Category Archives: Uncategorized

“We will do it in the Spanish way!” I have no idea what he means, but the race director at the first edition of the Courmayeur Mont Blanc Vertical Kilometer (K1000) is smiling and exuberant, as he explains the course during the race briefing. Only five minutes of the 30-minute gathering is in English, the

This weekend is one of the biggest trail races in the Alps, the Eiger Ultra, which each year draws thousands of runners to the Bernese Oberland village of Grindelwald. Though just in its fourth year, the race already has captured the imagination of runners from around the world. Much of the race course includes dramatic

Italian trail race directors seem to love the technical. They have a penchant for daring routes along ridges and twisty-turny vertical climbs that sneak around rock bands, requiring both hands– and a mind that’s not swayed by the abyss in your peripheral vision. This, after all, is the country that brought us Skyrunning—and with it, highly

Indisputably, Chamonix’s best-known trail running weekend comes at the close of August, with the start of the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc. But, earlier in the summer, there’s a lesser-known event that bring tens of thousands of runners, friends, and family to town: The Chamonix Mount-Blanc Marathon races. Together with UTMB, the events form bookends for summer

Writer Sandy Stott will be joining Run the Alps on a trail running trip around Mont Blanc next month. He lives in Brunswick, Maine. Read the first and second installments of his account as he trains for the circumnavigation along the Tour du Mont Blanc. The maps, when you stand on them, are big enough to

Who you pick, and who picks you, says a lot about a company. We’re pleased to be partners with some of the greatest folks in the trail running community. They include Dan and Janine Patitucci, of PatitucciPhoto. Ibex, for our clothing. Patagonia, for our client gear. ALPSinsight, for sharing trail running opportunities in Switzerland’s Jungfrau region.

I have a serious soft spot in my heart for crazy trail running ideas: the self-created adventures, the offbeat concepts, the way-out-of-the-mainstream mountain runs that have you shaking your head in a combination of admiration and shock, thinking “Who dreamed up that idea—and how many beers had they had–when they did?” So, when Salomon team member Rickey Gates mentioned an Alp town

Though the snowpack is still holding its own up high, not all Run the Alps participants are willing to sit back and wait for winter to fade from the alpine zone. Ray Sena, of San Leandro, California, has already returned from his trail running adventure in the Alps. Ray spent a week on a self-guided

Smitten with rock. Let’s begin there, and already you may be saying, “This guy is odd, or hard up,” and that may be true. But it is really a softness of heart for the slow, foot-won world that has me writing this. Which is really a way of calling back some moments on The Dome

This article originally appeared in The American Trail Running Association‘s (ATRA) newsletter, Trail Times, in April 2016. Run the Alps is a corporate member of ATRA, whose mission is to represent and promote mountain, ultra, and trail running in the United States. Run the Alps encourages you to join ATRA and support trail running across the US. Here’s