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So many storylines came out of UTMB week it’s hard to know where to start. The weather. Ruth Croft’s hat-trick. Tom Evans winning after DNFs in the past two years. The Joyline Chepngeno doping disqualification. Jim Walmsley’s sprint finish to win the OCC. Courtney Dauwalter showing us all the definition of class when it comes to ultra running.

Perhaps the most exciting news is that Brisbane runner Amber Wood, who spoke to me a few weeks ago about her tilt at the UTMB, completed the race. It took her more than 45 hours, but what an achievement! More about that in coming weeks when I catch up with Amber again.

But first, some background. I wrote about UTMB week a fortnight ago, but here’s a quick recap. The week of racing takes place in the Alps with its epicentre in the French ski resort of Chamomix.

There are a bunch of races, but three of them make up the UTMB World Series Finals - the OCC (raced over 60k), the CCC (100k) and the UTMB (100 miles, which this year was just over 170k). They’re dubbed finals because they are the blue ribbon events in a series of races worldwide that are part of the UTMB circuit. This includes Ultra-Trail Australia by UTMB, which is one of four UTMB majors.

UTMB is the premier event, with runners completing a loop around Mont Blanc and running through Swiss and Italian territory in the process. It’s one of the most prestigious ultra trail races in the world. So it’s a big deal.

The weather is always a talking point for the race. This year it certainly tested the runners, deteriorating over the course of the week. You know things are getting out of hand when the weather is so bad it forces a course change, and that’s exactly what happened relatively early in the UTMB.

With hail buffeting the runners at the front of the field, organisers decided to bypass the climb up the Pyramides Calcairies, which would have been one of the highest points on the course at 2,512m.

This was just over 50k into the race, runners battling through their first night on the course. The hail was just one of the challenges the elements threw at the field this year, alongside a biting wind, freezing rain and snow. Proper alpine weather.

Earlier in the week there were hints of what was to come. Heavy rain delayed the start of the OCC and caused a course change to remove a couple of climbs. For different reasons, both the men’s and women’s OCC races threatened to upstage the main event.

The OCC had a stacked field, especially in the men’s this year, headlined by American Jim Walmsley. Spain’s Kilian Jornet is widely considered the greatest of all time in men’s ultra trail running, but Walmsley is definitely in that conversation.

He’s won more than 20 ultras including UTMB in 2023 and Western States twice. This year he was competing the UTMB’s baby brother event because he’s part of the US team competing at the World Mountain and Trail Running Championships later this month. Even for Walmsley, running UTMB and backing up a few weeks later for the worlds is too much to ask.

This 60k race more or less turned into a sprint finish after Walmsley was passed by Italy’s Cristian Minoggio at an aid station with 10k to go. Minoggio, a shorter course specialist, blew his lead out to about three minutes before Walmsley started to reel him in.

He produced a finishing kick to pass the Italian in the final mile, and win by just 20 seconds. Which is insane.

The women’s race was memorable for all the wrong reasons, with Kenyan Joyline Chepngeno stripped of her win after the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) revealed she’d failed a drug test back in August, at the Sierre-Zinal World Cup race in Switzerland.

According to the AIU, she tested positive for triamcinolone acetonide, an anti-inflammatory. She’s accepted a two-year ban and had her wins in Switzerland and in the OCC stripped. The AIU’s statement says she had an injection to treat a knee injury in July, but didn’t realize it contained a banned substance.

It’s not hard to understand how such a mistake could be made. But Chepngeno’s coach Julien Lyon has form. This is the second time in three editions of the Sierre-Zinal that a runner he’s coached has failed a test.

As a consequence, the race organisers have banned Lyon and his Milimani Runners team from any involvement in the event indefinitely. You can draw your own conclusions.

Of course, all that happened more than a week after the race had been run and won, so it didn’t cast a pall over the big event. And the storylines here were much more positive.

In the men’s race it was a classic case of the ultra trail running redemption arc, with Brit Tom Evans winning after consecutive DNFs. The punishing start to the race claimed three of the favourites - Hayden Hawks (US), former champ Francois D’Haene (France) and Kiwi Dan Jones - before the halfway mark. But this was still a commanding performance by Evans.

He made a decisive move around the 100k mark, running through the snow to ascend Grand Col Ferret. It was a dominant performance despite the appalling conditions. After that he never looked like losing.

At the finish line the former military man saluted the huge crowd, then hoisted his baby daughter Phoebe high above his head. He finished more than 30 minutes ahead of American Ben Dhiman with another Brit, Josh Wade, a further 46 minutes back in third.

After the race he told iRunFarMedia his plan was based on “old school UTMB” which he described as “hike early, hike often and hike hard”. It’s a great reminder that running ultras is not all about running.

“My result here didn’t come from my strengths in running, it came from my hiking,” he said. He also used his poles a lot, even on the downhills. That may have been slower, but it was safer in the muddy conditions, and he said plenty of people were “stacking it” running the slippery downhills.

Evans also executed a Red Bull shoey in a grubby, trail worn shoe to bring a touch of Australia to proceedings. Daniel Ricciardo has a lot to answer for in popularising this dubious practice!

Here for the women’s race

But it was the women’s race that will live longest in the memory from UTMB 2025. Ruth Croft became only the second person, and the first woman, to win all three UTMB finals races.

In 2015 she won the CCC and followed up with victories in the shorter OCC in 2018 and 2019. She was second last year - her first crack at the 100-mile event - as American Katie Schide broke Courtney Dauwalter’s course record, and finished strongly, closing on Schide in the final third of the race.

Interestingly both Evans and Croft are coached by Scott Johnson so expect to hear plenty about his methods, which have been described as being based on “muscular endurance”.

In one of her post-race interviews, she told Dylan Bowman of the Freetrial podcast that she was struggling running up Col du Bonhomme in the dark, about 40k into the race. “I was in a terrible headspace … it was pissing down and I was like, ‘Man, what I am doing? I just want to be in bed right now.’” I think we’ve all been there in races!

Unlike others on the circuit, Croft tends to race less often, instead pouring all her focus into a key A race for the year. In 2025 that race was UTMB, and that single-mindedness has paid off.

One of those who runs more often is the Queen of Trail Running, Courtney Dauwalter. There’s no doubt she was the hot favourite heading into the race, having won it in 2021 and 2023 and dominated the sport for the past five or six years.

Everything looked to be going to script through the first 100k as she led by more than 11 minutes. That was as good as it got for her though as she was reeled in by Croft over the next 30k.

It was clear Dauwalter was struggling as runner after runner went past her. From first, to second, to no longer on the podium, to out of the top five… things kept getting worse.

It would have been easy for her to pull the pin. But she didn’t. She dug deeper and deeper into her famous “pain cave”, eventually finishing in 10th place almost three hours behind Croft.

(There is another reason why dropping would have made sense for Dauwalter - as an athlete, a DNF does less damage to your UTMB index than a poor result. And for Dauwalter, a 10th place finish is a poor result. That damage to your UTMB index can have an influence on entry into other races.)

And the crowd loved it. They call her the Queen for a reason. All along the course she was mobbed and wherever she went she had time to interact with the crowd and flash her trademark smile.

After the race she was quoted as saying: “It was a really, really tough day – and night – out there but I was boosted by the cheers on course and by my support crew. Teams doing the hardest things together makes for the best memories.”

She went on: “I think I continued because a race this special is worth doing the full loop.” All class.

Upcoming Events

There are way too many events for me to list everything that’s happening around the country, but here is a selection of upcoming races (with a bias towards South East Queensland).

The Running Calendar website is a great source if you want a comprehensive understanding of what’s available around Australia.