Submitted photo Zachary Helget (second from right) poses with his aunt Cheryl (far left), his uncle Brad (second from left) and his friend Gretchen (far right) at Zumbro Bottoms Horse Campground — West afther Helget’s 100-mile run on April 11.

KELLOGG — In 2023, New Ulm native Zach Helget embarked on a cross-country cycling journey, crossing the United States from San Diego, California, to Jacksonville Beach, Florida, over the course of 39 days.

Not satisfied with his long-distance endeavors, Helget has once again engaged in an extreme endurance event, as he recently ran 100 miles in a race that lasted just over 31 hours.

Helget, a 2019 graduate of New Ulm Cathedral High School, said he switched to the 100-mile run because it fit better into his current schedule.

“Honestly it’s just having the time and the availability,” Helget said. “The cross country thing took well over a month, and now working a full-time job and coaching, I don’t really have the ability to take a month off and do that sort of adventure. This was sort of the next-best thing, where it’s still very challenging and still very rewarding, but I could take an individual weekend.”

The race started at Zumbro Bottoms Horse Campground — West, a campground located about half an hour west of Wabasha. In 31 hours and 51 seconds, Helget made six 17-mile laps around the course, which included over 13,500 feet of up and down movement, without stopping to sleep.

“It was all offroad, all trail,” Helget said. “The first, lets say 12 miles, was really rugged with roots and rocks and a lot of vertical up and down. Then the last five is on a smooth gravel road. But that first 12 is pretty tough. Vertical-wise, since it’s looped, you start and finish at the same elevation, but over the course of the race, you go up and down over 13,000 feet.”

Helget, who lives and works in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, began training for the event in 2024.

“My aunt got me to sign up for the marathon version of a trail run,” he said. “Just 26 miles. Then last year, 2025, she got me to do the 50-mile trail version with her. Then when I was doing that, I didn’t really think I had emptied the tank. I thought I had more. So I signed up for the 100. The 50 was last September, so I really started training for this 100 in January of this year, 12 weeks of pretty intense training.”

Those 12 weeks were a bit less than Helget would have preferred, and he also did more indoor training than he wanted in the Minnesota winter. A big part of his preparation was training on a StairMaster to help get ready for all the climbing he had to do, putting in five hours a week on the machine. On top of that, when the weather allowed, Helget hit the trails. Overall, Helget put in about 25 hours of cardio a week, mainly indoors.

“Mentally that’s just brutal, being in the same place and not going anywhere, but still doing the exertion,” He said.

Helget said his love of extreme-distance athletics comes from the challenge it presents to both his body and his mind.

“In high school and in college, I was a sprinter,” he said. “So I was running 100-, 200-meter dashes. I guess as I’ve gotten older, the more mental aspect of it was more appealing. They always say, the body can withstand more than your mind can. If you have the mental strength to keep pushing past that, there’s really not a limit. That appealed to me seeing how far I could go and how far I could push myself before my mind said it was too much.”

When it came time to run the race, which started at 8 a.m. on April 10, Helget said he was more ready to do the six loops than he thought.

“That was something that I was worried about too,” he said. “I haven’t done a loop race before, so I was worried that I would get bored of the loop. But I really only got bored in that last loop. After I finished [loop] five, doing the sixth lap was like, ‘Oh, let’s get this done,’ type of thing. But the first five were pretty good.

“The first one was like reconnaissance. Let’s learn this trail, lets see the hard parts and the easy parts. The second lap was still kind of the same thing. But by the third lap, the last hour of that lap was in darkness. All of the last four were in darkness. About half of lap five was in darkness. Running in the dark, it changed up the course completely, and I enjoyed that. It was just different.”