Imagine signing up for events with names like Georgia Death Race, Mountain Masochist, or Hellgate.
Those are ultramarathons, and they’re the races that beef advocate Ryan Goodman gravitates toward the most. From 50k up to 100 miles, he is tackling distances and elevations that would make many typical marathoners blush. And he does most of it on rocky and uneven trails.
“Tell me I can’t do something, and I’ll go do it now,” he said.
Ultrarunning takes significant training, often logging 30, 50, or even 70 miles in a week. Race days can start before the sunrise — something many farmers and ranchers are used to — and the long hours of our industry translate well into the mental fortitude it takes to spend hour after hour in relentless forward progress.
The highs are marked by confidence, strength, thrills, and euphoria; the lows usher in crippling pain, fatigue, doubt, or regret.
At the point where a marathoner would be wrapping up their 26.2-mile race, some days, Goodman is just getting started. To illustrate just how rare an athlete of his caliber is, only 0.03 percent of Americans have ever completed an ultrarunning event.
And like Goodman, many of those runners take part in the sport well past what many consider one’s peak athletic age in their mid-20s.
Spending his high school days working on his family’s Arkansas ranch instead of joining the cross country or basketball teams, Goodman gravitated toward running in the early 2010s when he was at grad school at the University of Tennessee.
Back then on Mondays, Goodman and other grad students in the Department of Animal Science would meet for a regular 5k fun run and celebrate their workouts with beer and Mexican food. Before long, he found himself being recruited by some ranchers in Montana to take part in a 200-mile-long relay race in Napa Valley. Organized by Ragnar Relay, this kind of 24-hour event piles 12 runners into a pair of vans to cover the distance, with sleep deprivation, sweaty shoes, and roughly 15 miles per person at the heart of it.
“After that I was kind of like, OK, I could have fun running. It showed me that it can be a community event,” said Goodman, who lives in western Virginia and is popularly known on social media by the Beef Runner moniker. About a year after the Ragnar, he ran his first trail half marathon. Then his first marathon.
He was truly beginning to discover running — to find the joy in it and the opportunity to explore, especially once he got off the road and began doing more miles across single-track trails and forest service roads. He was living in Helena, Montana, at the time, and the region is a hidden gem of amazing off-road opportunities.
On trails, “you get to see places that you don’t see otherwise,” he said. “But there’s also such a great community here, because you get to see people that you recognize from different races and get to run with them. That’s what really drew me in.
“And by finding different trails and learning what’s out there, that’s kind of how I got latched onto exploring different races — it was a way to introduce me to new trail systems and new adventures along the way.”
At age 34, Goodman has some major marathons under his belt — such as the Chicago Marathon, Marine Corps Marathon, and Blue Ridge Marathon — as well as close to three dozen ultra races. His first ultra was a 50-miler in Montana in 2017. But since then, he said he has discovered a new favorite distance every time he steps up to go longer — “which is dangerous, right?” he says with a smile.
The Old Dominion 100 miler in Virginia, for example, is shaping up to be among his favorites and one he wants to tackle every year. This race is part of the Grand Slam of Ultrarunning, which designates a handful of the most prestigious and oldest 100-mile races in the U.S.
“I love Old Dominion. I love the history behind that race,” he said. “In the trail running and ultra running community, everybody has opinions on some of the well established races. But I think Old Dominion has a lot going for it. And just how long it’s been around, you have a real sense of community when you’re there. There are international runners there; there’s runners there that may not be the elite sponsored athletes that you hear about, but they are there to compete. And it’s a pretty strong field on such a beautiful course. It’s so well supported, and they put a lot of effort into the aid stations along the way.”
To earn the silver buckle prize, runners have to traverse 100 miles of gravel roads, single-track trails, ATV trails, logging roads, rocks, streams, and mud in under 24 hours in hot and humid June weather.
“It’s the embodiment of why I love trail running: You want to go out, you want to have fun — it’s you, the course, and the clock,” Goodman said.
Sometimes you relish in the success as Goodman did at this race in 2022 when he finished 20th. Other times, you accept that the course is stronger than you, like in 2023, when Goodman had to bow out 75 miles in due to his body overheating. He said he didn’t feel like he ate enough solid food early on and focused too much on hydration. He was nauseous and lightheaded, using his running poles for balance rather than propulsion. The region’s cool spring and sudden summer heat spike made getting his body acclimated to warmer temps difficult, especially at a race like this where so many performance elements have to be carefully managed.
The lessons from a shortcoming are what he takes with him into the next race and helps him to improve moving forward. Ultrarunning is literally one mile at a time, and it’s important to address adversity, even if feeling overwhelmed by the distance or the magnitude of what’s ahead.
Ending that race early and not finishing was “a difficult decision to come to terms with, but I wasn’t heartbroken about it because I’m like, ‘All right, I got to figure out how to fix this before I get to a really high-elevation race,'” Goodman said. “And I think I would’ve been more heartbroken about it if it was a race that I had traveled a long distance for, or if it was one that I didn’t want to do every year.”
Whether in his current home state of Virginia or across the country in Idaho’s Lemhi River Valley or in Moab, Utah, it’s not uncommon to see him sporting a bright red “Team Beef” T-shirt — which makes him stand out in a sport that has a larger percentage of vegans compared with the general public.
Team Beef is a state-by-state coordinated branding effort by the beef checkoff program, explains Goodman, who currently works for Certified Angus Beef.
“That helps to bridge that gap and showcase how beef can be part of a healthy diet and lifestyle because we know a lot of athletes hear a message saying that you need to eliminate these foods from your diet in order to perform well,” he said. “I’ve been on ranches all my life, been involved in the ranching business, and so I’ve always been an advocate to correct misperceptions or bridge conversations in that space.”
As an athlete himself, Goodman says he understands the hunger to perform better, to find any edge possible to be faster or more mobile in the field.
He appreciates ultrarunning because conversations with other runners inevitably come down to asking one another what they do for a living.
“I tell them I’m involved in ranching and cattle, and they ask me, ‘What’s the Team Beef about?’ And I get excited because that’ll open the door and give the opportunity to be an advocate for what I want to share,” he said. “And it’s about building that relationship and building that conversation and getting permission to share that.”
Having managed his own herds and worked with producers of all different sizes and in geographies spanning from Hawaii to the East Coast, Goodman has a foundation that people can relate to.
“It’s important that I don’t go in and say, ‘Hey, you’re a vegan, you’re plant-based, you’re not gonna do well without beef in your diet,'” he said. “That’s not a respectful way to do it. Being understanding and honest is a more respectful and more successful way to just open the conversation. … Let your actions speak for themselves.”
And even for those diehard vegans he encounters at races, Goodman quips that he likes plants too — after all, a good salad pairs well with steak at dinnertime.
“But because we are both there as athletes, we’re both there as runners in the same place,” he said, “I think that allows a conversation that can sometimes a lot of times have a negative tone to be much more open and friendly.”
Ryan Tipps is the founder and managing editor of AGDAILY. The Virginia Tech graduate has covered farming since 2011, and his writing has been honored by state- and national-level agricultural organizations.
