Will Murray stood under the orange sunrise sky and believed.
You belong, he told himself at the 2025 Black Canyon 100k start line in February. It’s possible that the only other person there who believed that was his older sister and sole crew member that day, Emma Murray.
Next to him were some of the country’s top ultrarunners, professionals with contracts, recognizable names, and wins at major races. Murray’s a full-time high school math teacher who felt bad missing two days of class during the school year to be there.
You get to perform today, his silent self-talk, rehearsed countless times, continued. Compete with yourself to achieve the best day possible.
For the next 7.5 hours, Will Murray achieved something close to the best day possible. After 62 miles and 5,000 feet of elevation gain, running near the front for the entire race and enduring a fall that bloodied his knees, he crossed the finish line in second place in 7:26:53, less than two minutes behind the winner, Seth Ruhling, and under the previous course record, set last year by Hayden Hawks.
Will Murray (left) on the 2025 Black Canyon 100k men’s podium, having placed second. Photo: Grand Canaria World Trail Majors/Howie Stern
He let out an uncharacteristic scream and fist pump. “Let’s freaking go, Will!” Emma Murray shouted as her younger brother poured water on his head, cooling down but also perhaps trying to make sense of what he’d just done.
Minutes later, he received a Golden Ticket to the Western States 100 from its race director, Craig Thornley. “Nice to meet you,” Murray told him. “I’m Will.” Thornley smiled, shook his hand, and quipped, “I have no idea who you are.”
Who is Will Murray?
Who is Will Murray? Let’s start with the basics: Murray is 30 years old. He teaches calculus and geometry at Blair Academy, a boarding school in New Jersey, where he also coaches baseball. He placed fifth at the 2024 Leadville 100 Mile in his debut at the distance. He scribbles notes about his running in journals and describes his approach to training as “artistic.” He loves planning routes and “bringing a map to life.” Outside of Strava, he has no social media presence. He can speak and understand French.
“He’s the coolest person I know,” is how Emma Murray summarized him. “He’s like the most mild-mannered, humble guy: Teaches math, lives in a sophomore boys’ dorm,” said Peter Curran, the head of school at Blair Academy. “He just goes out and crushes races.”
Murray grew up in Georgia, playing baseball and running cross country in high school, and had aspirations to run in college. He showed up to the track at 6 a.m. during his freshman orientation at Miami University to try for the cross-country team. He was the only one there. The coach told him he had to run three miles in under 15 minutes and then watched as Will ran circles by himself in the dark. “I ran like 15:10 or something,” Murray said. “And he gave me the info for the club team.”
Murray laughed at this origin story of a Western States 100 Golden Ticket recipient: a solid runner, relegated to the club team at a school in the NCAA Mid-American Conference.
He found cycling soon after, preferring its culture, internationalism, and exploration of place, and dove in — the long hours on the bike unknowingly building the immense aerobic engine that powers his success today. After college he bounced around jobs — working for a cycling and adventure company in France was the highlight — before getting a master’s degree in math and taking the job at Blair Academy.
Until recently, there was no indication, no breakout performance or epiphany, that he would become one of the country’s most promising and intriguing trail runners. Will Murray — and those who know him — accurately describes himself as steady. His entry to the elite ultrarunning scene was anything but. If he were teaching his students about his progression as an ultrarunner — though he’s far too humble to do this — he’d use an exponential function over a linear one.
A Promising Start in Ultrarunning
The first point on the curve would come two years ago at the 2023 Silver Rush 50 Mile, a qualifier for the Leadville 100 Mile, with more than 8,000 feet of elevation gain across 50 miles. Murray finished second in that ultrarunning debut. “That was pretty eye-opening,” Murray said. “I just did so little preparation for it and then really blew myself away with how I got through it, and I was like, Oh, ok, there must be some potential.”
Will Murray after placing second at the 2023 Silver Rush 50 Mile, his ultra debut. Photo courtesy of Will Murray.
After the Silver Rush 50 Mile, he told himself he wanted to try more competitive races and wrote them down among other scribbles in his journal: the Leadville 100 Mile and Western States 100.
His second-place finish at the Silver Rush 50 Mile qualified him for the former, and so there he was last summer in downtown Leadville, Colorado, lined up for his 100-mile debut on a rugged course featuring 18,000 feet of elevation gain, all at high altitude — a race that’s supposed to humble or break 100-mile debutants.
He got fifth.
In typical Murray fashion, though, he was less impressed by his own top-five finish and more by the record-breaking performance by men’s winner, David Roche. “To be in the same race as David Roche doing what he did: Incredible,” Murray said. “I was in one of the greatest runs ever. And I was nowhere near him, but it still gave me confidence.”
Will Murray with his pacer at the 2024 Leadville 100 Mile. Photo courtesy of Will Murray.
So he came to Curran, his boss, with a pitch: Could he take two days off in the middle of the school year to go run the 2025 Black Canyon 100k, where a top-three finish would land him a Golden Ticket to the Western States 100? He knew it was a big ask: taking time off for what he called “vacation” when teachers have annual vacations built into their schedules. And that’s why he was not going “just to see what he could do” or “to have fun.”
“I wouldn’t have gone to the race if it wasn’t solely for the purpose of trying to qualify for the Western States 100,” Murray said.
