Chase Price on the races that broke him and the one that redeemed him

Chase Price started running the way a lot of people do: half marathons, no plan, no idea what he was doing. Then he read David Goggins' Can't Hurt Me, decided a half marathon wasn't enough, and skipped straight to signing up for a hundred miler. He told no one, but privately set out to win it.

He came in second at Blackbeard's Revenge in 2023. It was still enough to convince him he had something. He won his next hundred that fall. By early 2024 he'd strung together a fifty miler, the Boston Marathon, and the Hellbender 100 in three straight months, and he was starting to feel invincible.

Boston is where it fell apart. He went out at a 6:05 pace on a hot day and refused to adjust when the heat and the hills caught up with him. "I didn't just hit the wall, I crashed and burned at the wall," he says. A goal of breaking 2:40 turned into a 3:09.

Worse was coming. Heading into Leadville that fall, Chase trained for months on a low carb, high fat approach. Between that and the altitude, he dropped out at mile 62 with rhabdomyolysis and fluid in his lungs. His wife made him promise to take a full year off from hundred milers.

"There's two significant events that at the time were the worst thing that could possibly happen to me," Chase says. "In hindsight, they are the most enlightening, because I learned the most through those failures."

He spent 2025 running marathons instead, since hundreds were off the table. This past March, he went back to Blackbeard's Revenge, the race that started it all, and ran his fastest hundred miler yet: 15 hours and 28 minutes, breaking the course record. It took him two years to get back.

Now he's training for his first 70.3 triathlon, which means starting over again as a beginner and relearning what it's like to actually trust a coach.

That relationship is at the center of Casually Ambitious, the coaching program Chase built out of everything he wishes someone had told him earlier. It runs on five things: running, strength, nutrition, recovery, and community. His argument is that most runners fail not because of the big workouts, but because of the small stuff, nutrition and recovery especially, that everyone assumes will take care of itself. He checks in with his athletes daily instead of weekly, and one rule holds for everyone in the program: "We don't quit on runs." Someone can walk it in if that's what it takes, but the workout gets finished.

Chase's story is proof that a bad race isn't the end of a running career. It's information. Hear the full conversation on the Maybe Running Will Help? Podcast here.