Ignorance is a Bliss
She ran 98 miles without knowing she was chasing history. That is exactly why she caught it.
With a mile to go, Jenn Lichter still had no idea.
It was the 2026 Western States 100, the strongest women’s field the race has assembled, and her first hundred miler. Three days earlier she had caught a stomach bug, so she was fueling on Wonder Bread soaked in Coca-Cola. And she does not run to splits. Her coach calls it a well-tuned internal intensity gauge. She runs by feel.
Which meant that for ninety-eight miles, nobody had told her she was hunting Courtney Dauwalter’s course record, untouchable since 2023.
At Robie Point, mile 98.9, her partner Nick Cornell finally said it out loud. Thirty-six seconds ahead. One mile left.
Nauseous and empty, she found another gear on the Placer High track and finished in 15:28:05. Eighty-eight seconds under the untouchable record, in her debut at the distance.
If someone had told her at mile 20, would she have run the same race? I doubt it.
When it gets real
Jensen Huang says the same thing about founders, in blunter words.
“The superpower of an entrepreneur is that they don’t know how hard it is. They only ask themselves, how hard can it be?”
Asked whether he would start Nvidia again knowing what he knows now, he says he would not. It was a million times harder than he expected. Not knowing that was the only reason he began.
Be careful with this idea. It is not a case for skipping the homework. Lichter knew her nutrition, her climbs, and her body better than anyone on that course. She just was not carrying anyone else’s number.
So learn everything about the work. Stay suspicious of the ceilings, drawn by people who tried before you had the tools, or the timing, or the nerve. Every benchmark you memorize doubles as a fence. Lichter ran through hers. Nobody had installed it.
Worth your time
Read Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. It is a short book of talks by the Japanese priest who brought Zen to San Francisco, and its opening line has outlived him: in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few. Read it on a Sunday morning. It will make you suspicious of your own expertise in the best way.
Final thoughts
Lichter did not break the record because she was naive. She trained. She had a coach, a plan, and three days of Wonder Bread and Coke in her legs. She just carried none of the weight the number adds.
Most of us are the opposite. We collect reasons things cannot work, call it experience, and run the pace the fence allows.
Thanks for reading.
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