Denver’s Taco Bell 50K Returns Saturday With 10 Stops and a Strict No-Puking Rule

Most people lining up for a 50K spend race week fretting about their legs. The several hundred who gather outside a Taco Bell on South Broadway in Denver on Saturday morning have a more specific worry, which is whether a Burrito Supreme will stay down after a morning of running between fast food restaurants.

The International Taco Bell 50K ultramarathon, now in its ninth edition, starts at 7:30 a.m. MDT on Oct. 3 from the restaurant at 447 S. Broadway and loops 31 miles around the city with 10 Taco Bells along the way. Runners must check in at every one of them and eat a menu item at no fewer than nine. By the fourth stop everyone needs to have finished a Chalupa Supreme or a Crunchwrap Supreme, and by the eighth a Burrito Supreme or Nachos BellGrande. Sodas and other drinks don’t count toward the total, receipts and wrappers have to come back to the finish as proof, and the whole thing has to be done inside 11 hours.

Pepto-Bismol, Alka-Seltzer, Pepcid AC and Mylanta are all banned on the course, according to the race’s rules, and runners get a single off-course bathroom break at Washington Park. “There is absolutely no Mylanta, no Pepto-Bismol, nothing like that. We have zero tolerance for that type of thing,” co-founder Jason Romero told Rocky Mountain PBS last year. “If you puke, you’re out of the race.”

For anyone who wants more, there are two optional extras. The Diablo Challenge means covering every item in Diablo sauce and finishing with a shot of it, and the Baja Blast Challenge means getting through 2 liters of the soda over the day without throwing up.

The whole thing started with a bathroom stop in 2016, when Dan Zolnikov was training for his first 50-mile race with his friend Mike Oliva, and the two had been planning their long runs around stops at Denver farmers markets. Oliva ducked into a Taco Bell to use the restroom and came out proposing that next time they refuel there instead, the Denver Gazette reported. Both were part of the Denver chapter of Achilles International, which pairs runners with disabilities with guides, and the idea kept coming up on the group’s weekend runs until Romero, who is blind, told the others it was time to stop talking and actually do it. “It only took a second for stupidity to take over,” he told The Colorado Sun in 2024. Zolnikov then mapped the course on Strava, and he has said he never imagined it reaching beyond “the 5-10 people that I know in my run group.”

Only 40 runners took part in 2023 before 170 turned up in 2024 and more than 700 last year. Entry has stayed free throughout, and organizers ask runners to donate to Achilles Denver instead, which spends the money on race entries, shoes and equipment for disabled runners in the area, and two blind runners have now finished the course, though Taco Bell itself does not sponsor or endorse any of it.

The fastest finish so far belongs to Sage Canaday, the 2014 Pikes Peak Ascent winner, who ran 4:28 in 2024, which works out to a little under 8:40 per mile with all the eating included. He had dropped out of UTMB in Chamonix after 50 miles with stomach trouble only weeks earlier. “My stomach’s been a weak point for me,” Canaday told the Sun. “I thought maybe this would help.” The race’s website claims a higher DNF rate than the Leadville 100, where in most years fewer than half the starters make it to the finish within the 30-hour limit.

Mike Wardian and Phil Hargis set up a Washington version last year and credit the Denver founders on its website, and almost 900 people from 25 states had signed up for that first edition, Arlington Magazine reported. The second Taco Bell DC 50K starts at 8 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 27, the day after Thanksgiving, from the Taco Bell Cantina on King Street in Alexandria, Va., and covers just over 32 miles and nine restaurants in Virginia and the District. A version in Knoxville, Tenn., had 165 finishers in February.

Romero has started asking runners to order ahead and has been warning the local restaurants about the crowds heading their way. Anyone who makes it back to South Broadway inside 11 hours gets a medal made from a Taco Bell sauce packet and a ribbon, which Romero’s mother, Cindy, made for last year’s finishers.