Alec Cline and Levi Yoder, for a grueling 18 hours, dueled one another May 30 during the Mohican Trail 100 in Loudonville, Ohio, for the second year in a row.
Behind them, Brenda Johnson was trying to break the women’s Mohican course record.
All of them started the race slow and steady.
“My plan this year was to try and save,” Yoder said. “Hold back.”
Halfway through the race, at the end of the second loop, which is actually mile 54.6 at Mohican Adventures, Cline had taken a 31-minute lead over Yoder, an advantage he held the entire third lap.
“I really didn’t feel like I was going hard,” Cline said. “I was just trying to run off of feel. I mean, just not out of breath… I would just get in a rhythm and breathe through my nose for a bit.”
Heart rate low. Breathing steady. Conversations easy.
“That’s when I know I’m in zone one, zone two, when we can just hang out,” Cline said. “The uphills, they would get me out of breath, get me a little labored, and then we’d jog into the flats and just start feeling good again.”
After the third lap, four hours and forty minutes later, this time mile 77.25 at Mohican Adventures, the gap between first and second had slipped to 29 minutes.
“I was so scared of him,” Cline said. “Once I found out he was in second, I’m like, ‘He is catching me,’ because I was slowing down.”
Five miles into the final lap, at what’s listed as mile 81.4, Cline reached the Gorge Overlook aid station 22 minutes in the lead — Yoder had already closed in another seven minutes with 19 miles to go.
“I think I hit my best pace in the whole race on loop four,” Yoder said. “I was trying to get away from third place.”
A little more than four miles later, at marker 85.9 next to the Fire Tower aid station, Cline’s lead over Yoder had fallen to 17 minutes, another five minutes closer with 14 miles left.
“I know you’re a good closer,” Cline told Yoder after the race. “I kept telling my pacer: ‘Levi’s been way past this distance before… we have to force me to run.”
By the final aid station, Hickory Ridge at mile 91.1, the race’s major climbs behind them, Cline’s lead was down to 16 minutes with less than 15K to go.
“I told my pacer: ‘The only way I will catch him is if he rolls an ankle or he blows up so badly that he has to walk the last four miles,'” Yoder confessed. “I said: ‘We’re going to be ready for that, but I don’t know if it’s going to happen.'”
Cline, 29, of Canton, Ohio, won the 2026 Mohican Trail 100 in 18:04:15.91.
Twenty minutes later, Yoder, 35, of Dundee, Ohio, finished second in 18:24:36.62.
It was the same order as the year before, 2025, when Cline won in 17:51:26.73 and, 14 minutes later, Yoder took second in 18:05:40.95.
MORE: Winners stoked about ‘short’ Mohican races
Brenda Johnson 11 minutes from Mohican course record
Not far behind Cline and Yoder, Brenda Johnson was gunning for a Mohican course record: 18:53:20.0 set in 2000 by Janice Anderson.
“That was my goal,” Johnson said. “That was why I ran the whole way and fought, and then I got confused.”
Johnson, 45, of Lancaster, South Carolina, had tackled the trails of Mohican State Park two years earlier, in 2024, when she was the first female finisher with a time of 21:16:46.18. She went on to place first among females in the 2024 Midwest Grand Slam of Ultrarunning by winning four the five Super Slam races that year: Mohican, Burning River, Hallucination, and Indiana.
This year at Mohican Trail 100, on course-record pace, she lost sight of the orange flags that marked the way.
“I didn’t know which way to go, so I went right,” Johnson said. “I ran back left and didn’t see anything, so I stopped to call some people to be like, ‘Do you know which way you go?’ So, I added a couple extra miles. Plus, with stopping, I lost some time.”
She looked at her watch and calculated a few numbers. The schedule looked tight, but manageable.
“I still didn’t give up on the goal,” Johnson said. “I knew it was gonna be even harder. Like, I had no margin for error — and that was my error — and so I still fought for it.”
Johnson was the first female and the fourth overall finisher in the 2026 Mohican Trail 100 with a clock time of 19:04:54.26.
She was only 11 minutes and 34.26 seconds off the course record — less than seven seconds per mile.
“I’m so proud of it, you know,” Johnson said. “There’s nowhere I could have done better. My grade-adjusted pace was like 9:36 or something. I’m proud of that.”
The 2026 race was still a best for her, personally.
“I hit a hundred-mile PR here,” Johnson said. “I hit a hundred miles at 18:15, is what my watch said… on one of the hardest courses I’ve ever ran.”
MORE: Veterans of Mohican Trail 100 greet record field
Results for the 2026 Mohican Trail Run
There were 200 people at the starting line of the 2026 Mohican Trail 100, which began 5 a.m. May 30. The starting field included 154 men and 46 women.
By the time the course closed 1 p.m. May 31, 87 runners had finished for a finishing rate of 43.5%, far above the 30% Ryan O’Dell, the race’s director, typically expects.
Of the finishers, 68 were men and 19 were women. That translates to a finishing rate of 44% for men and 42% for women — virtually identical.
After Cline and Yoder, Matthew Novak, 36, of Chicago, Illinois, finished third overall with a clock time of 18:33:29.44.
Nigel Wright, 35, of Wooster, Ohio, was the fourth male in 19:21:37.62 and Matthew Cooper, 47, of Grand Haven, Michigan, was fifth male in 19:48:59.79.
Lily Medina, 44, of Oglesby, Illinois, was the second female finisher with a clock time of 24:37:24.74.
Ashlyn Culbertson, 30, of Jackson, Ohio, was the third female with a clock time of 25:07:52.83.
Sarah Akber, 34, of Chillicothe, Ohio, was the fourth female in 26:32:05.63 and Allison Kossen, 27, of Covington, Kentucky, was fifth female in 27:44:14.08.
Full results are available online by Mid Ohio Race Management at: runsignup.com.
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