MDS Crazy Loops: The New Ultra Format With No Rankings
Ultra-marathon culture has long been defined by a single question: how far can you go? Distance has been the currency of status, the benchmark of seriousness, and the filter that kept most people on the sidelines. The MDS Crazy Loops format is built on a completely different premise. It asks a simpler question instead: how long do you want to run?
That shift sounds subtle. In practice, it changes everything about who shows up, why they're there, and what they take home.
Choose Your Own Duration, Keep Your Own Goal
The MDS Crazy Loops offers participants a choice of four time-based formats: 3, 6, 9, or 12 hours. You pick the window that fits your current fitness, your ambitions, and your life. There's no mandatory distance. There's no course cutoff looming over you like a judgment. You run loops through alpine terrain, accumulate as much distance as you want within your chosen window, and that's your race.
This structure removes one of the most persistent barriers in ultra running. Traditional formats force you to commit to a fixed distance before you've taken a single step. If your training didn't go to plan, if you're coming back from injury, or if you simply want to explore what mountain running feels like without betting everything on a finish line, the standard model punishes you. The Crazy Loops format doesn't.
The loop-based design also means you're never isolated. You pass through the hub repeatedly, can adjust your effort, refuel properly, and stay connected to the event's energy throughout. For runners managing nutrition strategies on long efforts, that repeated access to support stations is practical, not just reassuring. Dialing in your fueling approach matters as much as your pace, and sports nutrition in 2026 is increasingly focused on personalized, effort-matched protocols rather than one-size-fits-all plans.
No Imposed Ranking: What That Actually Means
This is the feature that generates the most conversation. The MDS Crazy Loops deliberately does not publish an overall ranking. There's no finisher list ordered by performance. There's no unofficial timer pressure pushing you to beat the person ahead of you on the loop.
For competitive runners, that might sound like something is missing. For everyone else, it's the point.
Removing imposed ranking does something measurable to the participant experience. When the threat of public comparison disappears, people run closer to their actual intention. First-timers don't catastrophize the gap between themselves and faster athletes. Older runners aren't anchored to what they ran a decade ago. People recovering from injury aren't treating a fun mountain weekend as a performance test they need to pass.
The format explicitly welcomes runners who are there for the experience rather than the result. That's not a consolation framing. It's an acknowledgment that for a growing share of the running population, personal achievement and immersive environments are the actual product. The podium is someone else's goal.
This also aligns with what's happening more broadly in race design. Research consistently shows that participation rates in endurance events grow fastest when perceived accessibility increases. Formats that signal "this is for you too" tend to attract a more diverse, multigenerational field. That's good for the sport, and it's good for the community around each event.
Five Alpine Destinations Planned for Summer 2026
Following successful editions in 2025, the MDS Crazy Loops is expanding to five new alpine destinations for the summer of 2026. Each event is built around a three-day immersive experience, not just a race morning and a parking lot goodbye.
The three-day structure matters. You arrive, you settle into the mountain environment, you connect with other participants across a range of formats and experience levels, and you leave with something that feels more like an expedition than an entry on a race calendar. That distinction has significant appeal for runners who've done road races and want something with more texture.
Alpine venues add genuine physical and psychological value. Running at altitude, on technical terrain, in mountain weather introduces variables that flat road courses don't. Your body adapts differently. Your attention is engaged differently. The recovery demands are different too, which makes smart summer training and heat management essential preparation for anyone targeting a 2026 alpine edition.
The geographic expansion also signals that this isn't a niche experiment. Five destinations across one summer represents a real infrastructure commitment and a bet that the demand is there. Based on 2025 participation trends, that bet looks well-placed.
Who This Format Is Actually Built For
The honest answer is that the MDS Crazy Loops is built for a wider demographic than traditional ultras have served well. But it's worth being specific about who that includes.
- First-time ultra runners who want mountain terrain and a proper event atmosphere without being locked into a distance they're not sure they can cover.
- Experienced runners returning from injury or time off who need a format that won't make a cautious, effort-managed day feel like failure.
- Older athletes who have decades of running behind them and are less interested in performance validation than in meaningful physical experiences.
- Runners who prioritize recovery and longevity and want events that respect the complexity of how real people train across real lives.
- Trail and mountain running newcomers who want a supported, structured entry point into alpine running without the intimidation of a big mountain race's mandatory gear lists and cutoff pressures.
None of these groups are marginal. Together, they represent the majority of people who run regularly but have felt excluded or underchallenged by existing ultra formats. The MDS Crazy Loops is a direct response to that gap.
A Broader Shift in How Races Are Designed
The Crazy Loops format doesn't exist in isolation. It reflects a structural change in how event organizers are thinking about participation in 2026. The old model, where a race was defined by its winner and everyone else was measured against that performance, is losing relevance for a large portion of the running population.
Average finishing times across major distances have been shifting. More people are running more events across a wider age range. The cultural weight of the marathon has expanded beyond the competitive runner into mainstream fitness culture. As average marathon times continue to evolve in 2026, the sport is simultaneously becoming more competitive at the top and more inclusive at the participation level. Those two things aren't in conflict. They're happening in parallel.
Race design that responds to this reality stops treating inclusion as a compromise. It treats inclusion as the core design principle. The MDS Crazy Loops doesn't offer a "beginner version" of a real race. It offers a genuinely different framework for what a race can be, and it applies that framework to serious alpine terrain with real logistical support and a real event community.
Gear choices matter in this context too. When you're choosing an event format that spans 3 to 12 hours on technical mountain terrain, your footwear decisions carry real consequences. Selecting the right running shoes for 2026 trail conditions means thinking about grip, stack height, and fit across extended efforts at varying intensity levels, not just picking what looks fast on a road.
What Participation-First Race Design Gets Right
There's a version of the "no ranking" conversation that frames it as softness, as if removing competition means removing meaning. That framing misunderstands what motivates most people who run. Competitive ranking is meaningful for athletes competing for a result. For everyone else, meaning comes from the effort itself, the terrain, the community, and the personal benchmark of doing something genuinely hard.
The MDS Crazy Loops preserves all of that. The mountains are real. The effort is real. The physical challenge of 12 hours on alpine loops is not a casual undertaking. What's removed is the external judgment of where you placed relative to strangers who had different goals, different preparation, and different lives going into the start line.
Nutrition and recovery strategies are just as relevant here as in any ranked ultra. Long efforts in mountain environments demand thoughtful fueling. Anti-inflammatory eating approaches have become a serious part of how endurance athletes manage training loads, and combining plant-based eating with structured exercise offers documented recovery benefits that apply directly to multi-hour mountain efforts.
The MDS Crazy Loops is an honest product for what most runners actually want: a challenge that's real, a setting that's beautiful, a community that's welcoming, and a format that respects the fact that you define your own finish line.
Five new alpine locations in 2026 means five new opportunities to test that proposition. If the 2025 editions are any indication, most people who try it come back with a clear answer.