mile 74 on the course near Redwood Peak is known as “Dapper’s Rest.”
Jamichael Steen, Nick Steel (below), Jaide Downs and Wynonna Fulgham are some of the top runners coming from out of state. Rob Nachtwey, Patrick Rabuzzi and Montera Middle School Dean Sam Cooper are some of the standout local men in the field. The local women include Rebecca Heymann, Caitlin Boldt and Zoe Ray.
That last name may sound familiar – Zoe is Adam Ray’s daughter and a Piedmont High School graduate.
Adam Ray grew up in Newport Beach and mostly played lacrosse and baseball. However, he also did run, just not competitively.
“To me running was something I did to get away from competition,” he said. “I did have a competitive career in ultra-running in my late 30s and early 40s.”
Adam Ray will turn 60 later this year. He has run the Western States 100, which claims to be the original oldest 100-mile trail race and starts near the site of the 1960 winter Olympics, and he paced his daughter in the race once. He moved to Piedmont 20 years ago and has another adult daughter and a nine-year old son. He owns a marketing company and runs several races a year all over California.