Curran knows Murray is not garrulous. “When he speaks, you listen,” he said. He saw something in his teacher: a quiet confidence that subtly betrayed that he was about to do something special. “If he was confident in himself, I was certainly confident in him,” Curran said. “So, it was an easy yes.”
Principles for Training
First, of course, Murray had to train, and to understand how impressive and difficult it is to run at a high level while working a full-time job, listen to Curran. “Working at a boarding school is like a 24/7 job,” the head of school said, and that’s not hyperbole: Murray lives on campus, teaches Monday through Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m., coaches from 3:45 p.m. to 5:45 p.m., and at least two nights a week either helps kids with math homework from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., or is on dorm duty from 7:30 p.m. until midnight. “Yet he still has time to train and get this done,” Curran said.
In the mornings before school, during the occasional free hour he has on weekday afternoons, in the post-baseball practice runs in the dark, during his long runs on Sundays, Murray follows what he calls an “abstract” approach to training. He doesn’t completely eschew the science of running, but equally, he doesn’t get bogged down by it. Instead, he abides by three self-generated principles to guide his training: put in as much aerobic work as possible, simulate the race that he’s training for, and adjust the plan based on how his body feels.
Will Murray training in front of Mount Massive in Colorado. Photo courtesy of Will Murray.
He used this training method, radical in its simplicity, to prepare for the Black Canyon 100k. And he knew after he ran a 3:29 50-kilometer training run in a snowstorm as part of a key long run that simulated the course that it was working.
The Dark Horse at Black Canyon 100k
The funny part was that, outside of those closest to him, no one else did. Emma Murray remembered reading articles and listening to podcasts previewing the Black Canyon 100k and being struck by one thing: None of them mentioned her brother.
“I know,” she said, “they don’t know someone.” Her confidence was only buoyed by the look she saw in her brother the morning of the race. It was a look that said: “‘Ok, I’m gonna’ do this thing,’” Emma Murray said. “And I’m like, ‘He’s gonna’ do this thing.’”
For the next 7 hours, 26 minutes, and 53 seconds, Will Murray did that thing.
After a chaotic start coming off the track, he was pretty far back, but gradually made his way to the front during the three miles of road before runners got on the Black Canyon Trail singletrack. “The first decision is where you put yourself on the singletrack,” Murray said. “I didn’t want to lead anything, but I wanted to be at the front.”
And that’s what he did basically the entire day. He took more time than others in the lead pack at the Bumble Bee Ranch aid station, just before 20 miles, so he decided to push hard on the climb out, a relative risk that early in a 100k, but in true Murray fashion, a calculated one: He knew there was a gentle descent after that would allow him to recover.
On course for second at the 2025 Back Canyon 100k. Photo: Grand Canaria World Trail Majors/Howie Stern
Curran, watching the livestream and refreshing the results page from New Jersey, said Murray ran the race “surgically.” He ran with no pacers and one crew member. Curran remembered seeing Murray come through an aid station in the middle of the race, solo and bloodied from a fall on the descent to Deep Canyon Ranch, and chuckled at his young teacher’s lack of pretension. “He’s just Will,” Curran said.
After he crossed the finish line in second, after he received his Golden Ticket from Thornley, after several people came up to him asking who he was, after he completed the next step in his meteoric rise, Will Murray celebrated with his sister. They ate deep-dish pizza and bought a large picture frame from Home Depot to protect his Golden Ticket on the flight home.
It was, Emma Murray agreed, a fitting ending to a classic dark horse story. “Who doesn’t love that, you know?” she said.
Why is Murray So Good?
Why is Murray so good? That’s perhaps the next question: Why is Will Murray, an unsponsored, full-time teacher, and relative newcomer to the sport, so good at ultrarunning?
Murray, of course, had thought about this thoroughly, and he offered three reasons for his success. First, he said he can run fast on trails because of the coordination developed from years of playing other sports — a lesson, perhaps, in not specializing too early. Next, his capacity for endurance was built by long, slow days on the bike when he was younger. And lastly, he said, “the thing I’m discovering little by little is I can eat and drink a lot.”
Beyond those technical reasons, though, there’s the unquantifiable. Murray possesses a unique blend of steadiness and self-belief that makes him one of the more mentally tough runners you’ll find. “It’s a long day out there, and things go well and things go poorly,” Murray said. “And the more you can stay level-headed, I think the better off you are.”
Both Emma Murray and Curran said his relatively tame scream and fist pump at the finish line of the Black Canyon 100k was the most emotion they’d ever seen from him. “He’s so chill about the whole thing,” Curran said. “He’s the best athlete on campus and you’d never know it.”
Celebrating on the finish line. Photo: Grand Canaria World Trail Majors/Howie Stern
What separates him further, though, is that over the past two years, when he has made a name for himself in ultrarunning, Murray has quietly developed a fierce belief in what he can do. “It’s kind of like a snowball rolling down a hill: like the more you believe in yourself, then the more you achieve, and the more you achieve, the more self-belief you can kind of earn,” he said. “You have to earn the self-belief.”
Will Murray has earned it. And that is why, in just over three months, he will stand at the start line of one of the world’s most iconic ultramarathons, among some of the best runners in the world, and believe once more. You belong, he will tell himself.
Will Murray believes that. Now maybe everyone else will, too.
Call for Comments
- Were you familiar with Will Murray before the 2025 Black Canyon 100k?
- What are your predictions for him at the 2025 Western States 100?
