Every Mile Had Her Name On It: How Aaron Kubala Won the Tahoe 200

August 24, 2026 | By Stan Pillman Every Mile Had Her Name On It: How Aaron Kubala Won the Tahoe 200

Every Mile Had Her Name On It: How Aaron Kubala Won the Tahoe 200

Picture someone getting ready for one of the hardest mountain races in the country. Now picture him doing it from a bedroom in Austin, Texas, at about 400 feet above sea level.

He trains at night. He waits until his mom falls asleep around nine or ten, then runs from ten until one in the morning. During the day, he is at her side, giving her medicine, not wanting to leave the house. His mom is on hospice.

A few weeks later, Aaron Kubala won the Tahoe 200 and broke the course record by more than an hour.

Aaron Kubala Is Not a Normal Person, and I Think He Would Agree

Aaron is a professional ultrarunner who lives in the distances most people cannot picture. 200 miles. 300 miles. He took third at the Moab 240 in his very first 200-miler. He set the solo record at The Speed Project, the run from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, by almost ten hours. He once crossed Chile's Atacama Desert on foot and scored the documentary about it on piano, because of course he did.

This year he is chasing the Triple Crown of 200s: Tahoe, Bigfoot, and Moab. Tahoe came first. And Tahoe is where we come into the story, because it was the first time Aaron had ever touched altitude training in his life.

So How Do You Train for a 10,000-Foot Race From a Room at 400 Feet?

You bring the mountain to you.

Aaron slept in the tent every single night. He had read our 200-hour protocol and figured that was the target, so he hit it and then some. He followed the same gradual approach we lay out in our sleeping-at-altitude guide: he started at 5,000 feet the first week and nudged it up 500 to 1,000 feet a night, all the way to 10,000, which is as high as the Tahoe course climbs. No point going higher than the mountain.

It was not a glamorous training montage. Rocky had a frozen side of beef and a sunrise. Aaron had a queen-sized altitude tent, a fan he bought to keep it from getting stuffy, and a girlfriend kind enough to sleep at simulated altitude next to him (she is an ultrarunner too, so she just took the adaptation as a bonus). The first week gave him headaches and a real thirst. He drank a lot more water. After about a week, his body stopped fighting it and started using it.

The Sneaky Benefit Nobody Prints on a Flyer

Here is the part that made the nerd in me light up.

Aaron paired the tent with the mask on an incline treadmill, a tip he picked up from fellow ultrarunner and former Hypoxico employee Dylan Bowman. He would power hike at a 20-minute-per-mile pace for twenty minutes, mask on, and his heart would work like he was in a full sprint.

His words: "You can really get your heart rate up in a high-intensity mode without taxing your body. My heart rate is as if I'm doing a sprint workout, but I'm not putting that biomechanical strain on my body."

Read that again if you run. You get the cardio hit of a hard session without pounding your joints to do it. For someone who has to keep his legs alive across 200 miles, that is not a small thing. That is the whole game.

The Word He Kept Coming Back to Was "Cheat Code"

Then he showed up to Tahoe, and the training cashed in.

Aaron has raced in Tahoe before, so he has a real before-and-after to compare. "This was the first one where altitude was a non-factor in a way that actually felt like a bit of a cheat code," he told me. He did not feel any different at 10,000 feet than he did at 6,000. His stomach, which usually rebels at altitude, was fine. There was no moment where he was sucking wind and blaming the elevation.

He had one big fear going in, something the locals call Tahoe lung. Dust, pollen, cold air, and altitude gang up and fill your lungs with gunk until you cannot breathe right. Aaron has had it before. This time it did not show up until the final hour of a two-day race. "It was kind of a mental comfort," he said. "If I got Tahoe lung, it wasn't because I wasn't acclimated. It took that off the table as a factor."

I asked him straight out if he set that record because of the altitude prep. He did not blink. "I would be willing to say it was a big factor, for sure."

And in case anyone wants to call that an unfair edge, Aaron beat me to it. "It's not cheating," he said. "It's just training." Nobody accuses the runner who lives in Denver of gaming the system. This is the same thing. You just get to do it from wherever you already are.

But the Real Reason He Was Out There Had Nothing to Do With a Record

Around mile 50, something scary happened. Aaron started passing blood. He had never had that before. He had led the race from the gun, and now he made himself walk for two hours to hydrate and get it under control, and he watched three people run past him.

The old competitive Aaron would have chased them. Instead he reframed it. "This race is for my mom," he told himself. "My mom wants me to stay healthy." He got it under control, and then he went hunting. He caught them all.

The moment that stays with me came later. Around mile 170 he was ten miles clear of second place. The win was his, the record was his, and he still had six hours of running left in a body that had slept nine minutes in two days. It was the second sunrise of the race. His girlfriend was pacing him. They put on the playlist he had made for his mom's funeral, and they ran in silence through the Tahoe pines while the sun came up bright orange over the ridge.

"For twenty miles, I just ran," he said. "I was bawling. I was thinking of her. It was such a cathartic way of processing everything."

Aaron's mom passed away that spring, not long after he and I first spoke. He went straight from a month of funeral and family into the biggest race of his year. When I told him the running was probably the easy part compared to everything else he was carrying, he agreed. "I would rather run 200 miles," he said, "than experience deep loss."

This Was Never Only About Running

Aaron's mom taught him something he repeats like a compass reading: no matter what you accomplish, it should always be about others too.

Before she passed, the two of them chose her cause together. It is called METAvivor, the only nonprofit in the country that funds metastatic breast cancer research exclusively. Metastatic disease is the stage that actually takes lives, and it receives only a sliver of the funding the rest of breast cancer research gets. That gap is the whole reason the organization exists.

They launched the fundraiser together in the weeks before she died, and she got to see the first wave of support roll in. "I wish she could see how much we've raised since then," Aaron said. He set the first goal at $10,000. It cleared in about two weeks. As of this writing, it is past $51,000, and he is chasing $100,000 by the end of the year. Every mile of his Triple Crown this year points back to it.

"It's not just about me," he said. "It's about what we can do for others. Any attention I get from these races, I just want to point it toward something that matters a little more. I think that would make my mom very happy."

If you have it in you, you can help him get to that number. The fundraiser is called Miles for Mom, and it is linked at the bottom of this piece.

One Last Question

Before we hung up, I asked Aaron the thing I most wanted to know. If someone reads this and wants to honor his mom in some small way, beyond a donation, what would he want them to do?

He sat with it for a second. Then:

"She really believed in community, and in being there for others. Even seeing how many people showed up at her funeral, with stories about her, was a testament to that. So do something for your community. Do something small. Get involved in a volunteer effort. She volunteered at a homeless shelter in Austin with us. Or pace someone at a race. That can go a long way. Just do something to get outside yourself, for someone else. I think that would make her very proud."

Ready to Build Your Own Altitude Edge?

Aaron trained for a 10,000-foot race from a bedroom near sea level, using the same tools available to any serious athlete. Here's where to start:

Aaron has two down and one more to go! He finished 1st at the Bigfoot 200 and the Moab 240 is next. Follow along, cheer him on, and if you would like to honor Mary, you can give to the Miles for Mom fundraiser for METAvivor.

Stan Pillman is a content marketing writer for Anley Media and PR coordinator for Hypoxico. He is a proud beer-league hockey goalie who trains 3-4 times per week with his Everest Summit II so that a 60-minute game feels like the easy part, and loves reminding the younger players he's twice their age.

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